WoW is meant to have a disney look and be scalable to many users, of course they wouldn't use high end graphics. They use a lot of HDR and bloom and have amazing lighting.
GW has an amazing material system and like WoW awesome lighting (Notice how light refracts off the armor).
WoWs' look is unique and nice in it's own way. They make up for their lacking graphics superiority with vast beauty with hundreds of textures, crazy ambience and wonderful atmosphere. Let's not mention the well known storyline. Blizzard was smart, they released RTSes so people would memorize the storyline. Now when WoW was releaased they didnt need to do much explaining or wait for people to adapt. Nor during world events do they have to explain WHY the scourge are invading. People just know from playing WC3
If GW were more established (and didnt completely fucking suck and have a shitty goal) it might give WoW a run for it's money. Then Blizzard would just sharpshoot them with a SC MMO and end all MMO competition.
I played GW for 6 months, and I've played WoW for just a couple weeks. The reason GW was so fascinating to me is because I was unable to do any sort of MMORPG due to being on a 28.8k modem.
But about the light reflection- completely agreed. There was a place off of Wizard's Folly, up where the elementist is in pre-searing. It was a cave of ice. When I first when in there with my character I just stood there and looked around for ~10 minutes. Fucking amazing stuff.
Problems with GW:
1. Very, very very easy to get to level 20 ( max ). '
2. The gear is sooooooooooooooooooo sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo lame. If you're a priest you're GOING to be using the same gear as everyone else.
WoW's gear also isn't that great. There's not too much variety, but still a shitload more then WoW. D2 has a really nice item database.
3. Not enough multiplayer interaction. As soon as you go out of town, you're basically in your own instance with whatever group you're in.
4. The storlyline is pretty fucking hard to follow. If you pay attention you can get it, but a very small amount of the people actually read the quests.
GW has a pretty decent PvP thing going on, however.
I like WoW a lot better than GW. I don't like the graphics as much, but there's a lot of other things that definitely make up for it. Such as:
1. You can reach 60 within a few weeks, but that would take quite a lot of farming and being very bored. It still takes much longer than GW
2. Gear is partially customizable.. You see different gear for different classes, it's not -too- universal.
3. You're in constant interaction with everyone in your server.
4. There's not really a storyline to follow, which allows you to explore around with your character.
5. BLIZZARD CARES WHAT YOU THINK. They can and -do- adapt to what players need and anything that they might be exploiting.
I wish Blizzard put as much care into WoW as they did D2. If D2 and WoW were released at the same time, had similar graphics, and had an equal amount of care put into both, D2 would be soooooooooooooooooooo fuckkkkkkkkkkkking popular.
What's even crazier is the thought of World of Diablo. That would take over the world in a minute. Sure Diablo II and WoW are completely different games and are hard to compare, but playing games 24/7 and noticing different things about each game gives me a hint that Diablo'd have the edge over WoW. ATM, people don't play Diablo because of how repetitive it gets, and the sheer fucking amounts of dupes and glitches. I fucking hate it, you can't avoid them because of how fucked up the economy is. Blizzard totally ignores it now that they have 6 million people paying them 15 bucks a month for their attention.
