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Coming from Ultima Online - What I have experienced from WoW so far
dinanm3atl
Member Posts: 215
I will start by saying I am a die hard Ultima Online player, take that back. Was a die hard UO player, UO "was" the best MMORPG. It is not currently and I am sure some of you played it and can agree, it just simply is not the same game. I quit right after it peaked, I tried to play after they made the game "carebear" and it just didn't work. I had an AMAZING account that there was a bid war on Ebay. Not bad to make money playing the game huh?
I had been playing Counter Strike: Source and wanted some type of MMORPG again since Pirates of the Burning Sea is TAKING FOREVER, WTF! So a lot of my Source friends play WoW so even though I hated EQ and WoW seemed like EQ I jumped into the 10 day free trial. I have since bought just the main game, no expansion yet. Here are some "gripes" that maybe someone that has been around longer can explain why they exist.
Death - Why is there no penalty for death? Dieing in this game means zero, absolutely zero. It even allows for you to not even have to run back to your corpse and it cost you 10 minutes and some silver. WTF? No one cares to even die, you can't lose your items, you can't lose your gold. Nothing. If I die to a group of monsters any random person should be able to come and loot by body, atleast for 1/2 my gold or minor items like leather or basic drops. Keeps players on their toes and have to go to bank to put money away etc. In UO EVERYTHING was fair game to loot, if you did loot someone then you faced being killed by other players but that is a risk you COULD run. Dieing holds nothing in this game, just a 5 minute penalty of having to walk back to your corpse.
Items - This is actually my biggest gripe. While WoW is overall fun and I am enjoying myself, I do dislike item driven games. The whole point of WoW is to level and get better so you can get better items. Both WoW and EQ created worlds that revolve around the items and nothing else really matters. You have to spend hours camping in spots or running this dungeon or that dungeon to get some rare drop. In UO a good player crafted sword was just a little bit worse than a full out magic weapon and they also did not give HUGE increases to stats. Because of this you could make people more lootable, do you know how mad a level 70 would be if they lost their sword? It would almost be comical.
Twinking - The item issue leads me to my next issue, twinking. This was impossible in UO. Sure I can give my new character 100,000 gold but since there are not super items to buy and use, and if I did get them I would eventually die and someone would loot them, I still have to spend my time to get my skills and stats up so what is the point? Sure I gave some of my characters gold to buy stuff to increase my magery but after that there is no real help to be provided. There are guys running around that are level 40 and they have all purple and blue items that are required level 40 and it is really lame, the item driven game causes this. It should be fixed in my eyes.
Levels - This is another problem with MMORPG's as whole, levels. I feel as though UO had a much better system of skills. If I am questing with 3 level 30s a single level 70 will destroy me. Why is this? They played longer so they get to kill me easily? Why can't the 3 of us group up and fight them and have a chance? It was difficult to take 3 people by yourself in UO because your max health was 100hp. The game has created super characters that you have no chance of killing until you spendthe hundreds of hours to catch up to them. Doesn't sit right with me. Make the game revolve around skill and strategy, not levels
Mounts - This is just simply dumb, I have to get to level 40 and have 100g and then go broke so I can move faster? That is really lame.
After all that is said I do like the game, I don't LOVE it and I am not addicted like UO. Going to experience it more and see where it takes me.
Old Skool Ultima Online Junky
Bring back the OLD UO so I can play again
Comments
I laughed ^^
Well, that was a very poorly written discussion/comparison.
However, he is right on all counts. UO had a far superior design; and early days of UO still has no comparison. EA took it in the wrong direction though. Anyways, I digress.
@ OP - You need to keep in mind WoW is a MMO that was designed to target the largest audience possible, not just original MMORPG players who are used to generally challenging game play. This means several things. WoW was designed to be easy to play and progress because it targeted people who may not of had a strong backing in RPG's or MMO's; likely they are coming from previous Blizzard games which are also without much challenge. Furthermore, due to the 'easy-mode' mentality, the game was developed so that there are few penalties for playing poorly due to either not caring, not an experienced gamer, or any other types of reasons that may put non-MMOers at a disadvantage to real-MMOers. WoW is not a game that strongly rewards players who are extremely skillful at a game; WoW dumbs down mechanics enough so that those who are not very skilled still stand a chance in comparison to those who are skillful at what they do.
What you need to keep in mind is that the WoW system of easy-mode, included with tons of item-driven content, is what keep people playing/paying for more WoW. A lot of people feel that gaming should be fairly relaxing and devoid of challenge since real life is challenging enough as it is; so you shouldn't expect WoW to cater to those who enjoy challenging or skill-driven game play.
