WoW v Everquest - What's the amazing difference supposed to be?

The Game Room
1

I played Everquest and Everquest II for years. When I went back to college to get my teaching license, I didn’t have time for Everquest any more, so I dropped playing it. Meanwhile, it seems like World of Warcraft has more than just overtaken Everquest; it’s become its own phenomenom.

So now that I have some time on my hands, I have downloaded the free 10-day trial of WoW to see what the reason is for the popularity. I’ve got my priest up to level 9, I’ve done a number of quests, I’ve trained, grouped, etc. I’ve not tried the crafting yet.

So far, I see NOTHING different. Everything works essentially the same, with the exception of the body retrieval system. The quests are almost identical in types, methods, etc. Fighting is identical, spell-casting doesn’t have any significant differences. The graphics are intentionally cartoonish by comparison, which I personally don’t like (it’s like the computer/console gaming world has decided that fantasy games shouldn’t look realistic; see, e.g. the recent Zelda incarnations). In short, it seems to me to be nothing but a carbon copy of Everquest, to all important purposes.

So am I missing something? What is the great draw to WoW over Everquest? Convince me that there’s a reason to buy this game once the 10 days are up??? :confused:

2

My mind is boggling at the thought of someone who got away from EQ intentionally going back to another MMORPG. My friends begged me to get WoW when it launched and I told them all to eat shit.

3

I played EQ while Ryzom was down. It absolutely sucks.

I’ve played WoW in standalone mode, but not as an MMORPG. Guess I need to try it out to seel what it’s like.

I’ve contented myself with City of Heroes and now that Ryzom is back in operation again, I’m in heaven.

4

One of the big things that separate them is how long it takes to level, I understand. You can hit 80 in a couple months easy if you work at it. Overall it’s a faster pace, with quests taking much less time to do so you can play in shorter spurts.

I haven’t played EQ, but that’s my understanding of the biggest differences.

5

It’s been a long time since I played EQ, but from what I understand WoW simply does things better. You could buy music online, but it wasn’t until iTunes came along that digital distribution really took off. WoW came along at the right time, learning from the mistakes of the first and second generation MMOs, avoiding their faults while emphasizing the positives.

It also had the additional plus of drawing from an existing canon that players were already somewhat familiar with from the RTS games, which makes a huge difference. Once the Warcraft players and the MMO players were on board, the game pretty easily hit critical mass and started drawing other folks who weren’t familiar with either into it.

6

¿Que? You mean Warcraft, the RTS game, or did they actually make an offline version of WoW and I somehow didn’t hear about it? 'Cause I would play that.

7

This is the essence of my question: HOW does it do things “better?”
If the only thing better about it is that you can level up faster, in my opinion, that’s NOT a plus. I’ve always disliked the idea that the goal for any RPG is to become a top-level player ASAP, as if the journey is irrelevant. Stupid younger generation and it’s insistence upon instant gratification: where were YOU when the original D&D EP system meant getting to a level 10 warrior took half a year! :stuck_out_tongue:

8

Half a year playing every other Friday night for a couple hours, maybe. I generally agree with your sentiment but EQ was TOO extreme. In the early days of the game, before people figured out strategies, best hunting grounds, best items, not to waste time with quests, etc, it was not uncommon to have 75 to 100 days of PLAYED TIME - that is actual, real life time playing the game, you could see this by typing /play - before reaching level 50.

Even as much as a year or two into the game, claims of 10 days played time to level 50 were still generally looked upon with lots of :dubious::dubious::dubious: - and that’s still 240 hours of real life time. Six work weeks. And getting to the highest level is not the end of it - most people feel like that’s where the fun really starts in these games. No game should require that kind of time investment.

9

I enjoyed EQ much, much, MUCH more than I ever enjoyed WoW, and even I have to admit that from a game design standpoint WoW is just better.

(Well, except PvP on WoW is somehow even more pathetic than EQ, and that’s saying something… but most people don’t care about PvP.)

10

Never played EQ but wasn’t one of the big deals with WOW was that solo play was far more viable? I know that’s one thing I heard mentioned in many articles when it first came out.

I’d also be willing to bet that EQ evolved a lot over the last 8(?) years so when it first came out people played it, got bored/frustrated with it and quit so when they picked up WOW they compared it to their old experiences with EQ whereas you kept current so you’re comparing it to a more polished and up-to-date EQ experience.

11

  • There’s very little downtime in WoW, even at the highest levels. In EQ as a high level wizard I remember waiting 10+ minutes just to meditate back a full mana bar from empty! It was insane. In WoW at the highest level as a mana user it takes 20-30 seconds max.

