All of what follows is, of course, opinion.  Going to look at a large amount of categories of these games and grade em A-F

First thing you see when starting up an MMO

Character Creation:

EQ2:  B+ - large racial variety, decent amount of appearance options

WoW: C+ - nice amount of races, very limited options

Rift: C-  -decent appearance customization, but one of the worst race selections in any MMO

SWToR:  D -only slightly better than WoW in appearance customization, but the race selection sucks gven the IP

Newbie Zone(s) and Tutorial:

WoW: B  -varied zones for each race, good pace brnging you along

SWtoR: B  -the voice overs are a good intro, less variety than WoW but a good intro to the game

EQ2: B-   -the zones are all well done, but it feels a little more overwhelming than the other two

Rift: C  -Puts its worst foot forward.  Rifts dont even come into play until after the zone, and there is only one zone per faction.  You get way too many abilities that overlap/are useless

Game World/Lore

WoW: B+   -Even before expansons, azeroth was fairly large.  Lots of prexsting lore, and its displayed well.  Varied areas

EQ2: B+   -Almost the same reasons as WoW.  The lore doesnt come through as much in EQ2, its more subtle.  The world is larger, but the islands make up of the original zones kinda sucks.  The expansions fare much better

Rift: C-   -world is small, and the lore isnt spectacular.

SWToR:  C-  -world is much bigger, but nt as open as it should be.  Star Wars lore saves this from being an even lower grade.

Leveling Experience(first time):

WoW: A-   -great quest presentation, active dungeons, active battlegrounds, good storylines.   Plenty of places to go. Downgrades a little because 61-85 isnt quite as good as 1-60, but the first time through its not as bad

SWToR: B   -lots of stories to be told, its still active enough that you can get the group quests done (YMMV, but Ive never had issues).  

Rift: B-   -Dungeon queues are long, but since they wisely marged servers they are no longer dead while leveling, and events actually happen n 20-45 zones,although not super common.  Quests kind of suck, but its still fun going throgh zones- the first time

EQ2: C  -Not a low grade because of quality, but because the top heavy aspect hurts.  Freeport can bump this up to a B because its much more active.  The quest lore for the leveling content isnt that great though.  There is a fantastic selection of dungeons, some open world some instanced if you can get folks to do em.

Leveling Experience(alt replayability):

WoW B+   -remans fun for all the same reasons, plus multiple zones each level means youll see different things, if you want

EQ2: C  -same grade as the first character, lots of content, and again those dungeons.  Youll probably have a better network of friends the second time and do more of them.

Rift: C-  -kiind of boring second time through, due to repeated content

SWTOR:  C-  -yes, you get a new main quest...but youve seen everything else already

Class System:

Rift: A-  -Im one of the guys that *doesnt* love the soul system.  I think the individual souls are a little too watered down to make the thing work better.  Still, Im the minority and most people love it

EQ2:  B   -Good class variety with most well defined and desirable.  AAs are often cookie cutter but there is a good deal of choice to be had

WoW:  B-   -Talent trees are cookie cutter, but they all are useful and on most cases ar elike 3 seperate classes, they play that differently.  

SWTOR:  D  -uninspired use of talent tree system, not man choices at all

Crafting:

EQ2: B   -amount of quests is great, and your wares are HIGHY desriable for leveling characters.  The system gets tedious though and the max level usefulness is iffy.

SWToR:  C-   -if they fix high level crafting usefulness it would go up to a C+

Rift, WoW:  D   uninspired, boring.  Useless as you level since you outlevel your skill too fast.  Not 100% worthless at max level

This is taking longer than I thought....just going to do grades for the rest:

PvP:

WoW: B-

Rift:  C

SWTOR:  C-

EQ2:  D

Max level, solo content

Rift:  C

WoW:  C-

SWtoR: D

EQ2: D

Max level, group content

Rift: B

EQ2, WoW: B-

SWToR:  C

Max level small raid content:

Rift: B

WoW, EQ2:  B-

SWToR: C

Max level large raid content:

EQ2, WoW: B

Rift: B-  (Only one raid added in the last 11 months, yes I know one is coming)

SWToR: C-

Non Combat stuff:

EQ2:  A-  

WoW:  B  

Rift:  B-

SWToR:  D

Developer:

Rift:  A-

SWTOR:  B-  (WHAT?????  1.2 looks awesome, Bioware does seem dedicated to development, I am givng them some benefit of the doubt here...this could drop rapidly still)

EQ2:  C  (honestly from 2006-2009 SoE was a solid A for EQ2, but 2010-11 have been weak plus that whole past history thing)

WoW:  C-  (wheres the damn content?  Cataclysm sucked.  Too much income to not have more content)

no overall scores averaged out from the individual scores?

Sorry, really, really, really disagree with you on your C- score to WoW's content. I don't think there has ever been a game that has given us so much great content.

I would give Rift lower scores in a few areas compared to SWTOR. Alt replayability in Rift is non existent but it's not any good in SWTOR either tbh. I think that EQ2 and WoW are a class higher than SWTOR and Rift, last 2 representing quite vividly what a stagnant pungent pond MMO genre has become. I'm still subbed to SWTOR, probably until TSW comes out just to have a game to play now and then but I cannot see myself playing it longer than I played Rift (4 months).

These scores really matter, they really really do and are totally thorough and well explained without any bit of bias!

