http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/p ... 46#1580246
The reasons why WoW has 9 million subscribers and EQ2 has only 173k are quite numerous but lets list them.
1. Polish at release. WoW was exceptionaly well polished at release with every little detail fantistically done from the wag of a Tauren's tail to little touches hidden in dungeons. EQ2 wasw rough and should have not been released for at least another year. Gamers will only give a game once chance. If your not ready at release you will never get a second chance. What is inetresting now is SOE is spending a ton oif money tryiong to convince people that EQ2 is making acomeback. They have given over 200k people free copies of EQ2 all the expansions and free play time in hopes of convincing people that there are people actually playing this game. Will it work? Maybe, its quite a good idea for a company that is in quite a desperate situation.
2. Fun Wow was fun, it had humor and played smooth. EQ2 was drab, boring and ugly and lacked severely in the fun factor. I played in both betas and I fully expected to hate WoW and love EQ2 but it turned out the opposite but EQ2 simply lacked that fun factor.
3. Quests While EQ2 to its credit tried to copy WoW's quest system late in beta and shift to quest directed gameplay it quests lacked the imagination, organization and design that WoW's quests had. WoW used centralized quest hubs to limit the running. EQ2 used a lot more Fed ex type quests with a lot more running and spread out over larger areas. EQ2 quests lacked the flow of WoW's quests giving the player a much more forced feeling. EQ2 spawns at release often did not have near enough spawns to handle their quests and often required a great deal of waiting for mobs to respawn. WoW's quests were also more complex and strategic requiring players to work their way thru mobs slowly and patientlky to their goal. Camps and quests were designed and arranged in such a way to require a progression and give a feeling of accomplishment rather than mowing down mindless mobs. This was really one of the brilliant achievements of WoW. The leveling time at release was not much faster than other games but the quest directed and progressive gameplay with constant achiement gave players the impression that were not grinding and that they were leveling much faster. WoW also used more modern technolgy at release wiyth many intersting clicky and suprise quests. Lastly the story in WoW's quests were considerably better.
4. Class Design Blizzard did a fantastic job of fleshing out their classes and making them unique and fun in their own way. EQ2 used the archetype system where classes werew all quite esimilar especially at release and not unique.EQ2 had 16 classes at release but it was more like 4 classes with small differences. I remeber being overwhelmed by how unimaginative and stale EQ2 classes seemed.
5. The World EQ2's world was boring, dark, drab, very small, lacking in variety, poorly designed and instanced. WoW's worlds was huge coompraed to EQ2, seamless, offering variety, wonder and containing many hidden nooks and crannies filled with suprises.
6. Details WoW's success was about detail. Every area, every character, every dungeon, every feature was broken down and polished to the smallest detail. Blizzard would introduce new content, polish it shine and it made sure it works fantastic before releasing it. At release rtaher than intoducing new content they went thru every quest in the game and made small minor changes such as movinga NPC to a better place even if only 10 feet. But the approach here was lets make it perfect before we start adding new content. SOE had the opposite approach. They would find an idea in another game put it into EQ2 with little thought how it would affect the world and not worry about bugs, polish, QA and then move to the next idea. No QA all quantity over quality. While some ideas shined like their quest journal most ideas were bland and boring.
7. Grahics EQ2's world was drab, boring and not alive. The character models are awful blocky, stiff and they look plastic. WoW's world and charcters look alive. The characters and sway when they walk and tun and the graphics and world are much more immersive. In the screenshots EQ2 looked great and much better than WoW but actually playing the games was the complete opposite. I remeber playing EQ2 after WoW and having to log out many times because the game just looked so ugly in comparison.
8. Open Beta Blizzard set SOE up. They knew they had the better game and they knew how greedy and impatient SOE was ands how much SOE wanted to release EQ2. They just waited and kept developing until EQ2 announced their release date then they lowered the boom and startd thier open beta for 500k people a few days before EQ2's release. Effectively killing any chance EQ2 would ever have of being successful a game. Ruthless.
9. Dungeons WoW released with many well done dungeons. EQ2 with few that were even mediocre.
10. Orginality WoW desigend itself for casual players, solo players and made its entire game directed around quests. Many people if not most people in the industry thought these ideas would fail miserably. By the time SOE found out how well recieved these ideas were it was to late fo them to change their game design and compete with WoW. Instead they just had to play catch up. The problem here for EQ2 was they were just trying to make their game be a copy of WoW without the resources, knowledge, or time to effectively replicate the game they were competing with.
11. Blizzard vs SOE Competence vs incompetence. Short term profits vs. long term profits. A desire to make fun games vs. A company that only cares about making short term profits. The biggest difference here is Blizzards number one goal is to make fun quality games. They know if they achieve this goal they will make money. This is a lesson SOE has never learned. If you design your games for fun rather than let your marketing department design them for hype you will make a lot more money in the long run.
12. Money Blizzard spent $75 million developing WoW and SOE reportedly only spent $25 million.
Whats intersting here is both games sold a ton of copies right away. After about 1-2 months both games had close to an equal amount of subscribers. WoW then desided not to release any new boxes for sale for a month or two so as not to stress their servers, staff and allow themselves to continue improving the game. EQ2 apoplogists trry to say WoW had all the hype but that is not true EQ2 was the bigger game and the game more people were looking forward to/ The sales and subs were even for for the first few months. What set the two games apart was not the hype but the quality of the two games, the design, the difference in company philosphies, the deatils, and most of all the fun factor. WOW was simply a well made fun game. If not for WoW EQ2 would have most likely been better received and a great success. WoW simply raised the bar of quality. One may not like their game design and I for one do not but I cannot help but acknowledge how well their game was made. WoW forced SOE to change the game design of EQ2 and redo their game to be more like WoW. They simply could not compete with WoW at release. There are no second chances. EQ2 will never be what it could have been.
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