Let's compare early WoW with early TOR

What the Bunny said

Here is my take on comparing early wow and early TOR.

I started playing wow 3 months after US release and by then it had very little bugs. Just some server stability problems and sometimes server lag.

But what matters much more than bugs is that to me wow was an epic adventure, I spent almost a year playing non-stop. I made new friends online with whom I leveled. It took us months to get to 60 and I still remember lots of it like grinding satyrs in desolace for the first level 40 mount, running scarlet monastery to try to get illusionary rod for my mage, or getting ganked in eastern plaguelands.

SWTOR was fun, but I hit 50 in what, 3 weeks? Am already decked in epic t2 gear, with 2.5million credits and little reason to keep the subscription. The story was nice and overall I enjoyed it but the overall experience was not even remotely comparable to the excitement of my early wow days. Nothing seems particularly memorable. I guess it all happened too fast and required too little effort to really make an impact.

so when you level your second character and you do the exact same quests all over again, and you level a 3rd, and then a 4th, is it not a grind then?

Since you only have one path to level up, you will always do the exact same quests over and over.

Talk to guy and make choices that do not effect the world.
Tells you he needs power converters and tells you that the gunarks took them.
You go to the area and you kill a mob. Now your given a bonus quest to kill 30 gunarks.
ok so you kill 30 gunarks because you can't abandon the quest. after this one it tells you to collect 10, 12 or 15 of random items or destroy weapon caches. by the time you get this quest all the mobs you killed already are all respawned so you kill another 30 gunarks.

now you complete that one and it tells you to kill an elite in a different part, so again you clear through multitudes of mobs to get to the elite. you kill it and now you go to your main quest objective and when you return to the quest giver, the guest giver says "omg those gunarks, they must be stopped!" and asks you to kill 30 gunarks.

repeat on every planet, two or three times, while you level to 50 on all 8 of your characters.

The real question is, was WoW the first MMO that you dedicated yourself to playing? (this means that, sure you may have installed and tried EQ for 2 days or something, but you didn't ever really get into it).

The reality is that NO MMO will ever recapture that epic feel of your first MMO. People who got hooked on EQ had the same epic feeling about EQ and the same "kinda meh" about WoW.

Something fascinating about TOR is just how many people I see playing who have never played an MMO before. It has attracted in a non-MMO audience in the exact same way that WoW did. For that influx of MMO virgins, I expect they will get all of that epic feeling out of TOR that you felt in WoW, and nothing will ever compare to it again for them either.

Some of the places in the old world before cataclysm were amazing when you first went to them. then they added weather effects and tanaris had sand storms, it snowed in everlook and dustwallow marsh was covered in fog.

I was just thinking though, on how long it'd be before something like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWgW3ogaV84 is made from swtor?
Keep in mind that blizzard actually promotes and has contests for the best warcraft videos.

or this,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeUhSjuhQYE

Oh really? SWTOR unfinished? Well you obviously don't remember 2004 WOW. After reaching the mid to high 40s in wow you had to "camp grind" mobs in order to level to 50. There were no more quests. That sounds pretty unfinished to me. Other bugs or bad design was the hunter class. Pets were so slow you could out run them and barely did anything. Shaman only needed one button hotkeyed since it was so OP (frostshock). Hours of queue times only to get disconnected and start over in queue. I'm sure many others I'm forgetting. Oh yea, no LFG finder (stupid stone things in the middle of nowhere.)

Quoted for truth.

I don't agree with that. I had played EQ since closed beta. When WoW came out it wasn't "meh".

To some it was too easy and cartoony. But WoW gutted EQ for a reason. It wasn't "eh".

To give an impression of how WoW felt as an EQ player I'll give a few examples.

Flightpaths. Holy crap that's awesome.
In-game mail? That's sweet!

I can tell who has a quest for me by an icon over their head? That's awesome.

Holy crap mounts?

LOOT LOOT LOOT.

In EQ I started a beastlord when Luclin came out and managed to get an RBB on it from killing Vox in an open group. Was EPIC, right? I felt I had more epic loot in WoW by the time I was level 25 and had some blues then I ever had in EQ.

Rest EXP? Nice. Hearth? Nice. Skill trees >>> AA's.

There was a ton of stuff compared to EQ that WoW just nailed. I actually HATED instances at first. Felt non-MMOish to me. Totally loved them by the end of WoW beta.

Now, i'm not a WoW fanboi. I can't wait for someone else to come along and finally make the "next" one. With about 500 minor/major tweaks SWTOR has that potential. But it starts with the combat/lag and crap loot for me. It right now lack the "polish" that WoW had at release for me. The stuff to do etc.

Besides, SWTOR isn't a world. I don't see level 50's while I'm leveling. There's no moment where you're doing quests right next to a zone that's meant for 10+ levels above you and you can't wait to be able to kill those things. SWTOR is a tunnel. WoW didn't give a ton of choices of where to go quest/level for any given level but they gave you some. SWTOR I'm playing a single player linear game. And in some way I hope that fails because I don't like linear in my MMO's. WoW's in grey area enough for me as is, SWTOR is 10x more linear.

for the 1 millionth time....SWTOR is not competing with early WoW....it is competing with current WoW. The demise the SWTOR is due to them not seeing that now. This game will have 250-300k max at end of 2012.