63 replies to this topic

[Arquenya]

RedStar, on 02 December 2012 - 03:35 PM, said:

They are obvious similarities in the same way that if you read two different paper on the Cold War you are bound to find mentions of the Berlin Wall and the Korean War. Does this mean that one of them copied on the other ? Not really, it simply means that you can't really talk about the Cold War without mentioning that.
Just like that as a MMO designer you want your players to find a race they like, so you give them humans, a bigger bulky race, a race close to nature, one that's beastly and one that is small. And then you assign to each of those races some character traits that blend well together according to your target audience.

(Yeah it's an awful analogy, but hopefully you'll get what I'm trying to say).

Yeah it's an awful analogy indeed!

The cold war is a fact. Fantasy MMO's aren't facts, they're a bit of a adaption of what originally were tabletop games like D&D which were mostly based on/inspired by Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
What we a.o. got from those are character stats and classes. Dungeons made for a specific number of players. Those are your "Berlin Wall and the Korean War". And the whole of history's mythology and fairytale creatures and lore mixed in.

How armour pieces are designed, crafting works or what races and their characteristics are concerned, it's totally up to game designers because it didn't all exist yet. If you played a lot of other games, you'll see that they did those completely different from WoW, like coupling a short race with science, technology and robots. Or how crafting works. How you call your regions.

WhiIe I do agree that for instance having light/medium/heavy armour is very generic, I think the other features I mentioned can't possibly be a "coincidence". If WoW hadn't existed, the chance that so many things in GW2 were so similar as they're now would be close to zero.

Edited by Arquenya, 02 December 2012 - 04:04 PM.

[RedStar]

Arquenya, on 02 December 2012 - 03:59 PM, said:

WhiIe I do agree that for instance having light/medium/heavy armour is very generic, I think the other features I mentioned can't possibly be a "coincidence". If WoW hadn't existed, the chance that so many things in GW2 were so similar as they're now would be close to zero.

I'm not too sure about that. From the things you mentioned, different colored letters for different tiers is something pretty simple. If you want to show a gathering node on a mini map, what's the most simple way ? Putting an icon that depicts what kind of node it is. However I don't enough about the other crafting systems to see how they are different and if they are better.

The names however aren't a coincidence. It's not the first time Anet does this. I doubt it was to have a laugh at WoW so maybe it was a nod or something like that.

Big shoulder pads are something I dislike. GW2 has them and it also have more down to earth options.

As for the characteristics : it isn't so much WoW as to what Anet thinks its target audience wants and always listening to them and their ideas (if players showed total hate for the Charr or didn't care at all about Gwen, I'm not sure that EotN and GW2 would have looked the same).

But anyway, we are talking about pretty useless stuff. It's not as if you said that GW2 copied one its core mechanic from WoW.

[Ardeni]

Arquenya, on 02 December 2012 - 03:20 PM, said:

I don't see my claims as "ridiculous". And as I already said in my former post I definitely don't think GW2 is a WoW clone, I just pointed out the obvious similarities. The fact that WoW didn't invent the term "gnomes" has nothing to do with the fact that also having a short, nerdy, science orientated, robot building race in a fantasy world is a bit too obvious to be a coincidence. Whether you call that race Asura, Gnomes, Smurfs, Humptydumpties or whatever ..

Why they´re more similar to WoW than other games I don´t know.
Perhaps the fact that ANet was founded by former Blizzard employees has something to do with it?

The point is that you can't know whether Arenanet took hints about these things from WoW. It is totally possible that a person who never played or even knew much about WoW would have had the idea of getting airships into the game or some designer would have designed the big shoulderpads even though he/she never touched video games. As for the Asuras, midget-like creatures exist in almost every MMO which I have played. These things are so minor that they most likely have nothing to do with WoW's success. Thus I don't think it is very likely that somebody thought "Oh hey! WoW has gnomes in them. We need midgets as well. Ah, they have airships! Airships are clearly something that we need to succeed as well!".

[Jobuu]

i dont agree with the slow combat statement. going from a tauren shaman whose hooves were glued to the ground to a human mesmer feels like playing the game in fast forward to me. I'm enjoying the game even though the end game is a bit lacking. I'll get flamed for bringing this up again but people forget the end game in original WOW. I hit 60 and quit because it was nothing but 2 hour shouting for groups... that's after you grinded from 55ish to 60 because they ran out of quests lol. Here's being hopeful of the next patch.