  • As you mentioned, the corpse retrieval system is vastly improved.

  • There are mounts for getting around, including flying ones. (I only played EQ1 and the first two expansions, so I don’t know if they ever ended up implenting this later on)

  • There is no spawn-camping for long-ass spawns, and dungeons don’t get crowded like they did in EQ. Respawns outside of dungeon areas happen very fast. The insides of dungeons are called “instances” and this is because every group of 5 players that enters a dungeon gets their very own fresh copy, or “instance” of that dungeon to themsleves and they do not have to share or compete with anyone else doing the instance at the same time.

  • The PvP system is far superior. More intricate and more thought out. There are always whiners who complain about the PvP being unbalanced, but hey, that’s because it’s an RPG with unique classes and abilties which are never going to be entirely 100% “balanced”. But I think for the most part they do a very good job of creating lots of abitilies and counter-abilities and tweaking them in response to actual class performance as well as they can. There are also battlegrounds and arenas where players can PvP competitively and earn PvP rewards.

  • The “talent” system (if you’ve only played WoW up until level 9 you haven’t encountered this yet) is a major difference. It allows players of each of the 10 classes to really customize how their abilities work within 3 different trees, or specializations.

  • The two-faction system (Horde vs. Alliance) gives players a way of experiencing two different worlds and a sense of camraderie vs. the enemy, especially for those who PvP.

  • The profession system is also a neat and interesting feature that EQ1 didn’t have when I played. Again I don’t know if later expansions or EQ2 tried to implement anything like this.

  • The player economy is buzzing with activity since there are a lot of useful items that players need to trade with each other to acquire, especially due to the aforementioned profession system, and gold actually has value. I remember in EQ gold/platinum was practically worthless once you reached a high level. Not so in WoW.

  • The raid content is more unique and challenging. I remember the old raids in EQ on Vox and Nagafen merely being a matter of numbers - how many people you could get to come along often determined the success of the raid. WoW raids are nothing like that - they are all either 10 or 25 players maximum, and require a well selected group of classes/specs with the right gear and quick thinking/strategizing in order to achieve a successful outcome.

12

This is important to note too. I played the original EQ and the first couple expansions. When I went to WoW, although I noticed some obvious similarities, I was bowled over by how they took every single flaw from EQ and vastly improved upon it (indeed, Furor from the famous Fires of Heaven guild in EQ was on the dev team for WoW, I later learned). I wouldn’t be surprised if, after seeing the explosive success of WoW, the EQ devs started copying Blizzard in their later expansions. Art copying art.

13

I always love the people advertising or exalting their toons on public-wide communication channels.

“12k mana!,” they would always exclaim.

“It must suck to be OOM,” I would respond, drawing a few LOLs.

Obiously, and what a lot of people don’t understand, is that the more mana you have, the longer it takes to recover that mana.

14

In the very early days of EQ it took about an hour for a level 50 wizard to meditate back to full, and back then to meditate you had to be sitting down with your spellbook open, which covered the whole screen meaning you couldn’t see enemies coming, and if you got surprise attacked as a wizard you were basically dead (which can potentially be hours [plural] of corpse recovery and will absolutely take hours [plural] to regain the experience - and back then ressurections were almost unheard of since few people had the spell anyway and it cost 100 platinum to cast.)

Eventually, slowly - one by one - they removed the looking in the spellbook requirement, then removed the sitting requirement, then iirc doubled the rate of mana regeneration, then added lots more spells and items that increased the rate even more, and made ressurections a lot more common and inexpensive. And after all that it STILL seemed a little extreme.

Brad McQuaid is a sadist.

15

Oh yeah, I completely forgot about the massive XP loss upon death. (I guess I blocked out the most traumatic parts of EQ from my memory)

In WoW, you never lose XP no matter how often you die. The only disincentive to dying is that your equipment degrades a little each time, and you have to pay a relatively small amount of gold to repair it. People constantly bitch and whine about their repair bills, but they are clearly people who never played EQ.

16

I’ve found that due to the incredible popularity (and relative lack of early complexity) of WoW, the playerbase has a heavier population of kiddies and twitch gamers. That’s not to say that mature players don’t abound, but you’d probably be best served by identifying a mature guild early and sticking with them. For me, 90% of WoW is like what LOIO was in EQ1.

One of the biggest flaws and strengths in WoW is the ease with which you level during the early game. The learning curve for early EQ was horrendous after level 10 (if you remember), but it virtually guaranteed that players over level 20 were mostly competent and could be trusted in group situations. Most WoW content is soloable by any class. So when you get ready to group, don’t expect your PUG (pick up group) to have more than one or two members who know what they’re doing. This continues until level 80, by the way.

