WoW is pretty cool

Post by **thibodeaux** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 9:04 am

Yeah, I know. Let me explain.

I played Everquest pretty heavily about 10 years ago. I gave it up for several reasons, but I really enjoyed playing it. I played D&D as a teenager, and when I first logged into EQ, I thought, "This IS D&D."

Anyway, my son is also starting to follow the Dark Side. I've read him the Narnia books, and we're starting on the Hobbit. And we "play" D&D some (I just narrate some stories where he's fighting goblins or whatever; no dice or paper).

So this weekend I downloaded a trial version of WoW; I figured we could at least check it out. I was not disappointed.

It's like EverQuest, but they fixed all the stuff that was annoying. The problem with EQ was that they REALLY thought of themselves as a Serious Role Playing Game.

Just take that in-game mini-map that WoW has. No freaking way! Getting lost is part of the Authentic Role Playing Experience. Or take quests. Sure the quests are about the same---"Bring this note to General Limpdick in Fort Whackamole." But in EverQuest, you had to talk to every NPC just to figure out whether they were giving out quests or not, then you had to scour each zone looking for something that might be Fort Whackamole, and then scour that for NPCs. In WoW, the mini-map has ICONS showing quest givers, and then MORE ICONS showing you where to go. How cool is that?

Then there's the monsters. In EQ, if you get in a fight with a monster, it ain't over til one of you is DEAD (or until you leave the zone---more on that later). You can run for miles, but that damn monster is not going to give up. But in WoW, if you just run for a minute or so, the monster stops chasing you. Whew!

Zones: well, I can't really blame EQ for this one; the technology might not have been there. But basically each zone was a self-contained box, with one or two bottle-neck exits. And when you left the zone, you had to sit there and wait a minute or so while the next one loaded. The good news was that monsters couldn't cross zones, so if you were chased by one, that was where you headed. But it also meant that EVERYBODY ELSE tended to pull their monsters there and fight. So you got traffic jams, etc. Anyway, none of that in WoW, that I know of.

While we're at it, it's VERY nice to know the actual level of a monster. In EQ, you got a 5-color code (green, blue, white, yellow, red) to let you know its strength relative to yourself. And soloing was a SLOOOOW way to level. My first EQ character took me months to get to level 8 solo. I soloed my first WoW character to level 13 just this weekend.

Dying is much less a pain. In EQ, your character was "bound" to some point in some zone. If you were a non-caster, it HAD to be a zone that contained a city. So if you were hunting in some area far from a friendly city, and you died, well have a nice 30-minute run back to your corpse. In WoW, you reappear in the nearest graveyard, and you can even have the nice lady rez you right there.

Anyway, long story short, it's pretty cool. I do think some of the characters look a little "cartoony," but you can't have everything, I guess.

Malcolm · Post by **Malcolm** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 11:05 am

It's all fun & games to the point where you have to organize 40-man raids to take down some big-ass critter with ph4t leWtZ you've got about a 0.000001% chance of rolling for.

Post by **GORDON** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 12:03 pm

Paging Dr. Ogre.

Post by **TPRJones** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 3:47 pm

I, too, played EQ long ago way too much, but then I followed that up with way too much WoW.

Recently I discovered that EQ II is now free to play. It's interesting, as it's a blend of the good ol' familiar EQ days with the convenient new WoW days. For any old EQ player I recommend checking it out. Especially now that it's free.

Post by **thibodeaux** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 5:07 pm

God damn you...the end of the trial was my escape.

Post by **TPRJones** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 5:15 pm

I tried several free trials and free-to-play games recently. So in order to be further damned, other free-to-play games in that general style that I would currently recommend include Lord of the Rings Online and Allods Online.

I have yet to try all of them, though. I got totally derailed by Minecraft. I bought it Friday afternoon and didn't come up for air again (except to sleep and poop) until I had to go to work this morning. It was instantly and completely addicting. But I think that'll burn out sooner rather than later.

Post by **thibodeaux** » Sun Oct 03, 2010 11:43 am

Trying out EQII and LOTRO. So far, the LOTR download is going to take 8 hours. EQ also wants to download a lot of stuff. Not cool.

Post by **thibodeaux** » Sun Oct 03, 2010 6:29 pm

EQ is requiring an awful lot of loading. Not cool. However, the UI is surprisingly similar to WoW's. Not sure who copied who. Haven't really played enough to decide which is more fun.

Malcolm · Post by **Malcolm** » Sun Oct 03, 2010 7:18 pm

EQ pretty much used to be !UO. WoW is EQ after being optimized by some kind of process that makes it more addictive than meth to a certain segment of the population and at least as attractive as nicotine.