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

The Game Room
21

Sweet jebus I remember that [cleric] there was serious money in rezzing. And buffs.

I remember when buffs took spell components - holy crap but I went through stacks of freaking peridots like they were popcorn some weekends…when I got the set of Donal’s armor and could do stuff without burning mana it was phenomenal, and then the sprinkler for the rez …

Though the clicky toys I had when I was customer service were sweet=)

I played WoW in closed beta, and once it went live I never went back to EQ except for about 2 weeks a few months ago when they reopened my accounts for free 2 week temptation attempt. No comparison, WoW is better for teh normal nongrind player.

22

I miss my skelly minion=(

Though my felguard is nice=)

23

I haven’t played EQ2 in years. The last time was when Desert of Flames was first released. The first two adventure packs (Bloodline & Splitpaw) had just come out. With WoW, I’ve been playing off and on and I’m back in the game at the moment with Lich King. If, at this time, EQ2 is functionally identical to WoW, it’s because the EQ2 devs have changed it to be so.

Back when I played EQ2, there was no Auction House. That was a WoW innovation. In EQ2, when I started, players who wanted to sell their items had to be logged in and sitting it in their houses. They couldn’t adventure while they were trying to sell something. SOE eventually set up a system were you could list items and then go offline which was a help but from the first, they were adamant that their waswas more realistic, or had more depth, or was just somehow more Visiony, and they would under no circumstances be copying the Auction House. The whole selling items system was a real pain in the neck and it took up space in your limited inventory and vault. IIRC, EQ2 has more functional broker system, with sellers able to list their items and manage their sales by visiting their home or any of the ingame brokers. The broker system now functions more like an actual Auction House although they still refuse to call it that (it’s the Consignment system, iirc.)

Wow has no loading screens between instances. Wow at the time was much easier and faster to travel between parts of the map. At the time I was playing I and my friend were in our twenties and had progressed beyond the area right outside Antonica. (Thunder something?) At the time I started playing EQ2, there were no gryphon towers at the far end of the Antonica region. Those were built in a sort of public quest shortly before I quit. If you were level 20 and you wanted to get to Thundersomething, you ran there. It was not fun. Once the gryphon towers were built there it was 10 minutes of running and load-screen time to get from our homes to the outside of the city walls. Then another 5 minutes to run to the gryphon tower (assuming you didn’t get ganked by the packs of elite grouped gnolls. Oh yes, I’ve got a lot more to say about them in minute.) Then about five minutes on the gryphon. Then another 5-10 minutes until you could reach the start of the questing area in Thunderwhatever. And we couldn’t bind in Thunder because at the time, we had to travel back to Antonica whenever we wanted to train or sell something or craft anything. We quit playing largely because we didn’t want to spend our play time running back and forth so damn much. Contrast this with WoW which was much more friendly for the levels 1-30. WoW didn’t get horrible until you hit STV in your thirties and you were doggedly inching toward your mount. (WoW by the way has added a bunch more cemetaries and flight points which makes things much better. The new SW harbor is a help too.) I assume EQ2 has improved their travel time ratios but when I was there, the player base & the devs were bitterly divided as to whether reducing travel time was ruining the game or helping it. A lot of players wanted fewer fast travel options and real time boats and so on. I can see why someone might want that, but as a practical matter, slow travel is unworkable for me and many others I suspect.

Speaking of crafting - when I was playing EQ2 it was a pain in the ass. As I understand it had a major overhaul about six months after I quit. At the time, the painful auction system meant there was essentially no market for any of the starting craftable items. The starter items were mostly limited to making like elixiers or boards or steel bars for the next tier of crafting. And it was many many tiers before you got something nice. There was a ton of cross-class stuff needed but you could almost never count on finding any for sale. Which meant you needed alts you could help you out. At the time crafting was a tricky timing mini-game I enjoyed it but I -hated- the grind of levleing it. WoW on the hand has very little cross-crafting materials. The process is faster and simpler, and people can start making good and useful items almost right away. Blue and even purple recipes are easily available within a short time. There’s very little actual grinding and there’s no recipes that are only there for grinding purposes as there was in EQ2 at the time. Considering the two games together, WoW’s elegant simplicy, ease of use, lack of grinding and short time span until you see some good stuff is clearly more likely to appeal to a wider range of people.

