Great article, I have very fond memories of both the Tarren Mill and X-Roads open world pvp. It is a shame that no game has been able to recapture that since.
Rob Pardo said that diversity is not what Blizzard prioritize today. They lost focus on that several years ago. Just look how todays talent tree looks like compared to 10 years ago. It's a huge disappointment. I think Blizzard has become an average company. However I have also fond memories how it was in early days.
Originally posted by Elmberry Rob Pardo said that diversity is not what Blizzard prioritize today. They lost focus on that several years ago. Just look how todays talent tree looks like compared to 10 years ago. It's a huge disappointment. I think Blizzard has become an average company. However I have also fond memories how it was in early days.
I agree.
I think the talent tree system was broken from the beginning. It never really offered the play style it was supposed to. Instead it simply became another routine step. Since Blizzard never properly balanced the skills in the tree, it easily became a system that was tested for optimal performance and players would be forced to hit the forums to get that patch's cookie cutter build. Combined with the size of the tree increasing with each expansion, I think Blizz to the lazy way out.
I still actively participate in WPvP. The guild I'm in does an excellent job of keeping Wow relevant through rp and wpvp, we do random self made up missions often stealing themes from World News headlines, last night we played some Jihady music and stormed into battle out in the open world against rival guilds, we quite often will taunt the enemy by killing the kings in the enemy factions main city. Wpvp has it's highs and lows, don't expect it to be as action packed as instanced, but expect a pro social atmosphere and victories to be sweet and loss to be silencing, wpvp can be fun, it's up to the players more so than the development teams though. Blizzard has tried to stop us time in and time out, we evolve and still find a way to make it a great experience.
Man do i remember those first few WOW years and how sleep and food were barely a necessity.
I believe the real issue now is that ever since those early WOW days everything is set to the WOW standard, I can't count how many times I am in a new MMO and someone starts comparing it to WOW.
The real issue is we really didn't know what to expect in the early WOW years so everything was fresh and new and exciting, now everything is just the reproduction of something that came out before it with a few new ways to do things differently than the last MMO failure.
We just need something new and fresh so we can get back to that "Its new" feeling and fall in love with something all over again.
To me the best thing about those early WoW times was the fact, that the majority of all players had no clue about MMOs.
Everybody was just playing the game and having fun. All zones were full and everybody helped each other. And there was a lot of common RP.
There were no guides, no AddOns, mobs were harder to kill (all ogers were elite!), quests were tougher (no hints on the map), community was far better. Just getting to a certain place could be an adventure (no teleporting, less gryphons, mounts available at lvl 40 and much more expensive).
Everybody was experimenting with the skill trees and most importantly: Nobody cared about items! Although items were important due to the design of the game, the players did not bother too much.
Today it is so different:
-A lot of teleporting.
-AddOns that tell me exactly what to do in every situation.
-There is no time to enjoy the game, all you have to think about all the time is items. How to get better items where, how and when - for PvE and PvP. There is always this huge pressure to keep up with everybody else item-wise. Which is completely absurd, because - think about it - there is no real difference if you have a sword with +1 strenght or +1000 the game is still the same.
-As soon as I join a group, I get whispers how I should play my character differently: Where I should put my skill-points, which AddOns I have to install, and of course that I should get better gear ASAP.
Just one example to end my comment:
I prefer a form of PvP, where players fight each other around TM, just to have fun, over a "honor-system" where it is very effective to just stand passively around in a BG and farm honor-points for stupid pvp-gear.
