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EQ2 Vs. WoW
Astralglide
Member UncommonPosts: 686
I have seen a couple of articles pitting various MMO's against each other. However, I thought that another interesting match might be EQ2 and WoW. I encourage your input and your comparisons and do expect a little trolling, however please don't let this become a flame-war. (I bet this thread dies anyway)
To be fair I played the shit out of WoW and have been playing EQ2 for a couple months now. There are a few categories that I will touch lightly on or stay away from because I don't have enough experience to make a comment.
• Graphics
Each have their own strengths and weaknesses. The texture quality is sharper and much smoother in WoW, however, EQ2 is nothing to scoff at but does require much more memory and power (I have a 9800GT). The graphic style in EQ2 is much darker and grittier and there are lots of little background details that I don't find to often in WoW. I give them equal scores simply because I think that they could definitely benefit from taking style, design and coding elements from each other.
Opinion: Tie
• GUI
Hands down, WoW. If you are going to have an open UI, then make it very open. Having the ability to skin a UI and not tweak it the way I like just irritates me. The base UIs are very similar, however WoW lets developers do more to make the game experience more enjoyable. EQ2 does not allow things like have a "Onebag" or "Onebank" addon and their healer interfaces are just plain lame.
Opinion: WoW
• Questing
EverQuest definitely lives up to its name and there is a ton of quests. The quest chains are very involved and the rewards are well done. I do like the quest experience in WoW as well, but I really think that EQ2 has the advantage here. Both have very similar types of quests and chains, but with guild raids, heritage quests, betrayal quests, diety quests, etc - EQ2 just simply has more
Opinion: EQ2
• Character Customization
Both have very well developed character customization, but the Alternate Advancement for EQ2 just plain rocks. With WoW you gain a level and you get to add a point to one of your advancement trees (I haven't played since the release of 4.0). With EQ2 one gets to put experience towards leveling their character development separately. Its conceivable that someone could have a level 25 toon with 100 AA (they would probably have to PVP to a higher level so they could quest again) whereas WoW's character development is tied directly to the level of that particular character.
As far as character creation is concerned, EQ2 simply offer more races and classes and combinations thereof. Also, the racial and class traits are a bit more expansive in EQ2 than in WoW.
Opinion: EQ2
• Community
MMOs are full of asshats. We all know this and all of us are asshats ourselves from time to time. Some of us make it a full time job. Now I play EQ2 Extended as a paid subscriber so I did not get to experience the game back in its earlier days. That being said, both communities are full of annoying conversation and jackasses, but at least I can find a group in WoW which brings me to my next section:
Opinion: The both suck, but WoW sucks less.
• Dungeons and Intances
Fuck you Sony. That's right, I said that. The dungeons in EQ2 are great, with lots of great content, mobs, bosses, loot, AND EVERYBODY AND THEIR GRANDMOTHER KILLING EVERYTHING BECAUSE THE DUNGEONS ARE NOT INSTANCED! To top it off, the respawn times on some of the named mobs that everybody is competing for are so long it seems mean.
Opinion: WoW
• Combat
Okay- this is a bit trickier for me. The combat in both games is fast and in depth. Both games have a great many abilities and you can fiddle with your rotations. I love my WoW rogue and he doesn't hold a candle to my Assassin in EQ2. However, I'm going to give this one to WoW for one simple (yet, big in my eyes) reason: pulling. EQ2 give you all of these abilities to pull mobs from a distance that you can't use in dungeons and raids because they almost always pull mobs with it that are not part of the encounter and and not that close. Instead, you have to body pull almost everything in this game and that is plain retarded.
Opinion: WoW
• Leveling
Yes, this is different than questing and I bring it up for good reason. Leveling should be fun and challenging while being relatively painless (if the game is an end-game raiding game). Both of these games with the plethora of ways to gain experience do it well. However, EQ2 has extra layers of leveling and you can level different aspects (Like AA and Crafting Exp) Also, the fact that you can mentor/chrono down to lower levels to help out guildees/friends without nerfing their experience while gaining at least some XP yourself just makes it quicker and a little more fun.
Opinion EQ2
• PVP
WoW has been able to balance the PvP over the years pretty well. Yes, several classes have had advantages that were out of line, but never for too long. I play a rogue for PvP and he kicks ass against most other classes (except Heal Trees and Pallys). I have spent over 5 hours at a time in Battlegrounds Queues in EQ2 and still have never seen a BG. So, the PvP that I can play will always be better than what I can. (This is one of the topics that the trolls will be better at)
Opinion: WoW
• Raiding
I. Love. Raiding. That's why I like WoW, why I hated LOTRO (end-game at least), why I will play SWTOR and StarCraft Univere (or whatever the hell Blizzard will call it), and why I tried EQ2. I have only done some lower level raiding in EQ2 so far and really cannot make a fair comparrison, so I won't. I think that EQ2 has the potential to be really fun and strategic when it comes to raiding, but the "body pulling" nonsense gives me pause.
