I’m making up my Christmas List of Self-Indulgence and I find I really don’t know enough about either of these games. Instead of reading a game review made by a possibly-not-objective person, I turn to the people in the trenches. Can you give me the pros and cons of each? Gimme the lowdown!
Guildwars Pro: You won’t have to pay anything, assuming somebody else (proxy Santa) is buying it for you as a gift. No monthly fees. As of yet, no purchasable expansions.
Con: I lost interest after about a solid month of playing it every day. But that’s probably more that I got burned out on it early, and then distracted myself with other games (such as The Movies, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, and Dead or Alive 2 Ultimate). I have been wanting to get back into it over the past few days, and probably will put in some time between Christmas and New Years.
GuildWars is a lot of fun - I’ve been playing for some time now. I haven’t played WoW, so take what I’m saying with that in mind.
The big pro, of course, is that there’s no fee. But it’s not ‘cheap’ in appearance or function; the landscapes are wonderfully realized, and the characters are widely customizable. The developers don’t skimp much, either, with special events - Halloween had the Mad King passing out gifts. Cool stuff, like ghost-in-the-box (open the box and a ghost pops out, says ‘Boo’, and disappears in a puff of smoke) and pumpkin hats (put it on, and your character has a punkinhead!). All for free.
The land is huge, with lots of areas to explore. All graphically amazing. And it doesn’t even require much computer horsepower to play and enjoy.
Another thing - PvP and PvE are seperate. I dunno about you, but I hate PvP and am glad I can avoid it. I don’t know if the same is true in WoW. But for those who like PvP, you can do that in any number of arenas, either with your PvE character or a special PvP guy.
Overall, I count this a great purchase, and a great game to play.
Another Guild Wars recommendation here. As has been said, a beautiful world that is very playable. And, the idea of paying a monthly fee for a game is so far divorced from my current reality that there’s really no question.
City of Heroes/Villains.
I know it wasn’t one of your choices, but you can at least consider it.
Pros: Very casual friendly–short missions, easy and fun to team with friends at different levels. Extremely customizable–you’ll never see another character that looks like yours, and the choices of powers is very large. No loot–no grinding for rare drops; no squabbles over loot division. Accessible developers–they post regularly on the forums and actually answer PMs (not that you’ll agree with everything they say).
Cons: Repetitive gameplay–probably true for all games, but especially so for CoH/CoV. Slow advancement–starts out fast, but past level 30 (out 50) it slows down a lot. Comics-oriented–tastes vary; I’d probably prefer a fantasy setting.
CoH has been out for a while and can be bought for cheap. CoV is new and still at full price. You can play both for the same monthly charge.
Actually, your suggestion is amusing to me, because the reason for the OP is that CoH/V has whetted my appetite for other games of that type. I like the customizable factor that’s been mentioned. I’be been playing Coh/V for a while (ooo holiday jetpacks! :D) and was looking for something as an alternative for if I get temporararily weary with being a spandexer. Interesting no WoW responses yet…
OK, World of Warcraft.
Cost? The same as pretty much any other computer game. Check around, some stores might have it on sale. There will be a monthly fee to play it, it is an online game. Think of it as a chat room with pictures and some killing=)
This page will give you some idea of the costs and some illustrations of the type of artwork involved in the game. If you read the forums, you don’t really get any idea of the community that actually plays the game. Often the posters are whiny little script kiddies. The percentage of players that post to the official forums are a tiny percentage of the actual players.
As to the players … you run the full gamut of assorted dopers who are lovely people all the way through asshat kiddies who are 12 years old and convinced mommy and daddy to put the account on their credit card and treat the game like it was a single computer type game where they are the only real live person involved. You can pretty much ignore them. Most players are actually pretty nice people of all ages.
It is actually 2 games in one, in a rough manner of speaking. You can play PVP or PVE. PVP is player vs player. Other people playing can kill you, which can suck as it can make it difficult to manage to stay alive and accomplish quests. PvE is player vs environment. This [“carebear”] style of play is what I do. Other players can’t kill me unless I flag myself PvP. There are 2 sides to the game, alliance [ human, night elf, gnome and dwarf] and horde [tauren, undead, troll and orc]. you can not communicate with them per se - you dont speak the same language, but some of the stock emote macros [things like /bow which is a command that makes you look like you are bowing, and gives the test message of 'you bow to <name>] are sort of communicating - you can wave or salute or bow to let the oposing side know that you thank them or respect them, or you can /chicken which is an emote that basically makes them aware you are calling them a chicken/coward. You can also /spit on them or /rude them. You cant hand them an item or get an item from them.
You can play the game solo from level 1 to 60, or you can do nothing but group the entire time - or any range in between. You can join a guild - an alliance of people who have the same goals as you do to give you a sort of ‘family’ in game or you can stay out of guilds. I am in a guild called Knights of Oblivion on Cenarius , and we are horde - my main is Sonnenschein.
The main difference between WoW and Everquest is mainly in a couple of things. In everquest when you die, you lose experience, in WoW you dont. The quest systems are also fairly different. In EQ, you get quests by running around and trying to talk to different nonplayer characters, and then trying to remember where you got the quest from [though they have implemented some sort of quest log system, I havent logged in and played in about a year.] In WoW, the nonplayer characters have a yellow ! over their heads when they have a quest for you, and a yellow ? when you have completed that quest - they also show up on your minimap as a yellow * to help you find them, as well as a decent quest log that gives you the information about the quest you need. The quest system in EQ can seem interminable, as you may have to wait for the monster you need to kill to appear, which used to be as long as a week some times, and hope that you can manage to kill them when they do appear=) in WoW, quests are more fast, you can easily do anywhere from 1 to 5 quests in a fairly short time, the experience seems to come faster and leveling is much easier. It is setup so unlike EQ where you sometimes have to play for 5-6 hours to accomplish something, you can whip through many quests in under an hour, and many instanced dungeons can be gotten through in under 3 hours. Some as fast as one hour=)
Use the search function here, there have been a number of threads about everquest, world of warcraft and other online games=)