Yeah, theres a lot of truth here. The modernization of the MMO (all these hints, teleports everywhere, fast travel, "gear gear gear and nothing but the gear" mindset , etc) has really killed the magic of MMO's today. It's no longer about just playing the game and enjoying it. I mean I guess you could do that, but no one wants to group with you because your gear is shit, or your skill build is not super-duper efficient, never mind the fact you enjoy what you have (not talking about WoW specifically, just MMO games in general)
The days of just grouping up to help out are gone. The magic's gone. Everyone is a critic now and tells you how to play your class and if you don't play it the way they tell you, your inefficient and a liability and are kicked. It's just dumb now. It's all about "keeping up" and making sure your decked to the helm so you don't die to the other thousands of players that are all decked to the helm as well. It's just the way it is now, people jump from game to game because there looking for that magic, that adventure, but its seriously gone. The best we can do nowadays to make the MMO were playing in fun is to just better ourselves as a community, help out the noobs, be patient with people that suck, stop all the rage-kicking because someone doesn't have a fully min-max character for a raid, and just sit back and enjoy the company of playing with fellow players. And if you bomb a raid or a end game dungeon, relax.. not the end of the world. So many people nowadays just rage because the medic forgot to drop that 1 heal or w/e. BFD, its a game. People need to seriously relax and just play and have fun.
I never thought I'd see the day when WoW players were thinking back to when the game was "harder".
Because for all of us MMO veterans that tried WoW, it was the most casual MMO on the market when it launched. All the arcade things that you're talking about were present and popularized by vanilla WoW. The casual gamer is WoW's main audience. It just wasn't as obvious in the first few months because so many new people were having their magical "first MMO" moments. AND because the game DID get easier as time went on. But if you valued socializing and lack of hand holding, you wouldn't have been playing WoW to begin with, right? It was always the most casual game, and it's just shifted with the times to maintain that title.
This is a bit tangential, but it fits. I think WoW was the last game I can remember where people didn't just throw up their hands and quit because there were bugs or broken features (i.e. the log in server disasters at the beginning and the 12 problem child servers that seemed to crash every 30 minutes). People complained, but they seemed to wait for the fix and Blizzard was pretty good about responding to the biggest problems first and at least getting some kind of band aid on them until they could finally fix it.
If a game launched today with the log in server issues/log in queues (by the way that is WoW's greatest contribution to mankind: a whole generation of gamers learned to spell "queue") that WoW had the first month, people would be leaving in droves and shouting the demise of the game from the roof tops. Don't get me wrong. I don't believe in this day and age there is an excuse for a company to have a launch as bad as WoW's was, but back then Blizzard got an opportunity to make good. That just wouldn't happen today.
Remember when battlegrounds launched? People would queue up and then go to work and stay logged in all day so they could get one battlefield done. No one could get into the battlefields as a result. Again there was a lot of grumbling, but Blizzard was given a chance by the players to make good and they did. They clustered up the servers for PvP purposes and soon all the players were busy as little beavers grinding away honor to get their "Welfare Epics".
Something has changed since 2004. People don't seem to want to give a game a chance either to be what it is or to improve. How many times have we heard that Age of Conan is 100% better than it was at launch or that The Secret World is really worth a go now? Yet those games have been tried and written off as bug-riddled, boring clap trap.
The reason we all had good times at Tauren Mill wasn't because the of any particular game design beyond the fact that the Horde and the Alliance each had a base in Hillsbrad so it was a convenient place to fight one another. We stuck out the log in issues and the queues and when we got in, we didn't wait for the game to make our fun. Instead we went out and made our fun. Witness the hilarious gnome zerg of Ironforge someone detailed above. That's creative and hilarious and it had NOTHING to do with anything content set up by the developers.
The lesson is if you want to have fun, you can have fun even in the most buggy piece of junk game. The fun isn't the content. The fun is in how you play the game and the people you hang out with. And give the developers a chance like we did back then. Believe me when things go wrong they devs aren't sitting around lighting cigars with $100 bills and laughing "Haha we sure fooled those idiots, didn't we?" Instead they're up all night pouring over code going "OHCRAP, OHCRAP, OHCRAP, OHCRAP!!!" just like you do at work when things aren't going right. Give them a chance and they'll work it out and the fun can continue unabated.
/rant off
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
I remember those days, my friend Gabby who hated MMOs found that WoW was simple and easy enough, like Runescape, to actually play.
She begged me to play and gave me a buddy key. I lasted 4 hours before stepping away and saying "This is just a really dumbed down version of EverQuest... and EQ had so many design flaws that still exist in this game..."
And I never returned.
