Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Grading the MMORPGS: WoW, SWTOR, Rift, EQ2
teakbois
Member Posts: 2,154
All of what follows is, of course, opinion. Going to look at a large amount of categories of these games and grade em A-F
First thing you see when starting up an MMO
Character Creation:
EQ2: B+ - large racial variety, decent amount of appearance options
WoW: C+ - nice amount of races, very limited options
Rift: C- -decent appearance customization, but one of the worst race selections in any MMO
SWToR: D -only slightly better than WoW in appearance customization, but the race selection sucks gven the IP
Newbie Zone(s) and Tutorial:
WoW: B -varied zones for each race, good pace brnging you along
SWtoR: B -the voice overs are a good intro, less variety than WoW but a good intro to the game
EQ2: B- -the zones are all well done, but it feels a little more overwhelming than the other two
Rift: C -Puts its worst foot forward. Rifts dont even come into play until after the zone, and there is only one zone per faction. You get way too many abilities that overlap/are useless
Game World/Lore
WoW: B+ -Even before expansons, azeroth was fairly large. Lots of prexsting lore, and its displayed well. Varied areas
EQ2: B+ -Almost the same reasons as WoW. The lore doesnt come through as much in EQ2, its more subtle. The world is larger, but the islands make up of the original zones kinda sucks. The expansions fare much better
Rift: C- -world is small, and the lore isnt spectacular.
SWToR: C- -world is much bigger, but nt as open as it should be. Star Wars lore saves this from being an even lower grade.
Leveling Experience(first time):
WoW: A- -great quest presentation, active dungeons, active battlegrounds, good storylines. Plenty of places to go. Downgrades a little because 61-85 isnt quite as good as 1-60, but the first time through its not as bad
SWToR: B -lots of stories to be told, its still active enough that you can get the group quests done (YMMV, but Ive never had issues).
Rift: B- -Dungeon queues are long, but since they wisely marged servers they are no longer dead while leveling, and events actually happen n 20-45 zones,although not super common. Quests kind of suck, but its still fun going throgh zones- the first time
EQ2: C -Not a low grade because of quality, but because the top heavy aspect hurts. Freeport can bump this up to a B because its much more active. The quest lore for the leveling content isnt that great though. There is a fantastic selection of dungeons, some open world some instanced if you can get folks to do em.
Leveling Experience(alt replayability):
WoW B+ -remans fun for all the same reasons, plus multiple zones each level means youll see different things, if you want
EQ2: C -same grade as the first character, lots of content, and again those dungeons. Youll probably have a better network of friends the second time and do more of them.
Rift: C- -kiind of boring second time through, due to repeated content
SWTOR: C- -yes, you get a new main quest...but youve seen everything else already
Class System:
Rift: A- -Im one of the guys that *doesnt* love the soul system. I think the individual souls are a little too watered down to make the thing work better. Still, Im the minority and most people love it
EQ2: B -Good class variety with most well defined and desirable. AAs are often cookie cutter but there is a good deal of choice to be had
WoW: B- -Talent trees are cookie cutter, but they all are useful and on most cases ar elike 3 seperate classes, they play that differently.
SWTOR: D -uninspired use of talent tree system, not man choices at all
Crafting:
EQ2: B -amount of quests is great, and your wares are HIGHY desriable for leveling characters. The system gets tedious though and the max level usefulness is iffy.
SWToR: C- -if they fix high level crafting usefulness it would go up to a C+
Rift, WoW: D uninspired, boring. Useless as you level since you outlevel your skill too fast. Not 100% worthless at max level
This is taking longer than I thought....just going to do grades for the rest:
PvP:
WoW: B-
Rift: C
SWTOR: C-
EQ2: D
Max level, solo content
Rift: C
WoW: C-
SWtoR: D
EQ2: D
Max level, group content
Rift: B
EQ2, WoW: B-
SWToR: C
Max level small raid content:
Rift: B
WoW, EQ2: B-
SWToR: C
Max level large raid content:
EQ2, WoW: B
Rift: B- (Only one raid added in the last 11 months, yes I know one is coming)
SWToR: C-
Non Combat stuff:
EQ2: A-
WoW: B
Rift: B-
SWToR: D
Developer:
Rift: A-
SWTOR: B- (WHAT????? 1.2 looks awesome, Bioware does seem dedicated to development, I am givng them some benefit of the doubt here...this could drop rapidly still)
EQ2: C (honestly from 2006-2009 SoE was a solid A for EQ2, but 2010-11 have been weak plus that whole past history thing)
WoW: C- (wheres the damn content? Cataclysm sucked. Too much income to not have more content)
Comments
no overall scores averaged out from the individual scores?
Sorry, really, really, really disagree with you on your C- score to WoW's content. I don't think there has ever been a game that has given us so much great content.
These scores really matter, they really really do and are totally thorough and well explained without any bit of bias!
/sarcasm
However, I do think most of your scores are probably pretty accurate. I do think as the last poster said, WoW and EQ2 are a class higher than either SWTOR and RIFT (and I'm a current subscriber to TOR and played Rift for six months). I still have hopes for TOR but really think Rift is just a well-crafted WoW clone that doesn't do anything great but doesn't really fail at anything either. To be fair, I haven't played EQ2 in a while but when I did, I really enjoyed the game.
