D&D 4E What D&D 4e Should Learn From World of Warcraft

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

No, completely true. WoW is a static, unchanging world in which your only contribution is crafted items, or temporarily dead NPCs or PCs. There's no "mostly" about it, at all.

Things have changed since beta. There are permanent additions made to the game world, with their rate of introduction controlled by the players. As he said, Ahn'Qiraj was the first major time this happened in WoW. Later this year, Sunwell Plateau will be another example of this in WoW.

 

[PeterWeller]

You can. You can drink (and it even causes the screen to blur - realism!), dance and make merry with other players. I remember having a party in the pool in Ironforge after we'd killed some boss or other. Yes I am sad.

It's not carousing until a table gets turned over and some teeth get knocked about.

You can create your own guild.

In WoW, guilds have almost no meaning beyond tabards and organizing raids. One of the two is meaningless, and the other can be done through other game implements.

You can if they're players.

Players are neither villains nor heroes in WoW. Anyway, you can't convince a Horde character to join the Alliance or vice versa. You can't even talk to each other.

You can be the first one on your server to craft a new item. That's pretty cool.

It's cool, but it isn't crafting a unique item or spell.

You can. Guild politics.

Have no real lasting effect on the game.

Guild politics again.

Again, don't mean a thing in WoW.

Auction house. I knew a player who did nothing but crafting and trading, stayed at level 7 the whole game. He said he didn't have time to go questing but he found the economics of the game intriguing.

Auction housing isn't being a merchant. Where are your wagons, ships and warehouses?

Guild leader.

Leading a guild isn't being a ruler or a lord. It's dealing with who gets which purples on raids.

Mostly true. The game would be better if you could build houses for example. But you can have a big effect on the other players and you could open the gates to Ahn-Qiraj, changing the world.

Opening the gates is the one lasting thing anyone could do so far, but the number necessary mean that it's you and a couple score other people doing it.

In WoW, the individual players are actually very unimportant. It's really a bad game if you want to compare the avenues available to players in an MMO versus a PnP RPG. The only MMO that I know of that even comes close to offering the avenues of playstyle that D&D and other PnP games offer is EVE online. That game takes a very different approach than WoW, however; it places the onus for almost all in game action on the players. Guilds in EVE aren't just groups of players who raid together, they are actual political and economic entities controlling territory and trade routes, allying, warring, and conspiring with and against each other for control of the world and its economy. Of course, if you want to do any of that, you essentially need to join one of the guilds already in play or convince enough people to jump ship to your own guild, so there's no room for lone wolves and PvE only players to effect the world in a meaningful way. You also can't actually leave your pod and walk around the space stations or explore the planets' surfaces, so there's that holding it back as well.

 

[Raloc]

Things have changed since beta. There are permanent additions made to the game world, with their rate of introduction controlled by the players. As he said, Ahn'Qiraj was the first major time this happened in WoW. Later this year, Sunwell Plateau will be another example of this in WoW.

Things the developers add have no real bearing on what I posted. The world doesn't change based on player actions. Therefore it's static. And "rate of introduction of something that I had no hand in shaping whatsoever" is not "player actions have consequences and can change the game world". Again, you lot haven't posted a single thing that supports your arguments, and Whizbang, you've at least once posted something that's basically a double standard. You said "WoW gameplay has more depth than D&D" and then someone pointed out your character basically can't make a single lasting change on the world, and you said "I think people should just drop this, because it's unreasonable to expect developers to do it." So you've essentially refuted your own fallacious arguments for why WoW is somehow "deeper" and has more gameplay than D&D. As Peter said, you're really being absurd.

 

[Cryptos]

The Ahn'Qiraj thing doesn't strike me as something that is truly about players changing the world. It's a clever bit of "players changing the world" packaging, but the truth is that it's something that has been developed by the world designers and is more or less inevitable.

If it was merely "evitable," if there was the possibility that no one might discover it until six months down the road, or a year, or never, then it would be more like the players were actually shaping the world. But the fact that they probably tell players to go and unlock it for the general population, announcing the potential to do so well in advance, knowing that there will be guild raids seconds after the unlockable goes live, just means that they've added bragging rights to something that was wholly designed, planned and implemented by the developers. They know it will be unlocked in a matter of days or weeks, if not sooner... there's no question that it will happen.

That's vastly different that a player character announcing plans to open up a trading company taking goods between towns as a side business to their adventuring (and getting a wagon, hiring henchmen, negotiating with merchants and townsfolk, creating his own 'brand' identity, etc), or telling the GM that they're going to investigate the mountains that he mentioned in passing and never really fleshed out, or taking it upon themselves to kill a god. We're still a long way off from that.

 

[The Little Raven]

If it was merely "evitable," if there was the possibility that no one might discover it until six months down the road, or a year, or never, then it would be more like the players were actually shaping the world.

Because of the sheer logistics involved, some servers took over a year to get the gates of Ahn'Qiraj to open.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

If you want to share a world with thousands of other players, you're going to have to accept a limited ability to reshape that world, except when that reshaping opens up more content, instead of closing it off. The 2.4 patch will allow players to add a new set of dungeons to the game, and how fast it happens is up to the players on each server. If the last time this happened is any indication, those who reach these goals first will have some permanent unique goodies given to them, but the content will ultimately be available to everyone.

Just to be clear, I don't have a problem with that - but IN WoW. I play WoW and enjoy it for what IT is. I have a problem with the idea of that being something that D&D should emulate, or needs to learn from. There probably ARE things that D&D could, maybe even should, learn from WoW. I was just emphasizing that THAT will never be one of them.

 

[Raloc]

Because of the sheer logistics involved, some servers took over a year to get the gates of Ahn'Qiraj to open.

Do any of the mobs you kill there stay dead? No? Thought not. Static world.

 

[Ahglock]

Consensual PvP definitely won the day here. It's not like PvP is unavailable on other servers.

And PVP server PVP usually boils down to when I'm rolling through stranglethorn vale a level 70 decides to beat the snot out of my level 28 and camp his corpse, woo-hoo you are hard core. The consensual PVP via the battlegrounds at least gives a semblance of balance between those who are fighting so there can be some relatively fun competition.

Still overall i prefer the PVP servers I find it a bit more tense and the times world PVP works out to not be glorified griefing it is a blast and to me that is worth the much more frequent grief trains.

 

[Relique du Madde]

Do any of the mobs you kill there stay dead? No? Thought not. Static world.

To be honest, if every monster you killed in WoW or any other MMorpg stayed dead the game would become boring since the entire world would be reduced to a barren wasteland. If I remember correctly, they tried doing that with UO but then ended up placing a respawn timer (although a lengthy one) since people complained that there was nothing to do.

 

[Raloc]

To be honest, if every monster you killed in WoW or any other MMorpg stayed dead the game would become boring since the entire world would be reduced to a barren wasteland. If I remember correctly, they tried doing that with UO but then ended up placing a respawn timer (although a lengthy one) since people complained that there was nothing to do.

No. They'd merely have to actually do some work (I'm a game dev myself and I can tell you, it's certainly possible to do this...I've written some technology that's comparable and using the same techniques in Crysis, for instance, so I can say that this is by no stretch of the imagination "hard" compared to some very trivial features people take for granted in other games) for a change. The only excuse for not having a system in place to take care of populating the world that's done in a fashion which is more complex than "some stuff drops based on a timer, hold a variable for the timer and put in some logic to trigger spawns based on elapsed time", is laziness. It's not really terribly difficult to think of a system capable of both 1) supporting quests, and 2) allowing a dynamic population to be created in a meaningful way that changes what mobs are out at a given time.

These sorts of things are merely lots of chucks of logic and data broken down into manageable parts, then assembled with appropriate data and structures to form the desired functionality. It's not rocket science, and it's certainly easier than integrating a physics library and networking it reliably.

All of that is beside the point anyway. The point is some people claimed that WoW > D&D in terms of what you can do. But the fact is, WoW is a fundamentally unchanging world, and thus fails completely in the area they're claiming is so strong. In fact, pretty much all of the opinions I've seen here about WoW's supposed superiority are in fact D&D's strengths, and people seem to be in crazyreverseland.