Will ESO pass WOW in popularity

Mush55 · November 2016

Not played wow since lvl 80 was the max and played from day 1 of release, When ever I logged into wow I always had some thing to do be it getting stuff for those epic 40 man raids reduced to 25 man in the later expansions if I remember correct or just generally wasting an hour.

Pvp was evenly matched and generally fun without the lag horse simulator that eso is. Tarren mill was one of the best open pvp encounters I remember with loads of alliance against not so many of us horde .

It boils down to the fun and memories a game creates yes eso is a good game but wow was so many lvls above .
I can't really think of anything I have done in ESO that makes me want to log in like it did with wow can even remember most of my old guilds players names will I with eso in 12 years time ?

This game needs more content, longer dungeons that have to be worked at and not completed in 40 minutes and gear that has to be worked for and not hid behind boreing solo play and horrendous rng until this is sorted eso will never pass wow......

Edit: Have a feeling this game will go the same as Warhammer online without the subs there will be a lack of enough funds to keep the game in content

Prof_Bawbag · November 2016

CosmicSoul wrote: »

Prof_Bawbag wrote: »

Never played WoW myself, but if people are stating ESO has the richer quests, then WoW must be terrible in that respect. Almost every quest is a cut n paste of 3 quest types and all almost always involve a lazy assed npc. Run around area>trash mobs>boss fight. That's how almost every quest pans out in ESO. Then they're split into the 3 quest types mentioned above, destroy a number of objects (crystals etc), solve a mundas type puzzle or kill 'X' amount of enemies to either fill a gem/collect certain items from their dead bodies and so on.

I don't believe questing is one of ESO's strong points. However, If you like an entire game full of those radiant quests we got in Skyrim, then yeah, ESO excels when it comes to quests.

How can you not believe eso does not have strong questing? You must be skipping dialogue.

Almost every quest is structured using the 3 same templates I mentioned above. I never said the dialogue was poor in every case, it's everything in-beween that dialogue that is poor and very, very, very repetitive. There's only a handful of unique quests out of the 100's available. Many are glorified fetch quests and many are implemented in a very simplistic manner. I mean, you're greeted with an npc standing next to say, a T-junction and s/he wants you to go and collect 10 items from slain enemies or wants you to destroy a crystal or something equally cliched. Then almost every single quest is finished of with a named boss. They're all the same. The stories may be different, but the actual questing is nothing more than 3 cut and paste jobs. A lot of the actual dialogue in quests is shallow too. Not all, but a large number of them are.

Rohamad_Ali · November 2016

Phinix1 wrote: »

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

Not in this lifetime .

I wouldn't be so sure. Now that the greedy Blizzard financial suits have taken the company down the road of asian MMO-style forced PVP and forced group content for profession leveling, a fundamental betrayal of their entire culture, I would look to see more and more disenfranchised customers moving on the better-than-pacman-graphics alternatives.

I personally know several people (friends and family) who have played WoW for close to a decade who literally uninstalled the game over their disgusting pandering to Asian MMO market demographics.

Wow does not have forced PvP . They have open world PvP but players decide whether to engage .

Riejael · November 2016

Its a possibility. WoW peaked out ten years ago at about 12 million world wide. It recently during the end of Warlords of Draenor dropped to less than 2.5 million. Final Fantasy XIV actually surged past it with Heavensward. However WoW came back with Legion to about 10.5 million.

You have to analyze the situations a bit closer to determine what's actually going on. WoW is sold everywhere. In NA, AU, EU, CN, and SA. FFXIV is only sold in NA, EU, and JP, with some minor focus in AU.

Worldwide its hard to compete with WoW.

When you take certain countries off the table, and focus on just NA, EU, and AU.. you start seeing some interesting results. In just those three regions its very possible for MMOs like FFXIV, TESO, and even SWTOR to be contenders.

Also having less than a million subs is NOT a failure. The MMORPG that started the whole MMO trend, Everquest peaked out in 2005 (after WoW had been out for a year... so much for being the EQ-killer) at 750,000 subs. At the time that was considered an achievement.

And speaking of Everquest, after 17 years, its on its 23rd expansion. It has only thrived in the last two decades. That should give everyone a perspective and scope of these MMORPGs out there. To put it shortly you don't need WoW level numbers to be successful. Also WoW is not too big to fail.

WoW's a great cashcow. But its not sustainable. Its running on 2000-2003 coding with a few updates to give it modern features. But rest assured, as it gets older and the coders who originally worked on it retire, it will be harder and harder for Blizzard to keep people on to maintain and update it.

