MMOs for dummies

[Jagos]

*sigh*

Something about WoW has always scared me. After seeing the planning that had to go on for a raid, the price of it even though I spend more for a happy meal, or just the fact that I have not wanted to actually sit and play the game, I've found reasons not to like Wow.

Currently, I'm looking into Rift, Wow, and Guild Wars, but I have no idea which is good and which is bad. TBH, I probably shouldn't play any of them but hey, it's an interest thing for me.

I've played DFO, Maple Story (one week), and tried DnDO, but with no one to play with, I dropped off.

So what are the good reasons and bad for trying the top three MMOs on the market right now?

[Toast]

I can only really tell you about Guild Wars. I've found it to be very fun and engaging over the years. There's very little grind for the most part. Top end weapons and armor are available almost as soon as you reach the level cap, which is 20. The prophecies campaign is the one exception, where it takes longer to reach the cap and longer to get the best stuff. There's title grinding, but how much of that you do is entirely up to you.

As for gameplay, it's much more dependent on skill than gear. If playing with others is a big thing for you, then you might be a bit disappointed as the population has spread out quite a bit over 3 campaigns and an expansion. There are heroes and henchmen to make up for it, though, so you'll never go without a full team. With the exception of teaming up with my brothers now and then, I've run exclusively with heroes and henchmen for the last five years.

As mentioned, there are 3 campaigns and an expansion, so there's a lot to do for a newcomer. If you're going to get Guild Wars, you almost need all 4 to get the most out of it. Also, they're being packaged together for a reasonable price anyway these days.

Guild Wars 2 is also on the horizon, likely early next year, and having the expansion will grant access to the Hall of Monuments, where some of your achievements in gw1 will earn you bonus rewards in gw2. These rewards aren't going to make you overpowered in gw2, they're mostly unique item skins.

Guild Wars is also going through a considerable amount of growth in content compared to recent years. The Guild Wars Beyond content is meant to bridge the storyline between gw1 and gw2 and it's not finished yet. The Dervish class is going to be getting an overhaul within the next month or so, we've already seen the preview. Currently, you can only bring 3 heroes, and what's being called the Feature build will introduce a full party of heroes, a variety of new features, and a new content area if I understand correctly. Then after that there will be the Winds of Cantha content, which will be similar in scope to the War in Kryta that's already released. So there's a lot that's still going on, and there was a lot of content to begin with.

Guild Wars' skill system allows for a huge amount of combinations. Unfortunately, the game's been out long enough, most of the good combinations are well known. And if you don't use one of these good ones, you'll be scorned, ridiculed, and sometimes even kicked out of the group. One of the reasons I don't play with others. There's also hard mode, which means the monsters have all their stats boosted through the roof. Don't expect to survive hard mode unless you're running one of these kinds of builds.

I hope I've touched on everything that will be useful information to you. If you've got specific questions, just ask and I'll do my best to answer.

[synkr0nized]

WoW is easier then ever now. You can get your phat lewts* and cheevos without ever being in a hardcore raiding guild. Grouping is as easy as clicking an interface button and waiting a few minutes, and questing makes you feel strong as most of the leveling experience is completely open for any class to solo. The talent system changes have also made it more straightforward once you get to level 10 and choose a tree, as the options presented are often really straightforward when there is a possible fork.

* aside from raid gear, of course


GW requires you, no matter what you are doing (aside from solo farming using particular builds), to be in a party. This has always been able to include AI henchmen, and after the third chapter included up to 3 heroes per human player max (obviously less if more of the max party size slots are held by actual people), customizable AI characters (so you can choose armor bonuses, weapons, skills, and attributes instead of it being the non-mutable ones of the other AI) that give you more means to choose how your party is set up (as there are multiple per class so you can use whatever combo you need or want). The upside is that you can do a lot more without waiting for a group of actual people. The downside is that most people do not party with other players anymore (in honesty, it's only in rare cases in PvE that I cannot do something quicker with hero/hench than I can with a PUG) and expect everyone to have heroes and all the skills unlocked. New players have a lot of work to not only advance through the stories but also unlock all of their class's skills (or at least the most useful ones) to better provide their characters and, thus, heroes with the skills needed for the many bars/builds you could take. Oh and the population, while still large enough and viable, isn't close to what it used to be. Interest has been renewed with the Hall of Monuments and GW Beyond content prepping for GW2, but it's still rare to find people in large groups doing random quests or many of the "older" missions (though Zaishen Bounties/Missions have helped -- daily quests that have you revisit content and bosses/elites all over the three chapters and expansion content).

