Anyone?
Guild Wars 2
- Thread starter bushmins
- Start date
Anyone?
Again if this is true then Guildwars 1 (No expansion's) should've failed right?
The end game in Guildwars was Clearing the Chamber/Smite run in the Underworld for ecto and farming the forest in FoW for shards, good luck trying to find a PuG and even a lot of guilds to explore anywhere else within these area's. When the 55hp/solo builds hit the scence unless you was x profession it was basically gtfo.
Lucky Sorrow's Furnace was something the playerbase wanted to explore abit more.
Guildwars factions for me had about 10-20 hours playtime in it for my first completion and I was glad to be able to do the missions for the opposite faction as this extended the game abit. When Factions first came out unless you part of the allience that held either the Luxon or Kurzick capital no end game content for you!
Last edited:
You must have missed the memo.
All MMO's must be released with at least 5 years worth of content go play through and operate like WoW.
Caporegime
- Joined
- 7 Apr 2008
- Posts
- 26,176
- Location
- Lorville - Hurston
Lol
free to play? Best cancel my sub now then
The measuring stick is WOW. Every MMO on release gets compared to WOW, and because WOW was the first MMO for a lot of people they don't like change so they will probably never truly like another MMO as much until blizzard release WOW 2, which undoubtedly they'll do.
Caporegime
- Joined
- 7 Apr 2008
- Posts
- 26,176
- Location
- Lorville - Hurston
A bit like apple fanboy
The measuring stick isn't WoW, I don't know why people keep thinking it is. Commercially WoW is a success but in engine, graphics and even UI these days it's far behind the competition. It has a superbly loyal player base though and some very nice content but I doubt it'd win on any individual element when put up against other more modern games.
Additionally it wasn't the first popular MMO by any means, when you consider how few people had the internet in any fashion at home and most were on dial up it's quite amazing how many people did play MMOs really. Broadband only took off around the same time as WoW was released (2004 onwards) which could possibly have helped it.
Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot in 2003 both had 250,000 subscriptions, Everquest later in the same year had over 450,000 subs.
I still remember playing UO on dial up and ISDN and DAOC was the first game I played on broadband (all 512kbps of it - and I paid through the teeth for it!).
All three of those games had drops in subs well before WoW was released and as someone who played both UO and DAOC I can pretty much lay the blame flatly at the door of management and devs in both companies rather than Blizzard launching WoW.
Don't get me wrong WoW is a fantastic game and I played it for many years, but it's never been the benchmark for a hell of a lot of MMO elements, it was perhaps for some parts such as the UI and raiding for many years but it's really starting to show it's age and in dire need of an engine upgrade and world overhaul.
Rift - now there's a WoW clone, by definition if WoW is the benchmark Rift should be one of the top MMOs.. yet it isn't because it doesn't have the player base that WoW built up. If you released WoW now it'd be F2P within 18 months.
Read my post again, I didn't say it was the first popular MMO. I said it was the first MMO most people played.
They went straight for EQ and took its market, Blizzard hired the guild leaders of the highest profile EQ guilds (Furor, Thott) and dragged the leading guilds to WoW.
High end guilds in EQ such as FoH, Afterlife, and to a lesser extend Ruin, Township Rebellion (not so much) restarted in Vanilla WoW. That's what killed EQ.
I was in a midrange EQ guild at the time and we got heavily trolled by Blizzard to join WoW. Everyone above us had already gone.
It gets compared to WoW by the WoW fanboys only though, they measure every new MMO against something with 8 years worth of content and when it inevitably fails it gets screamed to high heavens that its a fail game with nothing to do.
At the same time when the content gets used up (generally quicker in WoW than newer mmo's I might add) the same crowd are more than happy to sit there twiddling their thumbs doing nothing. WoW gamers are a very strange bunch.
There will not be a WoW2 in the next decade, Titan will be an entirely different setting too and probably a f2p model of some description.
I know, I didn't suggest you did say it was the first popular MMO at any point. I merely made the point that it wasn't.
Whilst its true they did take a fair amount of EQ's raiding guilds, EQ continued to grow in sub numbers when WoW came out. EQ's own design killed EQ, (along with some really poor management from SoE). The new player couldn't do anything within EQ unless you were max level and had AA's coming out the wazoo, it was also a slower paced game compared to WoW (and EQ2 to a certain extent) which didn't help.
You seemed to suggest it when quoting my post that's all. I fail to see how you can say WOW isn't the measuring stick. Every review of every MMO since WOW seems to have included some reference or comparison to it. Even in this thread WOW has been mentioned many, many times.
Even though I think it's daft WoW is the measuring stick.
It should be the measuring stick for the carbon copies like WAR, Rift, Aion, SWTOR etc but in a game like GW2 which does not play like WoW or even pretend to offer what wow offers (pvp as opposed to pve) I find the comparisson baffling. But because it is the only really successful MMO out there (barring Eve) the two are bound to be compared.
It should be the measuring stick for the carbon copies like WAR, Rift, Aion, SWTOR etc but in a game like GW2 which does not play like WoW or even pretend to offer what wow offers (pvp as opposed to pve) I find the comparisson baffling. But because it is the only really successful MMO out there (barring Eve) the two are bound to be compared.
I think the problem is, if you want to release an MMO now, people expect a certain level of content and features. If those aren't met people will complain (like me ^.^), but at the same time, why wouldn't a developer add these things when it could potentially keep a lot of people in the game.
Reviews always compare with the most successful game, it's the same with any genre and WoW has without a doubt been the most successful game in the MMO genre to date. Pulling in more money doesn't make it by default a better game though.
I'm not knocking WoW which I think is how you see this, I played and enjoyed it for years but I'd rather people compared like for like or compared GW2 versus other modern MMOs with better high res graphics than WoW, or compared it's dynamic content with other MMOS which have something very similar rather than go back to what in many ways is one of the few "source" MMOs for the genre. It's not a fair comparison.
In this thread as with most MMO related threads on any forum you've got the fanboys on both sides, those who can't see past WoW and those who can't see past whatever the latest MMO they've bought is. Within 10 mins of playing GW2 I was already reading in chat how this "was way better than WoW". It's the same with most MMOs I've played.
I still remember seeing "this is much better than UO" a few days after I started playing DAOC, to compare those two games is frankly laughable but they're both superb and both beat WoW hands down on specific elements.
For example I don't think any 3D mmo is going to compete with UOs basic 2d client for pure interaction with the environment or customisation of that environment for at least the next 5 years. Likewise I don't think WoW or any other MMO to date has had as good PvP as DAOC, yet both games will be behind WoW in other areas.
WoW shouldn't be the benchmark, we should be using the strongest areas of each MMO and comparing the newer games against those, otherwise we're comparing the latest supercar with last years supermini, they're both cars, both good in their field but you'd rather have the best of both if you could get away with it - that's how it should be in MMO, pushing the genre not accepting WoW as some sort of gold standard, it was mostly when it launched but it hasn't been for a long time. Simple truth is nothing else has actually been as good an all-rounder with the same mass appeal.
I've been writing and reviewing MMOs since 2004, doesn't mean I know more than anyone else, but it does mean I want the genre to improve and we can't do that if we're always trying to beat something released in 2004, in so many ways that's a poor benchmark.
Last edited:
When you sit down and analyze every game like this be it a mmo or any type, you may very well be right, but what makes you totally wrong and so many others like you, it thats not how players compare games, for players its a gut feel, they either do or don't, and all the other bullocks said counts for zip, till you understand that which you clearly don't seem o from this post, you will never understand why people choose the game they prefer.
and more to the point game's will always be compared in there whole, and never as you suggest.
Last edited: