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what you talked about is in the soon-to-be-released (hopefully) Guild Wars

Guild Wars Website

Check out Guild Wars, ArenaNet's (ArenaNet was founded by a group of former Blizzard employees) revolutionary MMORPG (or CORPG). Its the first of its kind, in that it charges $0.00 per month, and also presents the bulk world in an instanced perspective.

Currently in development, Anet has offered players monthly "preview events", in which practically everyone can test the game. Not only does it serve as an excellent stress tool, but allows GW to gain new fans and excitement. In my opinion, a brilliant stretch on the Open Beta idea. I belive the next one is scheduled for Feb. 18, 2005. So head over to the site for more information...

Basically, Anet is giving us a glimpse of the future, by focusing on casual players with its fast-paced PvP, which anyone can pick up and play via PreMade characters, charging 0 monthly fees, and allowing players to go on instanced quests.

The future is in X company's ability to get the attention of casual players, not just hardcore roleplayers. And this is exactly where games like WoW and GW are going...

As unfortunate as it may seem, the idea of families and living online has been tried by EA & Maxis, in Sims Online, which proved to be a devastating failure. But personally, I feel it is still possible to make such an idea a success. The only problem would be to harness the attention of casual people, a task which currently seems very difficult. And as we all know, if something isn't liked enough by the public, companies (especially in the gaming business)are going to ignore it.

You meet other players at towns and outposts (each mission start at an outpost), as well as at the PvP areas and guild houses. But you won't have to deal with them when you don't want in order to play the game.

See Guild Wars. No monthly fee to play.

I'll agree with this. I've found Guild Wars a lot more interesting to play, eventough I've only taken part in a few beta-events so far. The graphics are unbelieveable (more realistic look'n feel, than the cartoonish WoW graphics), sort of remind me of FarCry landscapes.
I think Guild Wars is going to be a huge success, because of it's one-off pay model: You only need to buy the game once, no monthly fees.
I'm pretty sure there are quite a few WoW players who will switch after paying the World Of Warcrafts monthly fees for a while.

I was just going to post the same. There's more to a game than graphics, but decent graphics is pretty much a requirement today to attract the large masses of gamers, which is probably required to fund a MMORPG as well. With screenshots as abysmal as this , it being a beta is not really an excuse. These screenshots are for example from Guild Wars, which had a beta weekend event end today.

Come on, it's a game for 2005...

I was just going to post the same. There's more to a game than graphics, but decent graphics is pretty much a requirement today to attract the large masses of gamers, which is probably required to fund a MMORPG as well. With screenshots as abysmal as this , it being a beta is not really an excuse. These screenshots are for example from Guild Wars, which had a beta weekend event end today.

Come on, it's a game for 2005...

Well if you bothered to look at the FAQ you'd see

Guild Wars is being developed on and will initially be released for the PC. We are aware that there is an interest in having the game available on other operating systems or other platforms, and we will continue to evaluate these possibilities as we get closer to release.

The next beta weekend is this weekend (8th - 9th). You can grab the client from http://guildwars.com/ and a beta weekend key http://www.fileplanet.com/betacenter/guildwars/ (reqs email + dob)

Jeff Strain: I definitely think that Guild Wars will change the way gamers think about online games and subscription fees in particular. As a passionate gamer myself, I like to play around with a lot of games at once. I may not finish them all, but I love the fact that I can play Zelda: Four Swords Adventure for a few weeks, put it down to play Half-Life 2 and Burnout 3, and then come back to it a few months later on a rainy afternoon. I don't have to feel guilty about not playing. I don't have to feel like I can only have one game that I am actively playing at a time. We think subscription fees are contrary to the way most people want to play games, in that they force you to pay every month, even if you are not playing. Our goal is to provide an online experience with all of the support and evolving ongoing content that you get with a traditional MMO, but without the need for that subscription fee; that is exactly what Guild Wars is all about. There are no gimmicks, hidden advertising, or fees in small print. You will not be paying in installments, or paying more than you would for any other AAA game. It just works exactly like you would expect: buy the game, play online for no additional charge, and when a new chapter comes out every six months or so, decide whether you think it is cool enough to buy. The choice is always yours. Do I think players will want to see more of this type of business model for online games? No, I think they will demand it!

Guild Wars: http://www.guildwars.com/

Guild Wars is still in beta, but they intend to have no monthly fees. As I understand it, they intend to support the game through frequent release of expansion packs. Whether or not they will be successful with this model remains to be seen, but I'm sure many developers are watching closely.

Guild Wars (still in beta) is currently set up so that there is no monthly fee. You buy the game at retail, and play online for free. "Chapter" expansions then will be a purchaseable item, but only required to access new chapter areas or items. So for someone who plays only occasionally they only pay once, or only pays more when they are ready for playing the expansion content.

