Torn between games

I continue being buffeted between the two big games, Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft. Saturday the EQ2 beta ended. My last deed in there was that I tried to find out how the new catalogue quests worked, which just had been implemented, but I failed to get them working. I already got a mail from the Sony Station shop that EQ2 was "in stock" now, but I guess they won't send it before today. If I'm lucky I'll have the game in hands before the weekend.

Meanwhile I played the World of Warcraft open beta, as this might be my last chance to play the game before the European release in February/March 2005. I'm playing only one character this time, a Tauren Shaman, and a bit over 30 hours into the game I am now level 19. Level 20, with its cool ghost wolf ability for faster run speed beckons. One could probably reach level 20 in WoW in 30 hours without breaking a sweat. But even played less efficienctly, running all over the place to do quests, and doing a bit of tradeskills as well, level 20 shouldn't take more than 50 hours.

Level 20 in EQ takes a lot longer. The first ten or so levels go equally fast, but somewhere in the mid-teens there is a noticeable slowdown. Unfortunately I couldn't correctly measure how long it took me to reach level 20 with my Warden (sort of druid). The /played command says it took over 200 hours, but I did spend some nights away from keyboard (AFK), but logged in, to be able to sell goods in EQ2's semi-automated trading system. But I'm pretty sure level 20 took me over 100 hours in EQ2.

I don't know how the leveling curve continues for these two games, but it is obviously a lot faster to reach the highest level in WoW than in EQ2. I might actually be able to reach the highest level for the first time in a MMORPG before my attention span runs out. And that is a good thing. I would rather reach the highest level, and then start the next character because it was so much fun, than to give up in frustration because the progress has become glacial.

Another new World of Warcraft experience was my first instanced dungeon. These are filled with "Elite" monsters, which corresponds to the double-arrow-up "group" monsters in EQ2. So this is not a place to solo, but to have fun in a group for a few hours. Being instanced means that there is no interference between your group and other players. This makes it possible to create a believable dungeon, where the group first has to vanquish a horde of minor monsters, to finally arrive at the boss monster at the end. In fact there were several different boss monsters at different ends in the Ragefire Chasm I visited, with 5 quests in total attached to them. The group curiously consisted of 5 shaman, level 14 to 16, with 5 being the maximum group size in WoW. This is not something I would have tried in EQ2, where character classes are much more specialized. But in WoW it worked well enough. We had quite a number of deaths, but with shaman being able to resurrect, and WoW not having a death xp penalty, we just needed to wait 2 minutes for the rez effect to go away before being able to continue. We killed every monster in the dungeon at least once, they respawn but slowly, and finished all our quests. Loads of fun, and finished with more than 1 level worth of xp, plus lots of "phat lewt" treasure.

This much calmed my fear that World of Warcraft was not a social game. Right now I like the compromise very much. If you don't want to group, you are not forced to. You simple have to skip the quests marked "Elite". If you do want to group, the instanced dungeons offer a very nice grouping experience, of reasonable length, and with an appropriate reward for the added hassle of having to organize a group. And of course you can alway form short-term partnerships for specific goals, when you find yourself on the same quest as other people. Add a guild with a nice guild chat, the occasional harmless PvP excursion just for fun, and WoW is as social as you could wish.

Which seriously makes me wonder what I will play next weekend, provided nothing goes wrong with the shipping of EQ2. As long as EQ2 doesn't arrive, or if it arrives but has serious server problems (which is definitely in the realm of the possible), I would be more than happy to play WoW instead. World of Warcraft is the better game, at least for me it is. On the other hand, WoW is just a beta, and it will end soon. Official release date is November 23rd, so I guess the beta will end 2 or 3 days before that. And then I'm dry until the European release early next year. So do I really want to level up a character that is going to be wiped shortly afterwards? Or do I want to start with my "real" Everquest 2 character, which I am probably be going to play for a couple of months? If EQ2 has a smooth start, I'm tending towards EQ2. But I guess my frustration resistance will be quite low, so if problems happen, I'll be back to WoW.

I should be thankful to Blizzard, but of course I ain't, that they end my torn state between the two games in two weeks, by not letting me play the live version of World of Warcraft. But for those of you that live in North America and thus have the choice, and are still torn, maybe I can offer some cartoon advice I found.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:00 PM Permanent Link