A witty saying proves nothing.
-Voltaire
Comments
Tag...you're it !
I installed EverQuest II and it was painful to play. Truly. Why? It just didn't "feel" right. The way my character moved, the combat system, everything just seemed off and stale.
World of WarCrack kept me busy for four years.
/shrug
I remember.. wow... 6 years ago when these comparisons were made all the time.
EQ2 came early in the fall of 2004, WoW came out I think less than a month later? I played EQ2 first because I had been a big EQ1 fan and I knew WoW was going to be big and I'd just roll on it a little later. EQ2 was great early on, but they lost me with their level 30 and 40 content back in the day.
Also your graphics card helps for crap in making EQ2 look better. It works a little, but they designed it in a really inaccessible way.
I dunno. This sort of comparison seemed to matter more in 2004 and up to 2006. EQ2 just didn't live up to the EverQuest 1 standard and WoW actually seemed more like a befitting successor.
I played EQ2 for years, and I have played WOW since Vanilla. While EQ2 has its charm what has kept me going back to WOW are some very basic things.
EQ2 is clunky. When I hit a spell in WOW as long as I am not in Australia, it goes off when I hit it.
Realism graphics die much faster then the "Cartoony" look. Its pretty easy to get bored with EQ2s plasticy models. Soga prolonged it for me.
Worthless content. Hands down the Faydarks was the final and best expansion EQ2 has come out with.
Crafting is painful and interesting. It would be a million times better if it wasn't so horrendously boring after you reached level 20 to 30 on any given craft.
Dungeons and Raids HAVE barely any scripting compared to WOW. Most fights are tank and spank and to know what is actually going on you need to watch your debuffs cause the mobs have really no clear cut graphic to predict the outcome. I have tried explaining this to friends in EQ2 who havent played WOW but they insist that EQ2 fights are complex.. but they're not.
I love the Everquest IP, as i came from EQ1 as well for years. Sony just needs to stop being cheap.
The only things EQ2 has over WoW far as I'm concerned is amount of content, housing, and crafting.
In every other area WoW trumps EQ2 rather significantly.
In the three areas I mentioned EQ2 does a much better job although quite franly while EQ2 has more content I personally think WoW's is much more entertaining and fun to experience. Although thanks to the dungeon finder tool and how quickly you level anymore a lot of people these days skip a large portion of it.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
Good Lord, we doing this again?????
The one thing that keeps me away from EQ2 is the animation and game speed. Everything, the enemies especially, look like they're on fast forward. The people on horses simply look ridiculous. Combine this with the simply terrible casting animations, and it turns into something of a game killer for me.
I hate RAIDING....the idea of killing the same guy over and over seems stupid.
Anyway, I think both games have strange graphics. I wish EQ2 has AOC style graphics or LotR graphics....heck, even WAR graphics. I thik WOW grahpics are a bit too cartoony but they make the combat movements flow much better than EQ2.
In EQ2 you look like you are taking a dump once you enter combat....and then run around like you have a load in your pants....I hate that.
However, I think EQ2 has incredible content. No game I have ever played had the variety of quests EQ2 does. I also love the way faction works in EQ2 better.
EQ2 has housing as well and a much more indepth crafting system.
There are many things that EQ2 is better at but WOW just seems to be much smoother in combat. Like one said earlier, you click a button and a spell goes off. Oh, that reminds me, you click a ranged attack and before the arrow even starts moving the mob is aggro'd. I hate that! Also, the way arrows shoot in EQ2 is totally dorky. I can shoot something 30 yards away and my arrow arcs 20 high in the air...wtf??
I think one of the more interesting discussions to have would be how the games have changed and developed since their release (since they were released only 2 weeks apart). How does the upkeep and development compare? (I can only speak for WoW in this case since I played that game since Vanilla and have only recently tried EQ2)
A witty saying proves nothing.
-Voltaire
I know it is a horrible argument but the graphics/animations are what made me stop playing EQ2. The environments are beautiful but man I did not want to play EQ2 past level 10.
I was thinking to try EQ2 and this got me convinced to try it. I hate instanced dungeons. Are all the dungeons in EQ2 not instanced? How is it on PVP servers - is there open PVP in dungeons. I would love that. Are there factions in EQ2 or can everybody PVP with everybody?
Going back in time to 2004 ...
This is what Gamespot wrote when they reviewed WOW at launch in 2004...
