Things that WOW didn't invent

[AllisterH]

WoW didn't invent mechanically-minded gnomes. Those were prominent in the early Forgotten Realms.

They stole it from dragonlance and they weren't even shy about it.

Seriously, the name of their homein exile is TINKER TOWN.

Real subtle there guys...

 

[rjdafoe]

But WoW added fun. When MMOs weren't actually fun for more than .001% of the population, they weren't actually a threat.

I completely agree.

MMOs are actually the red herring, in any case.

4e has more in common with turn based tactics games (Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, etc) than it does with any MMO.

But "4e has a combat engine that is vaguely reminiscent of a bunch of small audience games none of us have played or heard of!" is a terrible rallying cry. It might actually make some of the iconoclasts here go try those games. On the other hand, "4e is just like WoW!" taps into the right sort of media hysteria.

I agree. I just wanted to point out that WoW is being used in a generic sense.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

WoW invented new things? Since when?

I feel rage when someone looks at a 2e/3e style tiefling and says something to the effect of "They totally stole that design from the drenai in WoW!"

I flip out ninja-style whenever someone says, "Man, [other game] tottally ripped off Zerg!" I berate them on Tyranids, and Borg, and all the other alien-themed stuff that Blizzard copied the idea from.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

I agree. I just wanted to point out that WoW is being used in a generic sense.

Yes. But it is a carefully selected generic for maximum scare power and minimum applicability.

We could have an intelligent discussion of the statement "4e is too similar to Tactics Ogre" with actual points to be made.

"4e is too much like WoW" is a deliberate conversation-ender. It is intended to be impossible to discuss rationally. It's sort of like Godwin's Law for PnP gamers.

 

[OchreJelly]

As for class mirrors, the issue there is that, while theoretically both factions have similar classes, the unique abilities in the classes can make a world of a difference. Or in other words, lol bright wizards warrior priests.

I'm not saying it's a bad or un-fun game, but it's made some astronomically bad design choices that's lead to it hemorrhaging money.

I'm probably tangenting a little here, but I'm not even sure if it's the class mirroring that's as big of a difference between factions as is the whole idea of which faction is "cooler" than the other. IME with WAR, there were far more Chaos players (and better Chas players). Mind you this was a year ago, and I haven't been keeping up with things. WOW experienced a similar problem with alliance always being perceived as the "noob" or "kiddie" side, while Horde always seemed to dominate. For the most part this was for cosmetic reasons, rather than class choice reasons.

 

[OchreJelly]

I flip out ninja-style whenever someone says, "Man, [other game] tottally ripped off Zerg!" I berate them on Tyranids, and Borg, and all the other alien-themed stuff that Blizzard copied the idea from.

Yeah I just don't get it. There are no original ideas. To paraphrase Roger Ebert, "it's not what the story is, but how the story is told."

 

[tyrlaan]

And here I thought the problem was it just couldn't pull the users away from World of Warcraft long enough to get behind it. That was my experience anecdotally. Everyone I know that TRIED Warhammer prefers it to WoW(Except that none of their friends will play). In other words, if WH:O did not pull the whole guild along, they ended up failing to keep the players.

Maybe my experience is unique in that aspect, but I actually prefer WH:O's model for class design than WoW.

Off-topic, but just to give you some feedback on other experiences.

Speaking as someone tried WAR, it just couldn't hold my interest. The things that it did that felt "new" to me were all related to PvP, which isn't my preference. Public quests seemed like a great idea, but not that great when there's no one around to do them with you. I probably have other nits to pick but they're not really worth diving into.

A friend of mine who tried it stuck around a lot longer but ended up quitting after being the victim of far too many serious bugs. After crashing in the Nth instance, he just had enough. I know he had other technical issues with the game, so really he was driven away by problems with the game and, as he mentioned to me, the devs apparent lack of urgency to address said technical issues.

 

[TerraDave]

Squeezing out the last fraction of damage, AC or utility, no matter what the impact to the concept of the character appears to be more and more the "norm" these days.

min-maxing? Nothing new about that.

The internets and crunch bloat (a 20 year old phenomon) have let people push this farther...but, for example, there use to be "smackdown" threads here with god-awful combos that I am pretty sure predated WOW (or at least were being created in its early days).

 

[Rechan]

One thing I think is being overlooked that WoW does well:

Humor and in-jokes.

There are tons of little easter eggs hidden around WoW. For instance, killing giant gorillas that drop empty barrels? (Donkey Kong) Linkin's Boomerang? (Link of Legend of Zelda) Parodies of the X-Files/area 51 (complete with reference to MiB mind eraser) and Star Trek.

 

[The Little Raven]

WARs biggest problem is at it's core, it is a PVP game.

I think its problem is not that it is a PvP oriented game, but rather that it's a Team vs. Team PvP design, rather than the (much better IMHO) three-team design of DAoC. When you have two factions and one gains an advantage, that advantage usually just grows as the losing side hemorrhages players. With a three-way design, when one side gets an advantage, the other two often halt hostilities towards eachother and turn on the big dog until things level out more.