Do you play EQ2? Are you a blogger? Could you do me a favor?
Since EQ2 is hitting its 5th year anniversary as well, one of the things I would love to read is an article about five features or aspects of EQ2 that are better than World of Warcraft. I’m not asking for a WoW-bashing post, just highlighting successful features you felt did WoW one better.
So… if this is you and you’re bored today, that’s the homework assignment from Prof. Syp*
(*It’s well-known that any blogger with the name “Prof. [name]” is to be obeyed right away.)
Bio Break 
Housing. Not only does EQ2 have housing and WoW doesn’t but they have taken this feature beyond fluff to an entire minigame in itself. There hundreds (verging on thousands) of housing items in game including all immaginable furniture, trophies, food, plants/flowers/trees, carpets, wall decoration, bookcases with individual user-written book collections, and house pets. All items can be changed in size, rotated, moved in any vertical or horizontal direction so that any item can become a building block to create whole new user generated structures and items. I have seem merry-go-rounds, theatres, mountain top monastaries (in the yard of a guild hall), floating bar/taverns with teleport pads, and the ever popular use-built aquariums with shells, coral, swimming fish, watery backdrops. It’s total amazing.
I’ve admittedly only very limited experience with WoW — tried it 2x, but never got past about 2 weeks before returning to EQ2. Here’s my list of why I am still playing eq2 after 5 years:
1) Any race, any class (even if you have to “betray”)
2) No restrictions on talking to or playing with the “other” faction.
3) I prefer EQ2’s look.
4) Combat pacing is better in EQ2, IMO.
5) Guild functionality/leveling/rewards
6) Larger world with more places to go, things to see, content to experience.
7) Bigger variety of mounts, and (if you have the cash) purchasable at level 1.
8) No limitation on what type of harvesting you “have” to do for whatever tradeskill you want.
9) Tradeskilling is better too, for that matter.
*****
This is all trying to put specifics on it, though. For whatever reason, EQ2 grabbed me, and WoW didn’t.
Well, i´m not a blogger but you might take a look at this:
http://www.eldergame.com/2008/07/clever-designs-in-eq2/
That´s a good collection and some good points in the comments too. 🙂
Here’s my thinking: http://dukestreet.org/archives/004750.html
(And that was the more sensitively written version… )
Can I submit work I did for another class? Three of my five “features I’m thankful for” from yesterday were cosmetic outfits, every race/every class, and text-based vendor sales interfaces.
Housing (player and guild), mentoring, and crafting are the other obvious places where EQ2 improves unambiguously over WoW. I’d consider sandbox-yness and proportion of group content to be more questions of preference (and the current EQ2 expansions’ solo content is no less sandboxy than current expansion WoW content).
Mentoring is done well. High-level skills/spells are scaled down rather than becoming unusable. The character doing the mentoring is far, far more powerful than a character of the same class who is actually that level, which can make it a lot of fun for the person doing the mentoring.
The housing is awesome. My meager two-room apartment somewhat resembles a zoo, but my wife’s place is a five-room mansion full of great looking furniture, paintings, sconces, and tapestries.
1. Greater variety of races.
2. Greater variety of classes.
3. Better crafting system.
4. Housing.
5. More supportive of roleplayers (beyond just having RP servers).
JC took all of mine! But I definitely want to second the better graphics (IMO), crafting, any race any class, and mentoring. And I want to add housing to the list as well!
Your wish is my command!
http://blog.weflyspitfires.com/2009/11/26/five-things-that-eq2-does-better-than-wow/
Syp, are you considering getting into EQ2?
@ Stropp – No, I’m not. Partially because my plate is very very full right now, and partially because I’d be coming in on the ground floor on a game that’s been out for five years, and I hate that feeling. Also, there’s a lot coming up I want to play. I was just mostly curious — I wanted to write an article about what EQ2 did better than WoW, but I didn’t have any experience to talk about it.
An occasional guest writer on The Wizard of Duke Street has been provoked by this into writing a piece about WoW:
http://dukestreet.org/archives/004752.html
Syp: “I was just mostly curious — I wanted to write an article about what EQ2 did better than WoW, but I didn’t have any experience to talk about it.”
I know you said specifically this was not to be a WoW bashing post – but this reads like you are looking for an excuse 😀
I say, right on! 😛
Homework complete. I’m not penalized for being late, am I?
What’s EQ2? LOL!
Tough one, limiting it to five I’ll miss out something big no doubt, but here’s my stab at it
1) Cohesive gameplay, an expansion starts and ends and has progression you can make in it, while WoW continually resets the gear and trivialises content so that you can “see everything”, but by doing so makes it grindy and makes achieving anything hard.
2) Graphics, on a good system they are truly beautiful, the art style is realistic too and they don’t try to sell soft porn. Even zooming right in my Froglok animates and is equipped with surprising realism.
3) Detailed and involving quests, some quests where you can make a decision, and more quests that mean something to the game world. In comparison WoW develops with the process where they try to make everything doable without reading a thing, but this dumbs things down to fetch and retrieve all too often.
4) Realistic lore and storylines, not always being the hero, depth to the lore that deals with real emotion, whereas WoW especially recently is very cartoony with your character always being the big hero of the hour, everytime…
5) Mentoring, its such a brilliant idea that allows groups to form that would not offer any challenging content in WoW. And that last point is important and a big design philosophy difference, in WoW any content below the level cap is trivialised, in EQ2 its all important to the game.
6) Climbing, tradeskilling with real depth that can be played as a game, guild halls, housing, AA points that encourage you to do unique things rather then grinding to improve your character. Ability to betray to change class (to evil/good version)/faction rather then pay $, Epic sized zones that stretch to the horizons, I’d like to add more in but this is enough I guess.