It's nothing like WoW. In fact, if you are looking for WoW, you will weep tears of blood when you encounter how you have to climb this mountain:



Probably finish out 40 this weekend, sleepy.

No dwarf race balizar you can just make CoH-esque models with full control of dimensions.

lol the details are irrelevant

demand innovation!

There are only to "races." That's the pvp sides. YOU LOSE.

hurr

Nothing like WoW, aside from the blatantly rip-offed classes, two sides engaged in a war, though an daemonic force threatens both. Oh, and there's the Cloth, Leather, Mail, Plate stuff. Plus the whole Pretty Race/Bestial Race thing. Oh, and lets not forget the UI.

Honestly, from what I can see, Aion is just WoWs younger, if sexier, sister.

But to be honest, if it had a trial, I'd proabably ditch WoW for it for a month or so at least. Lets be honest, one can only kill so many freaking facerolling idiots, and generic low-poly monsters before you get bored. At least there wouldn't be Pornshire, capital city of the Whorde.

"What?" Everquest had two sides in a war long before WoW. So did TorilMUD which it came from. Saying that kind of crap is just... wow. I mean, sweet Jesus if you want to get specific Blizzard stole it from Warhammer.

Various UI elements are, but I'm perfectly fine with a game taking mechanical goodness from a tried and true source.

Blatantly ripped off classes? What? Once again, the game is far more of a throwback to EQ than WoW. Templar is is neither paladin nor prot warrior. Gladiator is certainly not a fury warrior and contains various other elements key in PvP and exclusive polearm stats. Sorcerers are like every caster since D&D. Spiritmaster is a standard summoner. The list goes on but not one class is directly comparable to a WoW class. It's kind of disturbing that you use WoW as the MMO original.

Cloth leather plate mail armor restrictions date to D&D, certainly not a WoW original. That stuff was in all sorts of MMOs before WoW.

Comparing the Balaur to the Legion is just... good lord.

Pretty/Bestial race? You can make either race pretty or ugly. The ferality of Asmodians is explained in the Lore but man, I'm just amazed at people who have all these reasons but don't do any research at all into them.

If anything the game borrows heavily from DAOC and EQ as far as classes and systems go. Even level non-elites will give most classes trouble at 30+ in the vein of everquest, no easy/quick regen, group grinding without quests is a must for most classes 20+, and no one can level on quests alone. Like I said before, if you play this game expecting anything near a WoW experience you're going to quit early on when you spend your second hour in a Black Claw pug.

Man this is like 90% of RPG's...

Dude...the reason WoW is not the MMO standard when you're talking about what things were taken from is because there were tonnes that came out before it and that it and its successors draw from. WoW is of course a major inspiration to MMOs that came after it, but all that class stuff has been around since significantly before that.

And...yes, a caster wearing fullplate sucks as a caster. That part has been around since at least the early 80s. That was his point.

Pretty much all of that stuff existed in EQ, and was a ripoff from EQ. Desitrus' point is that WoW was certainly not original. And EQ had tremendous success for a very, very long time. It was the main game, until people were getting bored of it (after many years of EQ) and WoW offered an alternative. WoW took a huge amount of the customer base, but to pretend that EQ was not successful and WoW did not build off of it is weird at best.

And even EQ stole concepts from other games before it.

It's not about new concepts these days, but about trying to wrap it up in a way that it sounds "refreshing" (to steal customers from other games). Use the things that work best in other games, plus some new hooks.

Hey guys, all of Achaea's successful mechanics are ripped off from Avalon, even the UI, so it's totally unfair to say that Aetolia, Imperian, and Lusternia are derivatives of Achaea, even though it looks, feels, smells, and tastes a whole lot more like Achaea than the "original" ancestor, Avalon.

I don't know. It looks an awful lot like EQ to me.

But yeah, even our IRE games are derivative.

You should go into more detail about the stuff we copied from avalon. If it's things like the caster-fighter armour distinction, specialised classes, and "there are two factions"...

Is our fast paced affliction/balance chasing based combat from Avalon? How about the city/guild/order makeup? The three-skills-per-guild-and-shared-common-skills distinction? The way classes take thematically similar skills across games (even Lusternia druids are more like Achaea ones than regular fantasy ones, and guardians are basically priests/apostates with heavy modification.)

Hmm. Maybe it's more to do with lack of awareness about Avalon then. Also, Aion is by a different company than WoW, so it's a lot easier to attribute broad similarities to its older predecessors. IRE MU*s are all built by prominent former players and admins of Achaea (I think), are given the same codebase and customerbase to work with, so those similarities are more pronounced than the ones under discussion.

I'm guessing I didn't trip enough sarcasm lines.

Of course the IRE games are derived from Achaea. Pointing out similarities between games that are further back doesn't change the design intent: Achaea/WoW, improved-but-familiar, made more exciting, and hopefully going to yank at the other's playerbase.

You did trip the sarcasm line, I just thought the other horn of the dilemma was worth more consideration than you seemed to be giving it. Ultimately though, there are reasons to think Lusternia in general is more derivative of Achaea than its broad ancestry which are unrelated to the specified similarities.

Conversely, things like classes that heal and give buffs (read: clerics), caster-fighter distinctions, and the factionalisation have been a core part of games even in different genres to WoW (and EQ for that matter) for getting on for 40 years now. Totally different league. If there are more specific similarities than that it might be worth noting but Kira didn't cite any and Desitrus seems to think the similarity isn't that tight.

Well, I haven't played Aion, but taking Kial's word for it...



The top one is a shaman in WoW, down to the piddly details, and there isn't an EQ class to derive that from so tightly.

The middle one is a bit iffier. Summoning is old. Summoners as offensive spellcasters is practically a given. DoT's aren't new hats. Summoners reliant on DoT's are awfully similar to warlocks.

The bottom one is perhaps even hairier. Yeah, that's supposed to be a hunter, but calling it a derivative would probably depend more on the trap effects and tools to get something to run over the trap.


Maybe the most important point here is that derivative doesn't automatically equal bad. WoW was not a bad game. It wasn't groundbreaking or impressive, but it worked well, and there are worse things you can do than learn from other people's mistakes and successes.

I loved Avalon.

The argument seems pointless. Ok, Aion is just a prettier copy of WoW's mechanics. And? WAR for me is worth playing over WoW simply because of the constant pvp. Even if everything else is an exact copy, that doesn't detract from the game at all.

(Other things do. Like getting stuck on everything.)