Thoughts on GW/EOTN from an ex-WoW player

I know no one cares what I think. None of this is brilliant or new insight. But I feel the need to express my love for the masterpiece that is this game.

Personally I think GW is the best game I've ever played. The EOTN content cements that. I find the Nordic theme very captivating. The music is fantastic - sounds very fittingly Wagnerian. The artwork is stunning - possibly the finest graphics I've ever seen on the PC barring some of the very latest releases. Also, Jora's a hottie - she looks like my ex. Great mini-games.

Quests are interesting. This is the main thing in PvE that sets GW apart from WoW. Quests in WoW are mindless, the only parts of PvE that are even remotely challenging in WoW are the boss fights in the instances/raids. The missions/quests in GW are varied and engaging and force you to think about what you're doing. I detest everything about the WoW endgame: raiding, farming, rep grinding, and let's not get started on PvP. Of course, I was addicted to WoW too, but I began to realize the relationship was an abusive one so I finally got out.

It's possible to level to 70 in WoW without learning how to play. After the 2.3 patch nerf non-instanced PvE became a joke (90% of the non-instanced elites were nerfed). That, for me, was the worst thing to happen to WoW yet no one seemed to care but me.

Gear: less elitism, more customizability. Brilliant.

Only one thing drives me nuts about GW: the lack of an auction house. Here's my theory about why it was never implemented: ANet knows that a certain amount economic inefficiency is needed to keep the economy afloat. A lack of AH prevents money from changing hands. I think this prevents inflation but I don't know enough economics to be sure. In ANet's mind GW was never about gear hence AHs are not crucial the way they are in WoW. Still, trying to hawk my gazillion weapon mods in ten different districts always drives me crazy. No one can really know how much something is worth. Price checks are highly subjective.

I love the idea of districts. I like playing on the French server occasionally to practice my French.

The GW population is at least as mature as the WoW folks. Personally I'm not bothered by stupid people.

Not much of a PvPer, but it's pretty damn clear this game was built for PvP. This ain't no warsong gulch.

I just hope GW2 doesn't try to pander to the traditional MMORPG crowd too much and lose what made GW1 so unique. From what I've read GW2 wants to compromise. We'll see.

Well, I somewhat agree. GW has many flaws also, though. I still prefer GW over WOW.

ya what he said ^ but im not so sure id prefer wow over gw way to much reptiveness

Neither game is better, some people prefer one, some people prefer the other.

Having played Guild Wars for just a little under 3 years now, I am fed up of it. I dont find it interesting at all anymore, and the game has become increasingly more and more flawed by the changes made by Anet's development team.

I just quiclky logged on today remembering I had a second Bday on my rit, and found that I had been kicked from my HM alliance for over a week of inactivity.

There may be less elitism in GW when it comes to gear and equips, but there is far too much elitism amongst its players since there is no way of telling that player A is better then player B, and also, there is no way of telling how good a player is when you choose to accept them into your party, and most people that play the game are crap at it.

I'm just waiting for Age of Conan now and can forget about every other MMO .

Hello mr. relativist

Ad 1, You have yet to prove that "Neither game is better".
Ad 2, It's not that hard really. Titles give an indication, make them ping their builds. Good players don't use crap builds.
Ad 3, I suggest that you read the AoC thread in off-topic forums. It doesn't look too bright IMO.

I agree with GW/EoTn being a very fun addition. And GW is a very pretty game graphically. I agree your ex is hot and the mini games are a lot of fun.

I havnt played wow so I dont know how they work, But gw quests are pretty mindless too. Talk to this guy, Run here. Kill this mob, take this item, map back to this guy. repeat. Gets old fast. Atleast in WoW there is some variety.
GW is the same stuff over and over. Talk to X, Travel to Y, Kill Z, Map back to X. Blah blah blah!

Leveling to 70 sounds like a blast, more options! In GW its 1 day to max level of 20, then in two years of playing the same character your massive XP gains leave you around level... 20! LAME! Balance blah blah, If the game system was not so fragil, then they could go beyond level 20. What does it say when the entire system is based on a low level system?

Anyone play warcraft 3 custom maps where your heroes only get to level 10, and other maps get to level 20+. Those level 10 maps suck horribly because you spend 20 minutes leveling and the rest of the time going " why havnt I leveled???

GW Equipment: Horribly done. I spend 100k on an "elite" suit of armor, I add runes to it, I wanna switch the runes, instead of pulling them off I have to lay runes over them. this was fine til you could recycle runes off heroes, making player armor a lot more restrictive.

Also if I wanna transfer my armor to another character because I no longer like the name, or any other reason, I cant. I can't buy armor or sell armor. 1 less thing to spend my money on! But wait, i can get 200 upgrade mods that no one wants! WOOHOO!. Not to mention the fact that when you customize a weapon you cant revert it back! WOOHOO!