I mentioned it in an earlier thread, but according to Guild Wars' FAQ at http://www.guildwars.com/, it will not have a monthly fee when it comes out. And thanks to filtering, the game looks pretty good too. It's the only MMORPG I've ever considered, based on the no-monthly-fee fact alone.

What about Guild Wars? According to their FAQ, there will be no monthly fee, and I believe the devlopers are composed of ex-Blizzard members.

there, are a few who are trying. Its just that the ridiculous up-front costs make it hard to attract the money.

The price war will be starting shortly...

Guild Wars, for instance, is an MMORPG that has no monthly subscription price. You buy the media, and you're in.

I had the chance to play this in Beta test early on and I've got to say, it looks like it's going to be a helluva game.

Yeah, well, this is why I'm probably just going to get Guild Wars instead. No monthly fees, and while it's not a true MMORPG, it's not a true kind of anything else either, but a new kind of genre, or maybe could call it a mix of genres -- MMORPG's and Action RPG's / PvP games.

The focus on the game is to get rid of the grinding aspects in MMORPG's too. I wonder if those parts are really just there for you to stick with their games for a longer time. :-P

I'm personally very interested in Guild Wars. Not really a MMORPG except for some aspects, but very little grind, no monthly fees, a lot of content and even more to be released in expansions that *you* decide when to buy and not absolutely necessary to play with those who have the expansions, excellent graphics (see website), Player vs Environment areas, Guild vs Guild areas, Player vs Player arenas, and questing and a decent storyline. Overall a new kind of game genre and I have already pre-ordered the game. :-)

Guild Wars, which had it's free World Preview Event over this past weekend, is a great example of competitive balance in a manner similar to what you mentioned. There are 6 classes a person has to choose from, each with 75 available skills to be learned. Players are only able to 'equip' 8 skills for any mission/instance from their primary or secondary class. The level cap is 20. Once you reach 20 (which can be done in 2 days or so if you work hard enough), you are essentially on an equal playing field with everyone, regardless of how long they have been playing the game. You can continue to learn new skills beyond level 20, but you are still limited to only carrying 8 at any given moment. While older characters may be much more versatile (with planning) than new characters, they are never necessarily at an advantage due to their age.

And GuildWars will be running its 2nd "Alpha" event, the WPE, across the weekend allowing players to try it out free of charge pre-release. http://www.guildwars.com/

The Guild Wars preview event started early. As in, it's up now. Everyone go play!

Actually, that might not be such a good idea. The game streams new content to you as you need it. Could their game servers take a /.ing?

Also worth noting is that Guild Wars will be having their second "World Preview Event", with an early version of their game available for free download and play Oct. 29 - 31.

Guild Wars is having a free preview event this weekend starting tomorrow, thru Sunday... Hopefully it will be more of a treat than a trick. And hey, just think of all those free costume ideas! :-)

http://www.guildwars.com/press/pr06-10-27-04.html

I played some of it while they were demoing over E3--alot of potential there.

I was looking forward to Guild Wars however since it is being created by NC Soft I will now skip that one too.

Actually Guild Wars and City of Heroes are published by NC Soft, but are created by ArenaNet and Cryptic Studios respectively. And there is a world of difference...CoH is pretty much the antithesis of Lineage 2 in terms of MMORPG philosophy: a shipload of character options, fast-paced and exciting combat, no crafting, and no PvP (yet). So don't hold Lineage's suckitude against the other dev teams...

Check out Guild Wars.

It will be interesting to see how free MMORPGs in the future such as Guild Wars (http://www.guildwars.com/) do. For me, I personally refuse to pay 10 or so bucks a month when I don't have the time to commit to such a game.

Quote from http://www.guildwars.com/Guildwars.com:

"What is the expected release date?

There has been no change in the release window, and we anticipate that Guild Wars will be released in the second half of 2004."

That was in the official game FAQ, where is this news of the game being delayed coming from?

The best MMO imo coming out will be Guild Wars. I've been following this game very closely since the E34E event. This game in an alpha build, blew my socks off. The game play is not dependent on levels or items so much (although they will be slightly) but much more on strategy. A new character should be able to beat a character that's got 5x's as much time spent in the game as him if the new character has better strategy. Of course, the game isn't released yet, so who knows if it'll live up to the hype. But with no monthly fee on top of all that, it looks great. Good pvp, good story, great graphics, the guys who left Blizzard. This game will be amazing. I'm convinced.

Guild Wars http://www.guildwars.com/ is supposed to be similar, except it will have no monthly fee.

