Blackmoor Vituperative

I spent about 5 hours today playing World Of Warcraft for the first time, using a 10-day free trial. I played EverQuest years and years ago, but I have forgotten most of how that game worked, so my main basis for comparison will be Guild Wars, which I have been playing reasonably regularly for about four months.

The look and feel of World Of Warcraft is much more “cartoony” than Guild Wars, and I personally like the landscapes in Guild Wars a lot better. They’re just beautiful, particularly Cantha (the Asian-style continent). I have been to two continents in World Of Warcraft. One is a sort of cartoon forest with lots of graveyards, which is neat in a sort of “Nightmare Before Christmas” way. The other is a large desert, which looks like a cross between the the Flintstones and the desert where Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote had their battles of wits. So far, Guild Wars wins for look and feel.

The interface in Guild Wars is very similar to the one on World Of Warcraft, which is probably to be expected: buttons across the bottom, radar map in the upper right, character status in the upper left. Pretty typical. There are a few things that Guild Wars’s user interface provides that World Of Warcraft doesn’t, and I really missed them. The main thing I miss is being able to see at a glance where friends and foes are on the radar map. If there is a simple way to see who’s around you in World Of Warcraft, I haven’t found it yet. That’s a huge drawback. I do not see the point of having radar at all if enemies don’t show up on it.

The other user interface difference is the keyboard commands for targeting. In Guild Wars, it’s a simple matter to target the closest enemy, or closest friend, and then cycle through them in either direction (from closest to farthest, or farthest to closest). No tedious mousing around and clicking is required. In World Of Warcraft, I initially thought that it didn’t have a targeting key at all, because even though the online guide I found said that you could target the nearest enemy by pressing TAB, nothing happened when I pressed TAB. I eventually figured out that you can only use TAB to target an enemy when you are basically right on top of them. This is another huge drawback, probably even bigger than the lack of a useful radar. It makes fighting an exercise in mousing and clicking and mousing and clicking. Some folks may like that. I find it annoying and primitive.

So far, Guild Wars wins for the user interface.

World Of Warcraft has a much wider variety of available characters than Guild Wars. Guild Wars has three races of humans, and ten classes. World Of Warcraft has ten races and nine classes, although all nine classes are not available to any given race. This gives World Of Warcraft roughly twice as many race+class combinations as Guild Wars. So for character options, World Of Warcraft wins.

I have done a number of quests in World Of Warcraft, and so far they seem on par with the quests one performs in Guild Wars. For quest quality, it’s a tie. However, Guild Wars makes it much easier to track quests than World Of Warcraft does. This ties back into the radar screen: in Guild Wars, you can click the quest and a pointer shows up on the radar screen leading you to it. World Of Warcraft doesn’t do anything like that, as far as I can tell. If it weren’t for internet sites like World Of Warcraft Cartography, I would still be wandering around trying to figure out where to go. So for quest tracking, the clear advantage goes to Guild Wars.

I can’t claim to have fought a statistically significant number of monsters in World Of Warcraft in just five hours, but based on what I have seen so far, I would say that monster variety and the animation quality is roughly on par with Guild Wars. For monster variety and animation quality, it’s a tie.

Both Guild Wars and World Of Warcraft have a penalty for dying, but they each handle it slightly differently. In Guild Wars, the character can either be resurrected on the spot by a teammate or henchman, or the character will appear at the closest shrine. All of the character’s equipment is intact, but her effective level is reduced by a percentage (the character’s actual level and experience gained is unaffected). That “death penalty” is removed either by killing more creatures or by returning to a town, which resets everything. In World Of Warcraft, the player has a choice of either being resurrected at the closest shrine or of running for a while back to her corpse and being resurrected there. Unlike Guild Wars, there is no “death penalty”. Instead, the character’s equipment is damaged (10% if the character runs back to her corpse, 25% if she doesn’t). There may be wrinkles to this in World Of Warcraft that I don’t see yet, but so far, I would say that both games handle death in a reasonable fashion. Tied for handling of character death.

So, for most game-play issues, I would say that the games are about tied. However, due to the user interface issues, World Of Warcraft is a much, much more difficult game to play. I do not mean “difficult” in the sense of being challenging. I mean “difficult” in the sense of one game simply making the task of moving and fighting more tedious and awkward than it needs to be.

So far, I would say that Guild Wars has the clear advantage.

However, I have only played a few hours, up to level 8. It remains to be seen how the game play will change once I get access to more abilities and begin to explore more of the world. By all accounts, World Of Warcraft really shines in this area. I am looking forward to finding out.