And elitism exists in GW: Ping your skill bar! Those skills suck! Noob! "kicked from party"
Ping your weapons: Those stats-skins suck, you must not play much. "Kicked from party"
You dont have elite armor? Kicked from party!
You dont have this rank in the title? Kicked from party!

Being able to build your weapons is cool, too bad most of the crap you get is worthless junk, Non inscribables in a game that demands inscriptions. Great way to waste time. I found an awesome skin,stat,req weapon, but its not inscribable! (merchant food, try again!)

Oh and the fact that anything worth while is a grind fest + very lucky to get! Good mods dont drop daily!

No Auction house does suck, Not even the ability to set prices and go into "merchant mode" for auto selling" like in a crappy free game called fiesta!
Instead you have to spam for hours and hours and fight on the search screen to sell crap! FTW! Items are over priced for skins only! I have a 2020/+30 r12 sword i bought for 1k because the skins ugly. Well I got a 2020 +20 r12 sword i sold for 100k because it comes from an elite area and the skins black!
WOOHOO!

Districts rock, especially when there are events and your district doesnt get the finale because it glitches up! Awesome! and if your search function glitches you have to go to each district to spam your items to sell.

All games have unsupervised children and disfunctional adults which makes GW heroes and henchmen rock. One thing it has over WoW!

This game was designed for PVP. PvE is just an added feature pretty much, which kinda screws PvE players out some extra content, Like additional levels!
WoW is PvE>PvP.

Not to mention instanced zones with a max group of 8 for normal areas! WOW 8 people!, WoW lets you join huge groups and tackle big time monsters like REAL DRAGONS! Not ghostly dragons. Freaking art department cutting costs with the GW Dragons!


Aside from heroes and henchies, Guildwars has one quality that makes it more appealing than WoW even through all the frustration, broken mechanics and lack of additional content (besides wonderful nerfs!)..... Its FREE TO PLAY!

If WoW was free to play, Half of GW's population would vanish. The other half would play for 1 hour and QQ on forums for the next 3 about how GW sucks.

That said, I love/Hate GW. and do not look forward to the epic failure of GW2.

if I may, I would like to offer my insight.

the graphics are pretty good.


I found the quests in WoW pretty fun, the difference I found between WoW and GW, is that the GW quests don't seem to be as rewarding as the WoW quests, and the WoW quests have better items/money.

the problem I find is that there is never anyone to do the missions with, sometimes WoW suffers from the same problem

farming, rep grinding, etc are in GW too, but it doesnt seem that, like the quests, the rewards aren't worth worth it.

you have to learn SOMETHING way to 70 unless you are lazy and get rushed or piggyback on other people.


i'll agree with you there, it really sucks that they nerfed the non-instanced elites, also that they nerfed the old world instances after BC came out, the PvP doesn't seem that bad for me, its pretty fun.

in WoW you can use any skills you get whenever you want instead of having a set bar, also there are tons and tons more items in WoW then in guildwars, and it seems to me that most of the armors and weapons are the exact same (except look sometimes)

yes.

QFT

cool.

but nothing beats disrupting trade channel with murloc movie quotes.

GW has more types of PvP then WoW.

I heard you can jump and climb trees in GW2 :P



thats just my opinion, it should be taken with a grain of salt.

except this:

this is true, it really depends on which one you prefer. OP has played WoW for a while and (in my reasoning) bored with it, as I have been playing GW for a while and I am getting bored of it. so its not possible to say one is better then the other because "to each their own".


also, have fun playing AoC Bhavv, it looks pretty sweet.


P.S ninjas

Um.... there's next to no customization in Guild Wars. I guess if you're saying because you can change up the suffix and prefix on the armor and weapons, yea, but there's not as many prefixes and since there's no stats to modify, not nearly as wide a range of effects in each prefix. Plus, in WoW, you can enchant your stuff with different effects and make your own items.

And elitism in gear? Are you nuts? The only point to most of the maximum items in Guild Wars is to show off.

That's probably the one thing I really don't like about Guild Wars compared to WoW: the entire weapon and armor system in this game is one of the stupidest, most trivial, and pointless things I've ever seen put into a game.

Actually,

WoW quests flow through better, have chains that get somewhat harder, and actually relate to lore (generally). Guild Wars quests are very individual based, most of them you're just doing it for the gold. Every single one of our characters is basically a mercenary.
"I lost my treasure, go get it and i'll give you money."

In woW it's
"This gang is terrorizing our land. Clear them out." Makes a lot more sense.

If there's anything GW did do right, it was the 8 skills only. It adds a lot more strategy where in woW you can use 40 skills or so anytime.

