nah, wow isn't low fantasy. the story maybe mean and gritty, but everything is magical and everyone has magic items and monsters are everywhere. that is basically the difference between high and low fantasy as i understand it.

low fantasy being pretty much like the real world except there is magic and monsters in the hidden parts of the world which to most people it's just a myth.

tolkien being low fantasy, where 99% of people will never even meet an orc or goblin in their life times and where even the highest king wouldn't know that there was a balrog in khazad dum.

but still, in some cases i'm am partial to high fantasy :P

WoW has the same quests for people aye, but also has that many different quests, unless your toodling alongside someone else helping each other as you go on, there still is a chance of not getting the same quests as your mates.

Fighting wise, lately its gone into a lull while people get levels up, but still get the occasional person sneak up onto you and beat you senseless whilst you were happily killing 1-4 monsters. Best thing yet, you get the kiddies who aint got the expansion yet, still going to the mixed leveling zones, hitting people 30-40 levels below them, because they can *grins*(equiv of a newbie char on uo going to fell and getting beaten in by 6x120 char).

Scenario-wise, on the expansion, aint seen anywhere within the expansion that I could say has bad visual content really. The grinding still is annoying tho

an interesting definition of low fantasy.

id have low fantasy down as no magical creatures and no monsters and no magick anywhere.

__________________
sigged by Firebird of Stratics! Thanks!

The quests, while not unique for you (how would you do that anyway?), are quite elaborate and the storylines (if you bother reading them) are well thought out. some of the quests are a bit dull, like a the myriad fed-ex missions and "kill 20 rabbits" things, but some quest chains are really fun and interesting.

As for the woes of PvP servers, I recently put that behind me (migrated my main and one other char over to a PvE server). I just found that world PvP is just annoying, while adding nothing to the game really. If I want to smack alliance I'll head for one of the battlegrounds!

__________________

http://www.futt.org/

well yes. the lower the fantasy the less magic and monsters you get.

I'd say you can put it on a scale. the higher it gets the more real monsters and magic become, the lower the fantasy the more mythical monsters and magic become until you reach a state where you basically are just in another world like our own where we hear about "magic" and monsters (loch ness anyone?) but no one ever sees it and if you do no one really believes you.


I don't see why making quests that aren't unrealistically duplicated would be so difficult.. you've just got to avoid having named characters in them who get killed over and over again.

If you mean just replacing "Evil Archmage Johnny" with "Generic Evil Archmage" I guess that would be easy to do - I'm guessing they have named mobs to give players some sense of accomplishment. Having quests that can only be completed once by one player they'd quickly run out of content.

__________________

http://www.futt.org/

Well I think you just got to make content that is part of a specific duty for a certain level or rank of person. So all players that are human warriors and part of the alliance guard or whatever have to perform certain duties to progress. This can be the same for everyone as they progress.

I just don't like the way they try to bring in an element of single player-ness into MMOs. I know that some people want to solo in MMOs but the whole point of an MMO in the first is that it is a massive multiplayer world. It's an online alternative reality. So I think it's got to move and behave like another reality, even if it's a cartoon MMO.

Oh, there are (somewhat) race-specific quests, and there are class specific quests as well. So an undead rogue would have an entirely different starting area (and thus chain of quests) than an orc warlock, and he would also have sub-quests that are for rogues only (and the warlock would have his own of course). I believe the alliance and horde quests are completely different, maybe a couple of common ones.

__________________

http://www.futt.org/

well that is sort of expected

but i really meant in the quest catergories, ie, a undead rogues quest list, duplicated in an unreal way?

like, all undead rogues fight a guy called bob and bob gets killed 200 times a day as new undead rogues go through that part of the story, which is the same for all starting undead rogues. rather than them completing tasks which can be the same for everyone but not in an unreasonable way.

The problem with that approach is that you remove any sense of accomplishment and make the task seem completely futile. "Go kill Evil Bob the criminal mastermind - For the Horde!!" sounds a lot more meaningful and compelling than "Yay, lookie, a gray mass of anonymous evil... people. Think you can manage to whack one of em? Not that it matters..." So Bob will respawn later on and thus you haven't really accomplished anything, but don't underestimate the player's ability to suspend disbelief if it's wrapped up in a good story and presented to him with an incentive.

__________________

http://www.futt.org/

And quest based experience is infinatley more worthwhile than grinding mobs.

With a quest you get to learn about whats going on - even if it is a static world environment =)

__________________
sigged by Firebird of Stratics! Thanks!

well imo that's where making a good quest based MMO has to achieve. making tasks that have some meaning for the lower level people. it could be recon, which will change depending on what they see. patrolling, which could change with changing monster spawns. sending messages, drill, gathering things, stuff like that. i'm sure there is probably some of that in the game, but i'd have thought it wouldn't be such a hard step from there to make some more interesting tasks which don't go into those kinds of world saving missions for level 1 baby sitters.

things that always get me is once i reach level 20, for example, i look back at when i was level 5 and think. what a stupid mission that was back then when i supposedly "saved the world" by killing evil mastermind bob..

Well there aren't any "save the world" type quests at level 1 really - and there are a lot of different types of quests. You have your run-of-the-mill killing sprees, deliveries, resource gathering, profession related quests (crafting), hell even fishing. Then there are a plethora of different factions, all with different agendas and quests - some of which you have to build their trust (faction alignment) to get to. No, the WoW quest system is not perfect but of all the MMOGs I've tried it is definitely the best I've seen so far.

__________________

http://www.futt.org/

"but of all the MMOGs I've tried it is definitely the best I've seen so far."

Couldnt agree more with that one - as a solo game on the PVE/RP servers it honeslty rocks in 2-3 month periods with casual play.

For hardcore players with plenty of time id go rpvp.

But it keeps me amused for a 20 min "jump on the pc" session =)

__________________
sigged by Firebird of Stratics! Thanks!

sounds cool

i'm just very bored at work so i felt like having a little debate hehe.

i always fancied playing a priest, but the fact priests couldn't wear plate annoyed me, which is almost one of the reasons i chose to try EQ2 over WOW, because in EQ2 i could play as a templar, which is a cool warrior preist.