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<blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5977089" data-attributes="member: 54877">I'm not a huge MMO player either, but I've played enough of them, and enough hours, and read enough of the theory and practices to know that it depends on how you look at it. &nbsp;WoW was never very varied in playstyle, abilities, or choices, and has gotten steadily less so with every version. What WoW did was spend a lot of time reskinning the same thing over and over, with new art and new names. Basically, they did what 4E is often labeled as. (And they do it well, the common &quot;charge&quot; against Blizzard having some justice that they never innovate, but test and polish to the max.) Whereas, 4E certainly has some limits to its range, but the classes play a lot more different than is first apparent. In fact, WoW looks more varied on the surface but is highly similar once you scratch past the gold paint, whereas 4E looks more similar on the surface, but reveals more variance when you dig. &nbsp;Then you look at something like Lord of the Rings Online. Turbine is the AD&amp;D-like company of the MMORPGs, in that they have got it well enough together to be successful, but they don't really design games. They make art and game elements and host them on a MMORPG engine, which they constantly throw things into. Underneath it all is the same kind of limits and decisions that any computer game will deal with, but they have so many moving parts that they don't really fully understand, you get some variety by sheer accident. Though I suppose thowing a lot of stuff against the wall to see what sticks is a strategy and method, even if it isn't much of a design. So you get charming variants like a hobbit minstrel that is mainly intended as healbot, but when he turns on &quot;war speech&quot; for solo play, he goes around like a holy terror, shouting monsters into the ground--especially the various wights who are suspectible to his &quot;light&quot;-based damage. It's totally ludicrous, but certainly different. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"&nbsp; class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing&nbsp; &nbsp; :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Crazy Jerome, post: 5977089, member: 54877"] I'm not a huge MMO player either, but I've played enough of them, and enough hours, and read enough of the theory and practices to know that it depends on how you look at it. WoW was never very varied in playstyle, abilities, or choices, and has gotten steadily less so with every version. What WoW did was spend a lot of time reskinning the same thing over and over, with new art and new names. Basically, they did what 4E is often labeled as. (And they do it well, the common "charge" against Blizzard having some justice that they never innovate, but test and polish to the max.) Whereas, 4E certainly has some limits to its range, but the classes play a lot more different than is first apparent. In fact, WoW looks more varied on the surface but is highly similar once you scratch past the gold paint, whereas 4E looks more similar on the surface, but reveals more variance when you dig. Then you look at something like Lord of the Rings Online. Turbine is the AD&D-like company of the MMORPGs, in that they have got it well enough together to be successful, but they don't really design games. They make art and game elements and host them on a MMORPG engine, which they constantly throw things into. Underneath it all is the same kind of limits and decisions that any computer game will deal with, but they have so many moving parts that they don't really fully understand, you get some variety by sheer accident. Though I suppose thowing a lot of stuff against the wall to see what sticks is a strategy and method, even if it isn't much of a design. So you get charming variants like a hobbit minstrel that is mainly intended as healbot, but when he turns on "war speech" for solo play, he goes around like a holy terror, shouting monsters into the ground--especially the various wights who are suspectible to his "light"-based damage. It's totally ludicrous, but certainly different. :lol: [/QUOTE]

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