Felon said:
I'm interested in hearing what constitutes "tons more depth".
Well, for starters, in addition to the PvE game, which is still 99 percent of CoX, WoW has a lot more choices for PvP, and set up in a consensual fashion on PvE servers, but it's always more available than it is in CoX. (And unlike CoX, despite the grand tradition of superheroes beating the crap out of each other, you can actually
duel.)
I played WoW in its first year with a rogue and warlock. Mostly tried soloing, since everyone I could group with was in a mad rush to grind their way to max level (back when such a thing wasn't taken for granted like it is today). I remember staying in one area, grinding one mob at a time, praying I never aggroed an add, and then moving to another area once I outleveled it. It was mostly kill X amount creature Y.
That's a very strange way to play WoW, especially given how robust warlocks are.
First off, WoW isn't meant to be "ground out" by killing monsters, it's meant to be played via quest lines. While there are a fair number of Kill X of Y, there are also lots of other sorts of quests, like operating a series of cannons to stop a rampaging sea monster from destroying Theramore, ferrying love notes between lovers in feuding families, disguising yourself and infiltrating various enemy encampments to gather information or flying bombing runs over enemy installations.
CoX has pretty good holidays, but WoW has more of them -- there are some periods of the year where practically every day has something going on -- and many of them are more impressive. The most recently added, Brewfest, features ram races to deliver kegs of beer, races to advertise a local brewery and rewards that include beer goggles that make everyone look like a sexy male gnome. Even older holidays, like Hallow's End, are getting revamped, and now characters have to stop the Headless Horseman from burning down various low level towns during the holidays, while higher level characters can fight him in the graveyard of the Scarlet Monastery.
If you mostly soloed, you missed out on the incredibly well-done single group dungeons, almost all of which feature scripted events and complex boss fights previously only saved for 72-man raiding bosses in EQ1. You can chase a mischievous imp through the ruins of Dire Maul or reenact the Tanis segments of Raiders of the Lost Ark in Ulduman, go back in time and make sure Thrall escapes from his slavers or even ensure that Medivh is able to open the Dark Portal and allow the Burning Legion to invade Azeroth.
Raids are getting smaller and smaller, and in Northrend, all raids will feature 10-man versions. In Outland, 10-man and even many 25-man raids are successfully run as pick-up groups, and allow more and more folks to see some incredibly creative and complex encounters (as well as some silly ones, like playing a game of chess against an echo of Medivh in his tower -- and he cheats).
Even tradeskills are more robust than CoX, especially with new daily quests for several professions, like fishing quests that can take you from the canals of Stormwind to fishing in the toxic sludge of the Hellfire Peninsula. Engineers can build and fly their own gyrocopters while jewelcrafters can turn the gems they mine into figurine of wondrous power-style pets.
I remember fun diversions like swimming under water to open shells and grabbing some eggs from griffins (or manticores or wyverns or something). But I don't recall tons of depth. I think I quit after about the three-month mark with characters in their low forties--about the time I got a steed, the game sort of lost some of its magic because I could just dash from one place to the next.
Faster forms of movement are now integrated into a lot of the content. There are quest areas you can't unlock in Outland until you can fly, like freeing dragons from slavery or becoming the hero of an enlightened enclave of ogres (living in, of course, the community of Ogri'la). As part of an ongoing war with the worshipers of the avatar of an evil raven god, you can fly bombing runs to stop the eggs located all over an avian community from giving birth to mutated raptors.
In contrast, CoX features a whole lot of going into ships docked in the harbor, punching your way through the thugs and freeing the guy at the far end. There are a few other types of missions, but not many more. And endless randomly generated dungeons start to look the same pretty fast. Ironically, that's meant to be a way to generate more content than is available in games like WoW, but in practice, the hand-made WoW dungeons feel far more diverse, despite being, by some measures, fewer in number.
