Warhammer, WoW and Guild Wars
A.k.a. I talk about games in this entry.
So over the past couple of months I've been poking and prodding at other MMOs besides Guild Wars (my crack of choice; I've been playing it for a little over three years now) to see if any caught my fancy. The two big ones I gave a shot were World of Warcraft, of course, the reigning king of the MMO genre, and one of the newest arrivals on the scene, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (from hereon out referred to as WAR).
I honestly expected to like World of Warcraft a lot, but it was mostly very, very mediocre. The graphics were--actually, let me just go off on a slight tangent here and say that I think Guild Wars has spoiled me. The game prides itself on not having (much of a) grind, on having excellent graphics, on taking out a lot of tedious, boring and annoying things that pervade other MMOs (loot-stealing, spawn camping, endless walking/traveling to get from A to B, "kill ten boars and bring me their bling" type of quests, an endless struggle to get better gear solely to stay competetive, and so on, and so on), and on focusing on being fun--
so with that said, WoW's graphics were kind of meh. I suppose I'd have gotten used to the cartoon-y style as a while, but as a personal preference, I just like GW's semi-realistic, fantasy style better.
Now, I didn't play WoW for very long, probably around six hours total (out of a ten-day trial), and here's why: the quests were boring. One quest chain I started went from "kill 10 Kobold Vermin" to "kill 10 Kobold Workers" to "kill 10 Kobold Laborers". Really? And that wasn't the only "kill x whatevers" quest I came across. So I pretty much gave up around there. It's possible I'm missing out on Awesome Stuff(tm) that happens later on, when you're a higher level, but I don't see any reason why early stuff shouldn't be fun either. One of the early GW missions involves fleeing a giant horde of Charr (an enemy race) while a timer ticks down. I distinctly remember having a "HOLY FUCK" reaction the first time I did that and it's still fun three years later (though of course less so, because I'm all jaded now ;P).
I then started playing WAR, because
rho had been playing it for a while. Now, WAR was a lot better right at the start -- it had fun quests and it integrates PvE and PvP right from the start. One of the earliest quests I picked up was to go kill enemy players in PvP. The PvP map I participated in was also quite fun, it was a little bit like Alliance Battles in GW, where you fight for control over a number of points.
WAR also beat out GW in the "easy access to PvP" part; they have a system where you can queue up for a PvP scenario anywhere in the world, and then you can just go do whatever you want while you wait. In GW, you and your team sit in a lobby watching a timer count down (and this can sometimes take quite a while (Kurzicks on Grenz, for those who play GW :P)). This system is head and shoulders above GW's and I hope they'llsteal copy it for GW2.
Graphics-wise, WAR also appealed to me more than WoW. WAR is, naturally, about a world thrown into chaos, so everything's pretty bleak and stuff, but there's room for pretty.
Another thing WAR got right are so-called Public Quests (PQs). These are quests that are scattered all over the gameworld and you just run into them while out adventuring. It's also very easy to team up with other people to do stuff; you press a key and a list'll pop up of all available parties in your area. Then you simply click to join them -- no hassle, no standing around Looking For Group-ing, easy to join, easy to leave.
On to stuff that bugged me about WAR now :P. I rolled a Bright Wizard and got it to level... mid-teens somewhere, I forgot. I don't know if this is also the case in WoW, but being a Bright Wizard in WAR is just like being a Fire Elementalist in GW, only without the ability to go do something else if you get bored of single target damage. Elementalists in GW can spec into four different "lines" or "attributes", so if today I'm a Fire Elementalist and I get bored, I can easily and on the fly switch to being a Water Elementalist and annoy people by snaring them. This was not the case in WAR and in the end I just got tired of doing the same thing to a different target over and over again.
Also, every Bright Wizard has essentially the same skillbar, as far as I could tell. Again, I don't know if things change once you get a higher level, but every time you reached a new level, you got a new skill. And every Bright Wizard gets the same skills, which means there isn't a whole lot of variety among BWs. Since this is a comparison entry, in GW :P, you can choose which skills to get (also in GW, you can only bring eight skills at a time, requiring a little more tactical thought).
Also, you couldn't get surnames until a certain level and then you had to pay for it :|. I don't really do role-play, but I do like to choose fun, immersive names that fit the world for my characters (GW: Valaris Lloryan, Noel Avareth, Loren Avareth, Dunya Zareen, Alyeska Lloryan, etc.).
