I go back to WoW every now and again.. (Cataclysm expansion upcoming), but the game is just too easy. While some of the quests were fun to do,... I did not like the nearly 100 % quest grind... (yea, I prefer mob grinding / eq style)
In WoW, gear was given to you. In EQ, you really did have to earn it (or buy it with hard earned coin)
I prefer the old WoW days when they still had elite mobs in outdoor zones, like outside of Zul'Farak, and near Shadowfang keep (shadow fang village?). I remember doing a quest to Shadowfang 'village?' where you had to infiltrate the town and grab a book from an upstairs building that was guarded by elites. That was a hard quest!... except that you could just run up there, die without much of a penalty, then run back to the corpse, pop up , take the book, die outside, and then rez outside of town and finish the quest. It was still fun to try and do the quest without 'cheating' so to speak. But.... they must have felt it was too hard so they took out the elites....
It was like over the years of WoW they took a poll of everything in the game that was remotely challenging or hard, and eliminated/replaced it. ;(
Expansions can help or kill a game as well. Wow expansions, while cool at first, trump the gear right off the bat from all the other expansions. There is no need to even have played much of the other content, just go straight to the new areas and you'll have the best gear there is (once you have the appropriate level to be there of course). They need to figure out a way to ensure playing each expansion is necessary in order to progress... I personally loved the EQ Planes of Power expansion. You had to get flagged to progress through the zones. When GoD expansion opened, you really couldn't just go straight to that content and expect to complete it without first acquiring some Time gear from the PoP expansion. It really felt like an achievement when you completed Time, and GoD... I have never really felt that level of achievement in WoW, or any other mmorpg game either.
Ok, this post was much much longer than I intended. Basically I think WoW is too easy like many others do. I hope someone can make another EQ type game in the future, but sadly I think that will never happen again... WoW style is what is 'in' and making the $$$, so other games are mimicking this 'quest grind' / casual style.
Blaz
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