Activision/Vivendi Merger Looms, Fallout Continues

Ever since the announced merger between Activision and Vivendi Games the community has been all aflutter with speculation and fallout. Here we are, six months later, and the shockwaves continue to resonate throughout the industry as the actual merger looms closer. Gamasutra has an in-depth investigation of what this deal actually means and what some of the details might be.

Re:it will be disaster

[moderatorrater]

I'm curious about how you think they screwed up World of Warcraft. One of the great things about Starcraft was how everyone had played it, no matter whether they were a hardcore gamer or not. The same thing's happened with WoW. They've developed the story fairly well, the mechanics are well balanced and open to being used to tweak your character but without requiring it, and created an experience that's unmatched by anyone in the genre (wow, that last sentence sounds like an ad).

I just fail to see where they've abandoned their morals and lost vision/path. I'm honestly curious to hear your views on what's happened.

Re:it will be disaster

[garylian]

No, the reason WoW trumps EQ2 in subscription numbers is that it came out of the gate with a much better product, and it had a much lower requirement for processor/memory/GPU.

EQ2 was a mess when it was released, with SOE still sticking to their formula they had in EQ1 of grind, grind, grind, and making things difficult for the sake of difficulty. Stuff like corpse recoveries and having to do time consuming quests just to change your bind point.

WoW came out with lots of fun right out of the box, and not a lot of unnecessary hassles. Time sinks were much less in WoW. Blizzard did a great job out of the gates. And since then, they've been slow as hell to add a lot of content.

They've long since fixed those problems, and in my opinion, EQ2 is now a much better product than WoW.

Adding an instance is not a huge amount of content. I'm fairly certain SOE has released that much content for EQ2 without a box set, and they've still had 4 box sets released to WoW's 1.