Istaria is like WoW? no wai

[meepsa]

ok, just a random post, not sure wether I should post it in here, but oh wellz.

I was playing FH (FeralHeart) today (ok, I wasn't playing, I was looking for a friend, sorta...) and saw the word "Istaria" pop-up in the general chat, and so, the lovely pink dragoness starts answering questions, then this dude starts popping up, and says: "istaria is a WoW ripoff".

there I was, staring at my screen for quite a while, till I finally replied with "what?! are you crazy or something??? istaria is NOTHING like WoW" then we got into this discussion about WoW and "all other games", in the end, I simply replied with "all games are ripoffs from pong, since it was the first game ever made" and left FH.

now, it might just be me, but in my eyes the ONLY things that WoW and Istaria share, is that you have to pay for it, and that they are MMORPGs.

so, my confuzzled little mind asks YOU what YOU think about "istaria=WoW rip off"

[Frith-Rae]

Eh you could have ended it by just saying "How is that possible Istaria was released first?" LOL

But no they have many other things in common, but most of those fall under the "general MMORPG" and "fantasy" category really. Something 95% of all "Mmorpgs" right now have in common. (I.e. things like gain through levels, fantasy races, quests, crafting, etc.)

Just his real mistake was getting the timeline wrong - seems to me you could have bonked him just for that and let the rest drop. =D Don't feed a troll!

[Kesqui]

As previously pointed out, seeing as Istaria (or at least Horizons) is OLDER than World of Warcraft.... wouldn't that make WoW the rip-off if either of them was one?

[meepsa]

haha, but there is something "I" didn't know lol, well ok, I kinda guessed it was, but can't keep up a normal discussion with just guesses

[Akrion]

This is exactly the point I was trying to make in this thread http://community.istaria.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=23935 xD

WoW just has that stigma, unfortunately. People just, for some reason, like comparing MMO's to WoW and dictating if a game is worth playing or not through that.

"I really think the WoW comparisons just need to go away." x3

And yeah, like previously said, simply mentioning that Istaria has at least a year on WoW would put a person like that in their place real quick. (Or saying that WoW, or any MMORPG for that matter, are technically an Ultima Online ripoff, since that's where the term came from.)

[Darkwing_Duck]

omg NUUUUUU!
*noms the guy who said that about Istaria* :P

[Dracana]

I don't play too often anymore but this was obviously said by someone who seems to have the MMORPG = WoW train of thought going and have never seen much less played the game.

[Dhalin]

All MMORPGs have a few things in common, at least the fantasy-based ones.

You run around, hack up stuff, get XP, gain levels. You equip stuff on your character, you try to get money to buy things from an AH/Consignment, and you can craft stuff.

But to compare Istaria to WoW? That's pure lunacy...

WoW makes you pick a class and never allows you to deviate from that class (though you have 3 different talent point specializations you can choose, which does modify how the class is played so basically WoW has 30 classes; you pick a group of 3 when you make your character).

With crafting, Istaria's crafting is way different. It is based upon a grindy XP system, whereas WoW involves running around hunting nodes to gather from (which are fairly rare and spread out).

There's just.... so many differences to even start pointing out, that it boggles the mind that people would try to compare the two. lol.

[Darkwing_Duck]

WoW`s very limited when it comes to schools. Istaria you can take them all!
and the crafting system, though grindy, has much more possibilites then WoW.
I mean where else can you build your own personalized plot or dragons lair?

[Veruliyam]

On the floor of your living room with Legos?

[Thicklesip]

On the floor of your living room with Legos?

That never works from me, eventually people start yelling at me to take it apart so they can walk through the room again.


/rerail: Congratulations! You either ran into a moment of stupid that would have been fixed by 1-2 polite sentences (yes WoW came out after, WAY after, my dragon was an 81 crafter before I was lured away by WoW's prettyshiny) or else you just tried to reason a troll into submission. Given that apparently it spiraled into an "argh! /walkaway" moment, I suspect a troll.

The "most fantasy MMOs share many, many features" thing has been covered, as well as "Istaria is not WoW, and vice versa."* In case it ever comes up again, if a few politely-worded volleys of facts doesn't achieve the desired result, they're either an idiot or a troll and you should probably cut your losses.