Both WoW and WAR have a persistent gameworld, whereas GW has an instanced gameworld (for those of you unfamiliar with MMOs jargon (why are you even reading this? o_O), this means that in GW, once you step out of a town, it's just you and your party in that area, and you won't run into other players. This does make for a less immersive world, imo, but it also means no one will steal your loot, no one will kill that boss you really need and no one will try to gank you while you're on your way to your quest point.
I gotta say, though, that I loved WoW and WAR's persistent worlds. It was fun to see other people roaming around as I went -- I helped someone kill a monster and I got healed by a healer who was just passing by. It made it feel more real. I didn't have any loot-stealing/spawn-camping issues in either WoW or WAR either, but I never really got far into either game, so. :D
Another thing I just couldn't get used to was the way to do combat in both WoW and WAR. I had to take on one enemy at the time and kill them with my skills. Lather, rinse, repeat until done. I never seemed able to take on more than one, two enemies tops, at a time. (This was not helped by the fact I sucked.) In GW, you can add so-called "henchmen" to your party who'll help you out in battle; additionally, monsters in GW are very, very rarely wandering around along. Like you are, they are usually in a group, so if you get one monster's attention, you get the whole group's attention. This, to me, is a lot more fun than soloing everything.
At this point,reiq requested stick figures. So here, Hisame, have some stick figures:
April Fool's 2008, Guild Wars
Traveling was also quite the pain in the ass. It involved a lot of walking without anything happening (at least in WAR, as long as I stuck to the main roads I wouldn't get attacked by anything) or using a Book of Binding/Hearthstone, but that thing had a recharge of one fucking hour and was therefore mostly useless. You could get mounts at a higher level in WAR, and in WoW too, I believe, but it still takes too much time to get places, especially if you want to meet up with friends.
WoW:
"Hey, wanna go do X?"
"Sure, just let me get my mount. I'll be there in fifteen minutes!"
GW:
"Hey, wanna do X?"
"Sure! *clicks three times, arrives in about ten seconds* Ready!"
(Map travel is the greatest thing ever. Once you visit a town or outpost on a character, you can travel to it any time you want just bly clicking on it on the world map. It encourages people to explore the world at least once and does away with pointless boring traveling from place to place over and over again.)
One thing GW fails at, however, is its trading system. In a world, it's pretty goddamn terrible. It does not have an Auction House or anything resembling it; instead you just stand around in a town spamming what you want to buy or sell. It's horribly disorganized to the point where you're probably better off going outside the game, to one of the forums, to buy/sell your wares there. At the moment, the sequel to GW, Guild Wars 2, is in development, and it will hopefully have some sort of auction house -_-.
Minor things:
* In GW, joining a guild and such is account-wide. If I join a guild as my monk, I'll have also joined the guild as every other character on that account (I actually have two GW accounts, both in the same guild.
* Interrupts in WAR are random and it's annoying. Interrupts in GW are something that can be done to you by the monsters or opposing players. There is in fact a whole class devoted to shutdown (the mesmer, though they can also do other things; classes in GW aren't locked into being able to do one or two things, and so-called "secondary professions" make for even greater variety) and another class with strong interrupt capabilities (the ranger). These classes, and their interrupts, take skill to play well, just as avoiding interrupts (by canceling your casts, or hiding behind a rock so the ranger's arrows can't hit you) takes skill.
* Gear in GW is not important. It's easy to get a weapon that does the maximum amount of damage and it's also easy to remain competetive as you can simply roll a so-called "PvP character" that is max level and has access to all skills unlocked on your account and max weapons. Whatever grind there is in GW is mostly related to aesthetics -- pretty armor and weapon skins rather than stuff that's better than what the enemy is wielding.
* You can't jump in GW. For some reason, this is a huge issue among some people :P. (Though I will admit jumping off of high stuff in WAR was a fun way to spend some time. Ahem.)
* You can only play humans in GW. This will change with GW2. I'm not yet sure how I feel about that, because I liked just being able to play a human. Also, I don't like elves -- they're boring and cliché -- but maybe Charr will be fun to play (as long as they're not innately better at something just because they're a Charr. IMO, the difference between the races should be just looks, so you won't have people bitching at you for being a Sylvari warrior because Charr warriors are better).
Overall, WAR was fun to play for a while, WoW kind of blows, and I just can't seem to let go of GW.
