I hate to admit it, but I play WoW. I don't think it's so much that they polished things, I mean yes, they did; but they also made things so much more easy, and accessible.

That's a good thing and a bad thing. Good thing because more people can have access to things like raids or high end gear. Bad thing because there is virtually no exclusivity.

That's where the older games come in. Much harder, much less accessible; and they suffer for it. But if you can stick with it, it's pretty rewarding, far more rewarding than anything WoW can offer.

And that isn't a knock on WoW, don't take it as such. WoW is a well made game, by an amazing company.

Yeh but it's not about it being easier because I don't mind hard games but functionality. The map on EQ right now is a joke and things like not being able to play in third person mode because you keep clicking on yourself. The horrible combat where you just stand there and it does a lackluster animation of them hitting the mob every few seconds. The stiffness of the movement and how clunky it feels, like you're trying to turn a lorry round on an old European village street in the mountains while it's covered in rocks lol.

I hate the nasty UI that isn't any fun to use like WoW and even things like that that way point thing floating in the air that EQ2 had. Just give me a proper map and put the way point on there instead or an icon over their head telling me thats the person.

The loading between all the zones is something I hate and what I love the most about the world is the world where it's all seamless between zones, apart from the main conts. However they do well to make it feel seamless where you have to travel on a boat and it loads in the middle of the sea.

I love how WoW did the classes where each one has 3 ways to play like a Priest can do heavy damage, healing or survival. All the classes in WoW are fun to play where as everyother mmorpg I've played I spent my entire time trying to find a class I liked and then quit.

Swimming in Everquest is so hard like you have to keep pressing space to float up and trying to get on a ladder to get out of the water is impossible. Found myself stuck in the water of the Lizardman starting area in Everquest lol.

I'm so thankful for all the improvements WoW did and the amazing quality of the content which is head and shoulders above any other game. My only gripe with WoW is I hate the direction they went with all the MT and all the giving gifts away left right and center. I hate how theres no in game character customization and you have to pay for it. I hate how theres no housing even so long after launch.


My fave mmorpg of all time was SWG Pre CU but I can't deny that WoW improved the actual functionality.

You have some valid points. Though, you must keep in mind the game is from 1999. It didn't even have a map until 2002 (maybe 2001) with the release of "Legacy of Ykesha".

The combat was very simplistic. Very. But it was met with some interesting challenges. At first it was just hard creatures with tons of hp and hit like a train. But they started to get inventive by adding challenges to raid bosses. All of what you enjoy in WoW raids is entirely due to Everquest's inventive raid mechanics.

There were also no 10/25 man raids. For the first 4 expansions (and the original game); it was "fit as many people as we can!", some raids requiring hundreds of people (see sleepers tomb). Sony figured out that was somewhat difficult. So they reduced it to 54, with the release of "Lost Dungeons of Norrath", and the implementation of instances.

From that point on, raids were usually 54 man raids. Gear was scarce and not as freely available. They managed to tone it down further by have 36 man raids, and I left before I saw it get any smaller.

Being well geared in Everquest was a status symbol. For a while, if you had your epic weapon (or epic 2.0), you were a god among men, because to get it meant a large amount of cooperation from your guild. Some of the fights to get these weapons required multiple raids, and yes with 54 people.

You don't get anything like that in WoW. It was those charms that had me really hooked to EQ, because you had a feeling of actually progressing through the game and accomplishing something. This is something I don't really feel with WoW. As fun as it can be, and as much as I like to PVP, WoW does not quite satisfy me like EQ did.

As for the interface. Yeah it sucked for a long time. You had a small viewport in the middle of the screen, then it was surrounded by a non-modular UI. You had a single chat window where combat text was spamming out vital chat. You couldn't change any of the UI settings. But thankfully this was replaced.

I'm not sure when they pushed their new UI on us, I imagine it was somewhere near the release of Luclin. It was a saviour. We could move windows around, have multiple chat windows, filter chat; it was great.

Loading between zones happened because there was no way to conceivably connect all the zones seamlessly. Ram was limited, computing power even more so, It made more sense to have zone lines way back then.

Having zone lines was a huge help too. Because mobs in EQ never stopped chasing you... NEVER. So you would run to the zone to escape danger, and often shout "TRAIN TO THE ZONE!". Oh yes, the memories of KC. /nostalgia off

EQ was very good for it's time. It was a pioneer in MMO gaming. When they created it, they envisioned everyone gathering around pubs and chatting while waiting for groups, and role playing a bit more. A lot of things fell out of the initial vision the developers had for the game. And it became an entirely different beast.

Sure you can knock it when approaching it with today's standards; but that's not really fair, since it's the grandfather of our current games. Sure it lacks the heavy metal rock music, but there is still some charm in the jazz that this grandfather game enjoys.

I could write all day about the game really. But I shall not.

Oh and I'll give it to you, SWG Pre-CU was amazing. I played it quite a bit.

How is lack of exclusivity a bad thing?

When I say WoW lacks exclusivity, I don't mean it's because it has some amount of millions of players. I mean it's because everything in the game is very accessible to everyone.

I didn't say it was a bad thing to lack exclusivity, I just said it was something WoW lacks. Everyone has the potential to be well geared. So there is really no way to stand out from the crowd. Where as in EQ, everything was much more difficult, intentionally; so good gear was harder to come by, and the people who had it really stood out.

I'm glad I could please you. As much as I loved Slippers, I don't think he and I would've been able to handle the combat system.

As I said in a different post, Kyle, the only reason why you guys were having such a hard time hitting the rats was because you started with 0 in your weapon skill. If you weren't in the tutorial and started in one of the cities, you'd have been able to go to a trainer and put 5 free points into your weapon skill -- which would have had you slaying those rats in literally two or three whacks.

This is noob-land, tutorial combat. It obviously changes as the game progresses. In fact, had they not been playing in the tutorial, and chose to play in one of the traditional leveling areas at starting cities, they'd have had access to class trainers *who could have trained them in their weapon skill.* Everyone starts with 5 free training points and gets another 5 free per level to use at trainers. Even putting those 5 points in your weapon skill at level 1 makes you connect much more frequently at level one, which makes things go quicker. The Mines of Gloomingdale Deep do not have class trainers that I know of.

That said, I agree that WoW improved upon combat, most particularly in the fact that all classes are much more balanced in WoW (though there are some aspects to combat in EQ that I like better). I don't think WoW combat is any quicker today than it was in EQ, though, since they improved health and mana regeneration rates between fights. Now, I honestly think both games are very fast paced in terms of combat.