Guild Wars - Competitive MMO, No Subscription?

Thanks to IGN RPGVault for a new interview with the ArenaNet team, developers of Guild Wars. These ex-Blizzard developers, whose company was recently acquired by Korean RPG behemoth NCSoft, talk in-depth about Guild Wars, which they call "..a competitive online role-playing game, which we believe to be a new genre." According to the article, "..gameplay options will include cooperative group combat, single-player adventures and large-scale guild battles.. [with] persistent characters but a non-persistent game world", and there will be no monthly subscription fee for this intriguing PC title, which is due out later in 2004.

Comments

no monthly fees?

[Anonymous Coward]

IANAMMORPGDE (I Am Not A MMORPG Design Expert) but I am an admin on a graphical MUD. It seems like there'd have to be some ongoing expenses to cover: bandwidth, server maintenance, game staff, designers, etc. I guess if they sell enough copies, that'll cover it...while they're selling copies.

From some of the things described in the interview (e.g., "But once you form a party and go on a quest, you and your friends get your own unique copy of the quest...") I'm wondering if they've got a completely different client-server model, with more stuff pushed onto the client side, and maybe direct client-to-client communication for some stuff to reduce the bandwidth requirements for the servers. But those both have some security implications, i.e., never put anything important on the client or it'll get abused.

Re:no monthly fees?

[Anonymous Coward]

Blizzards Battle.net is not even close to comparing a full blown MMORPG.

Take EverQuest for example.

There are over 30 -game- servers, each one of those game servers taking up many many computer servers themselves. I've heard developers referring to the "farm of everquest servers". Not to mention the bandwidth. Blizzard can run Battle.net with a small amount of bandwidth because their games, once started, run directly (for the most part) between the clients playing. Everquest has every single action sent to the server, then to each client connected (which can be hundreds at once).

Then we have on going development/technical support, which requires an enormous amount more than Blizzard does. They can get by with a few people working part time to tune their old games. Everquest has large teams in constant full blown development.

There is really a huge, huge, huge difference between the services a company like Blizzard has to provide and MMOPG's.

I honestly don't see how a largescale MMOPG could not have a monthly fee. Each month EQ racks up about $4 million (give or take a bunch). Sounds like a lot, but a large majority of that goes to what is needed to run it. So considering they need that much to run it each month, I can't possibly imagine how a company plans to do it on the base fee. Would be interesting to see.

Don't hold your breath...

[negRo_slim]

...with the current state of MMORPG's its going to take one hell of a revolution in that scene to make anything notably different.

I mean take a look at the huge amount of launched, cancled and announced games of this type we've seen ever since Sony hit pay dirt with EQ. I mean even with competivness brought in at different levels, or different playstyles (UO, DAoC or PlanetSide). All these games become the same in the end and they all suck... I shudder everytime I see the letters MMO.

And with this game going the free route, either they have figured out an excellent client server model or it's just going to suck like all the others if not worse...

All this in IMHO of course

Mithrilvar Valormir - Level 53, Half Elven, Warrior on Ayonae Ro