ManaByte
Gold Member
http://www.massively.com/2008/04/01/five-mmos-better-than-world-of-warcraft-part-1/
#1 EverQuest
#2 Dark Age of Camelot
#3 The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar
#4 EVE Online
#5 Dream of Mirror Online WTF?
And here's their defense against the 10 million flame emails coming their way:
#1 EverQuest
For our first game, we choose SOE's EverQuest. The Elder Game. When it launched in 1999, nobody was quite sure yet just what you DID in an MMO. Sure, join groups and kill stuff, but is that it? In its early years, it was largely just a chat room in glorious 3D. Monster killing was almost secondary, which was fine, because it took so long to pull and kill one and then recover from it. Straight through their second expansion, Ruins of Kunark, many groups were without any sort of healer, and a high bandaging skill was prized. Absent any sort of real goal to the game, players were content to build a strong community, do role-playing events, and by the way, set the stage for most every modern MMO. The EQ developers scattered content everywhere. By their second expansion, they thought players might enjoy gaining favor with NPC factions and working together to take down the big monsters. By the third expansion, Shadows of Luclin, they were convinced of it but they gave a nod to the casual play community by making a new race, the feline Vah Shir; an entirely new path to max level (the second time they'd done that), and some of the most solo and small group friendly zones in the entire game. On their fifth expansion, they implemented the raid tool instead of various groups working separately to kill, they would all be gathered into one raid. At the time of the Planes of Power, EQ had made the template that many later games would follow.
EQ had its problems, and they were big ones. It was nearly impossible for most classes to solo effectively. Top guilds had insane recruiting gauntlets that more or less shut out new people. The game was so incredibly huge by then that nobody could ever see more than a fraction of the place. Opaque keying requirements meant most content was locked behind raids, which shut out non-raiders. And the raiders were left with little to do but raid. When World of Warcraft went live, people flocked to it, and EQ's fortunes went into a steep decline. Since then, though, they have drastically overhauled the game. There is still no better game for large-scale raids the maximum size for new raids is an incredible 54 people and the waiting around for health and power to recover has been largely eliminated by rapid recovery when not in combat. If your joy in life is raiding, there is still no better game out there than the original EverQuest. It's had many imitators, EQ has the straight, uncut stuff with no compromises.
#2 Dark Age of Camelot
Mythic's Dark Age of Camelot always depended upon its PvP to set it apart from other games. Not just killing random players from opposing factions and DAoC had three but actual, full-out siege warfare, battling for possession of inter-realm keeps and artifacts of great power. The nations would form outside a wall called Emain Mecha, within sight of the Hibernian realm, close to teleporters from Midgard and Albion. And there battle would rage for hours, with people of all levels and classes fighting openly or sneaking behind for snipe shots from hiding; often times victorious Albions or Midgards would break through the Hibernian line and assault one of the nearby contested keeps. Other times, the Hibernians would take the fight back through the teleporters to the other realms.
DAoC also had the battlegrounds, which they expanded over time to provide challenges for all levels. You could fight against the NPC critters there, but glory came in the taking and holding of the central keep. Unlike the frontier keeps, the center keep was meant to be easier to take, and control could shift many times. It was a battle which never truly ended, but sometimes a realm could hold it for a few days. WoW's battlegrounds? DAoC had them years before and arguably better. They also introduced a contested dungeon Darkness Falls, den of much treasure and experience. The mobs (and enemy players) there also dropped signets that could be used to buy even nicer items. The entrance shifted among realms depending on who controlled the most keeps in the Frontier. If you wanted to get this good loot you helped your realm hold keeps. DAoC had decent PvE content and a number of expansions, but they always came back to their core, their PvP. Why wait for Warhammer Online? You can get in the battle right now. If you play Warcraft for the PvP, you owe it to yourself to see PvP done right.
#3 The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar
Some call Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online a cheap imitation of World of Warcraft, but aside from some similarity in the UI, it really isn't. There is little magic, healing is spread out among several classes, and every class fights. Each player works together to build weak attacks to stronger ones, choosing them according to their needs and waiting for the correct group combos to appear which can instantly turn sure defeat into triumphant victory. The dungeons are incredibly challenging for people their level, and you must constantly be on your toes, thinking far ahead to be sure the attacks you need to use in ten seconds are being built up now.
