Hearts are NOT quests, are NOT grindy

[Shrandar]

that's why i generally try to avoid WoW by now, after 8+ years they still don't have anything unique and never really fixed the general problem with the MMO genre.
there are some friendly players there but they always try to push you to places that screams boredom, i even asked around what is so fun about the game on a really nice way and all i get is ether BS allot of other MMO's also have or pointers that are the actual problem and why it is so boring.

GW2 however is overwhelming but it also fixes a ton of problems, getting bored in that game really shows you're not looking.
the last BWE was a short one for me because i didn't want to spoil it for me, when the game is released we'll have allot more time and so no stress behind it.

I remember explaining you in a polite way why I thought WoW was good and you still act like its the worst game ever, not much different from the WoW players you so love to hate. People get invested in their games, explaining why something is fun to people who think the same content is boring, see on these forums how well that is working out. Taste differs.

WoW did try to solve a lot of what was wrong with MMO's back then, much in the same way as GW2 does now. In MMO's before WoW, kill stealing was even more prevalent because the one that did most damage to the target got the kill. Also the main way of leveling up was simply mob grinding, there were hardly any quests and if there were they didnt give a significant amount of xp, or non at all. WoW introduced tagging (the one that starts the attack gets the kill and loot, no matter who joins in later) and introduced mainly quest based leveling as opposed to grinding mobs all day.


Yes WoW got old and yes some have never liked it, but there is a significant amount that did, including me. I still like it, even if it is for mostly nostalgic reasons now. Thank god games develop and react to new situations/wishes, doesnt mean we have to point at older games as if being old and outdated is actually a flaw. I am sure that if you asked Blizz they would never have expected to do so well as they did, I don't blame them for not significantly changing a winning formula. Maybe they will with Titan, who knows?

[sorudo]

but the question remains, what is today the one thing that makes WoW so different from other MMO's?

[djacob]

but the question remains, what is today the one thing that makes WoW so different from other MMO's?

More people play it.

[Shrandar]

Good question, it is mostly asked the other way around. I am not really sure how to answer it either. WoW was my first MMO and my first online gaming experience. As such there is loads of memories and nostalgia blended with my evaluation of the game. These memories might be a weak point when it comes to 'objectively' judging game mechanics but on the other hand they can imo be a very important tool when exploring online worlds. I know every corner of Azeroth, remember the ship in Menethil Harbour that was the meeting spot of my first serious guild, the guild trip to the Darkmoon Fair across Ashenvale and the Barrens in walk mode with a lot of the server joining in along the way, the same night organising a late night trip to Lower Blackrock Spire to complete the key for Upper Blackrock Spire (10 man raid), going in there with 5 for the first time and happily wiping away. I remember the bank npc's in Stormwind: Olivia, Newton and John. I remember the most uber awesome two handed mace from vanilla called "The unstoppable force" and after the first expansion there was a common mace drop called "The stoppable force". The hanso sword, the one ring and the two ring that was better then the one ring.

Exchange names and places and you could probably tell similar stories about GW1 and others about LOTRO, AoC etc. So does this make WoW different from other MMO's? Most obvious answer being no. At the same time though also yes, in the sense that WoW opened up the concept of an online world to a public far greater then previously involved in MMO's.
Mike O' Brien in the latest AMA answered a question from a player who wanted to know what he expected would happen to GW2 sales with so many MMO's failing and people getting more and more disenchanted with the genre. His answer:

First of all, what we all care about in an online world is making a living world that stands the test of time, where players can keep having fun with their friends year after year. So success isn't based on how many copies the game sells up front. Success is based on whether people keep playing the game over time. And financially, success is based on whether people keep supporting the game by buying new content.
Second, I'll address this idea that the time of MMOs is closing. If the word "MMO" means the same game mechanics that companies have been hashing out again and again for the last decade, fine, let them rot. But if you change the word "MMO" to "online world", then I bet we can agree that "online worlds" are only going to keep growing in importance.

For the first part of his answer I think we can all agree that WoW succceeded in doing so, it stood the test of time even against the expectations of Blizzard themselves. The second part of his answer is what we have mostly adressed here in the forums, yes MMO game mechanics have gotten old and have been re-used far too often. But the concept of MMO's as online worlds and communities have transformed from niche interest into a possibility and dream of many players largely (though ofc not solely) on account of WoW. The way people talk about GW2 now (MMO for non MMO'ers, fixing the problems of the genre etc etc) is suprisingly similar to the way people talked about WoW back then. How well WoW succeeded (apart from its commercial succes) is up for debate as is how well Anet will do at their attempts. But no matter what, online worlds will continue to grow and develop, most certainly now their audience is growing up.