/sarcasm

However, I do think most of your scores are probably pretty accurate. I do think as the last poster said, WoW and EQ2 are a class higher than either SWTOR and RIFT (and I'm a current subscriber to TOR and played Rift for six  months). I still have hopes for TOR but really think Rift is just a well-crafted WoW clone that doesn't do anything great but doesn't really fail at anything either. To be fair, I haven't played EQ2 in a while but when I did, I really enjoyed the game.

Originally posted by Jakard

Sorry, really, really, really disagree with you on your C- score to WoW's content. I don't think there has ever been a game that has given us so much great content.

 It has taken them seven years to give you all the content and they have billions of dollars being brought in per year, not to mention they charge you for the expansions.

I totally agree with OP on that regard.

Originally posted by Jakard

Sorry, really, really, really disagree with you on your C- score to WoW's content. I don't think there has ever been a game that has given us so much great content.

Truth be told, all you get is Raids, dungeons and Battlegrounds, there's not a whole lot to do besides that.

WoW needs to add new types of content, and should have done so years ago, the "world" has tons of sea, how about guild ships and add naval pvp battles for the open world? people can craft and upgrade their ship, so they start with a small personal one and can get a larger one, guild ships should need several players to make it function in combat and be the largest ones, and most hard to get.

Add small islands to explore, and other stuff for non pvp'ers to do on their boats etc. etc. etc. If a AA mmo like Archeage can do it, I'm sure Blizzard can too.

anyhow just a thought on some combat and non combat content.

SWTOR > EQ2 > WoW > Rift.

SWTOR I might have played. Not for long, because the game is too easy and the massive story content sadly doesnt help with making it a better MMO. But I would have played it.

EQ2 and WoW, I wouldnt play either, but they are still kind of solid games. EQ2 is kind of a Vanguard minus all the properties that attracted me to Vanguard, and added a lot of toys I dont give a damn about. WoW, the graphics alone turn me off and the game is pure RvR with only 2 realms.

Rift just doesnt belong into this list. Checking out the rulesystem alone made me completely disinterested. Thats not a high quality rulesystem like the other three, but a mathematical crap trick to get a formally high number of possible character builds, which however doesnt actually will lead to a high variance in gameplay. I've already seen it in DA:O and I dont need a repetition.

Just one question, how different are those 4 games?

Sure quality levels might be different between the 4 games, but mechanically, they all play the same way.

The fact that majority of MMORPG uses the same kind of presentation, hotkey bars, loot and gear tier, questgivers and cooldown based rotation combat that is heavily relient on statistical dispay of numbers, random number generators.

The fact is, they are all the same game.

they are like Skyrim to Gothic to Risen. They only want to achieve the same goal through the same design.

There isn't other sub genre into the MMO field, no action, no platforming, no shooter, no puzzle games, like their singleplayer counterpart.

Originally posted by xKingdomx

Just one question, how different are those 4 games?

Well, they are all EQ clones ...

Originally posted by xKingdomx

they are like Skyrim to Gothic to Risen.

Um, no, not at all.

Risen I dont know at all, but Gothic and Skyrim are VERY different games.

They only belong to the same genre.

Is this a joke? WoW's replayability is possibly the worst out of any MMO I have ever played.  The only difference is there are different skills on your skillbar when you reroll, same grind, same lack of originality, same boring experience.

Originally posted by Chrisbox

Is this a joke? WoW's replayability is possibly the worst out of any MMO I have ever played.  The only difference is there are different skills on your skillbar when you reroll, same grind, same lack of originality, same boring experience.

I levelled up 3 characters to level 60 and I didn't find it boring at all. You can level at least 2 characters without overlapping much of the content in the game. There are so many zones which can get you to max level. However, with the expansions it gets a bit tiring as their is pretty much 1 path to level up through. You can still avoid doing the same content if you level up 2 characters.

So different zones, different skills... When did you play WoW? For how long? Did you get to level 20 and then quit and then decided to flame the game?

Originally posted by Jakard

Sorry, really, really, really disagree with you on your C- score to WoW's content. I don't think there has ever been a game that has given us so much great content.

What meaningful solo content is there for a max level in WoW?  Its dailies, and thats it.  Dailies suck.

Originally posted by mbrodie

no overall scores averaged out from the individual scores?

Im curious what this would be if you gave d = 1, d+ = 1.33, c- = 1.67 etc and averaged them out.  Ill have to calculate that later.

Originally posted by Purutzil

These scores really matter, they really really do and are totally thorough and well explained without any bit of bias!

 

/sarcasm

Which games show bias?  They all got some high scores and they all got some low scores.  I thin the scoring was pretty damn fair.

Maybe you could say Im anti-SWToR?  Not true, it just scores low on endgame content because its buggy and the difficulty is out of whack (too easy).  Its replayability is rather low since tis the same zones and 75% the same quests.  I actually like SWToR.

Originally posted by Purutzil

These scores really matter, they really really do and are totally thorough and well explained without any bit of bias!

 

/sarcasm

What a brilliant bit of sarcasm there.

/sarcasm

Interesting to see crafting rated so low, particularly for RIFT and WOW due to it being "useless", when in fact both games regularly produced items superior to quest items while leveling.

The only argument I could see is that if you spent that time leveling instead of crafting that you'd progress faster overall (and be on higher level quests providing better items.)

I'm going to have to ask for the stats\numbers behind those rankings. Posting bias being what it is, any actual information to back the claims would lend some credence. Otherwise WoW>Rift>SWtor>EQ2 all categories.