So we were down at Lee and De’s today, and in the evening Doyce and Lee were (again) talking WoW, and Doyce pulled up some of his toons, and at one point Margie said, “Move over,” and sat down to create a character — a female Tauren hunter.
Now, 95% of what I know of Wow is from what I hear people say, and 5% is now from the couple of hours she and I spent taking turns running the Tauren through the first few levels. So, my largely uninformed thoughts:
- WoW has beautiful graphics. Okay, so we were looking at Lee’s $300 graphics card, but, still, the richness of detail and texture were much nicer than CoX.
- WoW has a highly textured and rich backstory and setting.
- WoW is full of so many twiddly bits — things to keep track of, inventory, supplies, crap like that — that it would drive me absolutely buggy trying to play it full time.
Really. I mean, yeah, there’s a bit of that in CoX — but, really, for the most part CoX is about going on missions to defeat/commit evil. The “supplies” you need to track and find room for and all that are largely abstract Enhancements and Inspirations (and, honestly, a good chunk of that I find irksome). It’s mostly about the missions — which, no matter how much one might bitch about the annoyance of pre-Travel Power jogging through Paragon City, are far more convenient and available
than loping along miles across the veldt to find wild boars.
But WoW seems to be all (or at least much) about the encumbrance-and-supply-inventory mechanic — just the sort of crap that I always hated in tabletop gaming, and which is no more entertaining here. One could, honestly, run a CoX character who never slotted anything in their powers and never popped an Inspiration. It would be annoying (and kind of unnecessary), but you could do it. So far as I can tell, you can’t advance at all in WoW without keeping track of (and/or gathering and/or selling)
broken claws and pig snouts. Margie’s hunter ran out of ammunition. Which is accurate from a simulationist standpoint, but just freaking annoying from an heroic story standpoint.
Now, if Margie turned to me and said, “Dave, I’ve fallen in love with WoW and want to play it from now on,” I’d smile, grit my teeth, and play WoW with her (and hope that my vague impressions of how problematic WoW is for soloing and duoing are not correct). But given my druthers, I’m still getting plenty of kicks out of CoX, and didn’t see much tonight to change my mind.
Though the graphics, and the setting, are very cool.
(And with that, everyone who loves WoW is welcome to tell me I’m full of shit and convince me otherwise. 🙂 )
I’ve played WOW, COH and most recently Eve. IMO, WOW is like you said, questing for that next big item as opposed to the story or the character. I recall many playing sessions where I just organized inventory and sold stuff at the auction house. WOW, like COH has a lot of moments where you sit there and say ‘that was cool!’. I thought both games were very enjoyable.
I’m actually off the MMORPG kick for now until star trek online comes out. I am actually discovering a slew of games that were made over the past two years that I missed while MMO’ing. Just finished FEAR which was fantastic game…
I’ve never played WOW, but I’m looking forward to my (hopeful) beta invite to the Lord of the Rings, Shadows of Angmar. Ill see what thats like. I would have liked to play the D&D online game,but every single person I’ve talked to says that its probably the most suckalicuous MMORG they’ve ever tried.
Which is a real shame because, man, that game was seen as the next best thing to printing your own money at one point.
I blame myself for the ammo thing — it is, literally, only a concern with hunters, and I had it STUCK in my head that Margie was playing a warrior, and so wouldn’t need that much ammo, and that it wouldn’t matter if she ran out, because it’s not her main thing.
That said, tracking ammo *was* something I always made Margie do during our four-year DnD game, simply because it was the only way to reign in what would otherwise be an archery-based hail-of-death, so it doesn’t bother me from a gameplay point of view — at least the TRACKING of said ammo is done by the game. 🙂
For me, the store/auction stuff is the ‘tactical management’ part of the game — the kind of stuff that you do in Civ 2 or in the ‘base’ part of X-Com — which is to say I like it, provided it’s not the whole game, and if I want to just log on and do that kind of thing, I can, and if I don’t want to think about it that session, I just don’t. Again, YMMV.
The only thing I say is that your perception of the ability of characters to solo in WoW is probably skewed — you guys got Notan to the ‘last big mission’ in the starting zone at least one and VERY likely two levels “early,” which meant you were dealing with a really challenging fight and making it even more challenging. In my experience, it is MUCH easier to solo and/or duo productively in WoW than in CoH — thus far, it is a rare evening that I log on and don’t ding, or at the VERY least make significant progress toward a level and maybe/probably get a cool new toy to equip myself with. I’ve said it to my NYC friends with my Horde guy — “I swear, I don’t mean to stay ahead of you guys — I’m leveling by accident.” I think this is partly because you have 20 more levels to ‘max’ in WoW, and because there’s no fear from the Designers that players will leave when their main hits 70, because unlike CoH (he said a little bitterly, missing playing his favorite characters a little) there’s actually IMPORTANT stuff to do once you ding your final ding.