How was the original Wow a dumbed down version of EQ? It basically fixed most of the flaws that were introduced with EQ. Personally I thought that EQ was the worst thing to ever happen to MMO's. At least Wow righted the genre for a time.
Something has changed since 2004. People don't seem to want to give a game a chance either to be what it is or to improve. How many times have we heard that Age of Conan is 100% better than it was at launch or that The Secret World is really worth a go now? Yet those games have been tried and written off as bug-riddled, boring clap trap.
People don't go back to those games for very different reasons.
Age of Conan is a boring WoW clone, and many don't want to give money to Funcom after they were lied to so blatantly. It's still missing features that were promised on the back of the AoC box.
And TSW isn't really an MMO. It was supposed to be a COOP singleplayer game but Funcom wanted monthly fees on it, so bam, half assed MMO features. I don't play an MMO to go through a scripted instanced storyline, and that's really the only good part of TSW.
This was a nice article Bill, I also have fond memories of these same battle in TM and Hillsbrad. It was open world pvp just for the sake of fun and that's what a lot of games just can't seem to capture any more.
On a side note this is an article about WoW in the early days and the fond memories those of us that were there share about those times. Therefore I find it kind of confusing why one particular individual has felt the need from their fist post to point out how WoW is dumbed down and casual and that he obviously does not care for it when this is not even an article or thread that should be used for that type of discussion.
Something has changed since 2004. People don't seem to want to give a game a chance either to be what it is or to improve. How many times have we heard that Age of Conan is 100% better than it was at launch or that The Secret World is really worth a go now? Yet those games have been tried and written off as bug-riddled, boring clap trap.
People don't go back to those games for very different reasons.
Age of Conan is a boring WoW clone, and many don't want to give money to Funcom after they were lied to so blatantly. It's still missing features that were promised on the back of the AoC box.
And TSW isn't really an MMO. It was supposed to be a COOP singleplayer game but Funcom wanted monthly fees on it, so bam, half assed MMO features. I don't play an MMO to go through a scripted instanced storyline, and that's really the only good part of TSW.
TSW is a great game, with that said I agree its not really a MMO, but the lack of genres of online games thats what they chose to call it, it might be more aking a MORPG, or Multi-Coop RPG, still a epic game.
1. I chose WoW over EQ2 for two reasons: 1. Because I did not want to buy a new PC 2. Because WoW was presented as a more casual game. MMOs had already a very bad reputation as highly addictive and time consuming. That WoW becomes exactly like this as soon as one reaches endgame was a huge disappointment for me.
2. Less time consuming does not mean easier. When will MMO-players start do understand the difference?
3. You missed my point! I said the most important factor was the mindset of the players. There were a lot of casual players with no MMO or even video game experience at all. And to me this was the best thing ever in WoW. Because they just played WoW like any other normal game. You know? Just having fun with others.
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.
1. I chose WoW over EQ2 for two reasons: 1. Because I did not want to buy a new PC 2. Because WoW was presented as a more casual game. MMOs had already a very bad reputation as highly addictive and time consuming. That WoW becomes exactly like this as soon as one reaches endgame was a huge disappointment for me.
2. Less time consuming does not mean easier. When will MMO-players start do understand the difference?
3. You missed my point! I said the most important factor was the mindset of the players. There were a lot of casual players with no MMO or even video game experience at all. And to me this was the best thing ever in WoW. Because they just played WoW like any other normal game. You know? Just having fun with others.
I started with EQ2 and then moved to Wow. It took SOE almost a year to get EQ2 playable, it was that buggy at release. I personally do not see any difference in difficulty between the two either. You have to remember that Wow was much more challenging at release than it is now.
I thought the pvp at Taren Mill was rather lame. Grave yards were too close and people getting right back into the fray was rather absurd. I really have not seen very much good pvp since UO.
I never played Vanilla WoW. I remember when that game came out it was all over the place but i never thought i would ever pay monthly to play a video game. In my country there was no such thing as subscription services for entertainment at the time. US WoW servers are not supported in my country so when i came to the US i stayed on a private server because my friend who got me into the game couldnt play from my country.
