Played WoW the last 2 days as well, so I'll add my 0.5c.
Graphics:
I agree. Would give Ryzom only a 8, though - the graphics are good, but not as good.
And for WoW it was never said that it has revolunationary graphics, so no big surprise here.
So, WoW6 vs Ryzom 8.
Char Generation & Development:
Yes, WoW Char Gen is somewhat limited. You get more variation in clothing than in Ryzom, though. Also, a lot of chages in Ryzom will never be noticed (is the nose 1 pixel more upwards or downwards).
Basically, WoW misses the extensive face options of ryzom (it has only about 10 premade ones, which can be combined with about 10 premade extras, which effeciently gives you a number of face only possible combos of 100) and has no option to modfiy arm/leg/torso thickness. It has a wide varity of skin colors, though.
But you neglected one thing totally - that you have 8 races with pretty different abilities. In Ryzom it currently doesn't matters, all races play just the same (yes, the plan to introduce racial abilities, but those are notin yet, and, more importantly, another race will be able to learn them, too, if they have good fame).
This is probably subjective, but I personally dislike that all races are just the same apart from the look & their starting regions.
In short: Ryzom has more options to modify your Char graphically (at the start), while WoW has more options to modify your Char in his abilities.
Which becomes very clear later on. From lvl 10+ you get Talents. Which are not to be confused with skills, you get those before already. Every char can get all skills (provided he has neough money, because you have to pay the trainers for them), but Talents are different. From lvl 10 on you get 1 talent point for every lvl. These points you can distribute in 3 different trees. For the thief for example, these are assassin, combat and stealth trees.
The important thing here is that you get a total of 51 talent points from lvl 10-60 (which is the lvl cap), but could invest about 150 talent points in all 3 skills together (actually I am not sure if you can even buy all talents in *1* tree with 51 points).
Which basically means: you'll probably get Chars which look the same later on in WoW, but you will almost never get Chars which have the same abilities. In Ryzom if you have seen one fighter you have seen them all.
Char Generation:
6 WoW vs 7 Ryzom
Char Development:
8 Wow vs 6 Ryzom
(Because I like to make a char whose abilites are unique. Others may like Ryzom better, because it allows people to be good at anything. For me it's more of a flaw. But tastes differ.)
Quests and Mobs
Now HERE I disagree. Let's take the mobs first:
There it's basically just like with the Char generation. Ryzom has the more shiny wrapping paper, but the thing inside tastes better in WoW IMO.
Meaning. Yes, the mobs in WoW are pretty much those you know from the Warcraft series (but not only - although the new ones I saw were not really jawdropping original creations
). But those behave a lot more diverse than in Ryzom. You have the usual "I attack you till I or you are dead" mobs, but also some which run away if they are on low health (mostly humans/intelligent races - quite some fun to kill those with a flying dagger in their back while they run away from you I might add). And ranged mobs. And ranged or melee spellcasters. And healers.
In Ryzom all you have are melee mobs, if you do not count the plants (which are few, nonaggro and are seldom picked as targets).
The maiority of them is aggro (espcially later, in the starting regions you still have a nice petting zoo), but I don't really have a problem with that. You can defeat them alone just nicely unless you get 3 or 4 of them and I am pretty much used to sneak past mobs as prime root forager
.
And one important thing to add: you can flee from them. They don't chase after you till kingdom comes, after 30 secs or so they usually decide you are not worth the bother and run back. Evne if you died you only loose like 2-5 min gameplay, since all you have to do is to get your ghost (spawns near the main city in the area you are in) back to your corpse (it runs faster than a physical person and cannot be seen or attacked). No other penalties.
Alltogether I miss the predator/herbivore behaviour of Ryzom, but I happily trade this for the more diverse (in behavior) mobs in WoW.
Mobs: 8 (WoW) vs 6 (Ryzom)
(In design only I agree with 4/8, but definatly not in design, diversity & behaviour combined together).
Quests.. Well, Blizzard cooks only with water as well - most quests are only fed-ex, just as in Ryzom. But the important difference is that here WoW has the better wrapping paper. Every quest has his own story, which so far has never been boring. And you have quest which depend on each other, meaning after you done quest a & b you can do quest C, which connects storywise to the previous quests. This increases the fun of them considerably.
This storyaspect won't be as vital when you make a new char, because you'll already know all generic (aka non race or class specific quests) you amde with another char already. but even there it doesn't becomes the "repeat quest xx a thousand times" as in Ryzom, because you can make a quest only once. Not to forget, you become very juicy rewards in exp, money and items from quests.
Quests: 8 (WoW) vs 2 (Ryzom)
Gameplay
Just a few things.
The most noticeable thing I saw in WoW was that..there is no real grind. You play the game..and lvl up. You do not make the same tasks 100 times. By the time you fully explored an area (and made all quests you can get) you are ready to move on.
Fights quite often get you on 10-30% health, but you have virtually no downtime, because reg rates are very fast.
You can do a lot of things solo, but grouping is generally more effective. Some quests are quite hard to solve alone. A good thing here btw - when you solve a quest as group *everyone* in the group (who has that quest) gets the quest reward. For example, if you have to bring back the skull of xy *everyone* with that quest in the group gets his own skull when the group killed xy. Not very logical - but neither is to camp that mob until he got killed often enough for all mebers to have the skull.
For normal mobs you have a very wide variety of group loot options (something which I miss very dearly in Ryzom).
In short - WoW falls definatly short in originallity and design compared to Ryzom, but has a lot more diversity and content.
I
