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EQ2, WoW or Guild Wars
sneck
Member Posts: 5
Everquest 2, World of Warcraft or Guild Wars. What shall i play
Comments
EQ2 is more old school , bit more complex and you need good comp to run it - but better community
Guild Wars is free to play , so i recomend to buy it anyway - you will not regret it
"Before this battle is over all the world will know that few...stood against many." - King Leonidas
Probably Guild War.
Both EQ2 and WOW are like this,
1. Go kill 10 bats and come back to me.(EQ2)
2. Go kill 20 goblins and bring their heads back to me.(EQ2)
3. Go kill 10 wolves and come back to me.(WOW)
4. GO kill 20 thieves and come back to me.(WOW)
5. Every mobs are next to each other within 3 feet with a respawn rate of 20 sec. or so. When you take a "quest" like above, go find the spot and kill 1 with 5 slashes, move 3 feet to the next, 5 more slashes, move 3 feet to another, 5 slashes, hey the first one respawn already, move 6 feet back and 5 more slahes, and hey second one respawned already, move 3 feet and slash 5 times more.... and so on....until you get 10 or 20 heads of whatever the "quest" requested. Then pick another "quest"...so much "fun"...
6. and so on.....take 10000 such "quests" until you max out your level.
7. If it's WOW, when you maxed your lvl, you have following things to do. Go raid the a few same old bosses(probably less than 10 different ones) over and over. Or go "battle ground" which is just a big arena to mindlessly battle ppl without organiation, without goal, without reward, without penalty forever. or duel someone 1 on 1 with no reward, no penalty either, not even death over and over.
Got my point?
WOW type of game isn't even fun to begin with. As the matter of fact, all MMO out there have mindless grinding. At least many other of this type of games have endgame contest after the meaningless grinding to high lvl. WOW has no endgame just like it has no fun to begin with. Skip it, and you will miss nothing. Not to mention its ugly character designs.
WoW is the most solid designed MMO around. It is easy and it is fun , perfect as a starting point.
Guild Wars isnt really a MMO , it is more like online rpg. Good thing about it is that you dont pay monthly subscription , so you can play it whenever you want. I still play it sometimes even after almost 1 year.
So again. Get WoW , and also buy Guild Wars
"Before this battle is over all the world will know that few...stood against many." - King Leonidas
EQ2: Great game, but not very newbie friendly. The community is nice, and you can have some great fun, but it is just a little harder to get settled into and find your "niche". It is mainly PvE (monster slaying) focused, but PvP was recently introduced, and from what I hear, excellent.
Guild Wars: Guild Wars is the ultimate newbie game. No monthly fee. Easy user interface. Fast, fun combat, etc. However, GW is more the casual game, and becomes a bit hollow later on. But, because it's a casual game, it's designed so you can come in and play as often as you like. GW is mainly PvP based, and it's done well, and can be a blast if you can find the right PvP team (The purpose of guilds). In short, this game is fun, it gets intense at times, too. But, in the end, it is just... short.
WoW: I must say, my favorite by far. However, that does not mean it is not without faults. WoW is very easy to get into, but not as newbie friendly as Guild Wars. Also, the game has a notoriously horrendous community. While this is sometimes true, there are also a lot of nice, awesome people. In my person experience though, I have noticed the more immature, or shallow people tend to flock to the Alliance side. Not to say there aren't idiots on both sides (because there are), but I have noticed the Horde to have a few less bad apples. But, bigger fanbase, bigger oppertunity for the scumbags of the internet to find you. Anyways, You will spend some time getting to level 60 (depending on your play rate, I play semi-casually, and am an alt-aholic, so it took me a whole year). After that, you spend your time either raiding instanced dungeons (such as Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Ahn'Qiraj, etc.) for better items, or PvPing against the other side to get honor points, which get you ranks, which give you access to better items. In my opinion, the dungeons are more fun, with the exception of Molten Core, which just sucks. And PvP is a waste of time unless you can play for hours on end. Everyday. All the time. Oh, and lastly, Blizzard customer service is atrocious, period. Now, seeing as this is getting a bit long, I will say that overall, I have been playing WoW for +1.4 years, and I'm still not bored. Has to say something about the game at least.
There you have my 2 cents on those games. I own WoW and GW, and played a friend's EQ2 account for about 2 months. Some people may not agree, but I think that is a fair assement of all of them.