I realise I did not really answer your question as to what makes WoW so different from other MMO's nowadays. Technically and game play wise not much or at all. As to how it became the succes that no other MMO since then has even come close to, if I knew the answer to that I would probably earn a lot more money then I currently do . Fact is though that WoW had/has what I would call the online world x factor. As inherent with the x factor, it cannot really be defined in terms of technique, you either have it or you don't, but also: you either like it or you don't. There is not much sense in debating wether or not Micheal Jackson was a star on grounds of his technical abilities (though there is ofc merit in discussing those seperately) , you either like him or you don't, there is no denying he was a star. That is not to say that there is no way to define what makes a good online world and what not, just that this cannot solely be done on grounds of game mechanics. Some of the things that come in to it are service, communication with the community but even those are still a long way from covering it all.

[Alaris]

@Sorudo:

If not for GW1-2, I'd probably maintain a WoW account. Basically, WoW beats the clones because: (1) biggest crowd, (2) druid, (3) more additions afaik such as expansions, patches, etc, and (4) high polish.

WoW did try to solve a lot of what was wrong with MMO's back then, much in the same way as GW2 does now.

I can see it now. In 7-10 years, people will be saying much the same about GW2.

[sorudo]

Good question, it is mostly asked the other way around. I am not really sure how to answer it either. WoW was my first MMO and my first online gaming experience. As such there is loads of memories and nostalgia blended with my evaluation of the game. These memories might be a weak point when it comes to 'objectively' judging game mechanics but on the other hand they can imo be a very important tool when exploring online worlds. I know every corner of Azeroth, remember the ship in Menethil Harbour that was the meeting spot of my first serious guild, the guild trip to the Darkmoon Fair across Ashenvale and the Barrens in walk mode with a lot of the server joining in along the way, the same night organising a late night trip to Lower Blackrock Spire to complete the key for Upper Blackrock Spire (10 man raid), going in there with 5 for the first time and happily wiping away. I remember the bank npc's in Stormwind: Olivia, Newton and John. I remember the most uber awesome two handed mace from vanilla called "The unstoppable force" and after the first expansion there was a common mace drop called "The stoppable force". The hanso sword, the one ring and the two ring that was better then the one ring.

Exchange names and places and you could probably tell similar stories about GW1 and others about LOTRO, AoC etc. So does this make WoW different from other MMO's? Most obvious answer being no. At the same time though also yes, in the sense that WoW opened up the concept of an online world to a public far greater then previously involved in MMO's.
Mike O' Brien in the latest AMA answered a question from a player who wanted to know what he expected would happen to GW2 sales with so many MMO's failing and people getting more and more disenchanted with the genre. His answer:




For the first part of his answer I think we can all agree that WoW succceeded in doing so, it stood the test of time even against the expectations of Blizzard themselves. The second part of his answer is what we have mostly adressed here in the forums, yes MMO game mechanics have gotten old and have been re-used far too often. But the concept of MMO's as online worlds and communities have transformed from niche interest into a possibility and dream of many players largely (though ofc not solely) on account of WoW. The way people talk about GW2 now (MMO for non MMO'ers, fixing the problems of the genre etc etc) is suprisingly similar to the way people talked about WoW back then. How well WoW succeeded (apart from its commercial succes) is up for debate as is how well Anet will do at their attempts. But no matter what, online worlds will continue to grow and develop, most certainly now their audience is growing up.


I realise I did not really answer your question as to what makes WoW so different from other MMO's nowadays. Technically and game play wise not much or at all. As to how it became the succes that no other MMO since then has even come close to, if I knew the answer to that I would probably earn a lot more money then I currently do . Fact is though that WoW had/has what I would call the online world x factor. As inherent with the x factor, it cannot really be defined in terms of technique, you either have it or you don't, but also: you either like it or you don't. There is not much sense in debating wether or not Micheal Jackson was a star on grounds of his technical abilities (though there is ofc merit in discussing those seperately) , you either like him or you don't, there is no denying he was a star. That is not to say that there is no way to define what makes a good online world and what not, just that this cannot solely be done on grounds of game mechanics. Some of the things that come in to it are service, communication with the community but even those are still a long way from covering it all.

long answer but you did answer it ^_^

@Sorudo:

If not for GW1-2, I'd probably maintain a WoW account. Basically, WoW beats the clones because: (1) biggest crowd, (2) druid, (3) more additions afaik such as expansions, patches, etc, and (4) high polish.

if not for GW1 i would never have played an MMO ever, difference is simply the monthly fee problem.

[raspberry jam]

Generic sounds clonish, which GW2 isn't. They're reversed a lot of rules that almost defined MMORPGs, like kill stealing. Making the game actually social (as opposed to parallel gaming) is a big step forward in the development of MMORPGs. This and other fundamental changes makes the difference between me not wanting to even try clones and me buying the CE as soon as I could.