My first PvP experience was during TBC at Grom Gol outpost which was alwasy invaded by Alliance and the horde always was showing up to defend it.
I eventually got into the Official WoW with the release of Cataclysm, and i feel sorry that my friend cant play the official servers as he loves the game a lot.
I remember in 2011 i went back home on a summer vacation and when i tried to log in to my official account i got a temporary account block because the IP wasnt supported in the US servers.... It was very lame, Latin American servers shouls cover the Caribean islands too since there are no latency issues from there and its part of the American continent.
This was awesome. I believe that the reason we enjoyed the game back then, is the same reason Guild Wars 2 is successful: you don't have to rush anywhere. That same lack of end-game content in GW2 was what made Vanilla WoW great: you just played for fun. Even with primitive mechanics (compared to today's standards), helping people out was the norm. Also, open-world PvP was exciting, because everybody was 'new' and nobody had figured out the latest OP build.
I remember hating walking everywhere, or having to spend an hour to get to the dungeon we wanted to do, before there were even Summoning Stones. No dungeon maps, either. Blackrock took about 6 hours to complete, if you knew what you were doing.
But, those days are gone, and we must cherish the memories alone. Today, players expect certain design in the games, and those designs, by nature, kill what made WoW the great experience it was.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self. - Ernest Hemingway
The reason TM/SS wars were fun, was because it was spontaneous. Some alliance guy would get ganked by a lvl 60 horde, so he would call his guildies for backup, then some Horde players would come to the lvl 60's aid, and then it snowballed into a mass warzone with literally hundreds of players, also disrupting questing and leveling, so the questers would jump in too. That's what really made it special.
When Blizzard came out with instanced BGs though, it totally destroyed TM/SS. Open-world pvp had so much potential, but Blizzard's servers couldn't handle the sheer numbers. They slowly killed it off by adding guards that 1-shot you to death, and implemented artificial world pvp in Silithus.
I find it funny how so many new players have re-populated WoW and each one says how "x" expansion pack killed WoW when they don't even realize how great it was in the beginning, shortly ruined by the addition of battlegrounds.
Thanks for the flashback, they were good days indeed that only the first players will remember. It was truely a nice open world that connected brilliantly. Unfortunately the true greatness of WoW didn't last long and the influx of content overload killed the original simple vision.
WoW was truly an amazing game. Everything happening in the game scaled from good to nearly perfect.
I understand that an expansion would eventually hit the game, but i never expected it to change the game from an epic experience to a kids game.
WoWs Cataclysm was for me, and around 60% of the players in my guild, the start of a gaming nightmare that still remains in the present day: the search for a game that can match Vanilla WoW.
Comments
I agree.
I think the talent tree system was broken from the beginning. It never really offered the play style it was supposed to. Instead it simply became another routine step. Since Blizzard never properly balanced the skills in the tree, it easily became a system that was tested for optimal performance and players would be forced to hit the forums to get that patch's cookie cutter build. Combined with the size of the tree increasing with each expansion, I think Blizz to the lazy way out.
Man do i remember those first few WOW years and how sleep and food were barely a necessity.
I believe the real issue now is that ever since those early WOW days everything is set to the WOW standard, I can't count how many times I am in a new MMO and someone starts comparing it to WOW.
The real issue is we really didn't know what to expect in the early WOW years so everything was fresh and new and exciting, now everything is just the reproduction of something that came out before it with a few new ways to do things differently than the last MMO failure.
We just need something new and fresh so we can get back to that "Its new" feeling and fall in love with something all over again.
I never thought I'd see the day when WoW players were thinking back to when the game was "harder".
Because for all of us MMO veterans that tried WoW, it was the most casual MMO on the market when it launched. All the arcade things that you're talking about were present and popularized by vanilla WoW. The casual gamer is WoW's main audience. It just wasn't as obvious in the first few months because so many new people were having their magical "first MMO" moments. AND because the game DID get easier as time went on. But if you valued socializing and lack of hand holding, you wouldn't have been playing WoW to begin with, right? It was always the most casual game, and it's just shifted with the times to maintain that title.