*Since you made the mistake of asking, I have to say the games are utterly different. WoW's lore/story is so bad I think my 9 year old brother could write a better, more coherent one; Istaria suffers from a lore so interesting I have occasionally found myself talking to NPCs just so I could read their stories. WoW's combat system is flawed but so good even I enjoy it; Istaria's combat system makes me cry tears of blood. Istaria has playable dragons; WoW has... bipedal cows. WoW has colorful, stylized graphics that trick the eye into seeing a lot without one's computer expiring under the workload; Istaria has graphics that hit every branch on their fall out of the Old tree. WoW has, hands down, the worst, most annoying, least fun crafting system of any game I have tried, ever; Istaria has crafting that remains champion all these years later. WoW has the mind-blowing eyecandy minigame of hunter pets; Istaria has housing and gear dyes.

Leaving aside mind-numbing dissections of whether the games are similar in flavor and genre, it seems to me like calling them the same is approximately like calling Minesweeper and Freecell the same game. They're both GAMES, you can play either of them on the computer... but what you'd get out of them just seems too different to get a good comparison. (Of course, anyone with two brain cells to rub together would instantly understand this, so if someone brings it up they're likely a dunce or a troll.)

[Dhalin]

Aww, now you've gone and done it hehe.

Since you made the mistake of asking, I have to say the games are utterly different. WoW's lore/story is so bad I think my 9 year old brother could write a better, more coherent one;

Some elements of the lore are cliche-ish, others are actually pretty ingenious and complex.

Istaria suffers from a lore so interesting I have occasionally found myself talking to NPCs just so I could read their stories.

Yeah, they pretty much said "Here's a fantasy world, it is slowly being eaten by The Blight/The WA, go out there and kill undead! Oh, btw, you're immortal and you can resurrect as many times as you want. Go get em!"

WoW's combat system is flawed but so good even I enjoy it; Istaria's combat system makes me cry tears of blood.

Not really seeing the flaws of WoW's combat, except PvP which I'm not interested in. Yeah, Istaria needs serious work here.

Istaria has playable dragons; WoW has... bipedal cows.

I -love- Tauren. And Draenei! But I also love Istaria's playable dragons, too.

WoW has colorful, stylized graphics that trick the eye into seeing a lot without one's computer expiring under the workload;

Get a good, strong, robust computer, and jack the settings up to Ultra, get on a flying mount and ascend in, say, Terokkar Forest or Nagrand, or Grizzly Hills.... it'll blow your mind away.

Istaria has graphics that hit every branch on their fall out of the Old tree.

Istaria had -the- best graphics of any MMORPG of its time, IIRC. Even today the graphics still look OK, though they could use a little more variety in armor and weapons.

WoW has, hands down, the worst, most annoying, least fun crafting system of any game I have tried, ever; Istaria has crafting that remains champion all these years later.

Personal preference I suppose, but if you want a most annoying craft system, try FFXI someday. It'll blow your mind away, at how asinine that system can possibly be.

WoW has the mind-blowing eyecandy minigame of hunter pets; Istaria has housing and gear dyes.

Blizzard has already released info about a possible upcoming armor dye system, so....

Oh, and Mount/Pet Collecting is fun. Also, achievements rule.

[Thicklesip]

I wrote out a long, involved post responding to (nearly) all of Dhalin's points, and then realized it'd just mean I'd Wall O' Texted twice in a single thread in a way that wasn't even particularly on topic. So I deleted it all.

You're welcome.

Before I stroll off to the Off-topic forum, I just wanted to emphasize that dealing with strangers is easiest when you're super-polite and assume that there's an incredibly good chance that they will be 1. an idiot or 2. a troll. If your first one or two attempts at "getting through" to them don't work, cut your losses and run. Unless you're (counter)trolling, at which point I don't know what to tell you. But nice people don't troll, right?

[LungTien Temeraire]

Istaria has playable dragons; WoW has... bipedal cows.

Bipedal cows? *The black ancient licks his maws. "Do they taste good?"

[Dragonboy]

Blizzard has already released info about a possible upcoming armor dye system, so....

A colleague at work seem to be a real WoW player… He showed me the gear he wore at the moment of his log off on some online website… His character’s armor truly had all the colors of the rainbow and looked really strange… So in the future he will only have a strange looking armor, but atleast it is possible to get normal colors?

Back on topic…
How do you think it is possible that all people compare every fantasy MMO to WoW. When I walk into any record/dvd/games store near my home I have at least 4 different game boxes from WoW from 7 MMO boxes that are for sale (all other games of course being single player). So it would be logical that people think that WoW is the best and maybe even get mentally troubled enough to think that every game is a WoW rip off.

However when people want to troll and dung dip any game you can better ignore them instead of trying to reason with them… Waste of time.