The other reason I quit EQ2 was that at the time I was playing (this was Fall 2005, recall) the dev team had acquired a multiple personality disorder in trying to balance solo vs. group play. I mentioned those elite grouped gnolls. In retrospect, I really think the dev time at the time wanted to enforce grouping but they knew they were losing players to WoW’s emphasis on easy soloability. When I started playing, they’d just introduced a bunch of changes to make most of the non-dungeon quests in the game soloable. I was really enjoying it playing either by myself or with my friend I mentioned. Then they swung the other way. Almost all the quests outside Antonica and in the sewers (ie levl 10 and up) were designated Group Quests. Solo mobs were replaced with packs of linked mobs marked Elite.

The con system, which is the color code that tells you if a mob is hard or easy for your level, was made useless by this. A level 18 character would be easy prey for a lvl 10 group of grey gnolls. And even if you were stubborn and managed to stick it out, you got no experience for killing any of those gnolls. They were grey because they were supposed to be elite packs for groups of players. A single player was vulnerable to them but couldn’t benefit from attack them. It was a mess. And like I said, at the time almost all of the lvl 10-25 quests were set up this way. Shortly before I left the dev team began tinkering with it hoping to find a way off ‘encourage’ grouping while keeping their soloists happy. The fan base on both sides was furious about it all. I don’t know what sort of balance they have now, but back then, compared to WoW’s silky smooth leveling and mob balance EQ2 was clearly inferior. Oh - and I shouldn’t forget to add that the LFG tools at the time were inadequate too. Not only was grouping encouraged, it was a PITA to set up.

Oh you know what else, at the time I started, Quest Givers in EQ 2 didn’t have big exclamation points over their heads. Which I could live with but public opinion was firmly in the “We Want Our Punctuation!” That was just a little thing that helped smooth the WoW experience compared to EQ2 at the time.

On paper, Wow’s talent trees vs the class branching system in EQ2 both seem to provide about the same amount of customizability (that is to say, not much) but in practice, at the time, the early level characters in EQ2 felt like they had less power and flexability compared to WoW.

I’ve heard that EQ2 is better these days and I’d like to go back. I enjoyed the game until the great Solo-vs-Group nervous breakdown. But I think it’s clear that at least early in the process WoW’s (I’m going to say it again) elegant simplicity and Blizzard’s genius for streamlining meant that WoW was a superior game to EQ2 with more time doing advancing, questing and crafting and far less time fighting the interface or the game Vision.

24

You know, it’s hard to say. I tried both. We got into EQ2 hard. I just plain hated it.

Everything about EQ2 is just ten percent worse. Zoning. Long runs. Fewer quests. You could only play it on an awesome computer. Everything was the same, but 10% worse in every respect. It added up to an unpleasant experience.

25

FFXI had an auction house a year before WoW, and it worked roughly the same way. (I severely dislike the WoW auction house, by the way; tell me how much people are paying for an item, not how much people are trying to sell them for!) FFXI probably isn’t even the first game to have an auction house, either.

26

dude, you played eq and eq 2 and you have questions about Wow being better?

let me explain,
Sony Hates Gamers.
Blizzard loves them.

the end

27

to be fair EQ 1 is in many many ways a vastly superior game to Wow. the faction system is so complex it boggles the mind to think it was ever implemented in any game let alone one so old.
the unbelievable freedom you had in EQ was also astounding, it was fun just to mess around with what you could do. one of my favorite things to do when bored was hit a city with my chanter, find all the charmable npc’s, charm them, shrink them down to super tiny size, then leave them that way. people would come into a human city and all the nps’s were about 2 feet tall. i loved hitting Kaldim the dwarf town after a patch with a pile of rusty weapons, give one to a guard to make him bag his shield, then pick his pockets clean of coins, gems, and his friggin shield. you had some insane freedoms in that game that may very well never exist in another game again.

