Why WOW can't kill Guild Wars

There is expressive power and expression (or appearance). It's like the paper&pen vs. the hand that use them.

The former allows you to draw more polygons, add more colors, shape things using curves instead of simple lines, etc. This not subjective, it's technology and maths. GW is superior, even more with the fact it can actually display all this on the low-to-average computer.

The latter is about how you use this expressive power to represent dragons, armors, dwarves, etc. This is very subjective, some people will dislike anything that is fantasy, some people will automatically love the kind of anime-style that some games have. GW's artwork is stunning and was rewarded with numerous awards, so even if you don't like it, all these awards probably mean that the GW artwork team is doing a good job.

Again:

Then prove it.

For something that everyone is so incredibly certain of, it sure does seem tough to get anyone to actually prove what they're saying.

Oh, right, because no matter how angry you get about it on the internet, you still can't prove an opinion....

i would....but myself and many others already did on the previous page, and i don't feel like quoting all of it over again.

do you consider all of these graphically equal?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Un...Comparison.jpg

As much as I hate so much about Guild Wars, GW PvP > WoW PvP, so it takes the cake for me.

The technical capability of each engine is not the point under discussion. The statement was, and continues to be, that "GW has better graphics".

Prove it.

What people fail to realize is WoW graphics are that way for a reason... Warcraft 1, 2, and 3.

Personally I have all the settings maxed in WoW and I think it looks damn good. It isn't blocky/polygon like and effects are very well done. If you don't like the cartoon style well that's just a matter of taste; be like me saying GW graphics sucked because they were too realistic...really?

Is that not what they meant?

The thing that wins it for me is that GW has some variability in pvp. It isn't where you see a class and follow a memorized routine of action and reaction. GW there is more variation making for intelligent play of analysing the situation before making a commitment despite the more dumbed down pve content. I love the idea being used for GW2, incorperating skill by having people able to fight on an equal level as their friends while maintaining character progression.

Guild Wars can't die because it isn't based on suscriptions. Our characters will always be waiting and Anet looses nothing if all they do is wait. Wow is the opposite.The devs already consider the income from GW to be done, any continuing income is just a bonus. If we consider a game as dead if there is no longer an active team working on it then GW is almost there though the game is still more then playable. WoW will continue so long as there are players.

Really lets drop the grapics issue.

I just have to say...this post was a complete ownage. +1

honestly....

Don't challenge people while failing to back up the minimum criteria of defending your own arguments; saying everything can be subjective is a waste of time to read or respond to. The burden of proof is equally on the WoW supporters side as it is on any GW supporter. Neglecting graphics engine capabilities while having an argument about graphics just appears to be absurd; quality has a direct relation to the ability of someone or something to meet any of it's full potential. When something fails to meet potential, it is below standard; not better than something.

There’s probably someone else somewhere who can combine objective criteria for both functional design and art to settle arguments on what constitutes better graphics. We aren’t talking about someone’s significant other here, unless maybe we are. I’m going to ignore what texmod or player-made additions can add to a game.

Some of the artwork sketches I’ve seen of Warcraft characters look respectable, but the in-game content of WoW falls far short of presenting anything graphically equivalent. It reeks of fulfilling bare minimum computer requirements and reskinning/recycling too much work to meet time deadlines. The way I think of graphics is by thinking of a pictograph; it will be some part text and some part art. WoW is text; Guild Wars is art. Text is clear in communicating. Art is everything else and beyond, part informative and part entertaining (that’s why writing gets considered as a form of art). In Guild Wars evil characters and opposing factions are designed to stand out. In Warcraft good and evil are reskins, and opposing factions wear the same items.

What I do think the Warcraft fanatics are completely wrong about is how they think game graphics can be better just by being unique (attempting to compare like you would a famous painter’s work). To me branding shouldn’t be emphasized by an inexperienced critic, as trademark flaws in Warcraft can be distorted as an example of branding (i.e. not making proportioned shoulders). Warcraft makes no effort to be realistic, giving them a technical edge in branding themselves differently. Any game that puts in the effort to make a realistic game has to do something completely different to brand that game. WoW takes the easy way out by doing something distinct with their artwork. Guild Wars has to brand itself entirely separately by doing something graphically different from other games.

