Post originally by Joe Grendel at 2005-03-04 23:26:43
Converted from Phorums BB System

"And CoH let you level off of quests before WoW."

I'm not saying games before didn't HAVE quests -- games well before CoH had that. But you can gain whole levels from quests in WoW. If you can do it in CoH, it's from level 1-2 and that's about it. Anarchy Online also prominently had quests at the center of its game play (it called them "missions," as I recall), but again, the amount of experience given wasn't comparable to what the rewards are in WoW.

Is it inventing the wheel? No, but it's still a signficant break from previous MMORPGs. The vast majority of WoW is polish, but this is new. And if battlegrounds are what they're advertised as (MMORPG versions of Warcraft III maps), they might constitute a real innovation as well.

CoH, like EQ and pretty much every MMORPG other than WoW, is all about killing 10,000 critters of the appropriate sorts to level up. City of Heroes is absolutely true to this model, especially as you can get a total of three missions which you cannot drop, even if you're unable to do them, or you discover they lead into hazard zones after getting them (something not always made clear in advance). Compared to the questing system in WoW (and EQ2, for that matter), it's positively antique in its design. (EQ2 doesn't give substantive enough rewards for quests to be comparable to WoW's, although they're a huge improvement over the somewhat sadistic quest design in EQ1, which all but required players to use player Web sites to figure out what the heck the quest was about.)