And then you get mesmers. Mesmers are amazing. I don't know of a comparable class in any other MMO right now. Many have rangers/archers, all have a warrior of some kind, and most have priests/monks. But mesmers are another beast entirely, and so fun. And necromancers that raise minions; not unique, but certainly fun (though I prefer Curses usually). But then WoW has druids <3 and shaman and shit and is in the Warcraft lore universe, which is kind of fun. Well, I think it's neat stuff -- that's why I even started playing years back. But these class name differences and layout difference are just the tip of the iceberg that is the difference in mechanics between the two games. There are reasons why I like one better than the other in both directions, and I'd be happy to get into any of that.



However, I am not going to recommend one over the others, at least not yet. Instead, I am going to ask you what you enjoy in games, what assumptions you have about MMOs (as in what you think they should be for them to be fun), and why the three you did try didn't last for you.


I can go off at great length about Guild Wars and World of Warcraft, but I cannot offer you any info about Rift (other than it looks pretty darn neat). I have experience with every class (perhaps quite a lot more in GW) and most if not all aspects of the games. I have been meaning to write a "comparison" of the two -- in quotes because they aren't really directly comparable and I would write it more as a presentation of the two within several broad categories to highlight how they tackle things differently and where they actually are similar.

[Jagos]

My main thing is partying with people. I'm more of a casual gamer who plays with a group. If it's hardcore guild parties all the time, I just can't keep myself to pace with the rest of the team since my harder courses keep me busy.

When I played RO, it was great until we switched servers twice. I liked playing Paladin and being a medic/fighter with capacity to do either in a pinch. I tried on other servers as a DPS guy along with mage. My appeal is to be a front liner tank with some healing capacity or all healing.

So when I played DFO, I'm good at being a Priest. What's horrible about the game is how the guild system is set up along with people who constantly spam about being in a guild. There's less incentive to really join and cooperate in a guild than to just play by yourself and beat up everything like it's going out of style. It's still fun to play, but I've backed off since really it feels like only me in the world.

With Maple Story, it was just the platforming that frustrated me. The tutorial may be great but it was too long and boring to figure out it's just not my thing.

DnDO might be well and good, but it still fails to really capture my attention. I could try again but when your first class is a monk... Yeah, I did that one to myself.

[RobinStarwing]

Originally Posted by Jagos

My main thing is partying with people. I'm more of a casual gamer who plays with a group. If it's hardcore guild parties all the time, I just can't keep myself to pace with the rest of the team since my harder courses keep me busy.

When I played RO, it was great until we switched servers twice. I liked playing Paladin and being a medic/fighter with capacity to do either in a pinch. I tried on other servers as a DPS guy along with mage. My appeal is to be a front liner tank with some healing capacity or all healing.

So when I played DFO, I'm good at being a Priest. What's horrible about the game is how the guild system is set up along with people who constantly spam about being in a guild. There's less incentive to really join and cooperate in a guild than to just play by yourself and beat up everything like it's going out of style. It's still fun to play, but I've backed off since really it feels like only me in the world.

With Maple Story, it was just the platforming that frustrated me. The tutorial may be great but it was too long and boring to figure out it's just not my thing.

DnDO might be well and good, but it still fails to really capture my attention. I could try again but when your first class is a monk... Yeah, I did that one to myself.

I found my DDO experience to be rather interesting and easy. I took on being a Human Sorcerer (Arcane Cannon) with a few modifications to the original build. I only needed to actually get help one time for a question and it was the kill the traitor one in the bar. Managed to get someone to tank for me while I Ice Daggered and Burning Hands us through the quest.

Now I am just wandering the island and getting a feel for it and exploring as well as beating up whatever baddies get in my way. Haven't been able to play due to crap internet connection.

As to RO, I played on the pay server for several months but gave up due to the all the bots taking all the kills. I couldn't get anywhere with them but I had a bit of a rep as a Wandering/Ranger Swordie who went from the very top of the world to the bottom of it and everywhere in between.

[bluestarultor]

I'd yammer on about the free MMOs I've played in-depth, but I've already done that. Although as an update, now that I've got Allods working with click controls, I'm really liking it. That's actually my current review.


Suffice it to say I'd recommend, for a healer type, Perfect World any time, or if you want to party up with people from NPF, I'm personally on Allods, where healers also work quite well and many classes also have additional healing powers, like Paladins, Summoners, and Wardens. Really, Allods is holding my attention in ways I never expected starting out, all without playing on addiction. Trust me, as a guy who's suffered from media addiction, the only reason I keep playing it, and keep wanting very badly to play it is because it's just that interesting (and the stuff I should be doing is boring me to Hell). There are no hooks in that game - no fancy leveling schemes, no level-dependent features (minus normal skill trees), no rare drops so far, quests are easy to do and quest item drop rates are high, grinding levels nets you one point per level to raise your stats only a small amount, and there's absolutely no sense that you need "just one more" of anything. The game is fully scaled to the long haul with no shiny promises to lure you in. Allods has kept me excited about it better than anything else I've played just by merit of it being that good, and the game itself seems written specifically to just let you play on your own terms.


