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What makes this game fundamentally different from WoW?
jakojako
Member Posts: 332
in Guild Wars 2
I've been googling for differences between this game and WoW, and almost every article I see just throws out a bunch of moot points in a fanboy craze. Example being this article:
http://news.mmosite.com/content/q/2012-04-27/guild_wars_2_is_it_just_a_wow_clone_1.shtml
So far I understand:
*You are limited to the amount of skills your character can use
*You can engage in high level pvp with a low level character (the game autoscales you)
...and that's pretty much it. Any help is appreciated, thanks!
Comments
And there goes any inclination I ever had to help you out with some answers.
WoW: Enter quest hub -> ! -> do stuff -> ? -> get reward -> repeat step 1.
GW2: Run around and do things with the people that are there.
Did you read the article I linked? The author rants about how much different GW2 is from WoW, and how you're an idiot if you don't see it, but then names ONE fundamental difference between the games in the entire article.
Hopefully you can understand my frustration after finding articles after articles that are written like that.
or.... there goes any inclinition to believe it was a serious question in the first place.
...And honestly, why would we want to have to play along side anyone who speaks in such extremely wide generalities and then ignorantly gives WoW all the credit for "inventing" those mechanics? Keep those folks away please. It's bad enough we have a ton of Ex-WoW players as it is.
Yes, now that you put it that way, GW2 is just another WoW clone. Especially in terms of combat movement, gear grind, mob tagging, kill steals, and questing. Especially the questing.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Nah, I didn't. What you said yourself put me off answering you or looking any deeper.
The whole thread smells of flamebait to me tbh.
But have fun with it.
Alright, but quest hubs in WoW are placed right where you would be exploring anyway. I understand that maybe GW2 has these NPCs and quests more spread out, but does it still boil down to "go to a zone for your level range, run around and do quests"?
I don't doubt that regardless of whether my assumption is true, the questing system in GW2 flows better and is a definite improvement over WoW's, but is it just an improvement? Or is it a fundamental change in how questing works? and why?
If you are truely looking for an answer OP, here is what makes the game fundamentally different from WoW; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CyqGJHTjes
This is not a game.
Just watch the gameplay videos. Aside dodging, the actual gameplay doesn't seem much different than WoW.
You can swap out different weapons to access different abilities, so that's a little different.
People will come in here claiming the "revolutionary" features like dynamic events and the like but those are little else than branching quests.
There's also no gear grind at end game. Might be a positive or negative depending on what you like.
It really isn't a whole lot different than WoW if you take it for face value.
There's plenty of info on the game on these boards on everywhere else.
Start here
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/view/forums/thread/336987/The-Tao-of-Arenanet.html
and come back after that
Sorry if my OP came off as flamebait, I don't intend for that. The reason I'm asking these questions is because I'm interested in TESO, and people keep arguing over whether TESO is a WoW clone or a GW2 clone.
I'm honestly just wondering what's so different between WoW and GW2 that causes this argument in the first place.
Edit: I also never gave WoW credit for inventing anything... It didn't.
Every single MMO boils down to "go to a zone for your level range, run around and do quests". (With the obvious exceptions of sandbox type MMOs, Lineage 2 comes to mind as an example.) So with this logic, WoW = Aion = GW = GW2 = TERA = SWTOR.
ok for starters did you get what the difference DE's are making to immersion,
or the difference between hearts and quest?
Did you get why removing the trinity makes it different? Or having a personal story makes it different. Lets start with that, then we discuss
I
My point wasn't about exploration. My point was that in WoW nothing happened unless you made it happen and you had no freedom within Blizzard's pre-defined paths.
In GW2 things happen by themselves and players have the freedom to do which content they please at any time in an area rather than being put through a linear path.
ok, taking you at face value, which is probably a mistake, but...
Your in the wrong forum tbh.
Your competition won't be between GW2 and TESO by the time it gets here, it will be with Archeage. You would be better off in that games forum asking why people are not calling AA a WoW clone. GW2 is irrelevant to TESO... you do not have to understand GW2 to understand anything about what that game may be.
I have a feeling that AA supporters will just sneer at you though, when you look at the two games comparative feature lists I mean.
Agreed with the above poster. If you reduce an MMO into its components too much, everything ceases to be distinct. The fallacy is called reductio ad absurdum for a reason
.
In addition to reading the link you were provided, I'll allow one of the devs to speak for himself regarding the difference in quest delivery:
Eric Flannum Quote: "I thought that something I posted in a thread a while back might be relevant to the discussion so I’ll re-post it.
This is going to be a bit of a long post so bear with me.