Wow on the other hand has essentially none of Eq’s flaws, no more waiting decades to regen hp/mana, no more stupid downtime for raids with 80 people spending 30-50 minutes buffing up only to have one jackass ranger wipe the whole thing when his “Finger slipped” (yes Viggs I am looking at you) and for whoever posted about no one caring about pvp? Sony had 4 pvp servers in Eq and iirc 0 in Eq2…almost 50% of the wow servers are pvp and that is a HUGE point in Blizzards favor. had Soe treated the pvp servers like a viable asset to be explored for future models instead of a red headed step child they would have kept a lot more of their base. most of the pvp’rs left quickly because Soe never did a damn thing to help with issues on those servers and the few times they did they got it wrong.

28

I think the one significant thing Blizzard figured out was how to keep people hooked by offering a huge number of small goals rather than fewer large goals. Yes, the gameplay mechanics are basically the same as a number of other MMORPGs. Some things are slightly more polished here and there, but there’s nothing that strikes me as redefining the genre (other than the subscription numbers). Where WoW excels is in offering the player lots of small advancement opportunities that can be achieved in a relatively short amount of time. Gaining one more level isn’t very hard. Getting a slightly better piece of gear won’t take you too long if you just go on a particular quest. You can craft and get a bit of armor with slightly higher stats. Gameplay downtime is reduced.

No single achievement will make you a powerhouse. Gaining an additional level won’t make you that much stronger (with certain notable exceptions where important skills are unlocked). The +20 STR sword isn’t really that much better than the +17 STR sword. In fact, after you complete some goal and your character becomes more powerful, you don’t get the feeling that anything has changed much at all except for the fact that the endless mobs seems to die one second faster on occasion. The whole game is extremely incremental in nature, much more so than other MMOs.

But you always feel as though you have some path of character improvement, however slight, that is attainable in a reasonable amount of time. So you keep playing.

29

I stand corrected. I always forget about FFXI. I’ve never played it (and I’m not really fan of Final Fantasy in general.) I think the pricing thing you mentioned about WoW’s AH is a little weird. Ebay doesn’t tell you what the average price is on it’s items does it? I don’t know. There’s a whole subculture of people who follow the market in WoW, tracking prices via mods and observation. I use a few mods to help track my sales but nothing elaborate.

30

You do have a point… MMOs now do pale in comparison to EQ in some ways. EQ had absolutely tons of things to do, especially for certain classes. Most especially enchanters. I remember doing all those and more, just plain silly, things. And the fact that every NPC was killable(some, perhaps only theoretically) is something I definitely miss.

EQ does have many faults, but it has some major strengths as well, many of which haven’t been seen since.

31

Ah, now we are starting to get some meat on the bones here! :slight_smile: I can see why some of those things would be attractive. And yes, I do recall finding it annoying to get to the next zone from Antonica in EQ2, though I always loved the swooping griffon flights; they were sooooooo pretty! The visual aspect of EQ2 was a large part of what I liked about the game.

I guess I assumed that the reason everyone liked WoW would be because it had something vastly different, something entirely new about it. It looks and sounds like this is not the case; most of the mechanics of doing things are virtually identical to EQ2 (and goodness knows who thought some of them up first; clearly each group steals from the other and from other MMORPGs). But what most of you are saying is that the implementation by WoW is easier to use, by which I distill that you mean: it’s generally simple, and doesn’t let “role-playing” get in the way of “have fun killing things, getting their loot, so we can use it or sell it and get better at killing more interesting things.”

So is there anything fundamentally different in execution about WoW? Something that EQ2 simply hasn’t put into the game at all? Is there something that EQ2 has that WoW doesn’t do at all, and do you find this a plus or a minus?

32

I, personally, liked the vast variety of zones into which you could go. Although inter-zone loading was a pain, I loved wandering around the world. I recall taking a level 4 cleric across the main continent, having to run for her life, finding people who would cloak her with invisibility, or give her the speed spell, or run with her to protect her from the huge beasties. All so she could deliver the mail! :smack: :stuck_out_tongue: :smiley:

33

Bueller?

34

I know you’ve said that the cartoony style is part of what you dislike about WoW, but personally I prefer my games to go for a less-than-realistic look. The more realism you shoot for, the harder it is to get it to look right. I’ve also found that some games can get the look down, but the movement just doesn’t quite look right. With the cartoony style, Blizzard can spend less time making things look real and more on making them look right. Also, it just fits better with the general sense of humour to be found in the game.