I play both games, sometimes within the same hour. I flip between the two. I like 'em both.

there are tons of go get my treasure quests in WOW,and there are tons of go clear this bunch of noobs quests in GW.

True enough, but the "go get my shit" in WoW usually relates to something bigger. Most of the time.

In GW it's very, greedy. Only the primary quests really matter, all the side stuff is "Oh, I be dead. Go avenge me" and crap like that.

1 thing that GW doesnt have that WoW has, a genocidal madman thats hellbent on the extinction of every single animal on the face of the earth.

this madman goes by the name, of nesingwary.

8 skills only is kinda neat, But 40 skills would let you do more and have more options and not be so restricting. But again its based on pvp.

Too bad half the skills in gw suck, and the majority of the good skills have been nerfed so bad as to make the sucky skills appealing.

Oh look, Wars endurance + mending + healing breeze on a warrior. Better than some other tank builds.

I agree that the rewards of side quests should be boosted,give us an option to choose between various greens or something.

8 skills adds strategy.
Nothing to it.

That's not to say WoW doesn't have strategy, it's just a different kind.

Can tell you are from the WoW community.

i Agree what ya say! i've played bit Wow but mostly gw. and Gw is amazing for Graphics and quests etc

She would crush you. Death by snoo-snoo anybody? But for the most part I agree with you.

In GW quests are: Go to green dot on map, kill what's there. Every. Single. Freekin. One.

Unfortunately, WoW wipes the floor with GW here. From trivial kill quests, to collecting items, to stuff like "kill a zebra, place its carcass there, wait for raptor to come feast on it" and all of that actually happening, not just in text, down to the likes of: take the gryphon, then use these bombs to destroy the emplacements from air, and actually doing a bombing run by aiming from the air....

And another thing: with just a tiny bit of organization, it's usual to accomplish 3-10 quests at the same time. Not like the old crap of zoning 5 times, and clearing the same zone over and over just to complete one quest.

The obvious downside is, that quests in WoW are means of leveling. That means doing lots and lots of them. But when it comes to individual quality, there simply is no contest.

How can anyone say that and not be wrong.
WoW is obviously more graphically appealing.

Though, in defense of the arguement, landscapes are nicer looking in GW. Basically, a lot of the areas you can't get to.
(Then again, a far-away view of the snowy mountains in Sunqua Vale is nice, and you can quest and fight inside them.)

That's very much a matter of personal opinion.

Both games have fantastic artistic styles, but they are alo both very different. In general terms Guild Wars goes with quite a gritty/edgey approach, whereas WoW has more of an exagerrated cartoony look.

Fair enough. I still think GW doesn't look as good.

Age of Conan looks better then both GW and WoW combined, even with Lotro thrown in on top.

This is the age-old comparison between WoW and GW.
We're not talking about AoC, are we? No, shut up.

one thing I LOVE the most about WoW, I can pass through enemies! that means no more bodyblocking, attack stopping, gross rubberbanding, etc.

...and as a side effect it will struggle to run on a lot of household PCs, which will have a defiante negative impact on their sales figures in the western market and completely cripple them in the (huge) asian market. It looks fairly pretty in the promotional screenshots, but was it a smart move by Funcom to use that engine? We will see.

I'll take performance and graphical style over polycount/bump maps any day, thanks.

You have yet to prove that GW is any better then WoW. It isnt actually. WoW is far superior for PVE then GW will ever be, but GW is better for PVP.

Titles do not equal skill. Also, you can give a bad player a good skill bar, and he still wont know how to use it (ZOMG I can hit with any of my interupts, Broad Head Arrow sux).

I have been reading the AoC forums for almost a year now thanks. I dont care what hard core fans of one game with the idea that their game is the best have to say about another. 90% of the people that have played the AoC betas are enjoying it thoroughly and I hear nothing but praise about the game.

A PC to run AoC doesnt cost much nowadays. A mid range ATI 3870 or Nvidia 9600 GT is all you need for high details, and a LOT of people that play games already have one of these cards or better (Really, the 8800 GT right now is probably the most common card that gamers are using).

If you cant run AoC on your PC, I couldnt care less, boo hoo to you. I can, so I will play and enjoy the graphics very much

The minimum spec for the game is a 6600 GT, and really, if you dont have one of them or better today, just what are you doing playing games?

I can discuss whatever game I like. How many threads do we need for GW vs WoW?

Im bored of it, i've seen it too many times. I will compare GW / WoW to other games if I want to.

It seems that people that play any MMO are desperate to compare it to WoW and nothing else just because WoW has 10 million subscriptions.

When did you perform this survey of average PC specs worldwide, exactly?

My PC is more than capable of running AoC, but that was definately not my point. Big budget MMO titles need a large population of players, or the world feels empty and it's just not as fun. Cutting your possible population in half by releasing on a high spec engine is usually not a smart move. I've been there and done that.