Then after you finish that you can move on to the big boy games.
It's kind of like riding a bicycle. Consider WoW your bike with the tassled handlebars, a horn on the front, chain guard to keep your jeans from getting caught, a piece of styrofoam from a ground beef pack between the spokes to click for you, and training wheels on the back.
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WoW and EQ2 are really fun great games. The only bad thing of EQ2 is that everytime u log on theres a patch that u have to download but if u got broadband ull be okay.
Guild Wars to me is boring as hell and i have tried to get back to it but i cant get hooked.
WoW is a great beginner MMO (like others have said). so if you want the kind of game you can easily slip into, then WoW is the game for you. lvls 1-60 are alot of fun. it's just end game that needs some major tweeking.
Guild Wars isn't a true MMO, but still fun none the less. it has a cap of lvl 20. that, in itself, isn't really THAT big a deal. it focuses a lot on the PvP aspect. the storyline isn't all that bad either. i liked how they immeresed you into the story and put your characters in the cut scenes. it moves you from place to place fairly fluidly. no monthly fees and a new expansion coming out (or is out).
EQ2 is what i am playing now. i've been slowly leveling since i've got so much to take in. the crafting can be a bit mind boggling. there're quests galore. new(er) artwork for characters was a nice change from the ugly NA ones they initially had (play-doh!). it's got a much steeper learning curve than WoW.
-t
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Now Playing:
EQ2
Prior Games (in no order):
SWG, L2, RO, PT, ROSE, CoH/CoV, AO, UO, EVE, WoW and a bunch of others.
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There are people on at all hours even off hours so you can find things to do.
Though most of it is instance meet in an area sent out to group, there are some hidden out door parts that make it fun to explore.
Loved wow but taken it in small doses here and there not in any hurry to level. There were some fun quests too, not all combat oriented which was a nice change too. The crafting is simple as well and progresses nicely so not that difficult to become very good at it .
Eq 2 held my interest for about 2 months never went back
In my opinion you want to do WoW.
Despite what some people say a lot of very hard core, experienced people play that game. It has a bad rep simply by being the best, and some of the things you hear are lies. Among them the idea that there are just "go out and hunt the monster" quests although for obvious reasons at the beginning of the game that is what you wind up doing.
In general in WoW if you explore you will find that you can do things like catch fish to turn in to complete quests (the "Blubber Gump" quest is an example of this). There are also special encounters that will be spawned outside of instances and such as you do things like investigate a rumor you believe might lead to the missing kind of stormwind.
Now granted, there is only so much you can do in an MMO. Quests ultimatly revolve around some kind of gathering, clicking on a specific object to hide/recover something, finding keys to unlock zones, and other things. But there is a variety to it, and even the "hunt" quests are usually pretty entertaining the way they are done.
The problem people have with WoW is that it does not really reward "eliteness" until the very, very end of the game (and that is largely because they are stretching out the current endgame content before the expansion). A guy who logs into WoW for 30 minutes can find something to do all on his own without a problem. While there are plenty of group quests, you can reach the top level and even fill up your slots with decent "Blue" items all on your own if you want to. Grouping becomes an option as opposed to being forced. If you choose to be social you can be, if you want to be anti-social and do the lone-hero thing you can do that. Me, I like WoW because I mix it up. Sometimes I go it alone, othertimes I like to group, and sometimes I'm in the mood for a raid.
Unlike other games where crafting is a money sink that eventually rewards you at the very high levels, crafting in WoW is useful at all levels. For example as an alchemist you can make your own healing potions, as a blacksmith you can make skeleton keys to open locks, and sharpen your weapon to do more damage, etc. On an established server some of the item creation (due to high level crafters and tons of look making it to the auction house) is fairly useless, but there is always something you can do with your trade skills to help yourself. I myself only tinkered with crafting but found it pretty useful all around, and much better than any other system I had seen including the EQ 2 system (where you can literally kill yourself grinding your craft skills).