DAOC, before SI AND TOA was a great game to play casually once you hit 50, since you could pvp for an hour or two at a time if you wished. Often (after 50) I'd log in around 7pm and play until 10-10:30 or so and really enjoy it. However once the expansions hit which required long (4+ hour) raids for items to "keep up" it just turned into every other MMORPG.

The upcoming MMO Guild Wars will have no monthly subscription fee.

SOE currently offers their All Access Pass :

"If you play more than one SOE game, or you want to try the other great SOE games available, SOE All Access opens the SOE game catalog to you.

SOE All Access grants access to all current games published by SOE*, which includes: EverQuest® EverQuest® Macintosh Edition PlanetSide EverQuest® Online Adventures Station Pass access, which includes the popular games Infantry Online, Cosmic Rift and Tanarus

Full access to these games for the low monthly subscription price of $21.99 is a potential savings of more than $18.00 every month over the total cost of the individual subscriptions!"


PlayNC (NCSoft) does not offer such a deal but is a central site for managing your online game subscriptions and I imagine once Guild Wars, Tabula Rasa, Auto Assault and others are released, we may start to see some special offers from them as well.


Skotos has been offering this type of service for a long time. For one monthly fee you can access and play all 11 of the games that they offer. Only 2 are graphical MMOGs (Meridian 59 and Underlight), but the other games are very good as well.


The largest factor in offering multiple "A list" titles for one monthly fee is offsetting development (and in the case of MMOGs, maintenance) costs and bringing in enough revenue to show a good profit. The bottom line is always a driving factor in any business. However, there is hope. As technology moves forward, we will start to see more and more rapid development of MMOGs of higher quality and consequently we should start to see a wider array of offerings and price points.


I also agree that some sports games should start to appear on the scene. XBox Live will probably be a driving factor to this more than anything. Playing football online against other players is quite fun and should prove to be very popular considering the amount of sports console games sold. Now, as to whether that genre will move to PC is yet to be seen, but as I mentioned before, in SOE's All Access Pass, they combine online console and PC subscriptions into one package. A diverse product line benefits them in this case. More comapnies need to grow in the genre and diversify at the same time, but that takes time and money. Soon though... very soon.

Hmmm... I remember playing the E3 demo for Guild Wars. It's almost an MMORPG. The pricing scheme announced for this game seemed totally different from other MMORPGs and seems more desirable. Basically, you pay a one time fee for the basic game. Every few months, they release an expansion which allows for new classes, skills, areas, etc. You can buy the expansion or if you want to try out the new stuff for free, ask a buddy who has the expansion to invite you to a new area. All the content is streamed over the internet. The gameplay handles like Diablo 2. Check it out here.

Check out Guild Wars for example. I played the alpha release during their E3 for Everyone event. They opened up their alpha version of game to everyone for about a week and it was amazing even at that early build. Their game will require no monthly fees. It's ex blizzard people and they've developed a new network design that will save tons so they will just release an expansion every 6 months or so to help cover the costs of this game. I for one am extremely hyped about this game and anyone who's into the MMORPG market should check it out. It's quite revolutionary in a few ways and if previous games by these designers are any clue, it will be amazing. Arena.net is proving to be just as good as they were when they were with Blizzard.

Its sort of sad to see games moving in this direction. There is nothing more challenging than playing vs another human being, and nothing more boring than fighting the same NPC mobs over and over to get the ph4t l00tz. I belong to a PvP guild, and our average member age (of around 140 members) is about 25 years old. I can assure Sony that none of my guild will be playing this game. To be honest, none of us were really considering playing it in the first place, because the EQLive team has never given any serious consideration to the PvP crowd as their crappy PvP servers can attest to. There are much more interesting PvP games on the way (Darkfall, Dragon Empires, or Guild Wars to name a few) to want to lose a few pounds on this level treadmill.

To the people who feel that 'pvp attracts the immature crowd', mabye you're just a bit too old (or too mature) to be playing video games. We'll be all practiced up and waiting for you when you get bored of kiting a_hill_giant01 for the 100th time to get that last bubble of lvl 35.

NCSoft is acting as a publisher here. The only titles developed by NCSoft is Lineage and Lineage II. Of NCSoft's other titles,

Guild Wars is being developed by ArenaNet , a group composed primarily of former Blizzard employees who worked on Diablo that left in the Vivendi Universal bankruptcy debacle over the possible sale of the games division (including Blizzard). They could have picked a name further from BattleNet, though.

Tabula Rasa is developed by Destination Games, the Austin, Texas group headed by Richard Gariott composed primarily of people that got fired from or left Origin after EA scrapped the Ultima Online 2 project. They were actually far into Tabula Rasa before being signed on with NCSoft.

City of Heroes is developed by Cryptic Studios based in San Jose, CA.

Finally, Auto Assault is developed by NetDevil .