There's nothing wrong with wanting that out of a video game, however, the real problem that WoW poses is that they have created a strong market for easy-mode MMO's, which is why many current and future MMO's want to tap into that market, leaving the small niche market to take care of those who enjoy challenging and in depth game play.
In closing, I'd recommend waiting for games like Age of Conan and Warhammer. From what I've read they seem to be directed more towards rewarding those who are skillful, but I can't say for sure.
P.S. I know that games don't really require any 'true' or practical forms of skill, but I'm sure readers understand what I am talking about.
Edited for stupid spelling mistakes.
Sounds like WoW just isn't the game for you. You are looking for something a bit more hardcore and WoW is anything but. I think that as time goes on, people in your position are going to be more and more dissapointed. MMO's have started moving away from a hardcore approach (death penalties, open PvP) because a major portion of the gamer demographic has changed. People that have full time jobs working 50 hours a week don't want hardcore, they want light,fun and fairly easy to learn and play.. This is why WoW has such a huge subscriber base.
-Currently looking forward to FFXIV
-Currently playing EvE and Global Agenda
You're looking for Darkfall OP. Trouble is, when will it ever see the light of day and will it be any good?
But WOW is quite far from UO in design/gameplay, so understandable that you don't care for it.
Consider playing EVE, much more of what you might be looking for.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Can answer all of your gripes about the game in one simple line really, "It is not UO!"
WoW is what it is, if you had been playing WoW for the past few years and then gone to UO, you may be asking what the hell is with the heavy penalty for dying. You see what i mean. From what you have written, both UO and WoW have their time sinks, UO's being the need to get back everything you lose when you die, WoW's being the fact that you have to walk everywhere before L40 (unless you are a shamen or druid of course) they just do the same thing in different ways.
As with any other MMO you have to take it for what it is and not compare it to other MMO's that you have played in the past, otherwise you will just constantly question what you are doing and why.
It must be Thursday, i never could get the hang of Thursdays.
A half-hour of research would have told you that these are things many PvP fanatics dislike about MMORPGs in general, not just WoW.
Every point in this post has been covered ad nauseam, starting the moment EQ hit the shelves.
rmk - Thanks for the response. I typed it up quickly. Very good read.
I am not trying to compare it. UO was just "my best game" and was the most fun for me. I was comparing how WoW stacked up so far. I think some of you are reading it as I hate the game and think it sucks. It doesn't. It is a GOOD game, not great like UO but good.
I find it funny that UO was FULL, lots of people playing and no one really complained about the open PvP and death penalties and not having super slayer axes. Then EQ came out and suddenly getting penalized for dieing sucks and not having super ganking weapons means the game sucks. I don't know what happened. If you don't make the game so item driven then death penalties of losing items isn't as bad. People would quit at level 70 if they lost their super axe. But the players control the situation, if you loot someone killed by a mob make the person fair game to get killed and loot. It balances out, eventually you can kill someone and steal their items.
I still don't like that at level 70 you are almost invincible to anyone.
I am watching for Warhammer. Any release date news? I think PotBS will also be good. We shall see.
It wasn't written as a bash, just to raise some discussions. People get so angry on forums.
Old Skool Ultima Online Junky
Bring back the OLD UO so I can play again
That is the funny thing, yes I like PvP. I love it. I also don't like a game designed to be 100% PvP and cater to that crowd. I want some good PvE and good battles where you need to group and get together with friends. After that we can go kill some other players. I don't want a game designed around PvP because it will end up not working because if people aren't on or are trying to level then it is a pain in the ass.
This leads me to another point. Why do I continue to get killed by level 70s that 1 hit kill me. Is that entertaining for them? Do they even get anything for doing that?
Old Skool Ultima Online Junky
Bring back the OLD UO so I can play again
What you have to remember is that some of what Blizzard learned about this type of game was from it's previous RPG entries, Diablo and Diablo II. World of Warcraft is actually much closer in play mechanics to those games then it is to any of the Warcraft games which are RTS's.
Diablo and DII, although very equipment centric, had a lot of success, so no surprise really that this same formula was used again in making WoW. Diablo was a bit tougher on death than DII and you could see Blizzard moving away from the whole "lose your equipment on death" scenario which many people didn't care for. I think WoW is pretty close to DII in that you never really lose your equipment, in DII at least you lost some gold.
The same can be said of PvP. In DII, you announced your intentions when entering a game and if you had your PvP flag set, then people that didn't want to fight you would simply zone out to places where you couldn't attack them. Well not much changed in WoW really except they made some servers PvP where most of the area was a free for all so you couldn't simply zone out that easily, but PvE servers are much the same way the DII was.