This is a bit tangential, but it fits. I think WoW was the last game I can remember where people didn't just throw up their hands and quit because there were bugs or broken features (i.e. the log in server disasters at the beginning and the 12 problem child servers that seemed to crash every 30 minutes). People complained, but they seemed to wait for the fix and Blizzard was pretty good about responding to the biggest problems first and at least getting some kind of band aid on them until they could finally fix it.
If a game launched today with the log in server issues/log in queues (by the way that is WoW's greatest contribution to mankind: a whole generation of gamers learned to spell "queue") that WoW had the first month, people would be leaving in droves and shouting the demise of the game from the roof tops. Don't get me wrong. I don't believe in this day and age there is an excuse for a company to have a launch as bad as WoW's was, but back then Blizzard got an opportunity to make good. That just wouldn't happen today.
Remember when battlegrounds launched? People would queue up and then go to work and stay logged in all day so they could get one battlefield done. No one could get into the battlefields as a result. Again there was a lot of grumbling, but Blizzard was given a chance by the players to make good and they did. They clustered up the servers for PvP purposes and soon all the players were busy as little beavers grinding away honor to get their "Welfare Epics".
Something has changed since 2004. People don't seem to want to give a game a chance either to be what it is or to improve. How many times have we heard that Age of Conan is 100% better than it was at launch or that The Secret World is really worth a go now? Yet those games have been tried and written off as bug-riddled, boring clap trap.
The reason we all had good times at Tauren Mill wasn't because the of any particular game design beyond the fact that the Horde and the Alliance each had a base in Hillsbrad so it was a convenient place to fight one another. We stuck out the log in issues and the queues and when we got in, we didn't wait for the game to make our fun. Instead we went out and made our fun. Witness the hilarious gnome zerg of Ironforge someone detailed above. That's creative and hilarious and it had NOTHING to do with anything content set up by the developers.
The lesson is if you want to have fun, you can have fun even in the most buggy piece of junk game. The fun isn't the content. The fun is in how you play the game and the people you hang out with. And give the developers a chance like we did back then. Believe me when things go wrong they devs aren't sitting around lighting cigars with $100 bills and laughing "Haha we sure fooled those idiots, didn't we?" Instead they're up all night pouring over code going "OHCRAP, OHCRAP, OHCRAP, OHCRAP!!!" just like you do at work when things aren't going right. Give them a chance and they'll work it out and the fun can continue unabated.
/rant off
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
How was the original Wow a dumbed down version of EQ? It basically fixed most of the flaws that were introduced with EQ. Personally I thought that EQ was the worst thing to ever happen to MMO's. At least Wow righted the genre for a time.
People don't go back to those games for very different reasons.
Age of Conan is a boring WoW clone, and many don't want to give money to Funcom after they were lied to so blatantly. It's still missing features that were promised on the back of the AoC box.
And TSW isn't really an MMO. It was supposed to be a COOP singleplayer game but Funcom wanted monthly fees on it, so bam, half assed MMO features. I don't play an MMO to go through a scripted instanced storyline, and that's really the only good part of TSW.
This was a nice article Bill, I also have fond memories of these same battle in TM and Hillsbrad. It was open world pvp just for the sake of fun and that's what a lot of games just can't seem to capture any more.
On a side note this is an article about WoW in the early days and the fond memories those of us that were there share about those times. Therefore I find it kind of confusing why one particular individual has felt the need from their fist post to point out how WoW is dumbed down and casual and that he obviously does not care for it when this is not even an article or thread that should be used for that type of discussion.
No signature, I don't have a pen
TSW is a great game, with that said I agree its not really a MMO, but the lack of genres of online games thats what they chose to call it, it might be more aking a MORPG, or Multi-Coop RPG, still a epic game.
Herald of innovation, Vanquisher of the old! - Awake a few hours almost everyday!