All of these developers are completely autonomous as far as design goes. NCSoft is only the publisher and the billing gateway. For the sake of the independent developers that just happened to have signed up with NCSoft, please don't confuse their works with that of other developers.

Pay $15 a month, AFAIK 50% more than any other major MMORPG on the market, for a month of use-it-or-lose-it gaming time. If you're playing it for only an hour every other day, you're paying a lot more per gaming hour than you are when you buy a game like Baldur's Gate that doesn't go away after a month. Don't get me wrong, I realize it's a flaw of the whole genre (though those crazy kids at Guild Wars seem to think otherwise), but then I (as a casual gamer) won't touch the rest of the genre for the same reason.

Yes. But this is coming from someone who can beat a $50 dollar game in a weekend.

MMORPGs provide things an RPG cant. Interaction with others. MMORPGs provides things FPSes cant. Storylines, and persistant worlds. Its like buying a Gamecube, then paying 15 bucks a month for all the games you want. (Only its one game, and tons of content)

If you don't play video games that much. Fine. There's plenty of games that will accomidate ya. Guild Wars is a Diablo 2 clone that lets you interact with hundreds of people (and actually play with 4 different people), and doesnt require any monthly fees.

Did anybody else give theGuild Wars "E3 For Everyone" promotion a try? If so, what'd you think of the game?

Over at the Guild Wars website you'll be able to download a pre-alpha build of the game on Wednesday, May 12! E3 for everyone, yay!

Guild Wars is a free MMOG, developed commercially. I don't know enough about their business plan to figure out where they're going to make money.

I imagine there will be interest in it if only for the free part of the equation. I don't see it overtaking any of the big guys, though.

Guild Wars Site

Check out Guildwars E3 for Everyone

The what looks to be awesome game Guildwars (from former employees of Blizzard, making it out to be a "Diablo 3" of sorts) is offering their client for everyone to play during E3. I think it's a great idea, so you can judge for yourself how it is, rather than reading hyped up previews. I don't know about you, but I would love to go but probably would never be able to, so I think opening up more to the public works well. Either way free gaming is free gaming.

This image brings up an interesting subject.

Why the hell are most hand held weapons (swords, clubs, etc.) used by characters in 3D fantasy games as big as themselves? Do game developers have any idea how heavy a sword that big would be?

Ahh, ok, it's a magical sword. That explains it. Too bad the other swords marked as "not magical" are as big and carried the same way.

Anyone noticed Guild Wars?

Developed by ex-Blizzard employees, and in the same spirit as Battle.net in terms of a free multiplayer service. New extra features can be bought (this is how the MMOG is financed), but they won't be necessary to play with those who have them.

It has pretty graphics too. :-) The gallery is all unretouched graphics with interesting lightning effects making some people think they were post-processed.

Anyone noticed Guild Wars?

Developed by ex-Blizzard employees, and in the same spirit as Battle.net in terms of a free multiplayer service. New extra features can be bought (this is how the MMOG is financed), but they won't be necessary to play with those who have them.

It has pretty graphics too. :-) The gallery is all unretouched graphics with interesting lightning effects making some people think they were post-processed.

Independent game companies usually have plenty of tactics, or else they wouldn't be as popular as they are. For example, I've been hooked on reading everything I can about an upcoming game called Guild Wars. This is going to be one hell of a game. Their kickers are going to be a non pay-to-play MMORPG(which, IMO, is huge) and "creating a game that's both easy to learn and compelling to play long term, and yet doesn't require players to spend hundreds of hours slogging through the preparation just to get to the fun bits." Defenitely going to be a game to watch.

Keep in mind that Blizzard experienced a similar defection about four years ago. Patrick Wyatt, Mike O'Brien, and Jeff Strain (One was a biz guy, the other two wrote battle.net and worked as leads on diablo and starcraft... if memory serves) took off to form a startup called TriForge. They then became Arena.net and finally were swallowed by NCSoft. They are now working on Guild Wars.

So, Blizzard has survived a previous walkout... they have since churned out Warcraft 3, Diablo 2, a few expansion packs, and are nearly done with WoW. Will they survive this? I believe so. I'm wondering if they will be able to come up with original content, or if it will be infected by suits who continue to pimp out the the Warcraft/Diablo franchise ad infinum.

So far all Arena.net (I remember they used to be TriForge) has made is something called Guild Wars that won best of show at E3, which means it's not done yet, they left Blizzard over 3 years ago, since that time they've been bought by a company called NCsoft Corporation of Seoul, Korea.

So saying all that, what innovative techniques are they using to make online gaming better? They haven't made anything yet, Daikatana was also promised to be some great good thing and was started by people in a similiar situation and look where Daikatana and Romero and company are today.

I'd like to see them succeed but I expected them to do so years ago.