So I think to answer your questions, the real answer is simply that Blizzard did what they knew best and what they knew worked from Diablo and DII. Those games were very succesfull and a lot of people that played those games played WoW and enjoyed WoW. Certainly there are other ways to do things, but they are not necessarily better ways, just different. You liked UO. A lot of people liked Diablo and DII. And ultimately as people have pointed out, Blizzard made the game they wanted to make, they didn't make a clone of any other game despite what people insist. People forget that Diablo and DII were carving out a very large crowd of game players long before Everquest ever came along.
I loved D2 but never really played Online. It was extremely boring to me after beating the game by myself, playing it all over again just wasn't entertaining.
Old Skool Ultima Online Junky
Bring back the OLD UO so I can play again
I agree with most of what Pappy said. WoW seems closer to Diablo than it ever did to Warcraft, which I suppose make sense because Diablo was an RPG - albiet a very hack n' slash one. Though WC3 was a kind of RTS/RPG hybrid almost.
Anyway, I think WoW owes the rest of its heritage to EQ (which in turn owes some other games as well). The game designers are ex EQ1 players, and it shows. Many of the people I knew from EQ1 play WoW, or at least played it for a significant amount of time before they quit.
I'm glad to have been a part of both EQ in it's prime (from Classic to PoP), and WoW (from Classic to TBC, and maybe beyond.
I didn't play UO, and I surely missed out on something great there. But then I can't play everything.
Still waiting for your Holy Grail MMORPG? Interesting...
I don't even have to read it to know that if you came from UO you absolutely hate the game. Good show for the wall of text though.
As a long time player/raider of WoW, FFXI and a dabbler in almost all other MMOs post-DAoC/UO/EQ1 era, I can honestly say that I will agree, having no "real" death penalty in terms of being able to loot someone's corpse, or the loss of experience may be "easy-mode" for many MMO veterans, but I have to argue that WoW -- end game -- certainly does NOT reward death.
In fact, often you find the people that complain the most about WoW's features are the people who never really got that far in the game.
To the point, dying -- especially when covered in T4-6 or in arena gear is NOT something you plan repeat -- the costs add up quickly, especially if you're a part of a hardcore raiding guild. Let's not be silly and debate the meaning of hardcore, I only mean a guild that raids several times weekly; n my case, 5 nights with a 6th optional raid.
The scripted instance encounters starting in Ahn'Qiraj, Naxxramas, Serpentshrine Caverns, Black Temple and the Battle of Mount Hyjal are all very interesting, challenging and most of all fun. Molten Core and most of Blackwing Lair aren't really worth mentioning save perhaps Nefarian and old-school cock-block king, Razorgore.
The only real gripe I will ever have with any MMO is the phasing out of old content for new. Part of what makes MMOs so damn fun is the exploration and the challenge of being the "first to see, get, die to." Exploration and discovery are what drive me to play new MMOs and to eat up everything in expansions.
Aside from the aforementioned MMOs, I've played basically every other major release since including; Vanguard, EQ2, SWG, Guild Wars, DDO -- each game had something to it that I enjoyed and somethings that I didn't, but the experience of exploring new worlds/stories/and the social networking that's bound to occur -- EVEN in WOW -- have made each experience unique and worthwhile. Some less than other, admittedly, but I haven't ever thought in retrospect that buying/playing any of those titles was a waste -- monetarily or otherwise.
I'm also a veteran MUD player from the early 90s and will say that MUDs did, and to this day, still offer the most enjoyable gaming experience solely because of the role each and every person plays in day-to-day activity and plot lines.
The MUD I played for 6 years was "The Turning Point;" it is now defunct. However, if modern MMOs and their developers can refocus gaming on the essentials that I consider to be community and player interactivity -- I think the debate of what was better, or how to make the current MMO crop better would end.
Ultimately, MMOs are as much games as they are social networking mediums and I think we all play for one reason; a sense of belonging.
Perhaps I went a little off-topic, but that's my two-cents.
Its really stupid to even witte something like this because you cant compare UO with WoW as much as you cant compare tetris to pacman...
Death...no penalty...rrright....let say that you need minimum 1000-1200 gold weekly to raid as you should (that means all repairs + consumables)
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Would you like some cheese with that whine?
WoW, after lanch, was actually a fairly difficult game. Instances like Scholomance and Stratholme were nightmares. Anyone remember raiding those? LoL. Pure evil. WoW just takes a different sort of skill set, and yes -- there IS skill and group synergy involved. You can't simply stroll into Mount Hyjal, even with the best gear, and win. You just can't.
I've never seen "end game" content in EQ2 and therefore would never make a post blasting it for any perceived failures or shortcomings I found in the game.
It's just silly.
Fan boys fail.