Look at Warhammer, LotRO, Guild Wars 2, Aion... Smart/experienced developers are still aiming for their games to be playable on mid/low range PCs.

WoW graphics are cartoony, which if you are 12 years old should appeal to you. GW graphics are by far much more realistic and beautiful.

Guild Wars 2 will not run on anything less then what AoC will run on lol.

If anything it will have a much higher requirement. Anet said it will run on MID RANGE PC's. A mid range PC right now is a 9600 GT or HD 3850, both of which are capable of playing AoC comfortably. In two years time, this requirement will be far higher.

Im not talking about PC specs worldwide, Im talking about 'GAMERS', people that play games. Head over to the AoC forums and you will see a thread every minute from desperate people asking for help on upgrading their PC to be able to play AoC.

I visit many gaming forums. People that play games and make up the market for computer games dont have PC's incapable of playing modern games. Assasins Creed is currently the number 3 selling game on the UK chart you know? Also Crysis is a very popular game, despite hardly being able to play well on max details on the best PC's that were available on its launch.

People with good PC's pay for games with good graphics. There is a huge market for them, and trust me, there are going to be lots of people playing AoC.

Yep. These are very realistic.
I just saw some in my backyard earlier today.

(Eh, that pic hurts my arguement. Damn you, wonderful trees!)

You DO know that "graphics" doesn't equal "style/art" ?

To be honest, that is like 100 times better then anything I have seen in WoW.

If anything,you see (wow)gnomes in your backyard

I actually like WoW's diversity of content, but the graphics were the nail in the coffin for me...it's hard to get absorbed mentally in something when it looks like you're fighting with Bugs Bunny. Heck, even in their commercials (which should demonstrate their BEST graphics, IMO), you kinda sit back and laugh at the pixels on the TV.

Hey I guess we are on the same boat! GW keeps getting better and better. Faction was a good expansion with the new skills. Nightfall with the awesome Hero system. Then EOTN with the newly way to adventuring by a book. The only thing I can suspect next is that GW2 is going to have more armor slots, more rewards, and more power to the player. Thus making it more interesting. (I am hoping they will take some WoW content and not just slap you in the face but BLOW you away. [Of course, Aion and Lineage 3 also have that opportunity as well.])

Quest were indeed mindless. Now that they added Dailies.... it became even more robotic. Guildwars quest offer some story, but they aren't as rewarding as they are in WoW.

The gear balancing is Guild Wars is great! However, I suspect more features to be added in Guild Wars 2. Hopefully there will be more customizing and slots.

In my vision for a very interesting game is to have each character be unique and fashionable by their owner trait.

The main goal is to have the character reflect the player. Thus at any time if the player wants their character to be fat... BAM they are fat! But that doesnt affect the gameplay but only the looks.

Auction house would nerf a lot of prices on people selling things as it can be use to "benchmark" prices on items since many items do not have any benchmarks on them.

I am waiting for the Japanese District so I can practice my Japanese.

You'll get that everywhere.

If I were to make GW2, I did upgrade GW1 System.

Their unlocking system is magnificent!

I would expand on my idea on how GW2... but I am not making the game :P

Guild Wars 2 releases in 2 years, AoC releases this year. In two years time the mid range household PC will obviously be higher spec than it is now.

Mid range PCs in what context? A mid range PC in say North America is very different to a mid range PC in the APAC region or globally. Untill they release some solid hardware requirements this is just useless speculation and semantics.

ANet know they have a large Asian market, and have put considerable effort into that with Guild Wars. There is no way they are going to cripple that, ala AoC, with unreasonable (for the region) requirements in Guild Wars 2.

How is a 9600 GT in any way mid range? It sounds like you spend far too much time talking on forums to other hardcore gamers with nice rigs, and don't really have a clue about the average casual gamer.

I'm fairly sure that last setence backs up my point, rather than yours.

Er, no. If you read any of the postmortems written about Crysis you will see that developers and industry experts all agree that the high spec requirements crippled Crysis' sales. It was a glorified tech demo of the engine, and not much more.

Also, good graphic engine does not equal good art.

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Anyway: after reviewing AoConan, i am convinced it will sink. JR has huge point with fact that MMO needs to run well on average household PC otherwise it will die because of nonexistant population.

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But to topic: WoW has some cool stuff, GW has some cool stuff. WoW majorly sucks as someting (Kill X of Y. Bring X of Y that drop from Z ... talk about timesinks.), but so does GW.

Only thing that really would benefit GW that can be taken from WoW is trading system and mail system. Nothing else. ITs no that there is not other good stuff, but that other stuff would damage GW (cough, reputation farming)

*coughs*

Definitely.

There was other problems with that game besides the high specs though, even if it was low specs it wouldn't of fared well.