Where Lord of the Rings Online really shines, though, is in its lore. How could any story be greater than that of the Lord of the Rings? You can walk where the Fellowship walked; clear their way, or help from behind the scenes. Without your aid, the Ring would fall to the Enemy. As you move through the story and there is one, a strong one the world changes. A town is burned and rebuilt; a powerful friend and ally is turned; the wizards of the land try to push back the darkness. LotRO's first expansion will open the Mines of Moria to adventurers. WoW has its share of lore, but will anything compare to sneaking past the Well of the Watcher and staring out at the vastness of the Hall of Kings? If lore and story is why you play WoW, you need to come to Middle Earth for awhile.
#4 EVE Online
Big spaceships floating in space, mining rocks. That's CCP's EVE Online? If killing ten buzzards in Westfall is WoW, than mining rocks is EVE. EVE doesn't have cute characters or impressive armor, because your avatar isn't playing the game YOU are. EVE Online is the first MMO we can think of where you can actively play the game on bulletin boards and email and phone calls the universe of EVE is the universe of its players. It's a game that can draw you into its community and make the shifting alliances, broken promises and triumphant deals of its world as real as the evening news. The technical specs are pretty impressive as well. A single shard, every EVE player plays in your world, any EVE story you may have heard of, happened to the people you can see online. Fortunes can be made or lost in an instant. And you don't ever have to fire upon an enemy ship. You can stay in the safe sectors and work on researching, inventing and producing new goods; a killing made in the economy can be more powerful than a dozen battle cruisers.
Split among over a hundred servers, WoW's community is fractured. By its very design, it cannot form a single community which can affect, and be affected by, every player. If you have ever wanted to play a game with an economy studied and shaped by real economists, where all the content is made and run by players, a true world limited only by whatever you can imagine you need to play EVE Online. Plus, it's the only game on this list which works as well under Linux and OS/X as on Windows, something it shares with World of Warcraft.
#5 Dream of Mirror Online WTF?
Perhaps you play World of Warcraft just for fun? A casual game that you appreciate for its low system requirements and ability to either group or solo as the whim takes you? A game fun for you but as fun for your kids, one everyone can enjoy? One with some pretty unusual game mechanics and a very unique art style? WoW does all these things pretty well but Aeria's Dream of Mirror Online does them better. Plus, it's free.
DOMO is built around stories and you're in one, someone brought from our world to the Mirror World along with many others to save the realm from dissolution. Are you the One who will save it? The Mirror people are willing to take a chance on you. You will meet Mirror Kings of every description to help you on your way; you can battle monsters or befriend them; you can fly around on swords; you can have quests with full cinematics and if you want friends to come along, then they can. If you don't want to grind your way to uberness, you can buy helpful items in their item shops for cash or in the dozens of player-created shops for game currency. Instead of killing monsters, you can capture them and release them later as pets under your control. And the graphics! Some people consider WoW's strong art style one of its greatest features. Well, you haven't seen DOMO yet. Playing DOMO is like being the main character of your own anime. If you play WoW because you enjoy a casual, colorful game with the emphasis on fun all the time, exploring strange worlds, and being the star of your own story... you should give Dream of Mirror Online a shot.
And here's their defense against the 10 million flame emails coming their way:
World of Warcraft is an excellent game, but its very success is something of a prison. They have ten million players to please. They can't try anything radically new. Smaller games are freer to try things that are very new and go to places WoW cannot follow. You've played WoW. Is it time to give something new a chance? No matter what you like best, there's a game that does it better, and all of them are filled with fantastically helpful people who welcome new players. These games can be a little overwhelming to begin with; but you probably felt that way the first time you stepped into the world of Azeroth, too.
We don't expect everyone to agree with our particular choices. Have some better ones? Or is WoW truly the best game no matter what you like to fo best? Let us know in the comments!