It is true that we do want to get away from the standard kill X MMO quest. One thing that’s important to realize is that while we desire to get rid of this sort of thing there are a finite number of actions one can undertake in a combat focused game and there are a finite number of ways to express to a player what they should be doing. I think too often we get caught up in semantics when the root of the problem is that the standard kill X quest is bad because it is unexciting and has no context or consequence. For example let’s pretend we have a situation where a group of undead creatures is gathering in a swamp to attack a local fortress.
In a typical kill X quest I would walk up to the commander of the fortress and he’d have an exclamation mark over his head. I’d click on him and he would present me with text describing how evil and foul the undead in the swamp are and how if they are not dealt with they will overrun his fortress. I accept this task and head to the swamp. It is likely that I now have “Kill 10 zombies” as a quest objective. I enter the swamp, see zombies and start killing them. After killing 10 I decide to head back to the fortress and turn in my quest. If I hadn’t done the quest what would have happened? Would the zombies have attacked? Are they still going to attack? I killed 10 of them but there are still more of them out there, doesn’t that matter? This is the experience provided by the typical kill X quest.
In Guild Wars 2, let’s take the same set up and apply it to a dynamic event. As I approach the fortress the commander runs up to me and says out loud for everyone in the area to hear that there are zombies in the local swamp, they are building up to attack his fort and someone had better do something. I head to the swamp and notice that the usual wildlife is gone, having been slain by the zombie horde (you actually get to see this happen as the event starts) when I enter the event radius I have the objective of “Cull the Zombie Horde” followed by a percentage indicating how much of the horde remains and a timer. I start killing zombies as the timer counts down. If I and any other adventurers in the area can cull the horde down to 0% before time expires then the remaining zombies will flee and disaster has been averted. I’ll automatically receive a reward, the fortress remains safe and the original wildlife will return to the swamp. If I fail to cull the horde and the timer reaches zero then the zombies will all shamble out of the swamp and attack the fortress. I have failed the event but now a new event presents itself where I can defend the fortress from the horde. If the fortress is overrun it will remain occupied by zombies until cleared, a valuable travel point will be lost, merchants and other NPC’s will be unavailable. My act of killing the zombies actually protected the fortress with the consequence of possibly losing the fortress when I failed the event.
In each case I was killing zombies. In each case I had a goal up on screen that communicated very similar things. However, the experience that I had during and after each type of content was very different due to context and consequences. Hope that clears things up a bit."
And when you're done all that, watch this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6CyqGJHTjes
I think the biggest fundemental difference is that while WoW and most other MMO's following the same formula actually encourage competition between players by default with mechanichs like mob tagging, shared loot, shared resource nodes etc. GW2 takes a different approach.
GW2 makes people (in PvE) work together and help each other as there is really no way other people can actually harm your experience of the game which is not the case in other MMO's. It really showed to me, and I've heard many others say this too, how cynical, aggressive and hatefull other MMO's have made us towards otehr players. We are playing an MMO but we dont want to see other people as they will propably steal our mobs or something else unpleasant.
And it worked great! I've personally never been in such fun and helpfull enviroment in MMO game! It did take me about 20 minutes to realize this, but when I did it changed the whole way I played the game and reacted to people around me. It made me realize the people in MMOs actually ain't as*hats but game mechanics tend to bring that out in people.
This is the biggest fundemental change in GW2 is removing the comptetition betwen players and focusing them to compete against the world together. This is not for everyone so thats why they have PVP to get more competition between players. Hope this answered your question as I understood you werent asking for a list of mechanical differences
My Guild Wars 2 blog. Read it. The bestestest and most TRUTHEST BLOG EVER!!
Good Morning,
I want to answer this a bit. On your skills, they are limited only in the sense that when you switch out weapons you get new skills. If your using a 1h weapon you usually will have an off hand as well. so you will have 3 1h skills and 2 off hand ones or something to that effect. I want to say they total 5. So each weapon has different skills associted with it and it determines how your going to play. Everyone can be melee as well as ranged to varying degrees of effectiveness. While I played the beta the classes I played all seemed to shine in certain situations depending on what weapon type they had equipped for a given situation.
Also you get more skills as well, keep in mind when you find skill points you can buy skills so the other part of your bar gets other skills as well so you have limited amount of weapon skills but you can switch out weapons at lvl 7 as well as other skills that you unlock with skill points.
I will probably be off on some of the things I say but here goes.
-There are no raids at end game.
-The quest structure has been redone...although there are quests they seem to be hidden quite well into the fabric of the game. Its more about exploration and you come across things that can be done.