[Dhalin]

I wrote out a long, involved post responding to (nearly) all of Dhalin's points, and then realized it'd just mean I'd Wall O' Texted twice in a single thread in a way that wasn't even particularly on topic. So I deleted it all.

You're welcome.

Before I stroll off to the Off-topic forum, I just wanted to emphasize that dealing with strangers is easiest when you're super-polite and assume that there's an incredibly good chance that they will be 1. an idiot or 2. a troll. If your first one or two attempts at "getting through" to them don't work, cut your losses and run. Unless you're (counter)trolling, at which point I don't know what to tell you. But nice people don't troll, right?

You're welcome to PM that or something, because I'm curious as to what sort of "wall of text" you could really respond to what I said with, considering I was 50% agreeing with what you said...

[Miravlix]

1> Istaria is older.
2> Istaria is a MMORPG 1.0 where WoW is a 2.0

Definition of MMORPG 1.0

In these games the developer provides a framework for players to have fun together.

Defintion of MMORPG 2.0

Here you get a much more limited game, but with e-sport elements. They are all about being the best at this and the best at that, beating others.



There is also sandbox vs theme park differences. Istaria is a sandbox where WoW is a Theme Park.


Just because it's 1.0 and 2.0 doesn't mean 2.0 is automatically better, though no one can deny 2.0 games has the potential to get way more players. I'm not much of a 2.0 fan myself and thats just how the world is now.

[Thicklesip]

You're welcome to PM that or something, because I'm curious as to what sort of "wall of text" you could really respond to what I said with, considering I was 50% agreeing with what you said...

I'll spare you-- it was mostly MORE agreement and some elaboration, with the occasional attempt at humor. I figured I didn't need to exercise my ability to say lots without adding more.

1> Istaria is older.
2> Istaria is a MMORPG 1.0 where WoW is a 2.0

I do agree with you that WoW and Istaria are from different generations of MMORPGs, and I also mostly agree that WoW is a theme-park (guided tour) game while Istaria is more of a sandbox ("here's stuff, do something with it"). I don't think you accurately captured the differences of the generations, though.

A game is essentially a framework for players to have fun. MMOs worth the label are a framework for players to have fun together. Generation 1, generation 2, generation 0.287b-- the point of a game is to make space for fun to happen, and MMOs chuck players together in the process of accomplishing this. So I wouldn't really say it's a defining feature of either generation any more than I'd say breathing is a defining feature of being alive.

I'm not sure that the difference has to do with e-sports, either. My combination befuddlement/rage at the concept of e-sports* aside, WoW undoubtedly has them, if anyone does, and the Old Guard does not. But having wandered among a couple of games, MMO and otherwise, if anything I'd say this is a result of what Blizzard likes to do in all its games: you start with a relatively simple, balanced set of rules, and then set people loose to see how it plays out. StarCraft 1 and 2 have this going for them too; they are just as much of an e-sport as any WoW arena game, and they have less contact with the RPG aspect of "MMORPG" than somebody's Luddite grandmother.

My current hypothesis for the difference between generation 1 MMORPGs and generation 2 is how sadistic the game is. Generation 1 games replicated the high of "whee, this is fun!" by gating it with lots and lots of painful lows. Pretty much anything seems great if you've poopsocked 10 hours of excruciating boredom first. I fondly remember one of my first forrays onto a roleplaying server in EverQuest, where I ran my little baby Vah Shir off of the moon and all the way to the Faydark. Once I got there, I was fortunate enough to find a high-level character who spoke my ridiculous kitty tongue AND the "common" language. Why? Because on roleplay shards you learned languages by hearing someone use it. To teach me "common," the nice high-level character sat down with me and spammed-- really spammed, sending a long message as fast as they could hammer the macro key-- party chat for the better part of an hour. This was so I could actually go into town and communicate with the other 99% of the population who were NOT my race.

Could be worse. One time I found a guy willing to teach me Dragon-- a language learned primarily by listening to several thousand lines of rare, absurdly-high-level NPCs talk in that language. Said NPCs were not known for obligingly spamming a party chat macro 5 times a second for most of an hour.