To elaborate on the only advantages Warcraft has graphics-wise: Warcraft graphics are exactly as informative as text, but equally plain. They also have a functional purpose advantage based on simplified game design. Glowing hands to indicate spell school is good function; although casting animations are recycled among the races to provide poor class distinction. Fancy looking armor to indicate the character is more powerful is also functional. Bigger character indicates a boss. Guild Wars skill icons and animations lose informative value because there are so many of them. However, spell school icons appear over a characters head; while informative, these blend into backgrounds or casting animations too well in some cases. Also there isn’t really a solid graphical indication that some characters are continuing to be amplified with a powerful effect outside of the initial activation of a skill; although bosses are distinguishable. What I mean is that in WoW, you continue to see a shield bubble on something, while in Guild Wars things like that are less obvious.

ITT: Semantics.

Say what you want about the graphics, but GW animations give me a headache.

I can say the same of WoW's. The only exceptions have been Draenei, BE's and male Orcs. The rest are meh.

Actually, I know a few people who don't like attempts at realism in gaming. They all claim the same reason for it too: it's close, but it's still far enough away that the difference is distracting. I suppose it's sort of an example of the "uncanny valley" effect.

I've already been over this. The post in question consists of a gripe about the size of shoulders, the look of animations for weapon enchantments, and the general stylization of the weapons. Does that sound to you like it's a post about his personal preferences regarding graphical styles, or a critique of the technical capabilities of the graphics engine?

That's not a quote, you made it up. If you want to discuss the technical merits of the graphics, go nuts. That has nothing to do with what I'm talking about, so I don't know why you keep trying to get involved with me.

Call me crazy, but when you (generally, not you personally) start calling other people morons, semantics become pretty important.

Just can't resist........

Arguing with an Software Engineer
Arguing with a software engineer is a lot like wrestling in the mud with a pig. After a few hours, you realize that he likes it.


OT Guild Wars beats WoW just because I said so!!!!


@ Dream: TY

It depends on who we're talking about. If in reply to Snaek, he brought up the technical progression of UT. If in reply to Fenix, I'm not sure since you attacked him before he specified if he was talking about the aesthetic or technical appeal. I don't think you and others are on the same page. But anyways:

Aesthetically, w/e
Technically, Guild Wars

The only technically "on par" portions of your character are going to be the helmets, weapons and shoulders. Everything else is low res and only with a one or two varying models.

Aside from that, WoW looks "graphically impressive" with view distance turned all the way up, and that's only speaking for the distant land. But the monsters in Wrath can look pretty cool.

Speaking for myself there's only so much of it I can take. My warrior is stuck with two of these, ungh (and no, that's not my war, just a pic of the weapons.)

GW and WoW are games with complete different gameplay and graphics as been said before personal taste theres no way you can compare those two games.
Whats the point of this thread? I mean its not like they are in a war they even got different communities ...

http://www.guildwars.com/events/trad...7/gcspeech.php

I can't add to this..

I'm talking about Alleji's post on page 9. If those two want to discuss the technical merits of each engine, I couldn't care less. I'm taking exception to the person who called everyone else who disagreed with him/her "blind morons" after making three clear statements of opinion about the design of the artwork in a video game.

I don't see why this is such a controversial thing. If I went out on the street and saw someone eating skittles, and I told them M&M's were better, and they disagreed and I called them stupid for it, I'd get punched in the face. Rightly so. You don't go around calling people morons or stupid or idiots because they disagree with your subjectively derived opinions. Pretty basic stuff.

Well, you do on the internet where you can cower behind your keyboard and get away with it, but you still shouldn't.

Graphics smafics WOW has 11 million SUBSCRIBERS, GW sold 6 million total copies of four parts, thus WOW rules is the best game out there for this type of play and makes more money every MONTH than GW did selling 6 million copies over 4 years. lol Which proves graphics are hardly the selling point of these games.

Because, like I said earlier, a lot of people here are on a different page. You may've been referring to Alejji's post, but they may have not.

I had to look the two words up, they aren't regular parts of my vocabulary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindness
Blindness (from Wikipedia) is the condition of lacking visual perception due to physiological or neurological factors.

Such neurological factors could be caused by Warcraft addiction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moron_(psychology)
And a moron, also according to wikipedia: "Moron" was coined in 1910 by psychologist Henry H. Goddard from the Greek word moros, which meant "dull" (as opposed to "sharp"), and used to describe a person with a mental age located between 8 and 12 on the Binet scale.