But with both problems, friends and guildies are the obvious answer. WoW just doesn’t punish poor players like EQ1 did, so more of them make it even to the very endgame.

The biggest WoW flaw, imo, is that they don’t have EQ1’s necromancer class :wink:

17

I’d be much happier with the comparisons if they were made between World of Warcraft and Everquest 2, not the original Everquest. Saying WoW is better than Everquest is a bit silly; it’s like saying that the Space Shuttle is better than an Apollo capsule. :smiley:

Based on what I’ve read so far, there doesn’t seem to be much difference between WoW and EQ2. For example, EQ2 introduced purchaseable mounts, a flying intra-zone transport system, a forced dual-faction setup (good v evil), instanced dungeons, etc. It appears that the main advantages have to do with the speed up working your way up the system. I did notice that, as a solo player, you end up being able to take on new fights more quickly in WoW that in EQ2 (we won’t even talk about mana recovery in EQ :rolleyes: ). But if these are they only real advantages, I’m not sure in my mind they outweigh the cartoonish visuals and the significantly reduced character choices of WoW.

18

EQ also had the wonderful system where if you were human, or any of the other races that didnt have night vision, and you went out at night without a light source, you were blind. Couldn’t see anything. It was horrible. My first memory of EQ is of being stuck in Surefall Glade after having made a human ranger, unable to make it through that damned cave to get outside.
WoW is just a lot more refined. Crafting in EQ involved massive amounts of trial and error, or finding recipe books that were actual physical objects. Then you had to write this stuff down unless you wanted to store the book.

Quests, same thing… Quests appeared in the chat log. Write everything down again. Often there was no indication at all of where to go or what to do. Some of the quests were downright evil… How long did it take players to solve the original shadowknight epic quest? Months beyond the rest, I think.

These two things made third party sites almost a requirement for playing the game.

Classes in the game were horribly imbalanced as well. Straight melee classes were extremely boring to play, with almost no strategy at all. Warriors? They hit autoattack, then periodically hit the kick and taunt buttons. Then after one fight they got to sit for ten minutes and wait for their hitpoints to come back, while the Druid was off kiting 4 enemies at once. Rogues got the same treatment as warriors, except that they had a backstab button.

EQ also gave people famously little direction… The first 3 weeks of playing I had no idea what to do, where to go, what possibilities even were. You’d have high level characters camping spawns in relative new zones.

Lets not forget the ever present mobs that were very high level for the zone they were in, whose sole purpose seemed to be to gank lowbies and punish them for the games ridiculously short view distance, lack of awareness, and just being low level in a low level zone. Fucking hill giants.

How many people accidentally forgot to hit enter to bring up the chat box when doing a quest for NPCs, then, in the course of typing their response, hit A, only to get an immediate and brutal smackdown because they had inadvertently hit the autoattack button on an NPC that was 50 levels above them?

How about the crafting professions that were restricted to races/classes? Only shamans could be alchemists(worthless anyway, only 2 or three potions had any value at all). You could be a jewel crafter as any class, but why would you, when only enchanters had the enchanting spells?

Jumping back to melee characters again for a moment, how wonderful was it to not have a way to bind yourself to a location? And no gate spell to take you back there(other than dying, of course).

There were lots of things that EQ was just plain cruel about.

19

Pretty much your whole OP compared WoW to EQ, not EQ2, though. As for me, after quitting EQ after years of playing I wouldn’t touch it again with a 10-foot pole, and I include EQ2 in that because the whole “the Vision” BS made me a very bitter player. So, I can’t explain to your satisfaction why I prefer WoW, I guess.

20

In WHAT way did my OP compare Everquest to WoW? If you read what I said, I talked about how WoW had essentially the same methods to do … That’s only true of EQ2, not EQ. The question at this day and age is: why WoW rather than EQ2?

As for EQ, frankly the whole bit about night vision was one of the few things that made SENSE about the game. Of course, it did help if you upped the gamma a bit so you could at least see outlines (and YES, I do have some bad memories of blundering around in BlackBurrow without being able to see!) And yes, I can see being annoyed by the situation, though why one would expect something different, I can’t imagine. You damn certain can’t go running around underground without a torch in any D&D campaign I ever ran and see things. :smiley:

But that’s all irrelevant because they changed that up for EQ2 anyway.

So again, to try and get this thread headed down a track close to what I was looking for:

Why WoW over EQ2? What is the advantage of the one over the other? I’m looking for something more than “bad experience with EQ (the original).” :slight_smile: