What does World of Warcraft do better than Cox?

[Transhumanish]

I don't think anyone disagrees that WoW is graphically superior, or that it has always enjoyed a much larger subscription base.  However, I think it's been pretty well established that what people love about this game is not it's graphical presentation.  So, while that level of polish would be great, it just isn't in the cards (and probably never was).  But, now with the age of the engine, and the advances in video card tech in the years since it's been gone, most folks can run all the graphics settings to "11", still have a decent frame-rate, and it looks good enough. 

 

You also commented about the details in their world.  Well, there are a lot of details here too, that a lot of folks just tend to run through so fast that they miss a lot of it.  They don't hit one over the head with the Lore, but it's out there to find and explore if you want to do so.  Like everything here, it's a choice to do, or not.  There might not be the same level of detail, but again, it's appeal is not strictly in the settings, maps, or tiles.  IMHO, it's because this allows one to feel like a newborn super hero, that gets stronger as they progress, until they are practically gods at the end.  Isn't that what a super hero game should allow one to do?  I believe it is, and this game does that very well.  Just like any MMO, there will always be the mundane, less fun things to do on the way to those halls of ultimate power.  But, all in all, it's an experience that most fans of the DC and Marvel stuff can really appreciate.  It plays well to their fandom.  It just suffers from having been published by a company (NCSoft) who never really understood the genre, and really didn't know how to market it as well as it should have been, considering it was around for the beginnings of the MCU, and went offline the same year as the first Avengers movie came out!  That should have marked the announcement of CoH2, not the closure of CoH!  The Devs in the US understood, and did their best, but without the backing of the folks back in South Korea, there was only so much they could do.

 

As for the large player base of WoW, well let's face it.  They started off with a huge advantage of years, and years of content before the game came out, and that carried over.  CoH had to generate it's lore from scratch, which I think they did a pretty good job with, but that kind of thing is hard to sell to the masses that already felt quite at home in the WoW.

 

I believe that the only real comparisons that can be made with CoH, are other games in the same genre (CO, DCUO, etc.).  In those arenas, the others are again superior in the graphical representation, but I think the majority of folks here would agree that CoH is a better game in most respects. Having played both, I know I do!

 

Don't get me wrong.  I think there is plenty of room in the gaming world for both.  But, I don't feel these WoW comparisons are really "apples to apples".

 

The OP literally asked for a comparison between WoW and CoX.

 

I personally also like CoX better, and it's easily the best superhero MMO to ever be released. And yes, there are TONS of details in the world in CoX, as well. Conversely, with those many small details comes a sometimes frustrating level of repetition you don't see to anywhere approaching the same degree in games like WoW. The utterly identical mission interiors (that don't even remotely match the building the door is in most of the time, mind you, not to mention the identical office buildings that would get any architect run out of the industry for doing). The overuse of buildings that look identical or nearly so; it's fine to have buildings in a neighborhood look really similar, but it's another entirely to have dozens of neighborhoods all look nearly the same, having the exact same power station stuck in the middle of areas, and so on. The repetition of the aforementioned tiny but fun details, and so on. Where a Blizzard game might only have this fun movie poster Easter Egg a single time in one zone, period (and have thousands upon thousands of Easter Eggs similarly unique), many, many, many games--including CoX, but it's hardly close to alone in this--instead take a fun detail and repeat it all over the place.

 

I adore CoX, warts and all. But again, I was quite literally responding to a post directly asking for a comparison between the two games. Thus, I compared the two games.

[EggKookoo]

I don't think anyone disagrees that WoW is graphically superior

 

*raises hand*

 

WoW is not graphically superior to CoH. I mean, CoH has its graphical limits but when was the last time the game got a visual overhaul? Was Bush still president?

 

When I made my free-to-lv20 WoW toon not too long ago, I was shocked at how bad Stormwind still looks. Blatant antialiasing on the bricks and cobblestones, and I had my texture rez set to max. Clipping galore. Sure, the new PC models and textures look cool, not that you see much under the mountains of gear. But my character still had a leather shirt with buckles that were very clearly (and poorly) painted on. I mean they'd stretch when he moved. When I got back into CoH and realized my modern computer can play it with all the settings cranked, I was blown away at how nice it looks. Yes, blue caves and such, but a lot of the game is just damn beautiful. And for me personally, switching on cel shading (but disabling ink lines) only makes it better.