"However, directly comparing World of Warcraft with any of its predecessors would be almost like pitting a professional sports club against a school team. With all due respect to the other online role-playing games out there, World of Warcraft is in a league of its own. "
6 years long now old MMORPG players have been trying to downplay the obvious everyone sees.
It is time you move on with your lives.
Welcome to 2004.
This was discussed to death back then.
This. WoW is/was something special and one of a kind.
This is the first picture I had in mind after reading the title.
Bouth games have their fun parts. It´s a little sad that EQ2 was developed based upon the opposite of what gaming hardware had gone (single core CPUs ruling all including VGAs).
This maybe it was interesting 5 years ago... but now?
Anyway lmao to the tie in grapichs, you can like or dislike EQ2 gfx but they are in another league compared to WoW, here two random shots.
EQ 2 is obviously more realistic, but I just found it really annoying. It feels like an oil painting and I get the feeling my characters are detached from the actual game world. You didn't do WoW any favors either taking probably the worst random shot you could of a wagon in the middle of nowhere with the interface up ... and an epic shot of a dragon in front of a castle with no interface up.
I chose EQ2 when it first came out because WoW graphics were too "cartoony". 2 months later I was playing WoW and never went back, In my opinion WoW trumps almost every part of gameplay that EQ2 has aside from housing and crafting. The graphics too ... I would give WoW the nod ... Eq2's vaunted graphics are just annoying IMO.
I picked the first ones that google showed me after writing the name of the games on their search engine, so blame them not me.
And as i said, you can like the art direction or not, but gfx are just superior in EQ2 when compared to WoW, i dont like EQ2 nor WoW but is just hard to belive how blind is people sometimes.
Not true.
5 years too late thread but i got to say i nearly fell out of my chair when i read WoW community wins!
The only thing WoW really does better than Eq2 is PvP and smoother combat. Everything else is kind of subjective like graphics, community standards, and raid styles.
Nah, the big difference is really that Wow have superior coding. Wow is very well programmed and EQ2 is rather pathetic if you compere the games. As for PvP EQ2 sucks more than Wow but it have other advantages.
But the coding was the thing that made Wow into the winner, that is the thing Wow have made superior to every MMO out today (counting GW as a CORPG) and that is the reason Wow won over the rest of the games.
EQ2 is not a bad game but they did cut down on the wrong thing. All other features can be discussed and people will prefer one thing or another but as a EQ2 player myself I never met anyone disagreeing about the coding.
If SOE tries to get back into the game again with EQ Next this is the thing they must improve, not gameplayt, animations or similar things (even if that doesn't hurt either). A badly coded game can not ever take the top as long as there is one well made out there.
As someone that played EQ2 at launch then had a stint in WoW for TBC, then back to EQ2 until WoW 4.0.1 came out... EQ2 really has nothing on WoW. You might be bored to death of WoW, but it is the better MMO. Even graphically, and I've been away since TBC so don't know when these got put in, WoW does things EQ2 can't. Its still lower poly characters but if poly equal quality then ugh. Even landscape wise, WoW is one of the least pointy worlds. Like mentioned above, you can crank it up and still get 60fps. Raiding in EQ2 even on extreme performance, which looks worse than EQ1, still couldn't pull 20fps.
The good news for SOE is their new MMOs use a great engine thats beautiful and fast. Bring on EQ:Next.
Everquest 2s biggest problem has always been far deeper than just the poor performance. Back in Beta people screamed! for a more Everquest 1 like game, Soe did the exact opposite plus launched a game that hasn't been ready at all. If this weren't enough mistakes they also looked more and more on Wow blindsided by the sub numbers, forgetting that the people who liked WoW already played it. I really didn't like the character look a mixture between cartoony and realistic graphics.
So...they screwed up their former crowd and failed getting the WoW crowd = mess.
I really doubt Everquest Next will be close to the game so much of us loved.
but speaking in terms of raidquality Everquest 2 is the better one, they do have open world raids and not everything is instanced.
UI: Oh well the *lua does allow addons that are playing the game for you thats way overboard, changing group frames, hotbars aso. is ok, having addons playing for you is not.
We need a MMORPG Cataclysm asap, finish the dark age of MMORPGS now!
"Everything you're bitching about is wrong. People don't have the time to invest in corpse runs, impossible zones, or long winded quests. Sometimes, they just want to pop on and play."
"Then maybe MMORPGs aren't for you."
These threads are comical. If anything though, they prove that WOW basically helped kill Everquest, which means that WOW itself can be killed in turn. I found the customization in both games to royally suck ass though. Compare it to COX of COL and you will change your mind. Hell, even DAOC let you customize more...
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