As far as gear goes, WoW is like DnD in that way — your character is only about 60 to 70% encompassed by your stats and skills — gear plays a major role in your effectiveness in both games, and if you’re not getting that gear, you aren’t “really” level 15 or whatever — that’s very true in DnD, and pretty true in WoW — though it only really matters in the instances and versus ‘elite’ mobs. The skill/invention system is more important in WoW than it will ever be in CoH, also, but that’s as it should be, per the genre.
If I were playing a Superhero game, odds are I couldn’t truly ‘make’ a new toy for another character to use — I could ICly, but when it came right down to it, the player would be paying points for it, and the rest of it is just color. In DnD, I *can* make magic gear, and that’s kind of cool. I really, really *like* that I have characters that can enchant my own or my friend’s gear… or make potions… or even make magical armor… that’s really cool, and adds to the character for me.
As for story — I honestly think that one thing CoH could really learn from WoW is to try story arcs from different contacts together… I don’t mean overlapping them in the same level, but having a ‘clockwork arc,’ say, that REALLY built from your 1-5 contact, to you 6-10 contact, etc, all the way to the Clockwork King, and which you couldn’t just start in the middle with you’re 10 to 15 contact. I really LOVE the fact that, at level 37, Grezzk is still running into elements of the same ‘nemesis’ group that he started seein at level 3. It’s not true of every quest, certainly, but on both the Horde and Alliance side, there are threads of the “The Threat from Within Our Own Ranks” that continue all the way up to the appropriate throne.
… and… I went a bit off track there. 🙂
Short version: again, as I’ve said, both games do their genre of gaming very well — CoH takes the old Champs/Gurps point-based, gestalt, no-real-gear, knockem-sockem genre of games and comics and does it perfectly — WoW takes the four-page-character-sheet fantasy game, mixed with a liberal dose of the elements of “strategic management” that they KNOW players like, thanks to the success of Warcraft 1, 2, and 3, and does THAT kind of game really well.
Given Margie’s Hail o’ Death (“Run, my pretty little chunks of XP! Run!”), I certainly understand the restriction. It’s just the tweaky little logistical crap that I’ve grown to hate about a lot of games. (Didn’t make me happy in Spycraft, either, which is why I tended to ignore it or worked around it.) Ammo should only be an issue if it’s a *dramatic* issue.
Now, that said, I’m from the old FPS school, where all the ammo for all the weapons is carefully tracked (except for your baseline not-very-good attack). But that’s part of that genre. As an MMORPG, CoX has spoiled me terribly.
I have had the sense that it is a significant part of what WoW-play is about, along with the crafting and all that sort of thing. CoX just drops stuff into your Enh and Insp trays automatically, and none of it is necessary to survival or prosperity or even to getting your next power.
Especially out of ammo. 🙂
Now, see, that’s useful data.
I’ve had the sense that a lot of the big stuff — the real character-advancing bits — *require* team/group/mob activity. (And, yes, you’ve mentioned that PUGs are a bit easier in a WoW setting than in CoX, so that barrier isn’t *as* high.) “Going off to raid town X” sounds like a key centerpiece activity, which isn’t something one does solo/duo. I wouldn’t think.
Now, maybe it’s just that group activity socializing thing that people talk a lot about, but that’s a lot of what I hear when people are talking about WoW. Well, that and ganking, but any WoWing on my part would be on non-PvP servers. 🙂
Yeah. And that’s part of what bugs me a bit, though it’s worth mulling over.
And that’s very cool, and I agree it’s something that CoX could do better (the “Destined One” bits from CoV aside). Evidently they’ve painted themselves into a corner against doing that, given the problems Posi claims in setting up a Nemesis system.
And given that I’ve played and enjoyed D&D number-crunching big-character-sheet-tracking sorts of games, tabletop, you’d think I’d enjoy that. I just get the sense that there’s a *lot* of time doing that kind of busywork, vs. the smiting, which is the part I’d be most likely to be into.
Still, as I said, all worth mulling.
As I have said before, CoX , EQII and Guild Wars all do each genre well. The straight forwardness of CoX is very well done and there is no really fiddling about with things to interfere with the game play….which is why I still enjoy CoX.
With CoX the story arcs are very entertaining and well worth reading (Some of the CoV ones have been great. :D). EQII is similar but with more of the puzzle aspect that I enjoy from FTF RPG’s the HQ’s being the big thing (think TF/SF) where you get 10-24 folks together.
EQII improved greatly the crafting from UO days and the economy is back to working after the big change from 6 months ago. Having housing and being able to show off you trophies and items is a lot of fun as is the SIM-lish house thing.
But EQII has the whole issue with ammo and equipment that ANY of the games of the genre seem to have.
One thing I find humorous about EQII is that they made the graphics way above what any computer could handle at the top two setting so that as time went on and equipment improved folks could move up to the higher settings. I have seen screenies from folks that are running Dual-Core MT computers with 8Meg of ram and a super graphics card and they are things of beauty.