* Guild Wars @ Wikipedia
* World of Warcraft @ Wikipedia
* Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning @ Wikipedia
So over the past couple of months I've been poking and prodding at other MMOs besides Guild Wars (my crack of choice; I've been playing it for a little over three years now) to see if any caught my fancy. The two big ones I gave a shot were World of Warcraft, of course, the reigning king of the MMO genre, and one of the newest arrivals on the scene, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (from hereon out referred to as WAR).
I honestly expected to like World of Warcraft a lot, but it was mostly very, very mediocre. The graphics were--actually, let me just go off on a slight tangent here and say that I think Guild Wars has spoiled me. The game prides itself on not having (much of a) grind, on having excellent graphics, on taking out a lot of tedious, boring and annoying things that pervade other MMOs (loot-stealing, spawn camping, endless walking/traveling to get from A to B, "kill ten boars and bring me their bling" type of quests, an endless struggle to get better gear solely to stay competetive, and so on, and so on), and on focusing on being fun--
so with that said, WoW's graphics were kind of meh. I suppose I'd have gotten used to the cartoon-y style as a while, but as a personal preference, I just like GW's semi-realistic, fantasy style better.
Now, I didn't play WoW for very long, probably around six hours total (out of a ten-day trial), and here's why: the quests were boring. One quest chain I started went from "kill 10 Kobold Vermin" to "kill 10 Kobold Workers" to "kill 10 Kobold Laborers". Really? And that wasn't the only "kill x whatevers" quest I came across. So I pretty much gave up around there. It's possible I'm missing out on Awesome Stuff(tm) that happens later on, when you're a higher level, but I don't see any reason why early stuff shouldn't be fun either. One of the early GW missions involves fleeing a giant horde of Charr (an enemy race) while a timer ticks down. I distinctly remember having a "HOLY FUCK" reaction the first time I did that and it's still fun three years later (though of course less so, because I'm all jaded now ;P).
I then started playing WAR, because
rho had been playing it for a while. Now, WAR was a lot better right at the start -- it had fun quests and it integrates PvE and PvP right from the start. One of the earliest quests I picked up was to go kill enemy players in PvP. The PvP map I participated in was also quite fun, it was a little bit like Alliance Battles in GW, where you fight for control over a number of points.WAR also beat out GW in the "easy access to PvP" part; they have a system where you can queue up for a PvP scenario anywhere in the world, and then you can just go do whatever you want while you wait. In GW, you and your team sit in a lobby watching a timer count down (and this can sometimes take quite a while (Kurzicks on Grenz, for those who play GW :P)). This system is head and shoulders above GW's and I hope they'll
Graphics-wise, WAR also appealed to me more than WoW. WAR is, naturally, about a world thrown into chaos, so everything's pretty bleak and stuff, but there's room for pretty.
Another thing WAR got right are so-called Public Quests (PQs). These are quests that are scattered all over the gameworld and you just run into them while out adventuring. It's also very easy to team up with other people to do stuff; you press a key and a list'll pop up of all available parties in your area. Then you simply click to join them -- no hassle, no standing around Looking For Group-ing, easy to join, easy to leave.
On to stuff that bugged me about WAR now :P. I rolled a Bright Wizard and got it to level... mid-teens somewhere, I forgot. I don't know if this is also the case in WoW, but being a Bright Wizard in WAR is just like being a Fire Elementalist in GW, only without the ability to go do something else if you get bored of single target damage. Elementalists in GW can spec into four different "lines" or "attributes", so if today I'm a Fire Elementalist and I get bored, I can easily and on the fly switch to being a Water Elementalist and annoy people by snaring them. This was not the case in WAR and in the end I just got tired of doing the same thing to a different target over and over again.
Also, every Bright Wizard has essentially the same skillbar, as far as I could tell. Again, I don't know if things change once you get a higher level, but every time you reached a new level, you got a new skill. And every Bright Wizard gets the same skills, which means there isn't a whole lot of variety among BWs. Since this is a comparison entry, in GW :P, you can choose which skills to get (also in GW, you can only bring eight skills at a time, requiring a little more tactical thought).
Also, you couldn't get surnames until a certain level and then you had to pay for it :|. I don't really do role-play, but I do like to choose fun, immersive names that fit the world for my characters (GW: Valaris Lloryan, Noel Avareth, Loren Avareth, Dunya Zareen, Alyeska Lloryan, etc.).
