vor_lord,May 16 2004, 12:10 AM Wrote:I haven't heard anyone yet make a comparison between the two, and not being able to participate in the WoW beta I can't make any kind of comparison myself.Well having been in WoW beta for a few weeks, and also having spent much of the E3 time playing GW, I could through in my 2 cents.
Despite advanacements, WoW still shares many qualities of MMOG to some degree: long bouts of scenery-watching as you travel without nary a thing to do, distance, faction (and later realm) seperating you from your old buddies, occasional camping issues, quests that have little impact on the world, boring corpse runs, and still a good bit of grinding. Whenever I bring these up to other WoW testers they usually start talking about "no this is great, EQ had this really bad" etc. etc. but not being an MMOG fan I can't stomache these de-provements over RPGs or even action-RPGs as justifiable.
Guild wars circumvents this by removing travel time between locations, and giving each party their own an instanced mission where you play an important part in some story. Not a great story necessarily :rolleyes: but it sure beats yet another "kill X" quest. You're also usually taking on a larger number of monsters than would be survivable in WoW.
Guild Wars has a lot of innovative concepts right... but the bottom line was that I didn't enjoy the PvM aspect myself very much. I was literally falling asleep the fourth time I had been through a mission, and it's not because the missions were too easy (and I was through all of those in E3). It might be being forced to repeat the same mission with the exact same monsters in the exact same plaice time and again that's an issue, it might be that consumable emergency items don't really exist, maybe players don't get much in the way of rewards, or the sameness that washes over the beautiful landscapes. Maybe it's even that you're less likely to meet long-term friends on the playing field. I'm not really sure.
WoW had a lot more downtime than guild wars PvM, but overall I liked it better for some reason. WoW's monsters aren't always scary, but they are varied and entertaining. Surviving a small group of monsters is much more taxing in much of WoW, and you've always got a billion (mostly lame) quests to keep you busy. Guild War's monsters being suprisingly stupid doesen't help, wheras WoW's arent that bad. I would characterize my experience with WoW as "fun in between boredom" wheras Guild Wars PvM was just mostly boredom.
For the "explorer" type there are some truly beautiful and unique places in WoW that the Guild Wars demo didn't show off really. Even though farming bashal'ran for some relics was a painfully dull experience, at least I was awake for it. And while you are sinking in a monthly fee, I doubt guild wars will be a quarter the size of WoW; the amount of content in WoW is staggering.
However, I was really suprised by the PvP aspect of guild wars. The toruneys were absolutely fantastic! WoW has some arena-style PvP planned as well but it still hasn't been implemented, so that is hard to compare. But for unreal-tournament style fast-paced team combat with a good dash of tactical strategy, I don't think WoW will stand up as well. The "collectable" skill system, diminishing returns rewards, faster pace of combat, and the mere fact that they've already got PvP in now, leads me to believe that WoW will not compete well here.
It may turn out that the long-term interest in Guild Wars is the PvP aspect; the vs computer might almost turn out something like Starcraft/Warcraft. Unless arena.net plans on expanding the world dramatically with their periodic expansions, I have my doubts that playing the completely identical PvM missions over and over again will stay fresh. WoW circumvents this by giving you so many quests, that it would take at least a year to get through all of it, and you'll be on an expansion by then. On the other hand, a tiny PvP map tends to last much, much, longer, as can be seen in any FPS or RTS game.
P.S. WoW's interface is equally annoying to us spoiled by Diablo so I wouldn't take that as a point of comparison. :rolleyes: