Poll: MMORPG Rant

[Dragunai]

Most, if not all of you, reading this are here because you play an mmorpg or know someone who does etc.

I want to state here, in a public zone, my annoyance so I can get it out of my system and move on with my gaming career if you will.

Yes, ok, World of Warcraft doesn't have true to world graphics like Lord of the Rings, Warhammer online and DDO, etc, etc.

But you know what it does have?

11,000,000 plus players with its peak being around 15,000,000 back at the end of TBC start of Wotlk.

Yes, you can sit in your communities in these other games and rant all you like about "How shit!" WoW's graphics are because They aren't true to life and they are Cartoony.

Because we all know that its graphics that make a good game and not depth of character design, quality of the gaming environments and replayability whilst making sure the game doesn't become stale with revamped areas for leveling or special heirloom items to make leveling quicker due to the addition of new level caps.

No! Its entirely to do with how pretty the game is, what with you being mesmerisied by them so much that you dont realise that Aion is a constant grind from start to finish or the quests in The North Downs are simply a rehashing of "go here and kill 50 orcs," 28 times.

Its not like wow has totally redesigned the talent and skill system in Cataclysm because the old one was getting stale and wasnt as functional as it could be so the players can play a whole new different version of a classic game they know so well but finally get to play from level 1 with new eyes.

What is the obsession with Graphical quality in games?
I dont see WoW going free to play just to survive like:

DDO
LOTRO
Pirates of the Burning Coast
Warhammer online (Not 100% but you get an unlimited trial now)

All those games have in common the fact that they are all graphically "superior" to wow without any of the 400,000 players they share between them realising that the person agreeing to their remarks about wow is, in fact, their own echo in the empty room.

WoW players cant hear their own echo because their community is packed from wall to wall with people discussing boss tactics for one of the 200 encounters they have or coming up with plans and startergies for the Battlegrounds and arenas they have or just shooting the breeze talking about equipment etc.

I recently downloaded Argo online a game which I thought was going to be fun until I noticed the graphics were all ramped up beyond my systems operating regions with no ingame menu (at least in the intro) and the options at the launcher are all greyed out.

Well done, I guess by focusing so hard on alienating those of us who dont want to upgrade our system every time a new game comes up you have sucessfully helped wows community stay strong by simply reminding us of the fact WoW will always work on my pc. Yes my machine is a bit ghetto now but I cant be bothered to spend money and time upgrading it for one game.

Even if I had a super machine which could run 3 games at once at max graphics I would still say that depth of gameplay and content supercede and frankly spit on games who care so much about graphical quality and the players who agree with that ethos.

I have had the same pc through all the wow games starting with Vanilla. Each expansion added new ultra high end options but never diminished or broke the low end options. If anything each one made the game more system resource friendly.

Why cant games like Warhammer do the same thing?
What is so nightmarishly horrific about simply programming in a setting for older machines to run on?

What you think you're game is too good to be run on older machines?

Oh in that case me and the other millions of people in the same mind set will take our £8.99 a month and keep giving it to Blizzard, I am sure the 500 people you still have kicking around all love discussing how great the games graphics are while they do their best to hate wow and find things to do in your contentless money sinks.

....

Yeah I feel a lot better now.

Peace.

 

[Atmos Duality]

I never had a problem with WoW's graphics. Just its obscene amount of grind and reliance on Operant Conditioning to pad out its content.

Though I do agree that too many of the outspoken members of the Hardware Elite today demand too much for graphics.

 

[Dragunai]

I never had a problem with WoW's graphics. Just its obscene amount of grind and reliance on Operant Conditioning to pad out its content.

Though I do agree that too many of the outspoken members of the Hardware Elite today demand too much for graphics.

In fairness most mmorpgs demand a certain amount of grind. Be it reputation, exp or whatever but they dont have to be so boring.

I got a warden on lotro to 52 and realised I hated the game. It was so slow and padded that it literally was "go here and kill 50 of x" masking the grind pretty heavily.

WoW has done its best to cut the grind down to a small % by including quests where you use a mount cannon to hold off enemies or you fly around bombing stuff etc. Gimmicky? yes but does it break the tedium presented by going here and killing x number of x? Damn right it does.

I am getting my system upgraded soon regardless of my feelings stated above. Mainly because my machine is getting on now and A lot of new age games wont run on it. Thats my problem and I admit it, but if I can run WoW then I should be able to run others else those games and their respective companies arent competition for WoW.

Its too bad because Warhammer is a fun game, just wish they would let me run it on a lower spec to enjoy it.

 

[nukethetuna]

Graphics don't mean anything if they aren't backed by solid gameplay. In WoW's case it might not mean interesting or innovative or unrepetitive and engaging, but instead balanced, accessible, not buggy, and with a wide range of content.

 

[Raven_Operative]

Personally, I prefer deep and interesting gameplay over graphics.

That being said, however, amazing graphics make mediocre game play much easier to deal with seeing as I often will stick around just to see what new environments the game will throw at me. *cough cough* Avatar: the game *cough cough*

 

[Owlslayer]

The only MMORPG that I've actually played for quite a while was DDO (about 450h in total).
And I tried WoW before that, but i didn't get hooked. The graphics weren't a problem, but i just didn't felt connected to the world and lore, even though i loved Warcraft 3 and Frozen Throne.

I think that the main reason why i got addicted to DDO was because it was Dungeons and Dragons. I knew the creatures in it, i knew the feats, i knew weapon damage and spells (though there were a lot of changes in the game to suit being a MMO). I had played a lot of D&D before even hearing of this MMO, and when i started playing, i more or less knew what to do. And i really really liked it.


But i bet if it had graphics like WoW, i had still played the hell out of it.

 

[Dragunai]

Seems the concensus amongst us is that as long as a game is something we can understand, appreciate and really get immersed into we couldnt care less about graphics. I think we can agree that good graphics in a functional game with good content and depth is a bonus while a beautiful game with mediocre content and depth is awful.

I wonder why game companies keep building their games on the graphics engine then instead of accepting and appreciating the fact that REAL gamers dont want a game that will push a top of the line system to breaking when it lacks anything to keep us playing.

Wow isnt the prettiest game I ever played. Far from it infact BUT it is the only game I have played consistantly for 6yrs. I have played games which were very beautiful (in my opinion) on my xbox such as Assassins Creed Brotherhood and got halfway into the 30hr or so story and got bored. Dragon Age 2 is also a good example of this from my perspective. Beautiful game but I havent gotten past the Golem boss in the Deep roads yet because I just dont want to.

If Dragon Age 2 had been excellent gameplay and the graphics sat onto of that Id have finished it 3 times by now as it stands I just let it sit gathering dust in my stack of games.

One game I do keep going back to for its multiplayer is Bad Company 2 because its gameplay is so fluid and satisfying that I just want to keep going at it. Vietnam is a lot of fun but I wouldnt call it a graphically heavy game as much as I would a game that uses its graphics to immerse you into the environment and make you feel you are IN that battle.

Still, one of the selling points LOTRO tries to run with is:

"You can explore the game world,"

Sorry... explore what?

If I wanted to explore anything Id be saving my money up to go on Vactions to south america and africa to explore the real world. I am however playing a video game and what I want to do in that game is kill bosses or other players and have fun doing it, I do NOT want to spend 6 hours walking around in your contentless game going, "Thats pretty... does it do anything? It doesnt? ... oh..."

I actully like DDO, I had fun on it as a rogue who specialised in trap mastery and it does have a fair amount of content with enough players to make grouping functional and fun. I actually forgot why I stopped playing it....

Will reinstall now!

 

[AlternatePFG]

I spent a summer on LOTRO before it went free to play, and it wasn't just graphics. Sure it was pretty, but there was a good game behind it too. It was pretty true to the Lord of the Rings lore (okay, the mage classes are a bitt iffy but it isn't nearly as bad as say, Lord of the Rings Conquest) and there was an interesting plot in the game. Had a nice community too, or at least it did before free-to-play. It ran on my horrible computer at the time pretty well. It was very similar to WoW though (what MMO isn't).

But anyway, graphics don't mean a damn thing if the game isn't good.

I played the Rift beta and that was very pretty and pretty fun too, I just don't like MMO's in general though.

 

[JaceArveduin]

I've played lotro and I love it, the only problem is, I can't play MMORPG's steadily, I try, but I'm just not a huge RPG person, though I did play a metric shit ton of hours on Oblivion (probably close to 1k.) The thing that keeps me going back to LotR though is just the fact that I know about most of the things, and theres always easter eggs for those who have read the books, like seeing Bill Ferny's house and hearing the bandits talk about how Sharkey is going to take over this little place and such. Though I really wish they would have made the Rangers a little less stupid >.<" I played some DDO a few years back, might try it again, iirc it was a hack n slash type game.

 

[Jasper Jeffs]

I like Aion, not for the graphics but for how unforgiving it is. The drop/proc rates are a joke, you get ganked by lv40 twinks if you even try grinding in the well known zones, there are money sinks everywhere, dieing removes experience points that you have to buy back using a shitload of kinah, you have to grind the same mobs forever to level up, and so on. That said, it sounds terrible, but I like it for those reasons, don't ask me why. I don't think it's like that any more though, I quit when they released the expansion.

OT: I prefer content, artistic style is what I like though in terms of graphics. WoW has shit graphics technically, but it looks good.

I would even argue MMO's like Ultima look better than some modern MMO's, a lot of them just lack artistic direction. That's what's important to me, but before that comes content.

 

[Dragunai]

I think I was being unfair before.
Lotro does run on my system pretty well and I had very few issues with it.
I am buying a new gaming rig as mine is literally too old to upgrade (gives you an idea of just how tolerant wow's minimum is) and this new rig is something beautiful.

I will most likely reinstall LOTRO onto it and play it because one reason I lost interest was when I was doing a lvl52 raid on it on my warden and struggled with aggro because the framerate was laughably low.

Not being able to raid in an mmorpg for me is like not being able to do Coke if you're Scorsese.
So I quit it with ire toward its content because I couldnt play it and therefore lost half the content.

I've play every expansion and love the character designs and classes but I am hateful toward the fact everything from 1-55 is grinding because finding dungeons is too difficult and the new age of LOTRO players are slackers who quit if it takes more than 15 minutes. THAT I personally WILL blame on wow and its entitlement toward players but then again do we really want to spend 2 hours doing one dungeon which isnt a raid?

I am reinstalling DDO tonight (4gb download and I have a ghetto connection cause I live in Englands equivilant to Arkansaw) but no it wasnt a hack and slash. The combat is like a more complex Diablo. Click to attack, special skills are fired via the hotbar.

Loved playing my rogue though, finding and disabling traps or opening locked doors for bonus gear and exp meant I was loved in groups and I love being needed in mmorpgs which is why I tank in wow and lotro.

Point here is Lotro still lacks content before you can do the dungeons in Moria at 55 and seeing as the cap is 65 thats a good solid 85% or so of the game before you can play it.

DDO is dungeons from the word go but its a different kind of game ^^

Cant wait to play it on my new system haha.

 

[blankedboy]

35-0 for gameplay. Because it's what games are made for.

 

[oldskoolandi]

Actually, to be fair Lotro has quite a lot of instances while you level up...it has skirmishes you can drop into at any time you like, either solo or in 3, 6 or 12 man groups, an instance cluster at level 30, another instance at 40, instances plus 2 fairly large raids at 50, 7 or so dungeons, 2 lair raids and another large raid at 60 and tons of solo quests, more than enough to get you to level 65...

 

[Tiger Sora]

Gameplay, without a good story and solid playing mechanics I don't think it's worth being made. Graphics are just icing.
I play WoW but it's one of the few big mac compatible mmo games I know.

 

[DarthZod]

I have played wow, lotro, ddo, champions, sto, swg,city of heroes, rift, aion, eq1 and eq2.

Of all of those I found WoW to be one of the least enjoyable in terms of playability. add to that, the immature community and the crappy graphics and it shocks me that so many people play it.

Ive always eqauted WoW's success to Blizzard's great marketing more than the quality of the game.

WoW came out when most people had never heard of a MMO, they marketed it great, had people like Mr.T and Ozzy doing commercials for it on TV. It brought alot of fresh blood into the market and these people got attached to it and propably can't be bothered to try to learn a new game.


aside form that I answered graphics in the poll on the assumption that most mmo's follow the same formula of -
Get quest. kill mob/collect item. turn in quest. As well as form group. kill mobs in dungeon. get treasure. with that said, if that's what I going to be doing the world and characters better look pretty damn nice if its what I'm going to be staring at for hours a day.

 

[Dragunai]

In all honesty up to the end of Wotlk I would have agreed with you Zod but Cataclysm changed a lot. The community has had a serious retard fumigation because the game once again requires you to actually play with an ounce of skill.

Tanks now suffer stuppid amounts of damage so they need to make good use of cooldowns (I play a DK tank these days but compared to my warrior and paladin in Wotlk the dmg it takes is insane), this is supported by the fact your avoidances are considerably lower on any tank and even if you do have 180k hp (as I do) you still die pretty quick if you play badly.

Healers cant sit and spam spells anymore while their mana regen keeps them at 100% so they actually need to read a tanks incoming dmg and account for it healing ahead of time and using shields etc in the right place for a boss.

DPS can still be morons but that said a lot of dungeons (Im looking at you Zanadalari!) if you screw around too much free wipe.

DDO is fun if you find dungeons and decent groups, Havent played Champions, rift, sto or EQ1/2 but I am getting a wicked powerful in 3 weeks so I will try them. SWG has more bugs than entomologist's lab and lag where there is none which is why I quit playing it and city of heroes became a massive grind by lvl4 with the missions making no sense or just being a cut down on go here and kill this a hundred times.

Marketting isnt a big deal because the game has over 11 million before the ads started anyway.

Cata has changed the game a lot. More skill requirement, the community is more mature now and the quests are massively varied. Less Go here and kill x, loot x etc and more gimmicky stuff like air raids and so on.

I have in my time played 115 mmorpgs (mainly f2p but a few P2P as well such as Warhammer, lotro and wow) this list is very long and I will happily defend the claim by having people post a game name and I will say what I thought of it. Point being that 90% of them are heavy grindfests while WoW does its best (or at least tries to) to mix it up.

Not arguing, just my opinion.

 

[infohippie]

Problem with WoW is it has neither graphical quality nor deep and interesting gameplay.