Both WoW and WAR have a persistent gameworld, whereas GW has an instanced gameworld (for those of you unfamiliar with MMOs jargon (why are you even reading this? o_O), this means that in GW, once you step out of a town, it's just you and your party in that area, and you won't run into other players. This does make for a less immersive world, imo, but it also means no one will steal your loot, no one will kill that boss you really need and no one will try to gank you while you're on your way to your quest point.
I gotta say, though, that I loved WoW and WAR's persistent worlds. It was fun to see other people roaming around as I went -- I helped someone kill a monster and I got healed by a healer who was just passing by. It made it feel more real. I didn't have any loot-stealing/spawn-camping issues in either WoW or WAR either, but I never really got far into either game, so. :D
Another thing I just couldn't get used to was the way to do combat in both WoW and WAR. I had to take on one enemy at the time and kill them with my skills. Lather, rinse, repeat until done. I never seemed able to take on more than one, two enemies tops, at a time. (This was not helped by the fact I sucked.) In GW, you can add so-called "henchmen" to your party who'll help you out in battle; additionally, monsters in GW are very, very rarely wandering around along. Like you are, they are usually in a group, so if you get one monster's attention, you get the whole group's attention. This, to me, is a lot more fun than soloing everything.
At this point,
reiq requested stick figures. So here, Hisame, have some stick figures:April Fool's 2008, Guild Wars
Traveling was also quite the pain in the ass. It involved a lot of walking without anything happening (at least in WAR, as long as I stuck to the main roads I wouldn't get attacked by anything) or using a Book of Binding/Hearthstone, but that thing had a recharge of one fucking hour and was therefore mostly useless. You could get mounts at a higher level in WAR, and in WoW too, I believe, but it still takes too much time to get places, especially if you want to meet up with friends.
WoW:
"Hey, wanna go do X?"
"Sure, just let me get my mount. I'll be there in fifteen minutes!"
GW:
"Hey, wanna do X?"
"Sure! *clicks three times, arrives in about ten seconds* Ready!"
(Map travel is the greatest thing ever. Once you visit a town or outpost on a character, you can travel to it any time you want just bly clicking on it on the world map. It encourages people to explore the world at least once and does away with pointless boring traveling from place to place over and over again.)
One thing GW fails at, however, is its trading system. In a world, it's pretty goddamn terrible. It does not have an Auction House or anything resembling it; instead you just stand around in a town spamming what you want to buy or sell. It's horribly disorganized to the point where you're probably better off going outside the game, to one of the forums, to buy/sell your wares there. At the moment, the sequel to GW, Guild Wars 2, is in development, and it will hopefully have some sort of auction house -_-.
Minor things:
* In GW, joining a guild and such is account-wide. If I join a guild as my monk, I'll have also joined the guild as every other character on that account (I actually have two GW accounts, both in the same guild.
* Interrupts in WAR are random and it's annoying. Interrupts in GW are something that can be done to you by the monsters or opposing players. There is in fact a whole class devoted to shutdown (the mesmer, though they can also do other things; classes in GW aren't locked into being able to do one or two things, and so-called "secondary professions" make for even greater variety) and another class with strong interrupt capabilities (the ranger). These classes, and their interrupts, take skill to play well, just as avoiding interrupts (by canceling your casts, or hiding behind a rock so the ranger's arrows can't hit you) takes skill.
* Gear in GW is not important. It's easy to get a weapon that does the maximum amount of damage and it's also easy to remain competetive as you can simply roll a so-called "PvP character" that is max level and has access to all skills unlocked on your account and max weapons. Whatever grind there is in GW is mostly related to aesthetics -- pretty armor and weapon skins rather than stuff that's better than what the enemy is wielding.
* You can't jump in GW. For some reason, this is a huge issue among some people :P. (Though I will admit jumping off of high stuff in WAR was a fun way to spend some time. Ahem.)
* You can only play humans in GW. This will change with GW2. I'm not yet sure how I feel about that, because I liked just being able to play a human. Also, I don't like elves -- they're boring and cliché -- but maybe Charr will be fun to play (as long as they're not innately better at something just because they're a Charr. IMO, the difference between the races should be just looks, so you won't have people bitching at you for being a Sylvari warrior because Charr warriors are better).
Overall, WAR was fun to play for a while, WoW kind of blows, and I just can't seem to let go of GW.
* Guild Wars @ Wikipedia
* World of Warcraft @ Wikipedia
* Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning @ Wikipedia