WoW used to run using 200MB of RAM in 2004. Now it takes close to 2GB. Its not as efficient as it used to be. Much of that is new textures, voice, and such. But there's only so much it will be able to process. And judging by how they have to release their expansions. WoW's getting tricky. I think eventually in the next couple of years, Blizz is going to want to move on. This is evidenced by the fact that Legion wasn't as well advertised as Draenor. Choosing not to advertise is a sign of a desire to downsize a game. And they should, they need to use their talents in newer and fresher titles.

Aeladiir · November 2016

BossXV wrote: »

Being a 2014, very modern game, ESO has tons of potential vs WOW, for example it's Superior graphics and combat

A couple questions

How popular is the game now

Will it pass wow

(Edit: if u find this stuff insightful, pls click the button, lol, I looked and I'm only 2 stars on forum :'( lol)

WoW is a phenomenon and a product of luck. It was made on the perfect time for MMOs. ESO is far superior to WoW, easily (honestly, those who deny that are objectively dumb), but no, it will never be as popular as WoW.

Doctordarkspawn · November 2016

CosmicSoul wrote: »

Doctordarkspawn wrote: »

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Not sure this kind of comparison matters.

I've never played WoW myself but some of my guildies did (and some still do). Sometimes they're not happy with ESO/ZOS but overall it looks like :
- ESO is prettier (graphically)
- ESO is better combat-wise
- ESO is richer in quests/storytelling/lore
- ESO's community is more mature and helpful

I can attest to the second and fourth being untrue.

ESO's combat is unfocused with design that even contradicts itself. It's been the biggest hurdle for this game, this game is bad at communicating what is a good setup between solo, and group play. WoW has set classes that are viable everywhere and you choose your rolls.

Lets be honest, ESO's community isn't that great, but it is quite frankly -meaner-. This 'Meta or die' attitude is gaining speed and credence. At least on WoW all you had to deal with was idiots.

For all people like to go 'this game is easy' and 'wow is easy' WoW is much better designed for the MMO audience. This game will never compare unless it sits down and adopts a more rigid design instead of just expecting us to know what's viable.

I disagree on combat, it is not meant to be super fast like guild wars 2, considering this is how similar all elder scrolls combat has been, the combat is really fun.

When it works. When the class/set/even role you sign up for to play isn't invalidated, crammed into a corner to be done one way or not at all or just done -badly-. Tanking has had a struggle to be needed. To be validated. To be something aside from the binary dance of block and heavy attack the designers have written it into to say nothing of how there is precisely one way to DPS, buff stacking and dot stacking, and any other way isn't viable.

This combat system is fun, when it isn't in the hands of the current design team. They have shown they do not know how to use the system they have come in possession of, make different styles of play plausable, regulate difficulty, or do anything resembling ballance the game.

Daemons_Bane · November 2016

I think not.. WoW appeals to a much larger crowd..

vyndral13preub18_ESO · November 2016

I think the title has it backwards. The question is when will WoW fall in popularity to ESOs level.

idk · November 2016

Cazic wrote: »

WoW has too large of a footprint for ESO to simply surpass it in popularity / active players.

ESO is a very strong competitor to WoW though. Maybe even the top competitor.

Would say ESO and SWTOR, but none have WoWs subscriber base mostly due to any PC will play WoW and overly simplistic play-styles they have since developed in WoW.

Mojmir · November 2016

Not with the current development

BlanketFort · November 2016

ESO has potential.
I wasn't around beta but the game wasn't pretty, either, when I started early 2015.
I just know that I ditched my 2 yr old WoW toon immediately after ESO.

It's all in the hands of the devs, IMO. They could capitalise on what makes the game great and further improve on it, or totally muck it up. With how ZOS is handling support, balancing, general communication, etc., lately, it looks like it may head down the latter road. But who knows.

Gedalya · November 2016

I'm a fan of a number of MMORPGs: WoW, SWToR, LoTRO, and TESO. TESO is by far my favorite though; it's evolution as been exceptional so I am always expecting good things. And I definitely see it being a steady and popular title; I also expect it will continue to grow in popularity.

RebornV3x · November 2016

Lol no never the only game this decade that might be able to pass up WoW would probably be FF14: RR last I checked it was the 2nd or 3rd most popular mmo.

StanicEnemy · November 2016

no

Publius_Scipio · November 2016

It's possible.... But WoW is so old and so entrenched in Eastern Europe and Asia I believe.

Publius_Scipio · November 2016

RebornV3x wrote: »

Lol no never the only game this decade that might be able to pass up WoW would probably be FF14: RR last I checked it was the 2nd or 3rd most popular mmo.

Lol Final Fantasy.... What a great franchise absolutely ruined.