Edit: Oh, and on partying, I'll outright say Allods has PW beat. It teaches you very early on that you'll need to party up for certain things and parties, in my experience, are very fluid. People will pretty much join up with whoever needs them from what I can tell, despite there being guilds.

[Azisien]

The Cataclysm patch improved WoW 1-60. Sucks after that because BC slaps you with an older, decayed grind. But you could get a good month or two out of it before you realize its not actually good, its addictive, and those are different things.

Oh was the thread title a trick question? All MMOs are for dummies.

[bluestarultor]

Originally Posted by Azisien

But you could get a good month or two out of it before you realize its not actually good, its addictive, and those are different things.

Pretty much true. When my "brother" (very good old friend who we basically adopted for a while) ran out of money and was forced to quit WoW, he went through some pretty serious withdrawal for a media addiction and had to re-acclimate to real life (he called going out for things like shopping going on raids for like a month afterward). After that he bumped around to pretty much literally every free MMO on the market until recently to help fill the void. Now he's back on WoW, spending money he knows he has no business spending again.

It's not like he doesn't even know the dangers of addiction. The guy's not stupid and just managed to quit smoking late last year. He just got into WoW because he had friends join up. Those guys all still play, too.


WoW: more addictive than nicotine. :T

[synkr0nized]

Originally Posted by bluestarultor

he went through some pretty serious withdrawal for a media addiction and had to re-acclimate to real life (he called going out for things like shopping going on raids for like a month afterward).

lolololololololol

[Krylo]

WoW is a very well designed skinner box. It's very easy to get into, and very easy to group, have some fun, etc. and the story is interesting... but at the end of the day there's no closure. No end. Just move pushing buttons to get an ephemeral and passing moment of gratification.

This aspect of it has gotten worse with every patch and with Cataclysm. As Synk said, they made it all very casual friendly, but they've, in the process, removed the only thing that I ever enjoyed about the game. Playing with the system, dicking around, making custom builds, figuring out what works and what doesn't. Now you just pick a tree and go. Can't even make a hybrid build, anymore.

I mean, the level 85 raids are actually supposed to be kind of challenging, but from watching other people doing them it seems more like it's more annoying than difficult (can't zerg past trash anymore), with the bosses just needing a salient strategy--which would be nice if you didn't still have to run them each umpteen million times until it's just going through the motions like before, but with less room for error.

So basically, they've removed all pretense of actual thought and challenge (what I constitute as 'fun') that doesn't rely on the stupidity of other players in large raids, and replaced it with 'push button, get reward'. And it was never particularly NON-Skinner Boxy in the first place.

You'd be better off making yourself a sandwich. Less effort, greater reward.

Guild Wars is, in my experience, a PvP game. The PvE aspect is as Synk said. You're soloing pretty much everything with the help of heroes and henches. The PvP is well balanced and tuned, but I, for one, can't just do various types of arena combat over and over and over again.

I'd actually suggest Guild Wars has a better PvE GAME than WoW does, with more lasting gratification and a feeling that you are actually accomplishing something in the world, as opposed to just clicking the same dongles over and over again. However, it's completely empty thanks to the instancing, and you pretty much never end up in a group. An MMO without other players is a sad sad thing.

I'm in the Rift Beta, but I can't ass myself to actually download it. If I do I'll let you know about that, but I can tell you it's probably going to be biting criticism.

If you REALLY MUST play a big name MMO, I'd suggest waiting for The Old Republic or grabbing Age of Conan.

The former looks pretty excellent from everything I've seen, from Dialogue trees to the implementation of the NPC companions, to the classes, to the fact that they keep pushing it back to iron out bugs before release, to the fact that smugglers get to kick dudes in the bojangles.

The latter is pretty similar to WoW if you play a caster, but instead of having to wait until 80 for bosses that require strategy and instances with difficult traps, you get that at about level 20 in Black Castle. If you play a warrior or rogue class, however, it actually requires some skill and thought to play, thanks to the combo system and directional shielding. Though both DO make PVPing as a melee class rather irritating (the mage pushes one button to nuke, you have to push 6). And you can build your own cities and what not for guilds.

I wouldn't really suggest AoC, though. It has significant population issues (there isn't one), and the ultra violence just feels silly at times. And it's basically WoW but less shitty. Too bad about the ultra shitty launch, I guess. Might be a better game otherwise.