This Old Neon Forum

Welcome to the #BGE2020 Elimination Round Lower Bracket!

Each game in the lower bracket is still seeded based on its performance in the two opening rounds of pools! Every game in the lower bracket has already been defeated by another game in a 1-on-1 poll to get to this point. This is their chance to claw their way back into the main event... but the stakes are high. The games that lose in these polls are out of the tournament for good! The games that survive will face the next crop of upper bracket losers in the next round.

Polls are updated weekly, typically on Saturday... or Sunday or Monday. Check back throughout the week to make sure you don't miss a vote!

HOW TO VOTE

This is easy. You only get one vote per poll. The game with the most votes wins. In the event of a tie, the higher seed advances, so don't get complacent!

Really hard to vote against WoW at this stage of the game. One of the most influential games of all time, and that's not an exaggeration. Even though it wasn't the earliest MMO, it was the one that single-handedly expanded and mainstreamed its genre more than any other game for any other genre—it's up there with the likes of Super Mario Bros. for platformers and Street Fighter 2 for fighting games. Not to mention it's still going after 20 years, god damn.

Wild Arms 2 is probably the second worst WA game. It's not bad... but even if WA2 is underrated and WoW is overrated (I tried but never got into it), it's hard to argue with the impact WoW had.

WA2's translation is awful, and it does no favors for a game that has a hard-to-follow plot even if you do understand what's going on. It starts with "why is everyone suddenly zombies" and ends with

Spoiler

"why is the oort cloud attacking us" (not an exaggeration)

. Although it has some interesting subplots with terrorists and nuclear weapons in the middle.

Meanwhile WoW is iconic and beloved by millions. Have a few friends that didn't graduate college because of it, although it wasn't the only game to cause a student's downfall..

WoW is base game or every expansion?

SkyPikachu wrote: ↑12 Apr 2023 02:55 WoW is base game or every expansion?

Up to you.

Kong Wen wrote: ↑11 Apr 2023 02:10 Even though it wasn't the earliest MMO, it was the one that single-handedly expanded and mainstreamed its genre more than any other game for any other genre—it's up there with the likes of Super Mario Bros. for platformers and Street Fighter 2 for fighting games. Not to mention it's still going after 20 years, god damn.

I've never really looked into it, and didn't get deep enough in the base game to routinize it - was WoW the pioneer of "dailies" or other real-time-gated quests? I remember there being at least some quests on a regular cadence you had to do to maximize rewards. I don't recall that being in earlier MMOs I played (Neverwinter Nights AOL, ImagiNation Network's Shadows of Yserbius & co) but I wasn't in on Ultima Online or Everquest.

If I can blame WoW for some of the core design concepts of modern gacha games, I might consider voting against it on principle. Or voting for it because it's even more influential. Either way, I'm curious.

Kong Wen wrote: ↑12 Apr 2023 03:39

SkyPikachu wrote: ↑12 Apr 2023 02:55 WoW is base game or every expansion?

Up to you.

So I assume none of the expansions have their own entry then?

SkyPikachu wrote: ↑13 Apr 2023 22:36

Kong Wen wrote: ↑12 Apr 2023 03:39

SkyPikachu wrote: ↑12 Apr 2023 02:55 WoW is base game or every expansion?

Up to you.

So I assume none of the expansions have their own entry then?

That's correct, but good thought! My vote for WoW is as a whole cultural artifact/phenomenon, so that includes classic, all expansions, each expansion individually during its era, etc.

I don't like WoW. But it's influence is impossible to ignore.