Brian
A question.
The listed minimum requirements for WoW are amazingly low - P3-800, 256mb RAM, and a Geforce 2 card. Like, wow! My systerm could run that.
My wife and I have matching P3-1000s, 512MB RAM, and NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 graphics cards. Could we run World of Warcraft, or could we run it with modest graphics card upgrades?
Anecdotally, I’ve not heard anyone complaining about WoW’s not running on their computers; I’ve heard people rave about how well it runs on low-end machines. This is pretty typical for Blizzard games, which are very scalable.
Daniel
Forgive me for being slightly off-topic, but I didn’t think we needed another “xxx vs World of Warcraft” thread.
I haven’t seen any mention of Guild Wars around these parts and I’m just wondering if this is on anyone’s radar. This is the game being produced by the creators of StarCraft, Diablo, & WarCraft that left Blizzard en masse a while back. It’s not released yet, but preorders are available at the usual retail outlets and there have been monthly beta events accessible to those who puchase the preorder.
Ideally, I would like to hear opinions from someone who has played both WoW and Guild Wars, but I’ll take any input on GW that I can get. By looking at screenshots and reading about the details, WoW and GW seem VERY similar. So similar, that I wouldn’t be surprised to see some lawsuits flying in the future, but that’s just judging by what I’ve seen without actually playing either game.
I have been tempted by all the things I’ve heard about WoW, but I guess I’m too cheap to pay a monthly fee to play even the coolest game. That is one reason that GW has caught my eye, there will be no monthly fees or reoccuring fees of any type, except for optional expansion packs.
From the GW FAQ: http://guildwars.com/faq/default.html
As a tightwad gamer, GW sounds really attractive to me. But since I haven’t played WoW, GW, or any other MMORPG for that matter, I would like to hear everyone elses thoughts and opinions.
Hopefully, GW offers hope to my fellow tightwad gamers who are still holding out on buying WoW because they have trouble justifying monthly gaming fees on their budget.
Oh, I meant to include this significant part of the GW FAQ in my post above:
The last weekend in October (I think), Guild Wars offered a free beta test.
I really didn’t like it. But it was an early beta, and may be fixed.
My problems with it:
-It took a long time,a nd a lot of tweaking, before it was playable: at first, the graphics were just gibberish.
-The landscapes and spell effects were lovely, but the creatures were not: they had the same sort of Geiger reject artwork as the game Sacrifice had, and they all looked the same to me, sad spiky/bulbous mutants. Not something I liked.
-It was difficult to find my way around the starting town: I had a list of something like 60 zones I could travel to, but they all seemed to be the same place.
-Starting a quest felt artificial: you told someone you were ready to start the quest, and then it put you out on the quest via a load screen. If you logged out, or went back to town to sell stuff, you lost all progress you’d made and had to start back at the beginning.
-I think you find yourself joining one of two factions, but I couldn’t quite tell: at the end of a quest, I’d see a glowy symbol or two, which I think had something to do with which faction I was joining. That should be a deliberate decision, not one you fall into. (Although if they polish this aspect of the game, it has the potential to be amazingly cool).
Now, I really did like my character class: as a necromancer, I was quickly raising my own army of undead, and I had all kinds of curses I could cast. The equipment seemed decent. And I never got to try the PVP, but I hear it might be good.
So the game has potential. Unfortunately, the creature graphics seems unlikely (to me) to be fixed, and that was a major turnoff for me. We’ll see what happens with it.
Daniel