World of Warcraft really is an EverQuest copy/pasta.

[Wakanda]

Originally Posted by Wakanda [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Talent Trees were not original to WoW. I also remember playing City of Heroes months before WoW came out; game was built around completely customizing your character through talent trees. EQ 2 also had talent trees and came out before WoW. Talent trees in WoW have also aged horribly to where you have no choice. It's hard to get excited about the next expansion coming out because they highlight these super unique talent choices, but in reality I can just glance at them and already know which ones will be mandatory for my spec to be viable.

It sucks we can't edit posts, but also SWG (created by the same people who made EQ) was also built around skill trees. I think you make the mistake of looking at things WoW has that EQ 1 doesn't have any coming to the conclusion that WoW created these.

I personally found the AA's in EQ more compelling than what we have in WoW.

[Wakanda]

Originally Posted by shovelquest [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

What I never understood about wow that worked in EQ and it made no sense to me.

If I saw you running from across the zone in EQ, I knew who you were. Like "oh cool there goes hazenblat, his armor I recognize a mile away"

But in wow, a game with much higher quality graphics, I couldn't identify one person from another in my groups.

I never understood why this was the way it was to me.

I think a lot of this is because when you're playing WoW it feels like you're watching a group of characters / dots from a far, but when you're playing EQ it actually feels like you're actually in the game and up close and personal with the people around you.

Secondly your gear changes so rapidly in WoW that your outfit may change multiple times a day. And items also look identical on every race, meaning you have to zoom in or hold your mouse over people a lot of times to tell if they are a night elf or a human.

But also in OG WoW each faction only started with four races and eight classes. Not a lot of diversity compared to EQ.

[Wakanda]

Originally Posted by vales [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

they copied almost nothing from EQ

so it's just a coincidence that top devs were also all EQ players and that they recruited other devs from their EQ guilds?

BTW I just watched the new Fantastic Four movie and when it was going off, I saw Jeff Kaplan had wrote the story for it [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] small world.

[Wakanda]

Originally Posted by Wakanda [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

-Griffin travel? I mean you may have a point there, but EQ had teleports, portals, PoK books, and boats long before WoW was even conceptualized. And ironically most people agree, even blizzard employees, that flying ruined WoW.

I just remembered I enjoyed the griffin flight in EQ 2 more than WoW because if you needed to, you could jump off the griffin mid flight and take fallen damage, but this was extremely useful to get to places that there was no flight path to, or to get off of a flight prematurely when soemthing came up.

[Wakanda]

Originally Posted by Rygar [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

WoW had plenty of "original ideas" if anyone can really say that in a fantasy setting (meaning everyone copies from D&D)

But to name a few: using a separate stat (resilience) to balance PvP play and not unbalance PvE, battlegrounds, quest exp system was very intuitive to new players, economy super well balanced (best I've seen in an MMO), stat tree allowed for a single class to function based on how you prefer to play (i.e. shaman could be a healer, range DPS, or melee DPS), armor enchants, trade skill system was integral to raiding, instancing, griffon travel, character fashion quest customization, etc.

And lest not forget a true "good vs. evil" system where you couldn't even group or communicate with the opposing faction.

Shame on you for playing Alliance (and making this thread)

also I forgot to touch on the armor enchants part [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] do y’all really not remember chain running LDoN instances to be able to augment y’all’s gear??? I feel like I’m jumping y’all’s case, and I don’t mean to, no hostility, it’s just that you keep implying wow came up with all of these new ideas that had never been done before when it’s simply ignoring reality [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[loramin]

Originally Posted by Wakanda [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

BTW I just watched the new Fantastic Four movie and when it was going off, I saw Jeff Kaplan had wrote the story for it [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] small world.

I don't think that's the same guy. This Jeff Kaplan makes video games, while this Jeff Kaplan makes movies (and there doesn't seem to be any overlap; neither worked on the WoW movie, for instance).

[loramin]

And back to your main point Wakanda, I think you've really hit the nail on the head. Everyone thinks WoW was revolutionary because it did something new ... and it did ... but it was much, much more about polishing the existing ideas than it was about coming up with truly new ones.

[shovelquest]

Originally Posted by loramin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

And back to your main point Wakanda, I think you've really hit the nail on the head. Everyone thinks WoW was revolutionary because it did something new ... and it did ... but it was much, much more about polishing the existing ideas than it was about coming up with truly new ones.

I used to know a chick that played ultima online before I knew what these kinds of games were, and I was like constantly fascinated she'd rather go home and play games than stay out and party.

Then I played EQ and finally understood.

Im sure EQ took as much from playing ultimate onlinle as wow devs took from eq when they played it.

[Jimjam]

Originally Posted by shovelquest [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I used to know a chick that played ultima online before I knew what these kinds of games were, and I was like constantly fascinated she'd rather go home and play games than stay out and party.

Then I played EQ and finally understood.

Im sure EQ took as much from playing ultimate onlinle as wow devs took from eq when they played it.

Any acquaintance I had who’d admit to having played UO was never very mentally healthy. It got worse when they’d evangelised the game. Very offputting.