 

But again, not wanting to bash WoW. WoW definitely has a cohesive visual language and I really do like it. I love Blizzard's sense of art direction in general. I mean if you haven't seen it, check out Overwatch. That's a pretty game.

[Abraxus]

I adore CoX, warts and all. But again, I was quite literally responding to a post directly asking for a comparison between the two games. Thus, I compared the two games.

 

Yup!  I get that.  I was responding to some of the comments that have materialized since the OP in my assessment that comparing a fantasy-based MMO, with a Super Hero MMO beyond the fact that they are both MMOs is kind of "Apples and Oranges".  ;) :)

[RikOz]

Something WoW does better that I haven't seen mentioned: Sheer variety of enemy mobs. You can easily encounter twenty or more completely different things to kill within a single zone. And then 20 more in the next zone. Literally hundreds of different things to fight, all uniquely animated and with their own fighting styles.

[Greentea]

Druid...

 

 

 

and Vulpera.

 

 

[Yes yes, I'm a firm believer in Vulpera. SUE ME.]

[Adeon Hawkwood]

Something WoW does better that I haven't seen mentioned: Sheer variety of enemy mobs. You can easily encounter twenty or more completely different things to kill within a single zone. And then 20 more in the next zone. Literally hundreds of different things to fight, all uniquely animated and with their own fighting styles.

Really? From what I recall the mobs in WoW all felt very samey. Now admittedly I only really played during WotLK where it was all skeletons all the time but even the old world zones seemed to have a relative small number of enemy types (murlocs, bandits and kobolds in various colors being the most common with a few varieties of animals).

[Sunsette]

Something WoW does better that I haven't seen mentioned: Sheer variety of enemy mobs. You can easily encounter twenty or more completely different things to kill within a single zone. And then 20 more in the next zone. Literally hundreds of different things to fight, all uniquely animated and with their own fighting styles.

Really? From what I recall the mobs in WoW all felt very samey. Now admittedly I only really played during WotLK where it was all skeletons all the time but even the old world zones seemed to have a relative small number of enemy types (murlocs, bandits and kobolds in various colors being the most common with a few varieties of animals).

 

WoW has a high variety of enemy shapes and animations. Individual riggings I can recall: humanoids (about 12 different riggings and pose styles for about 40 races, ranging from elves to werewolves to undead, doubling for gender differences), boars, wolves, turtles, raptors (birds), raptors (dinosaurs), owls, big cats, crabs, wind serpents, snakes, honestly I will be here all day if I list animal riggings, Centaurs, Naga, Elementals, Golems, Mana Wyrms, Dragons, Drakes, Whelps, okay I give up.

 

However, I would argue with the notion that the mobs necessarily -fight- very differently -- that is true in like, dungeons, where you have group content. Encounters tend to feel more samey at high level when you're solo -- there's nothing as complex as fighting the Carnival of Shadows, Arachnos, or Longbow solo in WoW, even though you get that complexity in group content all the time. So it depends on the content you're choosing to face.

 

This is one reason why I got bored of WoW; I solo quite a lot and the fact that every single time I had to fight solo I was using the same four buttons in rapid succession made things fairly monotonous. At some point a few years back, they homogenized a lot of the classes to the extent where the weakest solo specs don't solo as bad as they used to, but the strongest don't solo nearly as well as they used to, and made a lot of the enemies for solo content fairly samey.

[jubakumbi]

This is one reason why I got bored of WoW; I solo quite a lot and the fact that every single time I had to fight solo I was using the same four buttons in rapid succession made things fairly monotonous. At some point a few years back, they homogenized a lot of the classes to the extent where the weakest solo specs don't solo as bad as they used to, but the strongest don't solo nearly as well as they used to, and made a lot of the enemies for solo content fairly samey.

 

This is what shines in CoX for me, as compaered to WoW and ESO in particular - I end up spamming a small set of powers.

Even in CoX, the AT combos that end up really just spamming a few attacks of the same variety over and over makes me put down that character.

 

CoX though, lets me create characters that have many kinds of powers that can be used in different situations or as I prefer.

My 'main' right now is an Elec/Elec Dominator - I have controls, range attacks, melee attack and interesting ways to chain them.

[retiarius]

Three quarters the population of Toronto, ON. The most populated city in Canada. That's two million people. Even if half those accounts are doubled, that's still 1.5 million people.

That's a lot of people.

 

It's also important to consider comparison of how many are playing it to the number that were playing it and the number that could be playing it.

 

My understanding is that CoH, back in the day, was making money, but that growth was flat, and there was no indication that would change in the near future.

 

Therefore, it doesn't matter what the figure is in isolation -- if the number of players is too flat for too long, an executive, in his/her infinite wisdom, will decide that the revenue stream is too small to justify the costs.

 

Also, to clarify: I have nothing against WoW, at all.  I simply have no interest in it.

[EggKookoo]

However, I would argue with the notion that the mobs necessarily -fight- very differently -- that is true in like, dungeons, where you have group content. Encounters tend to feel more samey at high level when you're solo -- there's nothing as complex as fighting the Carnival of Shadows, Arachnos, or Longbow solo in WoW, even though you get that complexity in group content all the time. So it depends on the content you're choosing to face.

 

I find myself agreeing with Sunsette a lot on this thread, it seems.

 

I don't think WoW does combat variety all that much better than CoH, at least if you exclude raid bosses. I don't recall having to watch out for the equivalent of snipers, or sappers, or dealing a lot with self-destructing enemies. Or enemies healing/rezzing themselves or each other mid-fight. I remember back in the early days MOBs in WoW would indeed break off to go find adds just like they tend to do in CoH, but (and I could just be imagining things) it feels like they downplayed that in recent patches. I'm not sure I remember the last time a WoW MOB went and found reinforcements. They typically stand in place and hack at you until they die. Maybe that's just perception, though.

 

On the other hand, WoW still has obnoxious stuff like the dazed mechanic, which adds nothing of quality to interactions and is purely there to slow you down. Also, WoW MOBs have this annoying tendency to walk through you and then attack you from your own position/location, which they can somehow do, but you have to turn around and/or step back to avoid "out of range" or whatever the warning is.

 

And with regard to boss fights in WoW, they're more complex than tank & spank, but really they just (typically) have these set patterns or rotations. It's very connect-the-dots. I mean at least it's something, but after you've done it a few times it becomes choreographed. Don't get me wrong -- I like WoW a lot, but mostly in the overall packaging and presentation.

[jubakumbi]

And with regard to boss fights in WoW, they're more complex than tank & spank, but really they just (typically) have these set patterns or rotations. It's very connect-the-dots. I mean at least it's something, but after you've done it a few times it becomes choreographed. Don't get me wrong -- I like WoW a lot, but mostly in the overall packaging and presentation.

 

This is why I have no desire to ever do progressive raiding, so boring form my PoV, trying to make several people dance together and play the symphony without missing any notes...just tedious.

Far more like Work than Fun to me.

[Sura]

I don't think anyone disagrees that WoW is graphically superior

 

*raises hand*

 

WoW is not graphically superior to CoH. I mean, CoH has its graphical limits but when was the last time the game got a visual overhaul? Was Bush still president?

...

 

 

There's also a very distinct graphical choice made differently between the two games: CoH has made a choice to devote graphic development time to characters (including powers) and WoW has chosen to devote that time to the world.  When you make a character in WoW, there might be eight faces for you to choose from.  CoH might have fifty.  Just faces.

 

I thought WoW was OK, but I really wanted my character to be different from other similar characters.

[Rathulfr]

I liked the seamless zones of WoW, having come from Asheron's Call, which was also seamless.  Running from one end of the world to the other was kinda neat sometimes.

 

I also liked the Dungeon and Raid Finder features of WoW.  You don't have to spam/monitor an LFG channel: you just put yourself in a queue and are instantly teleported to the team.