@DavisFlight
1. I chose WoW over EQ2 for two reasons: 1. Because I did not want to buy a new PC 2. Because WoW was presented as a more casual game. MMOs had already a very bad reputation as highly addictive and time consuming. That WoW becomes exactly like this as soon as one reaches endgame was a huge disappointment for me.
2. Less time consuming does not mean easier. When will MMO-players start do understand the difference?
3. You missed my point! I said the most important factor was the mindset of the players. There were a lot of casual players with no MMO or even video game experience at all. And to me this was the best thing ever in WoW. Because they just played WoW like any other normal game. You know? Just having fun with others.
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.
I started with EQ2 and then moved to Wow. It took SOE almost a year to get EQ2 playable, it was that buggy at release. I personally do not see any difference in difficulty between the two either. You have to remember that Wow was much more challenging at release than it is now.
I thought the pvp at Taren Mill was rather lame. Grave yards were too close and people getting right back into the fray was rather absurd. I really have not seen very much good pvp since UO.
Good read, Bill.
I never played Vanilla WoW. I remember when that game came out it was all over the place but i never thought i would ever pay monthly to play a video game. In my country there was no such thing as subscription services for entertainment at the time. US WoW servers are not supported in my country so when i came to the US i stayed on a private server because my friend who got me into the game couldnt play from my country.
My first PvP experience was during TBC at Grom Gol outpost which was alwasy invaded by Alliance and the horde always was showing up to defend it.
I eventually got into the Official WoW with the release of Cataclysm, and i feel sorry that my friend cant play the official servers as he loves the game a lot.
I remember in 2011 i went back home on a summer vacation and when i tried to log in to my official account i got a temporary account block because the IP wasnt supported in the US servers.... It was very lame, Latin American servers shouls cover the Caribean islands too since there are no latency issues from there and its part of the American continent.
This was awesome. I believe that the reason we enjoyed the game back then, is the same reason Guild Wars 2 is successful: you don't have to rush anywhere. That same lack of end-game content in GW2 was what made Vanilla WoW great: you just played for fun. Even with primitive mechanics (compared to today's standards), helping people out was the norm. Also, open-world PvP was exciting, because everybody was 'new' and nobody had figured out the latest OP build.
I remember hating walking everywhere, or having to spend an hour to get to the dungeon we wanted to do, before there were even Summoning Stones. No dungeon maps, either. Blackrock took about 6 hours to complete, if you knew what you were doing.
But, those days are gone, and we must cherish the memories alone. Today, players expect certain design in the games, and those designs, by nature, kill what made WoW the great experience it was.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self. - Ernest Hemingway
The reason TM/SS wars were fun, was because it was spontaneous. Some alliance guy would get ganked by a lvl 60 horde, so he would call his guildies for backup, then some Horde players would come to the lvl 60's aid, and then it snowballed into a mass warzone with literally hundreds of players, also disrupting questing and leveling, so the questers would jump in too. That's what really made it special.
When Blizzard came out with instanced BGs though, it totally destroyed TM/SS. Open-world pvp had so much potential, but Blizzard's servers couldn't handle the sheer numbers. They slowly killed it off by adding guards that 1-shot you to death, and implemented artificial world pvp in Silithus.
Great article!
I find it funny how so many new players have re-populated WoW and each one says how "x" expansion pack killed WoW when they don't even realize how great it was in the beginning, shortly ruined by the addition of battlegrounds.
Thanks for the flashback, they were good days indeed that only the first players will remember. It was truely a nice open world that connected brilliantly. Unfortunately the true greatness of WoW didn't last long and the influx of content overload killed the original simple vision.
WoW was truly an amazing game. Everything happening in the game scaled from good to nearly perfect.
I understand that an expansion would eventually hit the game, but i never expected it to change the game from an epic experience to a kids game.
WoWs Cataclysm was for me, and around 60% of the players in my guild, the start of a gaming nightmare that still remains in the present day: the search for a game that can match Vanilla WoW.
I am unable to find such a game.
or the sign of a 10th year anniversary
for EQ 10th anniversary - there were plenty of lookback articles
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/story.html?story=17392
EQ2 fan sites