World of Wacraft is the most successful MMORPG of all time. I played WOW for about 4 months (not including my dirty little secret), a year after its release (yea I gambled on EQ2 at release instead of WOW). I think WOW is a really fun game, and I can see the appeal but can I honestly say It is the best MMORPG Ive played? My first MMORPG was Everquest, and that is the game I usually use as a comparison model when I look at other games. Why? I played EQ for about a year, I was really addicted to that game, and I have had experiences with that game that no other MMO has came close to duplicating, not even WOW. There were 3 things about EQ that drove me away, those same 3 things are things that many MMO’s since have improved upon.

  • Everquest-RangerEQ forced you to be grouped to do just about anything. If I couldn’t find a group I was pretty much stuck waiting for people to come along to group with to play. That means that there were a lot of times I spent hours waiting for groups to do things.
  • It took forever to gain levels in EQ. The time it took to level was insane, especially those "hell levels" where it took double the time to gain a level. It makes no sense for levels to take more than a week to get, and there were plenty of levels that did just that.
  • The death penalty was way too harsh. You could play EQ for 8 hours, die once, and loose a whole 8 hours progress. Not only do you loose that progress, but you start back over in the last city you were bound too without any weapons or armor. You had to travel back to the area where you died to get those things back, which sometimes could take 30 minutes or more. Then many times you had to have your group, or find a group to help you get to your items. The whole process could easily end up taking an hour or more. That doesn’t include the very possible 2nd and 3rd deaths you may get trying to get your equipment when you look at the fact that you have no equipment or armor on that "corpse run".

WOW completely resolved those issues. The time it take to gain levels are sufficient. You can be productive in game with or without a group. When you die in WOW you usually "respawn" somewhere close by. Also, you get the option of traveling to your corpse as a spirit, to recover some of the lost exp without fear of dieing a second or third time getting there. If you don’t want to recover your lost exp, you can jump back in game with weapons and armor to continue playing with a little bit of a stat penalty for a certain amount of time. Those fixes to the genre enables players to have more fun playing the game, without being as worried about dieing because of a harsh penalty. Made the game much more approachable for many, which is a part of the reason why it is so popular.

What about other games? Was WOW the only game that improved the genre? Check back tomorrow to see the second part of this post when I talk more about those topics.