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?

[eht]

Blizzard doesn't charge for access to Battle.net for Starcraft, Diablo, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 or the B.net version of Warcraft 2, in one interview or press release they claim ad revenue from the advertisements shown on the connection screen pay for Battle.net in it's entirety and then some, so I'd expect ex Blizzard employees to use the same tactic.