 

I have to admit that I liked solo questing of WoW better than CoH.  In CoH, I always feel like I'm "alone" when I'm solo, rather than just "solo", which is a different feeling.  That's not to say that I necessarily liked the quests/lore of WoW any better than CoH.  Killing X of Y or collecting X of Y is just as tedious in WoW as it is in CoH.

 

I liked playing with my family and friends, who would not give up on WoW no matter how much I asked, invited, cajoled, bribed, etc.  This is still a problem, but I've just decided that they need to ask/invite/cajole/bribe me away from CoH, now that it's back.  Yes, I probably will go play WoW Classic for at least a month, just to humor them.  But ultimately, CoH is home.

 

[Scarlet Shocker]

Advertising

[EggKookoo]

I liked the seamless zones of WoW, having come from Asheron's Call, which was also seamless.  Running from one end of the world to the other was kinda neat sometimes.

 

Agreed. CoH's compartmentalized nature seemed unavoidable when it launched. Blizzard showed you didn't need to do that (granted, they may not have been the first).

 

Advertising

 

People like to say this but I don't recall much advertisement for WoW outside of Blizz talking about it on their own website. I mean, YouTube didn't even exist when WoW launched.

[Sunsette]

Blizzard wasn't the first, no, but it was still a big point in their favor. Wolfenstein 3D vs. Doom, so to speak.

[PaxArcana]

People like to say this but I don't recall much advertisement for WoW outside of Blizz talking about it on their own website. I mean, YouTube didn't even exist when WoW launched.

... World of Warcraft had a whole series of TV spots with celebrity endorsements.  Mister T, William Shatner, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Ozzy Osborne, CHUCK NORRIS ...!

 

 

"There are ten million people in the world of warcraft, because Chuck Norris ... allows them to live!

 

I mean, seriously.  How were you never exposed to any of those commercials?!?

[RikOz]

 

This is why I have no desire to ever do progressive raiding, so boring form my PoV, trying to make several people dance together and play the symphony without missing any notes...just tedious.

Far more like Work than Fun to me.

In ten+ years of playing WoW, I participated in a "current content" raid exactly once. It pretty much cemented raiding as something I just wasn't interested in. Aside from one boss where my job seemed to be to stand there and mindlessly flail at the thing for 20 minutes until it finally fell over, the other encounters featured what I came to call, "mechanics for the sake of mechanics". Stuff that made no sense whatsoever, other than being an arbitrary obstacle to overcome. Like this one boss in Naxxramas who hung out it a room with an exploding floor (Self: Why the hell would he even have that?), which was overcome by the physics-defying expedient of all 25 people in the raid group occupying the same physical space to stand in the one, tiny, "safe" spot on that floor. Or the giant stone golem boss in Ulduar who is, for some reason, guarding an impassable chasm, and whose body, once he's defeated, falls over and serves as a bridge that now allows you to cross the chasm.

[EggKookoo]

People like to say this but I don't recall much advertisement for WoW outside of Blizz talking about it on their own website. I mean, YouTube didn't even exist when WoW launched.

... World of Warcraft had a whole series of TV spots with celebrity endorsements.  Mister T, William Shatner, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Ozzy Osborne, CHUCK NORRIS ...!

 

 

"There are ten million people in the world of warcraft, because Chuck Norris ... allows them to live!

 

I mean, seriously.  How were you never exposed to any of those commercials?!?

 

Oh, right, the Mr. T one. In my defense, I completely forgot about it.  :)

 

I actually don't recall seeing or really even hearing about any of the others. Probably came out during the era I canceled ad-based TV and just went with pure streaming services. Also, 2011 (the air the Norris one aired?) was the year my first kid was born, so if I wasn't dealing with the baby I was probably sleeping.

[Sunsette]

Will point out that WoW's celebrity endorsements came during a period when WoW was already unparalleled in subscriber count. You can say advertising was responsible for keeping it running near its apex for a long time, but I think it's not an accurate summary of how they got there.

[Charistoph]

In many other avenues, such as print magazines and online review sites, WoW did get more access, but then, if you talked about Diablo 2, Starcraft, or Warcraft 2/3 during that time, than that would lead to introductions of WoW.