-All content is playable regardless of level. Example..say your level 80 and your friend just started playing and you want to group with them...well when you come down to the starter zones your level 80 delevels to say level 5 or whatever and makes the content around you a challenge in comparison. This way you never really out grow content.
-Node: there is a discussion on this site about this and griefing as well, pretty good reading if you have the time. Basically you know how in wow if your say killing a mob to get to a node and someone ups and comes behind you and steals it. Well In GW2 if your fighting and someone comes and hits the node you can as well and you both will get credit.
-No more kill stealing as well.
-Pvp and PVE are completely separate
-Oh also you just generally have people helping people out as there really is no reason not to. No one is competing and that is something that should really be looked at so I'll say it again...You are not competing with anyone. There is no end game so why race to cap...no kill stealing..griefing...node taking...the way I see GW2 is that its a big game of exploration. Your all on an island and it behooves you to help the other person out.
I'm sure I missed a lot or didn't clarify a lot of info and I apologize. However there are some good articles about the differences so I would say check them out and give the game a try.
Oh...Community: let me expand on this using an example. Tera and GW2.
Tera: beta weekend...not sure how many times I died from griefers on a pvp server just up and killing me for no reason. 10+ levels higher than me. The level of profanity, racist and anti-gay wording flying around just to test out the filter and of course implimenting clever ways of getting around it, constant curse words and general negativity.
GW2: The whole beta did I not once see any of the above...trust me I checked and I waited to see if the community would be the same. So I want to say its more mature and by that I mean people who just generally are good natured and speak in chat as if they were talking to you in the street..common courtesy.
V/R
To further summarize:
GW2 is fundamentally different from WoW in the way it delivers content, in how it uses levels as a gating/progression mechanism, in how it uses combat, in how it deals with defeat, in how it enables social interaction as well as interaction with the environment (environmental weapons etc.), in how it approaches endgame, in how it approaches character customization, in how it approaches guild management and membership, in how it approaches server membership, and other features.
This helps a lot, thanks. I found the Mass PvP section especially interesting. Do you know if there's pvp in the game world itself? And if so, does your faction's success in pvp have any consequences on the players in your faction?
Also, the flexible classes seemed more similar to what TESO is going for that WoW, so that's helpful.
So NPCs carry out quests and actions regardless of whether the player joins in or not, right? Then what do the NPCs do when they finish their quests? Do they repeat it? Do they move onto something else?
From watching the video that someone posted earlier in the thread, it seems like the NPCs sort of loop sequences of actions. So is the world changing permanantly as the player progresses through it, or is it changing momentarily and then resetting?
I'm also not really getting how GW2 has more freedom than WoW. It seems that you have a bunch of options as to which quests you want to do in GW2, but you have this in WoW as well. I think i'm missing something.
I'm not worried about GW2 competing with TESO or anything, it's just that people are arguing over whether what we have seen from TESO so far more closely emulates GW2 or WoW. I'm just trying to figure out what the differences between the games are (admittedly I don't know much about GW2).
Alright then try using "EQ" clone instead b/c that's where it all started.
If you want to call GW2 a clone of anything, get it straight and call it a DAOC clone or something more imaginitive, even if the only reason you're here is for the sake of argument.
If you aren't actually interested in learning anything in-depth about this game that's fine too but next time try being open about that instead of trying to be sneaky. Even over the internets, some people can sense bad acting.
PS: That Elder Scrolls thing had an honest to god chance of being Awesome if it had organically grown out of Oblivion's designs. But It didn't and it's just been stealing every popular feature from every other MMO it can. Sorry to hear you're having trouble defending it, but have you considered yet that maybe there's a reason for that?
MMORPG's are based on archetype..
GW2 is an Open WOrld, thus even if the mechanics are the same as another game, the gameplay will be much different, etc..
"No they are not charity. That is where the whales come in. (I play for free. Whales pays.) Devs get a business. That is how it works."
-Nariusseldon
I (and many others) use the term WoW-clone because it's the most successful MMO out today, and it's apparant that MMO developers today are taking ideas from WoW because of its success. They aren't looking at EQ for inspiration.
I also never called GW2 a clone of anything, I don't know nearly enought about it to make those assertions.
I'm also not trying to defend TESO (as of right now I'm convinced it'll flop), I'm just trying to figure out which game it most resembles. It is interesting that you said 'DAOC clone' because TESO seems to draw a bit of inspiration from DAOC (at least with the 3 factions)
Seems like they removed everything from the game that made elder scrolls games so special
I dont know what TESO will be, but it looks to me that they follow the WoW road.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
You're not alone then.... But be sure to come back and let us know your findings if it ends up stealing too much from GW2 like I expect it to