The term moron has a coined designation by its creator similar to the way it has been used in this thread. Cartoon looks are probably designed for people with mental ages somewhere close to between 8 and 12. The terminology “blind moron” came up in the discussion about looks; it wasn’t related fully to the game content itself.

So for future discussions, it would have been more appropriate for the methodology to have been included along with the label. At this point, I think if Alfred Binet had separated his theory of intelligence into multiple intelligences; people who think Warcraft looks better might be classifiable as “blind morons” within social/artistic intelligence disciplines. It might have to do with some consideration of neuroses involving preferences away from realistic looking objects or people, something that someone might consider some form of mental retardation. That’s just my assumption. I typically do not agree with the intelligence standardizations other people have, but I can see those types of things being classified that way based on development of the theory that came out of the early 1900s.

Graphics aside, I believe guild wars is niche marketed (mainly pvp and no subscription fee niche) is how it has done so well, it isn't trying to stand up to the behemoth known as WoW. The guild wars 2 in production however sounds like it is.. it may or may not be a fatal mistake, but that is up to time to decide.

Not going to touch the rest of the trolling in this thread, and as for the actual title name.. WoW can't kill guild wars because they are targeting different audiences.

@master fuhon
i don't know if that was meant to be funny...but i lol'd

The ability to laugh comes with the ability to recognize that one is not the joke. Or is it; the ability to laugh comes with the inability to recognize that one is the joke. That’s pretty funny in itself; because you have to have the ability to laugh in order to successfully detect when an ironic situation presents itself. Yes, laughing initially at irony is very good for you. It’s bad to not be laughing, or to be laughing continually at the same joke.

Guild Wars has no monthly fee. That's the only reason it has survived for this long.

As much as I like Guild Wars that is a very true statement but on the otherhand Guild Wars was not meant to have a monthly fee. Guild Wars and WOW are just different types of games. Though if people had to pay a fee for Guild Wars many would not play.

Agreed. Believe it or not (and this might come as a big suprise to a lot of people here) people on WoW's forum don't waste 11 pages discussing about games like GW. Hell, they don't even care to.

There's one thing GW really has that simply tops all other MMO's, and that's the instant PvP character creation. Not just because it in itself is awesome, but in terms of one of the most important factors in balancing: feedback.

A simple glance at WoW or WAR's forums will show why. All of the class forums are massively flooded with essentially "dear devs, nerf scissors and rock, signed paper", and there are rarely any moments of unbiased discussion.

The near opposite can be said of GW: there's rarely any moments of biased discussion. GW isn't about playing your "main" as best as you can, it's about playing all of them as best as you can. Because of this it allows the devs a much more filter form of feedback.

This isn't saying there aren't problems, though. But I'd consider GW's situation five trillion times worse if most people were sticking to one class.

You cannot compare any facet of either simply because WOW has 11 million active subs (as they report to stock holders) and GW has 5 million purchases , WOW is it's own game, GW is it's own game. And semantically speaking GW is NOT and mmo. It is 100% instanced. You have a 6 to 8 player max in most areas. MMO stands for MASSIVELY MULTI.... and so on.

This doesn't make GW a bad or less desireable game, they simply are not in the same class. LOTRO is an MMO, SWG is an MMO.

You could probably boil it down to:

WoW cannot kill GW because:
1. WoW does not include the the gameplay or art style of GW, while being strictly as good as or superior to GW, so doesn't represent a strictly superior offering.
2. People can play multiple games
3. Blizzard don't own ArenaNet, so can't directly shut it down.

Tbh you can boil it down to GW is not a MMORPG, and is not trying to compete with WoW.

wow cant beat gw because gw is free. when wow players go poor, they'll migrate to gw. (albeit blizzard will be rich and anet less so ;-))

Agreed 100%! That's because people spend so much time on one character and they feel obligated to stick with just one or two characters, and they may or may not remain somewhat ignorant about other classes. In GW, I can imagine that about everyone that has tried every class available to them and probably has most at level 20. That, and the PvP in WoW is ridiculous nowadays, it is NOT the same game that it was in 04-05, and is no longer about actual PvP. Just a bunch of people dueling in a sand box is what the PvP scene looks like now. Oh, and for the record, you CAN make an instant PvP character in WoW, but it costs you money (hey big surprise) and you are ONLY allowed to participate in the arena (can't even do battlegrounds). I love/d WoW for all the great things it brought to the table, but now that world PvP is not really there it's not really much of a World of WARcraft. If you guys have/had played the game early on, you'd understand how far it's shifted, from amazing PvP, albeit unbalanced, to mediocre and still unbalanced.