 

As I said earlier, being big enough and strong enough to basically self-publish goes a long way, and those three game series allowed Blizzard to write their ticket.  Paragon Studios just didn't get a good deal with their publisher, which lead to the Sunset.

[Sunsette]

It definitely helped a lot -- but we forget there have been many other major license MMOs that got a lot of consistent financial backing and dedicated fanbases in their own right, like the Matrix Online and the two Star Wars MMOs. None of them have ever compared to WoW and Final Fantasy is only starting to verge on it. No one plays your product without marketing at all, but marketing can only do so much.

[Obitus]

Will point out that WoW's celebrity endorsements came during a period when WoW was already unparalleled in subscriber count. You can say advertising was responsible for keeping it running near its apex for a long time, but I think it's not an accurate summary of how they got there.

 

How they got there is a question that haunted the industry for years.  No one's been able to repeat WoW's success.  SWTOR probably tried hardest, spending hundreds of millions on story content and copying WoW's combat model more-or-less wholesale, but of course they failed miserably, even despite the platinum Star Wars IP.  At some point not long afterwards, most studios gave up on subscriptions entirely.  If getting a huge subscriber base isn't going to work, then might as well move towards milking a relatively small base of whales, instead. (Free 2 play.)

 

I'm no expert on WoW, having only played it for like two weeks not long after it launched.  The game didn't appeal to me, and of course I was already elbow deep in City of Heroes anyway.

 

That said, I don't think you can give Blizzard full credit for achieving such massive success with WoW.  A lot of credit, sure; whatever their flaws, they do know how to polish a product.  It was a decent IP too, etc etc - but it seems obvious in retrospect that WoW's greatest asset was its timing.  The game arrived at right around the same time that household computers and broadband internet became truly mainstream, yet also well before social media, smartphones and the billion apps and games to follow started contending for the broader populace's attention.  WoW also arrived on the leading edge of a wave of related cultural changes, small and large, ranging from the mainstreaming of so-called "nerd culture" to the wider phenomenon of social atomization that came with all of the above technological shifts (among others).

 

In short, WoW arrived just when playing online games to socialize lost its taboo, and when, for a whole host of reasons, online socializing in general became more attractive.  Again, I have to give Blizzard a lot of credit for how they handled their unprecedented popularity; I'm sure a lesser studio would have faltered, but WoW caught lightning in a bottle.

 

What's my point?  Well I guess there isn't one, except to say that you're right: the marketing blitz largely occurred after WoW blew everyone else out of the water.  Then again, WoW did have probably a disproportionately large amount of buzz for an MMO back when it launched, what with the IP and Blizzard's reputation from games like Diablo.  That buzz, combined with the confluence of happy coincidences described above, propelled the game to unprecedented success. 

 

I doubt we'll ever see anything quite like it again.

[EggKookoo]

I doubt we'll ever see anything quite like it again.

 

I don't, actually. I think there's a massive, massive audience out there that's not interested in the F2P format, that has considerable disposable income, and would be more than willing to part with it if a new, classic-approach AAA MMO appeared. I mean, I know I would be thrilled to pay easily twice what WoW charges for a state-of-the-art, content-rich MMO that doesn't try to constantly upsell me. I suspect game developers are waiting for WoW to die (whether that comes from Blizzard lowering the curtain on it or not). Granted, this awesome new MMO might also be another Blizz game, but whoever it is will clean up. WoW's eventual death will kick off a new feeding frenzy.

[Xaeon]

I doubt we'll ever see anything quite like it again.

 

I don't, actually. I think there's a massive, massive audience out there that's not interested in the F2P format, that has considerable disposable income, and would be more than willing to part with it if a new, classic-approach AAA MMO appeared. I mean, I know I would be thrilled to pay easily twice what WoW charges for a state-of-the-art, content-rich MMO that doesn't try to constantly upsell me. I suspect game developers are waiting for WoW to die (whether that comes from Blizzard lowering the curtain on it or not). Granted, this awesome new MMO might also be another Blizz game, but whoever it is will clean up. WoW's eventual death will kick off a new feeding frenzy.

Bold of you to assume that Blizzard won't be shut down entirely in the 2020s as all studios devoured by big faceless evil publishers eventually are.