GW vs. WoW (Part 1 - Intro & Level Cap)

My World of Warcraft three months subscription ended yesterday at 8.34 pm (lol..i still remember the time). So, after 3 months of playing time, my current characters are a level 66 Draenei paladin, level 44 Night Elf hunter and a level 10 Blood Elf mage. My level 66 could have been a level 70 easily if not for the long hiatus from the Internet that I had. Haha, so I guess that now I could comment on these two mmorpg that are often the source of comparison by many players. I'll divide my posting to several parts/series since they are so many aspects of it to look at.

I've played Guild Wars for almost 2 years plus since 2005 and I've completed all the campaigns. WoW has a solid international reputation, thanks to Blizzard's fame as a quality game maker. However, I did not jump at the band wagon when it first started becoz it's quite costly and secondly, I'm schooling and using maths, the fees paid to play WoW is not worth it. So, that's y I chose to play GW instead. I think that GW is not that famous in South East Asia itself apart from the Philippines or maybe in Singapore. But even in Singapore itself, it's rather limited but at least they had some established guilds like Sg Knights. I doubt GW is really heard of much in Malaysia. So, most of the GW player base are from the USA, Europe or Korea. This is also partly because the origins of the companies of NCsoft and Arenanet. I have to say that Guild Wars remains one of the few mmorpgs that could stand up against the superiority of WoW in terms of quality wise and professional development. Cheapo 2D stuff like Maple Story or Runescape (which are more famous in the SEA region) are just no where near in challenging Guild Wars.

After my A Levels, I decided to give WoW a try to see how different the two games are and I'm fortunate to have some of my SJI friends playing at the same time for company. So, here goes my review...

Price

The most notable difference between Guild Wars and World of Warcraft has to be the price. Guild Wars require only one time payment and you can play as many or as little as you want afterthat. On the other hand, WoW requires one to pay for the game itself, and then also monthly fees if players want to continue playing. So, if you wanna have some fun but don't wanna waste so much money, then Guild Wars is the economical choice. If you're feeling rich, have lots of spare time or don't really bother with the ratio breakdown of price per day, then WoW's tremendous pricing is not really an issue. Of course in the US or UK, the subscription fees is peanuts but if converted to Asian currencies, it's pretty much expensive for folks in the South East Asian region. It's quite manageable in Singapore for S$ 50 for two months but in Malaysia, RM 100+ for that is just mind blowing to keep up. Not only that, it's nonsensical that the BC expansion is priced at S$79.90, double the price of the original. It's even more absurd that I could get a nice package deal of S$69.90 of both original and expansion through the Battlechest as compared to S$118+ if I were to buy them separately. The moral of the story is that you ended paying more for some CD covers if you started playing earlier before the Battlechest came out.

Level Cap

Another notable difference is the level cap. Guild Wars sets it at level 20, while WoW at first started with 60 and then to 70 for the BC expansion and in future 80 when another new expansion arrives. This level cap also determines the type of players that it would attract. Guild Wars developers explained that the low level 20 cap is to ensure that emphasis is on the numerous amount of skills that the game offers instead of focusing on level grinding to survive in the game. Also, Guild Wars is geared towards PvP and so, level 20 makes it easier for skill balancing and enables players to be quickly equipped to battle in the arena. I think this level 20 cap is the pivotal reason why GW does not have a huge following in SEA.

From my experience, I've known quite a number of my friends who started GW but stopped quite quickly afterthat because there is no "ding!" or levelling up motivation to continue once they reach level 20. This low level cap also does not allow them to player kill and have the "superiority complex" over other players. But for the players from America that are in my friends list, many of them are still actively playing in their account. From this observation, I figured out that Southeast Asian gamers just get the orgasm from seeing big numbers in their RPG characters.

In my opinion, there ain't much difference to me for a lvl 20 GW character or a lvl 70 WoW character since both essentially enable players to deal with high-end stuff in their respective games. And in WoW, the level grinding is really attrocious especially in the Outlands when the player is between lvl 60-70. In Azeroth, there are plenty of quests that ask the player to kill 10 of "insert monster name" and maybe 20 at the higher ends. But in Outlands, the number rises to 30 and then the ultimate one that annoyed me was 50. These repititive kills are the only ways for players to overcome the huge levelling gap other than the other more creatively crafted quests. So, at times, one just spends his sorry ass time by completing quotas. GW does have its fair share of grinding with the introduction of achievement bars. But the consequences of not grinding in GW is not that severe or even affects the effectiveness of the character as titles are pretty much aesthetic. In WoW, not grinding and levelling characters meant that one cannot visit many of the high end places and are disadvantaged in many ways (eg. armour gears and mounts). Low levels are prime targets too for maxed out gankers and PKers in PvP servers. So, WoW players do have to spend a huge amount of time and also have the patience to reach the higher echelons of the game.

Ok, I'll comment on other aspects of the comparison at my next gaming post before this gets too long..lol