Plus if you’ve only played to level 9, you haven’t seen Northrend. WotLK upped the graphics level, and some things look much better on the new continent. Mountains and cliff faces especially have improved.

35

Its like comparing a car from 1970 to a car now, they might both do the same thing in basically the same way but one has had years of polish and experience to do it better.

36

Word. I’ve given up on all of Sony’s MMOs. They don’t know how to run them properly, but they want in on the market and so they spend gobs of money buying up the licenses and game rights. Star Wars: Galaxies would have rocked so hard had NCSoft had it and not Sony.

As much as I dislike the mindset most PVPers have, I have to admit that PVP is a big selling point. A large portion of gamers don’t like it, but the portion that does is nowhere near insignificant, and it does incredible things for a game’s longevity. You can eventually get tired of a game’s static content, but every time you PVP it’s a new experience.

Exactly. That whole Uncanny Valley thing. I find trying to get characters to look realistic actually robs them of a lot of their humanity. City of Heroes manages to strike a decent balance between realism and stylized, but World of Warcraft’s style is immensely appealing. Team Fortress 2 also has stylized graphics, and that’s done just as much to make it popular as the gameplay.

37

WoW has better encounters, requiring more fun interaction and coordination than “time the full-heal spell to hit the tank 2 seconds after the previous caster’s full-heal spell”. Even some of the early dungeons have encounters that are just MORE FUN to play through.

Also, I agree with the previous poster who stated wow doesn’t look real, but it looks RIGHT. The cartoony graphics are an issue of personal taste, but in WoW the fluidity of motion is better. EQ1 and EQ2 look more like your character is a sticker placed on a background. In WoW, your character looks like a part of that background.

You mentioned before that EQ2 has more variety in character-type choice, but WoW has much more variety than it looks like at first. There’s a whole class which you haven’t unlocked yet, and every class has hundreds of ways to customize their talent points. There are three talent “trees” for each class, and at level 10 you start earning 1 talent point per level to spend customizing your talents in those trees. A marksman talent specced hunter will have 3 or 4 different staple abilities from a beast mastery hunter, for example, and there’s more difference between those two hunters than there is between most classes or the same basic type in Everquest. You can spend talent points to unlock skills that completely change your playstyle, and you can spread them in ways that give you combinations of abilities from each tree. This means that you can come across five hunters that are specced different ways from each other, and each play quite differently from each other. This difference becomes much wider as you approach the level cap, because people’s talents diverge more as they have more talent points to spend.

Also, do not ever let anyone tell you that PvP in WoW is bad. There are several different battlegrounds you can play on in any server (doesn’t have to be a pvp server) which give you real rewards for participation. Some people do not quest or do dungeons for their gear; they spend their time in battlegrounds getting arena and pvp gear. This is completely viable, and as far as I know EQ2 has absolutely nothing even remotely close to this. Once you get to the level cap, you can have a completely fulfilling experience doing nothing but battlegrounds and arenas that range from 2 hour territory grab all out wars to 2 minute death matches between your group of friends and another team. PvP in wow is almost as polished as PvE. PvP servers allow regular-world pvp battles (sometimes against unwilling opponents) that add an extra element of excitement without completely ruining your day if you get ganked. Competing for rare spawns or resource nodes on a pvp server is FUN, because it breaks up the monotony of “get quest. go to where quest mob spawns. kill mob. get next quest” and actually makes things unpredictable.

WoW is better in lots of ways that are just not as tangible, like the quality of class development, the way you progress through the different story arcs, the quality of the story arcs (especially the development of the villains, with a few exceptions like Molten Core), the quality and usefulness of the different skills in each class (where very few skills are useless, and which ones you use is just a matter of taste), the interface, the macro writing system, the variety of addons you can use to customize your interface, and on and on. Seriously, in every single possible way, WoW has done what everquest2 does one (or ten) steps better.

38

Why the holy fark would anyone play this horrible, horrible game?

Joe

39

Because it was the only game of its kind out there.

40

Which forgives a lot of the problems with EQ, really. It was doing something new, so there were a lot of unknown problems in doing what sounded ‘right’. Still not a game I’d have fun playing, but it’s understandable.

Personally I thought Ultima Online got things right before EQ ever came along, but nobody seems able to replicate UO.