SWTOR

[Cyrrex]

YOU CAN HAVE A PURPLE SABER?!

Where's the lifetime subscription link?

(I'm...almost...kidding)

[AcidCat]

WoW was simplistic but certainly not generic.  You had nomadic orcs, native american minotaur people, goth zombies and jamaican trolls and lots of other 'hooks' for people to start the game up and say "oh this is awesome!" and going to undercity or thunderbluuf for the first time truly felt that way for many.  No game is really capturing that feeling, that initial 'hook' wow had.  Even if you copy every game system in wow you still need to dress to impress. 

This is from a few pages back, but it is so right on the money.

[Lakov_Sanite]

^  that's what I'm trying to say, it's also what rift lacked.  Rift is technically a good game, solid coding attentive devs but do most people give two shits about the setting, the races or hell what's even happening to that world?

Star wars can certainly compete with wow, there's no reason it can't and anyone thinking this is some sort of impossible task has merely set their expectation so low they think EQ2 was a great game.  What star wars needs is to have people care about the setting while executing it in a technically sound manner. Step two is a lot easier than step one but sadly some people fail at even that.

[Paelos]

^  that's what I'm trying to say, it's also what rift lacked.  Rift is technically a good game, solid coding attentive devs but do most people give two shits about the setting, the races or hell what's even happening to that world?

Star wars can certainly compete with wow, there's no reason it can't and anyone thinking this is some sort of impossible task has merely set their expectation so low they think EQ2 was a great game.  What star wars needs is to have people care about the setting while executing it in a technically sound manner. Step two is a lot easier than step one but sadly some people fail at even that.

I think I said that about Rift in the beta when I first tried it. I was like, WTF is going on? SWTOR will have so much more going for it because it's got the IP that's so well known, but it still has to craft a world that feels like a world. That's where SWG fell apart. It was endless plains of nothing, and sprawl.

[Ingmar]

I ended up never even trying Rift because the intro was so off-putting when I watched it on YouTube. The lore/story looked completely awful.

[AcidCat]

I ended up liking Rift in spite of itself, it did not hook me at all at first with its bland persona. I ended up subbing out of sheer boredom and lack of other options, and it gradually won me over, but it was just lucky it came at a time with no other mmo's on the horizon I wanted to play.

[Amaron]

Rift.

Oh look, your argument is invalid.

RIFT is not as well made as WoW.  RIFT is very well made but as much as I hate WoW it still stands head and shoulders above RIFT in a couple things.   RIFT's success is pretty clear proof that making a quality game is all you need to do to make buckets of cash.

[Morfiend]

Rift.

Oh look, your argument is invalid.

RIFT is not as well made as WoW.  RIFT is very well made but as much as I hate WoW it still stands head and shoulders above RIFT in a couple things.   RIFT's success is pretty clear proof that making a quality game is all you need to do to make buckets of cash.

I would argue that Rift is a much more well made game at release, than WoW at release. WoW now is the better game, but Rift is still well made.

What is an interesting thought is that if Rift was released as it is now, when WoW was released, do you guys think it would of had the same success?

[Fordel]

Doesn't matter really, since Rift has to compete with WoW of today, not WoW of 6 years ago or whatever. WoW still would have won is my guess though, if only because there was/is real interest in playing in the Warcraft universe from tons of people after have played War2/3 for so long. I couldn't even tell you what Rift was supposed to be about, it didn't generate enough interest from me to learn enough to even mock it.


EQ2 looks like a 1990's ray trace project and when released had mechanics that were proto-vanguard. Even if you had the computer from the FUTURE that was required to run it at release, it was still a terrible game.

[Merusk]

EQ2 was in many ways a superior mmo...if you had the pc to run it. And folks seem to like GW, which is f2p. Why didn't that dominate the market? Because WoW is an anomaly,

Eq2 had a lot of Ill-SOE-will against it. Say what you want, but your company's rep can hurt you and I think it did a lot for EQ2.   GW had a few glaring flaws that kept me from enjoying it.  1) Hunting down abilities.  If I'm forced to level, fine.  If I'm forced to quest or hunt rare trainers for key and core abilities, fine.  Make me do both and I lose interest pretty damn quick.   2) The goddamn maps.   People complain WoW is "on rails" quite a lot.  If it is, then how do you describe GW, where you literally had to suss out the path from point a to point b the way the developers wanted you to.   No no, you can't go down that little hillock, you have to come around the corner on the path.  Or hey, bet you didn't realize there WAS a path over here, because you didn't do the "run your toon against the zone wall" thing to discover you could go down, around, up, whatever.

[Tannhauser]

Rift was released in better shape than WoW.  Remember loot lag?  Hunters?  I was in both on Day 1 and in Rift I wasn't sliding around crouching.  Ok, Rift's lore is not that great, but what can they do?  Just have you whack foozles?  They have to put some kind of lore in and I've even started reading quests.  

Rift kind of feels a bit bland BUT it is more sandbox than WoW currently is.  I enjoy artifact hunting but archaeology in WoW is not fun, it's tedious.  WoW is a good looking game now, but I feel its lost its soul.

[Fordel]

The original Guild Wars campaign was inferior to WoW's release, plain and simple. It also came out well before WoW unless I am mistaken, and did a number on the other MMO's of the time. I know it put a pretty big dent into DaoC at least.

[Lakov_Sanite]

RIFT is certainly NOT sandbox in any appreciable way. The only, only reason to ever go to old zones is to gather crafting materials or get artifacts.

[Venkman]

Rift kind of feels a bit bland BUT it is more sandbox than WoW currently is.  I enjoy artifact hunting but archaeology in WoW is not fun, it's tedious.  WoW is a good looking game now, but I feel its lost its soul.

