WoW vs. EQ1

[Xzin]

Unlike EVE when I tried flying around a bit - got lost and gave up.

Pretty poor new user experience there - even though I know the game is much richer than that.

[Minister]

One thing I always considered the epitome of WoW's brilliance: when you start the game, your UI is pretty much empty. With only a couple attacks and abilities, plus some food and water, it's easy to get started. When you get access to talents at 10, you're ready for another level of complexity. When you hit 20, you're ready for grouping and instances. In Eve, they dump a huge tutorial on you before you even get started. It's just a lot to get wrapped around.

[HPAVC]

I admit I never got out of the 'bone chips' stage of EQ1 and then WoW beta arrived.

One thing that was interesting is what in WoW the warlock pets are useful, as much as they are, from the first level pet to the end game pet, whatever that is. Where the EQ equivalent upgrades the pet with a new monster companion and the previous are cast aside. That was sort of odd to me.

People talk about the 'cartoony' graphics of WoW and hate it for that. I admit the graphics are as described to a degree. However they are completely consistent, you can walk from Under City to Booty Bay and never see a group of objects that were dropped into the foreground in some different stylization. I found this with a lot of other games and it always bugged me more than anything cartoony would. Once you play the cartoony goes away with the immersion.

What I like most is that same walk from UC to BB would be without a single load screen and you can enter every building and talk to every guy and not get a load screen.

The engines like LOTR and EQ2 where you hit that load screen when you walk into a building, enter a courtyard, etc. Oh for shame.

[Steph]

The cartoony graphics are simpler than the average attempt at photo realism, but on the bright side that means that the system requirements are much lower. You can run WoW with a relatively low spec computer. Convincing someone to play the game is so much easier if they dont have to buy a new computer =]

Bringing off photo realism is very hard since humans are rather good at seeing the make believe humans move incorrectly. Wooden horses anyone? Even if it looks awesome standing still or if you have nice spell effects, bringing off realism is made harder by the movements. If that is messed up it will spoil the realistic look anyway and you are back to square one.

[Gigatron]

EQ brings back a lot of memories for me, my first mmo back in 99. I still remember when I first got owned by a giant in oasis or argoing the specs, creating and getting killed by trains. Holy crap, mobs would chase you until you ZONE and would argo anyone on their way back.

I really like the cartoony style of wow, I especially like the art direction warhammer is taking. I hated "realistic" styles of EQ2 and LotRO, they try to hard and it ends up looking fake, especially the animations.

[mmcookies]

I never really understood why photo-realistic style of graphics became the trend of 3D fantasy MMO's

When I was playing the old school console RPGs, I always imagined the characters and monsters with a comic/anime appearance

[johnholmes]

Yo Sam,

How many women are you up to now?

[Andune]

I've played EQ since 2003 and box 3-4 accounts on a regular basis. I tried to play WoW a couple of times because some friends had switched over and I ended up getting really bored really fast. It was nice to see my xp fly so quickly, however I felt like I didn't have to do much work to get it.

IMO it kinda comes down to do you like to quest/tradeskill etc more or do you enjoy the grouping/grinding xp more. Graphics and such do not mean as much to me as game play and server reliability.

[Olibri]

I played EQ1 from beta through RoK and gave up. The game was fun to an extent, but the death penalty and the sheer grind killed the game for me. WoW is at least interesting from start to finish. I've been playing since launch and I'm getting a little burnt out on that now too. Multi-boxing makes the game fresh again.

The guy in the cube across from me plays both WoW and EQ1 with his wife. In their opinion WoW is simply a better game, but they play EQ1 more because they have a tight-knit community on the test center with RL friends that they raid with.

[Jezebel]

Perhaps some of the points I'm making are old (I stopped playing EQ1 in 2001), but I clearly remember what I was so impressed with in WoW.

1. No Downtime: even in full 40-man raids in WoW, you will not find yourself waiting for buffs/mana for more than 60 seconds. Many character classes require absolutely no downtime at all while soloing. This is a stark contrast to the pre-35 "spellbook staring meditation" method.

2. Content Availability: they have enough quests to take you all the way to 70 and beyond. And what's even better: the quests guide you to the next zone for you. It's beautiful. Grinding is almost obsolete.

3. Instances: instanced dungeons means never having to race another guild for Trakanon or coordinate Plane of Fear clears.

4. "Ghosts": since you run back to your corpse as a ghost, you never lose gear or loot. Deaths hurt your durability, which is simply a way to remove money from the economy. No more "corpse run gear".

5. Macros and UI Addons: there's an entire community of people, playing the class as you, having the same problem with X, and they have designed a macro script or UI addon to fix it. As long as it doesn't promote botting, they can do it legally, too.

I heartily disagree about max level and items in a short time: level, yes, but endgame items are tough to get.

wow.. i couldnt disagree with each point more.

1: down time encourages efficient use of mana/hp and thus adds more intelligence to gameplay
2: questing is just another form of grinding. PvE is PvE.
3: instances ruin PvP
4: again, "PvP" immunity to retrieve your corpse, and no death penalties is horrible
5: macros are fine.. WoW macros have a lot less impact than some games have had (ie, /tar in shadowbane, /face in daoc, etc).

then again, i suppose most of those points are valid if you play for PvE. i play games to PvP. the grind between starting a game and getting to the point where i can kill people is an unfotunate necessity.