It has taken them seven years to give you all the content and they have billions of dollars being brought in per year, not to mention they charge you for the expansions.
I totally agree with OP on that regard.
Truth be told, all you get is Raids, dungeons and Battlegrounds, there's not a whole lot to do besides that.
WoW needs to add new types of content, and should have done so years ago, the "world" has tons of sea, how about guild ships and add naval pvp battles for the open world? people can craft and upgrade their ship, so they start with a small personal one and can get a larger one, guild ships should need several players to make it function in combat and be the largest ones, and most hard to get.
Add small islands to explore, and other stuff for non pvp'ers to do on their boats etc. etc. etc. If a AA mmo like Archeage can do it, I'm sure Blizzard can too.
anyhow just a thought on some combat and non combat content.
SWTOR > EQ2 > WoW > Rift.
SWTOR I might have played. Not for long, because the game is too easy and the massive story content sadly doesnt help with making it a better MMO. But I would have played it.
EQ2 and WoW, I wouldnt play either, but they are still kind of solid games. EQ2 is kind of a Vanguard minus all the properties that attracted me to Vanguard, and added a lot of toys I dont give a damn about. WoW, the graphics alone turn me off and the game is pure RvR with only 2 realms.
Rift just doesnt belong into this list. Checking out the rulesystem alone made me completely disinterested. Thats not a high quality rulesystem like the other three, but a mathematical crap trick to get a formally high number of possible character builds, which however doesnt actually will lead to a high variance in gameplay. I've already seen it in DA:O and I dont need a repetition.
Just one question, how different are those 4 games?
Sure quality levels might be different between the 4 games, but mechanically, they all play the same way.
The fact that majority of MMORPG uses the same kind of presentation, hotkey bars, loot and gear tier, questgivers and cooldown based rotation combat that is heavily relient on statistical dispay of numbers, random number generators.
The fact is, they are all the same game.
they are like Skyrim to Gothic to Risen. They only want to achieve the same goal through the same design.
There isn't other sub genre into the MMO field, no action, no platforming, no shooter, no puzzle games, like their singleplayer counterpart.
How much WoW could a WoWhater hate, if a WoWhater could hate WoW?
As much WoW as a WoWhater would, if a WoWhater could hate WoW.
Well, they are all EQ clones ...
Um, no, not at all.
Risen I dont know at all, but Gothic and Skyrim are VERY different games.
They only belong to the same genre.
Is this a joke? WoW's replayability is possibly the worst out of any MMO I have ever played. The only difference is there are different skills on your skillbar when you reroll, same grind, same lack of originality, same boring experience.
Played-Everything
Playing-LoL
I levelled up 3 characters to level 60 and I didn't find it boring at all. You can level at least 2 characters without overlapping much of the content in the game. There are so many zones which can get you to max level. However, with the expansions it gets a bit tiring as their is pretty much 1 path to level up through. You can still avoid doing the same content if you level up 2 characters.
So different zones, different skills... When did you play WoW? For how long? Did you get to level 20 and then quit and then decided to flame the game?
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
done
What meaningful solo content is there for a max level in WoW? Its dailies, and thats it. Dailies suck.
Im curious what this would be if you gave d = 1, d+ = 1.33, c- = 1.67 etc and averaged them out. Ill have to calculate that later.
Which games show bias? They all got some high scores and they all got some low scores. I thin the scoring was pretty damn fair.
Maybe you could say Im anti-SWToR? Not true, it just scores low on endgame content because its buggy and the difficulty is out of whack (too easy). Its replayability is rather low since tis the same zones and 75% the same quests. I actually like SWToR.
What a brilliant bit of sarcasm there.
/sarcasm
Interesting to see crafting rated so low, particularly for RIFT and WOW due to it being "useless", when in fact both games regularly produced items superior to quest items while leveling.
The only argument I could see is that if you spent that time leveling instead of crafting that you'd progress faster overall (and be on higher level quests providing better items.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I'm going to have to ask for the stats
umbers behind those rankings. Posting bias being what it is, any actual information to back the claims would lend some credence. Otherwise WoW>Rift>SWtor>EQ2 all categories.
SWTOR>WoW>EQII>RIFT IMO.
quest items - perhaps
dungeon items - no chance
Not sure about Cata, but in Wrath you could get patterns that were best in slot without the set bonus. Rift crafted sets are on par with the 1st tier of raiding content. I have never seen some of these super involved systems people talk about.
I never player EQ2 but I would go
Rift > WOW > SWTOR
I've enjoyed my time in Rift far more than the 7 years I played in WOW and it just keeps improving. I think maybe EAWare could compete in a few years if they can get their game together but right now it's a mess. Of those 3 Trion is the runaway best AAA developer. Can't wait to see how end of nations turns out.
While RIFT's items indeed felt that way, crafting WOW blues or TOR epics you're going to end up with items that are at least equal to dungeon items, if not better.
In fact some of the best TOR loot were orange gear so that you could use an entire set of crafted item mods, which I found to reliably be the best stats you can get (you wouldn't see comparable blues until 5-8 levels after, at which point you could simply upgrade to the next tier of item modifications.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Everquest...17 expansions and counting.