Judge each game, if you've seen everything / most of what it has to offer on its own merits. You can't just make assumptions based on even 100 hours of game play; within reason of course. If you hate the game's controls/interface for example, that's definitely something I'd consider as a legitimate criticism with little play experience. Click-to-move, for example, annoys me to all Hell. I just -can't- function with that control scheme. WSAD movement please.
if your lookn for a good pvp game out right now think you might like checkn out eve online. other than that the only game lookn like they may have some good pvp is age of conan and warhammer but you have awhile fro them to see what they are like
Only because WoW is casual player frendly doesnt mean it sux....its so casual player frendly that some hardcore players even whine about it...and jet again you have part of totaly elite players on every realm that are really good in PvE and that have only goal in beating endgame content...
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Would you like some cheese with that whine?
OK.
Make a new post when you are 70 and have been raiding some , because this post has no insight ..
10 % was right, rest was perhaps little missjudged stuff. I will be waiting for the new post after you played it some more months.
EVE is not a good game for a UO person. I played UO since 97 till 2002 and tried EVE and thought it was a huge pile of crap. Not an interesting game in the least for the action UO offered.
Its full of insight when you think of UO. Unfortunatly patrikd23 you probly popped your MMo cherry on this terrible game err I mean WoW. He nailed it on the head and won't get any new information from lvl 70. All his gripes will not change with times or levels and that is the problem that true original hardcore MMo addicts miss in the market today. There have not been true PvP kill it loot it steal it MMo's released in the last 6 or 7 years, and I blame Blizzard for this. Their peice of crap MMo has tainted the market and made people to scared to develop these style of games anymore.
Its full of insight when you think of UO. Unfortunatly patrikd23 you probly popped your MMo cherry on this terrible game err I mean WoW. He nailed it on the head and won't get any new information from lvl 70. All his gripes will not change with times or levels and that is the problem that true original hardcore MMo addicts miss in the market today. There have not been true PvP kill it loot it steal it MMo's released in the last 6 or 7 years, and I blame Blizzard for this. Their peice of crap MMo has tainted the market and made people to scared to develop these style of games anymore.
100% correct
Its full of insight when you think of UO. Unfortunatly patrikd23 you probly popped your MMo cherry on this terrible game err I mean WoW. He nailed it on the head and won't get any new information from lvl 70. All his gripes will not change with times or levels and that is the problem that true original hardcore MMo addicts miss in the market today. There have not been true PvP kill it loot it steal it MMo's released in the last 6 or 7 years, and I blame Blizzard for this. Their peice of crap MMo has tainted the market and made people to scared to develop these style of games anymore.
Do you have *any* idea how brainless it sounds to blame a 3 year old game for for what happened in MMO gaming over the last 6-7 years? O_o Not to mention these games are in development for years so it's even longer before you'll see any fallout from Blizzard's success.
But do go on, it's amusing at the very least ^^
if your going to blame MMOs post UO for PVP
- try blaming games like DAOC or Shadowbane (this one especially, promised big, failed to deliver)
they were years before WOW
EQ2 fan sites
I haven't gotten there yet. If I die now at level 42 I lose nothing except 2-3 minutes to walk to my corpse. What changes at a high level?
Please tell me what is so horrible that you lose? It cost 1000g to repair your durability? If your level 70 I doubt that matters. Do you lose some Honor Points? Wow... That would be horrible!
Considering that high level guides show you can farm hundreds of hold in a couple hours so what is the big deal? Where is a penalty that is tied to something more real? Gold can be earned. What happens when you lose your axe? That makes it really more exciting.
When I played UO I got an adrenaline rush during PvP or when I got jumped by 2 or 3 mobs that I couldn't really kill. Why? Because if I die I could lose something that mattered. Maybe my set of mage armor that cost 10,000-100,000 gold per set or hours of killing dragons to get it. The main important items are never lost in WoW.
I wasn't trying to make a comparison and bash WoW. I even said I like it. I was just asking where some of the "missing" items were like death penalty.
Old Skool Ultima Online Junky
Bring back the OLD UO so I can play again
OK.
Make a new post when you are 70 and have been raiding some , because this post has no insight ..
10 % was right, rest was perhaps little missjudged stuff. I will be waiting for the new post after you played it some more months.
Ummm
What 10% am I right on? This is not an item driven game? Please elaborate. So MAYBE it could be argued that losing gold is so horrible, do you lose anything TRULY important in a raid? In all seriousness... Be truthful. With gold ALL you lost is your TIME to get it, nothing more.
You guys need to do reading comprehension. I am not bashing the games. I posted some items I don't like. I play the game a couple hours a day and SAID I like the game in the original post a couple times. I don't see why I need a flame suit for that.
Old Skool Ultima Online Junky
Bring back the OLD UO so I can play again