World of Warcraft is the true spiritual successor to EverQuest.

[Wakanda]

This may seem like an inflammatory thread, but that's not my intent. I frequently see EQ players debating over what the true spiritual successor to EQ was or will be. Vanguard, Pantheon, M&M. But to me it's super obvious that the true spiritual successor is WoW.

Classic WoW has more in common with EverQuest than it does modern WoW. WoW was heavily inspired by EverQuest, with some of the top devs being former EQ players themselves. If you had a time machine, and you wanted to show some kid in 1999 what MMOs would be like in 25 years, you would almost certainly show them World of Warcraft.

Do you agree or disagree?

[magnetaress]

Voted mostly true. There's some caveats here butt WoW should never be dismissed. Drop into first person view from time to time and check out the vistas. It's got great feeling from It's OG days.

[Topgunben]

Should be an option for “bush burned the towers”

Now that I’m older, I understand why WOW defeated EQ handily. As a youngster, I could game for 10 hours straight on a Saturday or in the summer time. It didn’t bother me that I’d have to wait for an hour for a group to open up because I had all the time in the world.

Now I just want to jump in and play. I’m fine waiting for a couple minutes, but waiting an hour to get to the group I want to be in doesn’t work for me. EQ deaths probably are a little too punishing for the average casual. I don’t want to feel the need to do a CR before I go on a week long vacation because my corpse might pop.

Blizzard seemed to be able to tap into the best parts of EQ while dropping the worst parts. Admittedly taking away the punishing mechanics did take away some of the challenge and reward of achieving something, but I think Classic WOW was able to balance this as well as could reasonably been done.

Just my thoughts.

[Trexller]

WoW was designed from the ground up to appeal to the masses based on lowest common denominators as a cattle chute straight to the in-game cash shop

[Rygar]

If you are talking dopamine addiction most certainly. It was certainly watered down to appeal to the masses. The spirit of EQ for me is balance and challenge.

WoW did far better at raid encounters, if EQ did that from the start then near perfect game.

The whole question mark quest thing is ugh, and soloing to quest to max level felt less community driven. Every patch made the game easier because need to keep crybabies happy for subs.

[Pulgasari]

I'm not sure what the second expansion was about but Wrath was clearly Velious and Cata was clearly the elemental planes..

Why do I think Velious is north of Everfrost?

They also went to space later but there was less bitching about it.

[Swish]

How about them wow tokens tho

[magnetaress]

Just palling around the gnomeragon newbie area... it's something to explore, like EQ was. And see. WoW got too far away from its roots.

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Anyway wows biggest problem are its players not the game itself. It's players dont want to play an MMO anymore.

[Ciderpress]

If WoW hadn't been based on a well-established and beloved franchise (Warcraft), and was instead just a generic cartoony looking original mmo with the exact same mechanics, I'm not sure it would have been nearly as successful.

People are always like "Well see it killed EQ because of this feature or that feature" but they always leave out "oh also it's a WARCRAFT GAME"

[Ciderpress]

Also worth noting that this was peak blizzard. Not only did people love the Warcraft games, people were also obsessed with diablo (especially diablo 2) which came out a few years prior. So blizzard had a ton of good credit with the public when WoW was released, and a lot of people probably realized hey this whole mmo thing is fun, just cause it was new to them.

So no I don't think it's a successor to EQ. They took the formula and slapped an established IP into it that they knew would sell. Hardly surprised it did so well, but in a way that's because people already loved EQ and the original Warcraft games, not necessarily WoW on it's own merits.