[Knuckle]

Originally Posted by Wakanda [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

-BGs are not original to WoW, they first appeared in DAoC.
Yes but to the original topic, this feature was not copied from Everquest.

-The economy in EverQuest is superior to any other MMO I've ever played. There are really, really, really exciting items you can buy with the currency. People go out and farm the currency because of how valuable it is. Meanwhile on WoW I have over 10 million gold, and could buy dozens of WoW tokens. That's about all I could buy. You basically can't buy any powerful items in WoW, making the economy extremely boring.

Irrelevant point, and economy was very strong in classic WoW, but not part of the original statement that its copy/paste from EQ.


Talent Trees were not original to WoW. I also remember playing City of Heroes months before WoW came out; game was built around completely customizing your character through talent trees. EQ 2 also had talent trees and came out before WoW. Talent trees in WoW have also aged horribly to where you have no choice. It's hard to get excited about the next expansion coming out because they highlight these super unique talent choices, but in reality I can just glance at them and already know which ones will be mandatory for my spec to be viable.

Everquest 2 released 2 weeks before WoW. WoW did not copy talent trees from EQ2. They did get talent ideas from other MMOs as shown above, this is true, but not part of the original argument.



-Instances are not original to WoW. The first time an instance ever appeared in an MMO was EverQuest, Lost Dungeons of Norrath.

There is a one year gap between Lost Dungeons of Norrath and WoWs release. WoWs development began in 1999. I have read John Staats book several times as I was an original kickstarter, but I can not say definitively what month/year they confirmed instancing for WoW dungeons, however, if I had to dig for it, I am confident it was not the last 12 months of the development cycle, since they had to extend the release date, implying the majority of technical tasks were in some sort of progression or near completion state, and the idea that they just then pivoted to instanced dungeons because of LDON would be ridiculous. Again, only to argue that WoW is not copy/paste EQ, it doesn't really matter if another game did it first.



I find that WoW did a terrible job at this to be honest. In EverQuest a Shaman or Druid can Heal or DPS. They are true hybrids in that sense. There's no such thing as inviting a Shaman and finding out he can't heal, or inviting a Druid and finding out he can't deal DPS.

In WoW, they call classes like Shaman and Druid "hybrids," but the reality is, they are forced to choose a role. Which doesn't really make them hybrids. I remember when WoW first launched 20+ years ago, I would get mad at the Druids in my group because they couldn't heal or tank. I just didn't understand it because they were advertised as hybrids; what do you mean you can't heal or tank??? You're a hybrid!

This would further cement the DIFFERENCES as opposed to similarities between the games, nullifying your own topic.



-Trade system being integral to gameplay isn't really an original WoW idea. It started with SWG, and was carried on in EQ 2.

Trade system was technically in EQ1 before EQ2 since Shadows of Luclin introduced the bazaar. You could argue that the WoW trade system is most similar to SoL EQ1 as far as timeline and development. But I think its a vast improvement over the EQ bazaar system, which ended up being both worse than classic EQ tunnel and WoWs auction room. Any EQ2 stuff is always going to be irrelevant to WoW copying as stated above, they released within 2 weeks of eachother.

-Griffin travel? I mean you may have a point there, but EQ had teleports, portals, PoK books, and boats long before WoW was even conceptualized. And ironically most people agree, even blizzard employees, that flying ruined WoW.


WoW was conceptualized way before 1999, but development did start in 1999, meaning when WoW was conceptualized, EQ Was not out yet. Eq classic was out when WoW began development, so only teleports and boats would be relevant means of egress. Also, you are misinterpreting what flying these people are talking about, they are not referring to the griffin travel, but the flying mounts of TBC. Griffin travel I would say is far more unique than anything they would have copied from EQ. Boat travel and teleport spells are very similar to EQ in the sense they are probably the closest argument to "copy paste" so far, but griffin travel is far more original and clearly not an EQ influence....


-The fashion quest customization part triggered me. EverQuest had custom cowls, and you could literally dye your armor. The transmog system? It was copy/pasta'd from Rift, but the version in Rift, called the wardrobe system, was superior in every way. So superior in fact, that WoW's next expac is adopting it. Unfortunately we still won't be able to dye our armor in WoW. I'm sure they will eventually add it in a future expac and pretend like it's new groundbreaking content.


I know this is an off topic aspect but now we are talking modern systems and so irrelevant.

This part triggered me too. I spent the last few years of my EQ career playing on Sullon Zek. You couldn't communicate with separate factions. I don't think anyone would actually argue that the language system in WoW is more advanced than the language system in EverQuest. Quite the opposite.

Language system being more advanced I agree that is not the case. Hard coding racial factions to two sides is also more simplified than EQ's multi faction multi race systems they implemented. I do believe EQ's system superior here, and maybe you could argue WoW copied this and dumbed it down, but Orcs vs Humans was 1993(?) I think? So they always had factions at the core of the lore/game, so I am not sure how much we can draw from this pertaining to the original topic other than EQ did it better, as opposed to WoW copying it.


Again I know my quotes of you are not all necessarily directed at the original topic, but they help prove multiple points on how WoW was not trying to copy/paste EQ.