I kinda agree, but the only real "sandboxy" part of Rift is the Souls. Even the rift events themselves are formulaec after awhile (though I got bored at 27 so dunno if they change?). Take out Souls and Rift is WoW with the 2004-era EQ2 art team using Warhammer's engine and writers. I was surprised how polished it was in beta and at launch, but the game lacks character that WoW had in spades even at its first E3 showing. And I was one of the biggest WoW skeptics going...

It seems to me that most of the development on the game is now getting PvP right, for the huge numbers of potential players who will be brought in by that.

Ugh. How many people would they lose if they just didn't launch PvP? From the PAX demo I really didn't get a sense this would be good for PvP. How about give the assets to Dice to make a real PvP game? :)

[AcidCat]

Rift was released in better shape than WoW.  Remember loot lag?  

I would gladly put up with occasional loot lag in exchange for true variety in races and a variety of starting zones, just to name a few things WoW still has over Rift.

[Fabricated]

My beef with just about everything that isn't WoW is the visual design.

You could take a no-UI screenshot from 10 different fantasy MMOs in a real gameplay scenario and I honestly couldn't tell the majority of them apart.

[Fabricated]

Pretend you're not on a forum for bitter MMO burnouts for like 5 seconds. Squint and tell me which game is which.

[Pezzle]

Yes, we live in a sad world.

Clearly one is Vanguard with the BUY VANGUARD button.

Another is Lotro with the Weathertop stuff.

Interestingly enough 1/3 of your samples have references to penises in the screenshot.  

[Fabricated]

Yes, we live in a sad world.

Clearly one is Vanguard with the BUY VANGUARD button.

Another is Lotro with the Weathertop stuff.

Interestingly enough 1/3 of your samples have references to penises in the screenshot. 

I said squint. Also the penis thing is pretty hilarious since I picked the first reasonably clear screenshot I could find for each game.

[Pezzle]

So I cheated!  Your point certainly stands.  It is our sameness that makes us different!

In fairness I cannot name the other 4 with 100% accuracy, though I have a decent idea on 2. 

[Fordel]

I can tell most of them, but only because of the UI.

[Rasix]

It's not very difficult to point out EQ2 and Vanguard from the character models. The downie Ogre is a dead giveaway.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Proof of what I was getting at. Any of those games could be perfect from a technical gameplay stanpoint but if you wanna compete, that aint good enough.

[tmp]

My beef with just about everything that isn't WoW is the visual design.

You could take a no-UI screenshot from 10 different fantasy MMOs in a real gameplay scenario and I couldn't honestly couldn't tell the majority of them apart.

Does it mean if someone made you log into Alganon instead of WoW you wouldn't notice, nor mind the differences?

[Rasix]

Heh, only two of those look particularly crappy.  I have no idea what the second one from the bottom is.  The art style on that one is.. inconsistent.

edit: Yah, don't like that one either.  So half look bad and half look fine out of your sample.  And I don't event have my glasses on.

[Fordel]

Aion I believe.

[tmp]

Aion I believe.

Yup.

[caladein]

Pretty sure it's:

Age of Conan
EverQuest 2
Rift
Vanguard
Aion
LotRO

Edit: Pedantry aside, yes, they're all pretty much the same, even with the slightly different UI art.  Character art is pretty interchangeable.

[Fordel]

So it's what, AoC, EQ2, Rift, Vanguard, Aion and LotrO?


-fake edit-

AoC and LotrO blend together to me, if it wasn't for the UIs I would have issue telling them apart unless there was a really distinct landmark, like a hobbit hole.

Rift and Aion do something similar in that regard. I had to look up their respective UIs.

The only thing that told me the difference between EQ2 and Vanguard was the BUY VANGUARD button. 

[Count Nerfedalot]

what the heck is the first one?

fwiw, I hate both the plastic look of EQ2 and the cartoony look of WoW.  But I played and enjoyed both for many years (EQ2 AFTER they threw out all the original Vision stuff and copied the better parts of WoW and WoW had gotten stale).  I love me some good graphics, but they wont keep me long if the game sucks.

[Fordel]

I'll take stylized over pseudo photo-realism just about any day of the week.


What really bothers the fuck out of me though, are animations, mainly bad and/or lazy ones. I fucking hate motion capture, it almost never looks like a person doing something, but a person pretending to do something. SWTOR has this disease from what I've seen so far and it troubles me.

[Sky]

Does TOR have square nails, too?

I fucking love this website.

[Koyasha]

Funny thing.  Vanguard is the only one I didn't instantly recognize.  Only figured it out when I looked closely and saw 'Buy Vanguard'.

Age of Conan and Lord of the Rings Online I wouldn't have recognized at all if they'd been UI-off pictures though.  The others are very distinct  - to me at least - and I know them just from the looks of the characters and the other things in the scene.  EQ2 is instantly recognizable because of the ogre, Rift because of that claw-thing out of the ground, and Aion characters are pretty distinct, even though that's taken with graphics settings far inferior to what I'm used to.  Besides, I know that room.  The three I wouldn't recognize at all, I haven't played very much at all, so overall I don't agree that they look so similar as to be indistinct.

[Ingmar]

I do think if you had WoW lined up with the rest of them it would stand out clearly as different from the rest. They really are kind of same-y. It seems like TOR and GW2 will also be pretty distinct looking, so good for them.

[Ashamanchill]

Of those, I will at least forgive EQ2 because it had race differentiation. By the time I was playing, my toon was a dragon and my buddies' was a bitter looking faerie.