I felt better once I learned these languages, yes-- I'd attained a goal! (In the case of the Dragon talk guy, there was the ridiculous glee of getting my hands on something not a whole lot of people had which was also pretty lore-awesome.) But the road to attaining these things? Look, there's no way to make mashing a macro until my hand falls off fun. And a lot of the game was like that: I'd do something for the end reward, but getting there was a matter of whether I felt up to gritting my teeth and plowing onwards. Killing 10 rats with an awful combat system was not FUN. Spamming a party chat macro until I passed out was not FUN. Hiking from the Gfaymart to Dwarftown and back over and over and over and over so that the dwarves would kinda like me a little better was not FUN.

Generation 2 games, by contrast, have been doing what they can to obliterate such "fun via pain" with a vengeance. I doubt ANYBODY will ever completely eliminate the suffering aspect, as it does heighten later rewards, but a lot more stuff is now done because doing it is fun, not just because players are desperate to get their hands on the rewards. In WoW, I enjoy leveling, because I like making my level number go up. But at the same time, I enjoy leveling because I get to go interact with the world in a way that I am eager to do. It's so bad that a couple of times I have gotten myself in trouble because I can't bear to STOP questing/killing/exploring, and oops how did those five levels happen. Reputation grinds? I rather recently went back and did a two-expansions-old grind.** Yeah, I wanted the rewards at the end, but I also REALLY REALLY wanted to do all the things that got me reputation: daily quests (eeeee), gathering things, killing bad guys. I enjoyed arriving at my destination, but I also enjoyed the journey.

So to revise your statement:

MMORPG 1.0:
A game where fun occurs by suffering for it.

MMORPG 2.0:
A game where fun occurs by having fun.

Parting thought: Istaria is firmly a 1.0 game, and I'll enumerate on its many weak points when provoked. Doesn't matter, I gladly shell out my $15 a month and play it. It's been years, but nothing scratches my Istaria itch the way Istaria does.

PS. Please stop giving me interesting things to think about so I can stop banging out two-hour wall o' text behemoths.



*I cannot be the only person rendered speechless by the idea of taking a video game-- something known primarily for the diversion resulting from playing it-- and then turning it into something you don't participate in. Buh what I don't even.
**The fact that the term for it is a "grind" probably says something.

[Andaras]

Bipedal cows? *The black ancient licks his maws. "Do they taste good?"

ROFL I just got an image in my head of a flight of Istarian
dragons going to the Grand Opening of the WOW Restaurant!

[Dhalin]

RE:Thickle:

Another thing that WoW likes to do, that Istaria, FFXI, and other games doesn't seem to, is give you more buttons to press during combat so you're spending less time watching and more time doing things.

This makes combat seem fast-paced, but it can be overwhelming for some people who have slower reaction time, or those who have higher latency connections.

I rather find it more fun, though. Istaria isn't too bad, the longest I go without hitting some ability button on my dragon is about 5 seconds or so. In WoW, the longest you go without hitting something is 2-ish seconds. 3 tops. If you spend 4 seconds between hitting buttons, you're doing something wrong, unless you're still low-level.

Also, I like how in WoW, you can die, but yet multiple mobs don't mean absolute death, either. In Istaria, only some classes/characters are built to do multiple mobs at once (that are your own level).

Also, in WoW, there's much much much more class balance. It isn't perfect (no game is), but the class balance is a lot closer to "balanced" than what we have here in Istaria. Probably because there's a lot less competition.

And then, you got Group Play. Istaria's Group Play dynamics seem a bit old... Monster AI is pretty lacking... "go hack on the lowest level in the group until it dies" is about the extent of it. If everyone's the same level, I suppose it goes by Damage and Healing, whoever does the most.

WoW's Monster AI is much more advanced, and some dungeon bosses have pretty complex routines. Also, many class abilities are designed with the Group in mind. WoW has Taunts that actually work, allowing one to be a tank, and actually tank (Tanks also have various other things, like immunity to critical hits, more dodge/parry/block, etc) and tanks have a built-in system to cause higher "threat" (threat is the value by which a mob chooses who in a group to attack, whoever has the highest threat is usually the guy it attacks when possible) and many abilities have modified threat instead of going by pure damage and healing. Many tank abilities cause extra threat, and some Healer and Damage-Dealer abilities cause less threat than normal. Some of these classes also have "threat dumps" too. Some are permanent, some are temporary.

But for all of these things WoW has that Istaria doesn't, I *do* love my flying dragon PC, and I'd have to say that strolling about my lair is cool, though I doubt I'll ever build a T6 grand hall anyday soon, I just simply don't have hours upon hours upon hours to spend grinding that many T6 materials.

But then, in WoW, you'll never see me in Progression Raiding for much of the same reasons.

Hats off to those who do it, and succeed all the same though.