Wildstar

[Hiromi]

So, early access starts next Saturday, did anyone else play the beta like me and get completely suckered into pre ordering it? Sigh.

Though honestly going solely by the Beta it felt like a lot of fun, moreso than any MMO I've played in a while. And God help me I loved the art style.

[wjowski]

Lemme go ahead and save everyone sixty bucks. It's WoW with Secret World's combat system.

[Xero Kaiser]

"It's like WoW if WoW's combat, mechanics and character building were completely different!"

And The Secret World's combat? Really? How? TSW had standard tab-targeting and auto-aim combat.

[wjowski]

"It's like WoW if WoW's combat, mechanics and character building were completely different!"

And The Secret World's combat? Really? How? TSW had standard tab-targeting and auto-aim combat.

Same 'Dance Dance Revolution' dodge system. Oh, and they took Champions Online 'spam button to shorten CC length' too, I guess.

And really combat's about the only difference. Same 'grind quests to level' system, same 'trap vs character impovement' talen-er, AMP system, same 'everyone's standing around waiting for you to do stuff for them' atomsphere, same 'eternal treadmill' design philosophy.

[Hiromi]

Nothing you just listed was ever unique to Warcraft, at all, they're staples of the entire genre and were already old and established by 2005 when WoW was released. It's like calling a platformer a Mario clone because there's too much jumping around.

[wjowski]

Nothing you just listed was ever unique to Warcraft, at all, they're staples of the entire genre and were already old and established by 2005 when WoW was released. It's like calling a platformer a Mario clone because there's too much jumping around.

Not unique maybe but WoW indisputably popularized them. Before them things like questing for XP or talent trees were relegated to niche games like Anarchy Online or Asheron's Call 2. They certainly weren't to be found in Everquest or Final Fantasy XI, the previous major MMOs.

[Hiromi]

Funny, because I played Everquest a few years, and I distinctly remember completing quests for various rewards, reputation, items, experience, whatever. Two seconds in google confirmed my memory
http://everquest.allakhazam.com/qgen/

And I love how quests are now considered "grinding" since they more or less replaced mob grinding, which was considered the real monotony when talking about MMOs.

It all come back to the "endless treadmill" you mentioned, hate to break it to you but that's not going away, ever. it's how MMOs keep their player base and in turn make more money, if you don't like that then you just plain don't like the genre, and it's present in some way shape or form in virtually every MMO ever made.

[Xero Kaiser]

Not unique maybe but WoW indisputably popularized them. Before them things like questing for XP or talent trees were relegated to niche games like Anarchy Online or Asheron's Call 2. They certainly weren't to be found in Everquest or Final Fantasy XI, the previous major MMOs.

Everquest had Alternate Advancement. A set of skills you could give your character that was separated into 3 trees.

This was in 2001.

[Hiromi]

It should come to no surprise to anyone that the original WoW devs readily admitted to basing the game heavily HEAVILY off of Everquest which they were all veteran players of.