I understand your point though. But to be more direct, the DEs are scripted. ANet can literally add anything to their game in any area, they could even have an event start in endgame and wave through the whole continent *if they wanted*. The thing is that they really don't have to for launch, but as people get bored of local quests we might start seeing some really wicked large-scale stuff happening. In a way, all you need is to make a bunch of DEs chain into each other...

With scaling, it also makes sense for players from higher areas to follow the event chain all the way back into the lower areas. In this way, you can repopulate the lower areas, and you're not really messing up the game because scaling makes sure that the content remains properly challenging for everyone. So some of that new content can be experienced with veterans and noobs alike.

You'd run into tons of technical and balance issues if you tried that in WoW.

In many ways, GW2 is clonish. It's literally as if they took Generic Standard MMO 1A and then invented mechanics that cover up all the bad stuff. Like, yes, kill stealing, content segmenting, quest givers (I still don't know why this was a bad thing though, but they made a big deal of that they were gone). All these things are still beneath the hood; making them look a bit different doesn't mean that they are no longer there. For example you mention scaling: it wouldn't even be needed if they had approached the project with a blank slate to start from. But they didn't; instead, they assumed that MMOs need a certain set of things. Such as levels and grind.

And as for being social, MMOs were always social. There is no more or less parallel gaming in GW2 than in basically any other MMO. In fact, there are MMOs that are far more social than GW2 (for example EVE Online). However I disagree that it is a big step forward: instead, I thought that being able to be selectively social (as in GW1) was a far better model.

Yes, DEs are scripted, and that is their weakness. They follow a script and that script will not change (unless there is something wrong with it). That alone makes it not actually dynamic. Instead, the events are static. You could argue that they are on a dynamic chain insofar as that the next event depends on the outcome of the previous one, but that doesn't make it dynamic either. It's still a static, repeating quest which happen to have several states.
If the events were truly dynamic, they would be generated on the fly by Ai algorithms that represent various factions. For example, instead of having a farm attacked by bandits every 10 minutes or something, where defending the farm successfully means that you get to raid the bandit camp... Let the bandit leader at times decide to attack the farm, or maybe the village nearby, or maybe the merchant caravan... his decision depending on the reports from the scouts that he sent out, scouts that can, in turn, be recognized and attacked (and doing so might lead to nothing, or might lead to bandit retribution, depending on what they feel like). And all this should happen dynamically, not by running a script. This is, by the way, not a hard thing to do: it's how RTS AIs work.

In short: Let the events not run on chains, but have multiple event generators that react to each other and to players, and produce not static events but truly dynamic ones.

I realise I did not really answer your question as to what makes WoW so different from other MMO's nowadays. Technically and game play wise not much or at all. As to how it became the succes that no other MMO since then has even come close to, if I knew the answer to that I would probably earn a lot more money then I currently do . Fact is though that WoW had/has what I would call the online world x factor. As inherent with the x factor, it cannot really be defined in terms of technique, you either have it or you don't, but also: you either like it or you don't. There is not much sense in debating wether or not Micheal Jackson was a star on grounds of his technical abilities (though there is ofc merit in discussing those seperately) , you either like him or you don't, there is no denying he was a star. That is not to say that there is no way to define what makes a good online world and what not, just that this cannot solely be done on grounds of game mechanics. Some of the things that come in to it are service, communication with the community but even those are still a long way from covering it all.

I'd say that a combination of smooth gameplay, extremely good timing, an existing and widely respected brand name, and a multitude of psychological tricks is to 95% the reason for WoW's success. Basically all other MMOs have lacked one or more of those things, in particular brand name and timing. Interestingly GW2 have all of the above things, except maybe timing (we'll see).

[Alaris]

Not just hiding, improving.

Levels and grind was re-introduced because even though we GW1 veterans understood, the rest of the MMORPG didn't. They need the levels. Also, open-world RPG needs leveling not for the grind but for pacing. I don't like levels, but they do serve a purpose.

You can be selectively social in GW2, and better yet, you can group on the fly. This is awesome, and never seen before afaik.

As for events being scripted, I'm happy with that. Random generation can easily feel repetitive, it's really hard to make a system where interesting things happen randomly, and even if they happen, they'll be rare. By contrast a script is easier to make interesting. I like both approaches, they each have pros and cons.

[Lady Rhonwyn]

As for events being scripted, I'm happy with that. Random generation can easily feel repetitive, it's really hard to make a system where interesting things happen randomly, and even if they happen, they'll be rare. By contrast a script is easier to make interesting. I like both approaches, they each have pros and cons.

Using the one doesn't mean the other can't be used. Some events are better scripted, while others (mostly the smaller ones) can be perfect for randomization.

[Alaris]

Using the one doesn't mean the other can't be used. Some events are better scripted, while others (mostly the smaller ones) can be perfect for randomization.

Developing either system takes resources, which is why most games have either not both. I'd love seeing both being used and combined, but realistically, we're not there yet.