WoW's big weakness is the PVP system, their Battlegrounds are great (despite what you might hear, millions of people play them after all) but the problem is that in order to gain benefits from PVP you need to accrue rank. As you get to be higher in rank you need more kills/honor simply to maintain your rank since it degrades over time. Up to the point where you need to be on for like 10 hours a day doing nothing but BGs in order to maintain what you have and have any hope of actually getting into the next bracket to gain any benefit. After months of chasing this I eventually gave up because it was just too time consuming, even if I didn't work full time I want to do more than grind BGs. Of course by this point I had maxxed my primary character months ago, done some of the hardest zones/quests in the game, and otherwise exhausted all the content except for the most "leet" aspects that were only open to huge guilds of lifestyle players (I was with a small guild, we had some decent people, but not enough of them on at any time to produce the long-term raid parties we'd need).
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I played EQ II first for months, and I'll be honest, I did not give it up because it blew total chips. I feel WoW is better, but EQ II has a lot to recommend it, including some things (collections, book quests, a house you can decorate) that WoW does not.
What really tanked EQ II for me was the "Station Exchange". See people like to sell in game money and items and such for RL money. I am against this practice as I feel it ruins the game and gives rich people an unfair advantage in the arena of a fantasy game (although to be honest I could buy such stuff if I wanted to, I rarely need to). The "Station Exchange" was SoE giving up the idea of policing it and instead deciding to become a broker that would take a share of the profits in exchange for handling the transaction. While only a few servers were "exchange enabled" they put their tacit approval on such selling although were saying it was dangerous to use anyone but them on one of their approved servers.
While there is RL sales and such on WoW, at least Blizzard makes an effort to shut these people up when I complain about them. If my in-game E-mail gets spammed or someone sends mass tells they make an effort, EQ II doesn't much care if some guy sends you bulk junk mail in game or dumps tells on you periodically trying to get you to pay him for PLing. At least this is my experience.
That aspect aside, WoW is just a stronger game all around.
One thing I will contest is that EQ II has better graphics. They have a more powerful engine, but in general I do not think their graphics are better. It's just that they are more "Serious" as opposed to Warcrafts more "cartoony" graphics. It's a matter of stylization.
When I played EQ II had some really pathetic graphical elements, for example their "Spear and shield" fighting combo where it looked like you were a special olympian trying to club people. Also while WoW doesn't really have a weapon-draw animation, some of the animations for this in EQ 2 were absolutly horrible, the guys who programmed the game did not know anything about fighting at all. For example when you draw paired weapons it looks like your trying to committ suicide becaus eyou wear your weapons on each hip, and then cross your arms ACCROSS YOUR BODY and draw them, which brings the blades close to the proximity of the inside of your wrist. It looks really funny at times, especially if you think about it, and see your character drawing his weapons at a ruin. Everyone draws like an untrained first-time SCA moron who hasn't been properly educated by his betters. Basically you wear your weapons on one side and draw one weapon "normally" and the other (usually the shorter blade) accross your back following your belt. Then there is the whole thing with whips, you wear them coiled on your belt, but when you run the stream out like a tail....
So yeah, EQ II has a more powerful graphics engine and shows some things that WoW doesn't, but this is not always an improvement since sometimes you'll be looking at it and going "what the f@ck". This doesn't really detract from the game itself, but it's worth noting in any comparison of graphics that simply having more animation sets and such is not an improvement if they look stupid.
Trust me dude, wield a one handed spear and a shield at some point. I have some idea of what this should look like (even simplified for repete attack animations), unless they took the advice of thousands (doubtful since it's SOE) you will laugh so bloody hard it's not funny.
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Guild Wars I have not played, it's free though (aside from initial software) so it's not that much of a risk. Tell me what you think. Maybe sometime I'll try it if I get burned out on everything else.
To be honest though I've been wary of it because it seems like a very competitive "leet guild" game combined with PVP. I might have a lot of fun with that if I had time, but honestly I can't invest the time in playing *THAT* seriously. It's probably aimed at a younger crowd, or (despite the free price tag) people who are finanicially independant enough where they don't work seriously (I do not consider sitting in a cubicle farm making $100k a year and playing a video game because you never have to really work to be 'employment').
Maybe when I'm retired Social Security will still be around. If I'm not starving on the street or dying in a closet at a state "Retirement home" I'll be able to dust off the successors of games like this and give it a serious go. I'm not the most skilled player out there, but I figure with enough time I can hold my own and give people a pretty hard time. Plus then I can do the enraged old-fogey thing without having it be a mere characture... yep dude, you really did get told off by a crotchety old geezer.
It's odd to think that at 30 I'm actually kind of looking forward to it.
>>>----Therumancer--->