Messy1 · November 2016

When the Elder Scrolls franchise spawns a movie in theatres then we will know ESO has caught up to WoW popularity, but honestly, it's the single player Elder Scrolls experiences that will continue to drive the popularity forward!

stevenbennett_ESO · November 2016

I'm pretty old school -- I played in MUDs, I've played in some of the earliest MORPGs before they could scale to massive (Kingdoms of Drakkar, for example), through the early MMOs like Everquest and Ultima Online, then way more time on WoW, and now the only MMOs I'm playing are SWTOR (very rarely) and ESO (all the time).

WoW was nice for it's time, but it started losing my interest even before Wrath of the Lich King came out -- the game was already getting bogged down into a boring, tedious grind fest where you pretty much had to do content over and over to hope to advance a tiny bit -- and I don't have the time or desire to grind for gear. Also, I'm a huge fan of story and lets face it, WoW's story, even after all the expansions, is basically window dressing on a combat slog fest and a bunch of not very inspired quest lines. Cataclysm renewed my interest for a while - I actually ran multiple characters in different alliances through the base game after that because the stories became compelling... if incomplete. But even that wasn't enough to keep me interested, and by the time Mists of Pandaria came out, they'd lost me.

Both ESO and SWTOR won me over with story, and ESO is *so* much better in almost every area - graphics, combat, story, and interesting quest lines. It's also, despite comments I've seen earlier, actually improving and expanding it's content significantly faster than WoW did. (Remember, with WoW, It took over 2 years before the first major expansion hit, and the remaining expansions happen roughly every two years since. IMHO, ESO has added a LOT more in it's first two years than I'd say WoW added in it's first four...)

Will ESO ever be more popular than WoW? Doubt it -- a lot of WoW's popularity was because nothing really comparable was out there for a long time, and people with an investment of time stayed for a long while. In today's market, ESO is competing with a lot more options (and WoW itself), so it's a different market. But I think it can and does hold it's own.

ItsGlaive · November 2016

Not with this content schedule and not with this monetization model.

SickDuck · November 2016

For me it did already. Never cared about WoW.

Nocturnalan · November 2016

Can it? Yes.

Will it? doubtful.

vamp_emily · November 2016

My brother played WoW. I logged in one day for about 5 minutes and some guy was farming me in some noob zone so I quit

Maybe I should revisit Wow, since I am a trained killer now

Julianos · November 2016

LOL no way

D3x · November 2016

BossXV wrote: »

Being a 2014, very modern game, ESO has tons of potential vs WOW, for example it's Superior graphics and combat

A couple questions

How popular is the game now

Will it pass wow

(Edit: if u find this stuff insightful, pls click the button, lol, I looked and I'm only 2 stars on forum :'( lol)

No I dont think so, because if you look at wow, it does have really nice graphics but they all start from warlords of draenor, which require a high end PC not too high end but does require decent gaming PC, but as it goes for start expansions and zones they have not so good graphics and sorta any PC can run but for ESO even at the starting zone not every PC can run it.

and lets face the fact not everyone has such PC so therefor they wont be getting eso and its population wont pass wow's.

Khaos_Bane · November 2016

Aliniel wrote: »

No. ZOS has no idea what they're doing when it comes to balancing classes, items and everything connected to both. This will eventually kill the game.

Every MMO does through balancing classes all of the time. Do you know how many issues WoW had with class balance?

Rohamad_Ali · November 2016

What's crazy is wow is still subscription based and they retain more players every year then here .

BossXV · November 2016

D3x wrote: »

BossXV wrote: »

Being a 2014, very modern game, ESO has tons of potential vs WOW, for example it's Superior graphics and combat

A couple questions

How popular is the game now

Will it pass wow

(Edit: if u find this stuff insightful, pls click the button, lol, I looked and I'm only 2 stars on forum :'( lol)

No I dont think so, because if you look at wow, it does have really nice graphics but they all start from warlords of draenor, which require a high end PC not too high end but does require decent gaming PC, but as it goes for start expansions and zones they have not so good graphics and sorta any PC can run but for ESO even at the starting zone not every PC can run it.

and lets face the fact not everyone has such PC so therefor they wont be getting eso and its population wont pass wow's.

That's an excellent point, even if ESO were to be better in every way, wow still require s less hardware

Valethar · November 2016

Doubt it. They've already been assimilated by the Greed Collective™. Blizz manages to make money and create content without resorting to idiocy like gambling boxes, so don't expect to see ESO eclipse WoW in this lifetime.

Enemy-of-Coldharbour · November 2016

Never.

ItsGlaive · November 2016

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

What's crazy is wow is still subscription based and they retain more players every year then here .

Same could be said for FFXIV. Sub model is perfectly fine, and can be accepted by a large playerbase. You've just got to have the regular quality content updates and top tier communication and expectations management to go with it.