To note on what Zinger said. Guild Wars was never intended to have a monthly fee, so it's kind of silly to say it would die if it had one.

Besides all that... Why have just one when you can have both? If you like them both and have a job, you can easily save up enough for GW, with enough on the side to pay 15$ a month.

If you want to nitpick about technical categories, this is correct. But if you want to see GW and WoW from player's point of view, it is not that simple.

Sure, GW is 100% instanced. WoW is heavily instanced too because player community has been divided to several hundred realms which are just copies from the same virtual world. One realm can hold something like 20,000 players and how many of them are online at the same time anyway? GW at least gives you an access to the whole player community without making new fresh start characters to different realms or ask real money payment from the transfer.

When talking about game experience itself, what benefits WoW's open world gives compared to GW's instanced world? I see the benefits when you are leveling a new character or making your first one. However, I don't see the benefits when you are at level 80.

Large amount of players are hanging in Ogrimmar (Horde) or Stormwind City (Alliance), talking crap or selling stuff in chat channels. Players can't do that in GW? WoW has shared trade channel with all four big cities. One of the is the most populated, second one is somewhat populated, third is barely populated and fourth is a ghost town. If you use trade channel, you can communicate with same amount of players as GW's typically populated town instance has. If you want to do general chat, it is a bit different thing because using trade channel as chat usually upset players and you go to their ignore list. So it is very minimal. GW doesn't have this problem. You can even switch town instance and have an access to another bunch of players.

Let's look the game when you have reach your maximum level. Do you wander around the open world or you do instanced areas like dungeons, raids or PvP? What open world can offer you? Low level ganking? Random pointless opposing faction city raids? Group playing with what? Some random group quests which usually are done before you are at max level anyway. Mostly open world is just daily quest solo grinding, hanging or ganking. You can't do solo grind in GW or hang with other players even if it is 100% instanced game?

I really fail to see why open world is so fantastic compared to instanced world when comparing WoW and GW. Open world theoretically could be way superior to instanced world, but its potential is not used much in WoW. Realm server will most likely crash if couple hundred players enter to the same visible area. Hurray for MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER!

Why WoW is more popular than GW? Because people have experience from early Warcraft series from years ago, because Blizzard makes quality games which have long history, because WoW will feed ego with epics items and cheap humiliation. GW requires skill for success. WoW requires just time, time and time.

WoW killed GW on day 1 by them not being competitors and Blizzard doesn't give two shits about Guild Wars or ArenaNet because Guild Wars won't ever be a threat to them.

Now if Guild Wars 2 is god's grace to MMORPGing, then they might be worried, but Guild Wars and WoW were never really strong competitors with each other because they both attracted different crowds.

Slightly worried only. Activision Blizzard is a mammoth and WoW is more than an MMO now, it's become part of the society in unexpected ways (to show that games can improve kids learning skills, seen in the press). It's become a phenomenon, many many people know it without having played it, a politician organised a virtual march in WoW, it's on TV. It's become so big that only social pressure will bring it down (the same pressure that made it so big).

GW1 is making me very happy, it's the perfect game for a casual gamer like me. And I'll never ever give monthly payments to Activision Blizzard. WoW can never kill GW for me.

Amen Brother

another good thread finishing quote... why is this thread still alive?

I'm more concerned with the potential lawsuit from worlds.com. That may reshape the mmo landscape worldwide if successful. Why? GW generates no monthly income other than sales and add ons. So a large award of damages/license fees could really cripple if not end the game or any hopes of gw2.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ght=worlds.com

heres my theory tell me what u think: wow is a hard core live-in-ur-moms-basemnt-and-lose-all-friends game. i used to play and you have to play ALL THE TIME to get a high level. also, ive found that in wow, you dont really have fun unless you are an extremely high level. people that are level 80 have put in at least 400 hours at the very VERY least. this is ridiculous. i quit wow for that reason. i the started GW and found its a more relaxed easy game. u arent searching for sunken treasure without a boat (metaphor) and u always no what to do and the biggest thing: you can play GW for a week or two and have a level 20 and the best obtainable armor in game. in wow that takes a year if your a hardcore gamer. simple. people want to have high level characters but they dont want to bust their asses doing it.