I feel like when I go on these forums and read what people post about Classic WoW i’m doing a double take because they paint this picture of WoW as this rugged hard MMO that was punishing but rewarding.
Then I’m like do ya’ll actually remember other MMOs from the time? Because I remember EQ and compared to WoW it was like walking through the most violent terrain known to man. I didn’t play DAoC but I think they had similar content. And UO was probably the longest slogfest of see-saw grinding skills ever.
I’m reading these comments like WoW wasn’t some simple game. No bro–it was. There was no real death penalty. Your “Spells and Skills” literally came from 1 vendor you did not have to have a separate tradeskill to get certain spells. Mounts? EQ was lucky when they got the Nexus in SoL and that was only a 4 zone port! Instances did not exist. Everything was open world. There was no such thing as quest grinding, and there were only really 4 classes that could solo, maybe 5/6 if you include SoL Beastmaster.
WoW specifically was designed around the lowest common denominator. It was designed so a potato could run it. They wanted as many possible people playing at all times and in order to do that you needed to make the game crazy simple stupid. In EQ we were being told of players hitting 50 and then eventually 60 when that dropped in a month. A lot of players were like that’s unheard of because EQ literally had levels known as the “Hell levels”
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SWG was my first… and the fights That would break out were pretty crazy lol also, was fun to sneak into player houses and take stuff
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I can only think of Star Wars Galaxies and Everest from before wow.
Unless you count nonsense like Puzzle Pirates or Runescape.
Good old UO here - loved that game. Sure wasn’t refined as WoW is though.
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I played EQ and a little EQ2, which was in beta at the same time as WoW. I also played City of Heroes and Vanguard: Sage of heroes. Which might have been after WoW launched?
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Yes. Asheron’s Call 2.
Dropped it like a sack of crap when wow launched.
Never played EQ. It released my senior year of HS, I had no job and mom refused to pay a subscription fee for a game.
There were times early in DAOC where I didn’t have enough gold to use the npc horses to get from one place to another so I had to run. Those maps were huge and you couldn’t just auto run and go afk, to many mobs that you would agro. Nothing in wow is that bad.
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Vanguard was after wow. Made by EQ devs.
I played it for a while, as well as EQ2, Rift. Aion. FFXIV.
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I remember Vanguard. I followed Brad over there. I was a Shadow Knight in his game started in the Sand city killing the rat things. I remember the diplomacy system and his crafting system. I think that was the first game Brad allowed flying.
Yes!
I still play. Best MMO to date.
The PvP was the best around. Interrupting spells with lower level fast casts (magic arrow), hiding, stealth, poisoning, etc.
When you die, you lost everything. People who PvP on WoW wouldn’t last a week on UO.
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How about EvE, where it can take as long as 6 months to learn a single skill. And while you’re learning that skill, you literally cannot progress your character further in any way, shape, or form
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Wow was the first i played but later i tried others…loved playing bothan in sw galaxies, was a bounty hunter for the empire. Was sad when galaxies got shut down. Ive tried just about every free to play mmo out there and not a single one could hold my attention like wow could. Most of them are dead mmos now.
We see hundreds of posts here every day people saying wow is bad but truth is its still the best mmo out there to play…besides i guess that final fantasy one that i havent played.
I played Ragnarok Online, Lineage 2, and Priston Tale before WoW. After taking a long break from WoW I tried GW2, Aion, and SWTOR. Those old mmos you moved around by clicking and used the F1-F12 keys for abilities.
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Yes. I played UO which had a huge learning curve and the community, albeit a small one, was very cliquish and from my experience not welcoming to new players. They weren’t rude just no one would talk to you, answer questions, etc. Keep in mind, there weren’t many websites to get help like we have now back then.
I tried EQ but kept getting errors when trying to connect to their server for the first time so ended up not getting to try it.
SWG then was my first real one where I played a lot. It was a pure sandbox game so to me that is all there was. The community hands down was the best I have ever seen in any online game to date. Be it an mmo, fps, moba, etc. SWG was an awesome community. The game was a blast too even though it was very glitchy and some of the most OP classes like Combat Medic/Pistoleer at one point you basically died instantly from the poison and 1 knee shot. Or Creature handler able to control 2 rankors out which demolished people or the Imps able to use AT-STs and roll over anyone.
Then WoW came out and tried it at launch and been playing ever since.
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I played Star Wars: Galaxies and still have some of my more fonder memories of online from there.
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I started with earth and beyond. That was a great game, after that tried SWG.
Alot of the things you mention about EQ were gone or obsolete by the time Wow came out. Plane of Knowledge pretty much made travel anywhere trivial and hell levels were long gone at that point. Not sure when it was changed but you no longer lose your items on death but you do still lose XP. You can go to the guild hall which is right off plane of knowledge and pay a NPC to summon your corpse for you and then get it rezzed. There are also plenty of ways pretty much anyone can rez themselves between veteran awards and other items in-game.
Its still alot more punishing than WOW though that much is for sure. Thing is with systems like losing currency on death in The Maw Blizzard is goign against the very design that made wow popular in the first place.
They should know there are not alot of people who want to play games like EQ anymore.
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I started WoW pretty late but definitely not new to the MMO space.
My favorite MMO still to this date was Star wars Galaxies. There was just something about that game that got things right.
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I have Played UO, Never Winter Nights (AoL version) SWG, SWToR, and clearly WoW. I am sure there are a few others I tried but those are the ones I actually played for any real amount of time.