Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Yeah, the atmosphere, leveraging the lore of three games and two expansions (and uncompleted game that got turned into a novel) before WoW, is really one of the selling points. My wife didn't know why I got sort of choked up the first time we entered the Arathi Highlands and saw the last soldiers of Stromgarde still patroling the roads, in an effort to bring back their country from the apocalyptic events of War3.
The whole game world reeks of such things, and apparently it gets kicked up a notch in the expansion (although that necessarily is mostly a sequel to Beyond the Dark Portal).
In contrast, there were numerous instances in EQ1 where something was clearly intended, it was never implemented (or implemented in a half-assed way by someone not around to know what the original plans were) or, better yet, put in half-heartedly and then jerked away later. See: half the lore dealing with Ak'Anon and the Steamfont Mountains.
In addition, it looks like WoW (and to a lesser extent, EQ2) won't be repeating the mistake of EQ1 in that each expansion gave a new complete set of capital cities that pulled people away from the rest of the world (a process that stopped after five or six expansions in EQ1, but that's still five or six too long). In WoW, even in the expansion, there will be a lot of reasons for players to come back to the old world capital cities on a regular basis, despite the shiny new locations in Outland. Nothing sucked more in EQ1 than being an expansion or more behind the cutting edge and finding everywhere else a barren ghost town.
The whole game world reeks of such things, and apparently it gets kicked up a notch in the expansion (although that necessarily is mostly a sequel to Beyond the Dark Portal).
In contrast, there were numerous instances in EQ1 where something was clearly intended, it was never implemented (or implemented in a half-assed way by someone not around to know what the original plans were) or, better yet, put in half-heartedly and then jerked away later. See: half the lore dealing with Ak'Anon and the Steamfont Mountains.
In addition, it looks like WoW (and to a lesser extent, EQ2) won't be repeating the mistake of EQ1 in that each expansion gave a new complete set of capital cities that pulled people away from the rest of the world (a process that stopped after five or six expansions in EQ1, but that's still five or six too long). In WoW, even in the expansion, there will be a lot of reasons for players to come back to the old world capital cities on a regular basis, despite the shiny new locations in Outland. Nothing sucked more in EQ1 than being an expansion or more behind the cutting edge and finding everywhere else a barren ghost town.
