Guild Wars Ramps Up To E3, Previewed Effusively

Thanks to GameSpot for its hands-on impressions of ArenaNet/NCSoft's online PC RPG, Guild Wars, a subscription-free title that's previously received positive press. The preview explains that "the game relies on a skill-based system that's reminiscent of the card game Magic: The Gathering. You can collect and earn a wide variety of powerful skills and abilities, but... you'll be allowed to select only eight of them to take into battle", meaning that "a relatively new player will have a chance against seasoned veterans." It's also noted: "One of the most surprising aspects of Guild Wars is that the entire game will download to your computer while you play it", with only a "small executable program, about 90 kilobytes in size" needed - this is shown by the official download page for the E3 For Everyone alpha demo event, explained thus: "From May 12 through 14, while Guild Wars is being demonstrated on the E3 show floor, players from around the world will be able to play the same experience over the Internet."

Comments

E3 vs the world?

[MMaestro]

Its a stretch, but maybe the developers would hold a special event before E3 ended. All the non-E3 players that are online vs what few people stayed in the booth to play. While they're at it, they could turn it into a Lord of the Rings like scene..

"Just as our brave media correspondants were overwhelmed by the rabid gamers, the servers crashed saving our heroes from certain humiliation!'

Effusively?

[gkelman]

What the hell does Effusively mean?

Re:Effusively?

[chrismcdirty]

effusive ( P ) Pronunciation Key (-fysv)
adj.

1. Unrestrained or excessive in emotional expression; gushy: an effusive manner.
2. Profuse; overflowing: effusive praise.

effusively adv.
effusiveness n.

Re:Effusively?

[gkelman]

Good answer. I managed to guess the meaning, just had never heard it before. Me, when I communicate, I like to use words that other people would have heard before. Unlike effusively. Mebbe I'm just uneducated.

Re:Effusively?

[chrismcdirty]

Mebbe I'm just uneducated.

That's unpossible!

Re:Effusively?

[Zoshnell]

But realistically it's a perfectly crommulent word. Neigh, it even embiggens the smallest man!

An Excellent Idea

[HeadCrash]

While I have my suspicions about the business model (the content will have to be damn good for people to keep paying for upgraded stuff), I must say that the model is a killer idea. How many people out there don't play MMOs because of the monthly fee? I know I don't (Yeah, yeah - call me a cheapskate...although City of Heroes looks damn tempting...) I'll be there for the E3 event...

Re:An Excellent Idea

[*weasel]

The business model is very interesting.

You can play without paying for anything, but the game is heavily mission-based. Ostensibly, the missions are what you're paying for. So, if you don't pay, you quickly run out of things to do. Paying for content in this way is effectively episodic peristent gaming.

This also leads to the interesting situation where early adopters for an 'expansion' might deem it 'broken', or 'crappy'. This could quite likely stunt the market for that particular expansion/episode. They certainly won't enjoy the automatic-upgrade that every Everquest player does for each new expansion from SOE. They'll have to earn their upgrades.

The PVP element seems to draw strength from the fact that non-payers will be able to compete against paying-customers, keeping population at critical mass for PvP encounters.

This requires that, expansions can't introduce 'phat lewt' in the traditional sense. If one gets appreciably stronger by acquiring an item/ability from paid-content, it'll imbalance any conflict with a non-paying customer (it's a pvp game). Imbalancing conflict with non-paying customers, in turn disincentivizes free players from sticking around, which will heavily diminish the viability of the 'free-play' option. Casual gamers won't likely hang out to be pummeled by paying customers with egregious PvP advantages.
If they include phat lewt, their episodes become required to compete - essentially staggering the monthly into the episode fees. Paying $10/mo isn't economically different from paying $30 every 3 months.

And any reward that doesn't make the player appreciably stronger, isn't 'phat lewt' after all. So they're hanging their entire game on the idea that players will pay exclusively for the fun they get from playing the game, and not necessarily for the carrot at the end of the stick.

Fortuitously, their streaming content technology also doubles as convenient electronic distribution. This will help them keep costs (and thereby prices) down, and gives them more time and opportunity to hit fiscal viability.

Guild Wars is set up to simultaneously challenge the notions of electronic distribution, episodic content, and the traditional level-grind of the RPG genre all at the same time. It will certainly be interesting.

Re:An Excellent Idea

[SamBeckett]

Nitpick:

Paying $10/month for 3 months is VERY different then paying $30/3 months. Proof:

Let i = prevailing market interest rate (per month); let v = 1/(1+i), the amount you must invest now to get "1" back at the end of the month. Then the present value of each option:

($10/month for 3 months) = 10 + 10v + 10v^2
($30/3 months) = 30

The only times these are equal is when

10 + 10v + 10v^2 = 30

v = -2, or v = 1. The only root that makes sense is "v=1", and solving for i, we get i = 0. Therefore the two options are only equivalent if there is no interest rate.

To further illustrate, let's say you can get 2% interest per year in your savings account. This equates to (1+i)^12 = 1.02 -> i = 0.00165 (0.165% per month). Then, v = 0.998351, the PV of option#1($10/month) is PV = $29.9506 and the PV of option#2 is ($30/3 months) is PV=$30. The accumulated value at the end of 3 months for option#1 is $30.0992, and for option#2 is $30.1489.

These numbers may seem small and insignifigant to you, but to the companies, $0.05 x 1 million customers = $50,000.

Re:An Excellent Idea

[RealErmine]

If one gets appreciably stronger by acquiring an item/ability from paid-content, it'll imbalance any conflict with a non-paying customer (it's a pvp game).

One point that I have read about the expansions is that, while you must pay to get consistant access to them, even if you are playing for free you can be invited into an expansion area without paying. This helps insure that even free players can participate in expanded content.

Unfortunately I cannot find where I read this info =/

Re:An Excellent Idea

[*weasel]

My point was that paying $10/mo is seen in the same light as $30/3mo for the consumer.

I'd thought that was implied by context, and I apologize if it wasn't so.

Clearly the publisher (NCSoft), doesn't have a problem with GuildWars' business structure - so whether or not they're concerned about their theoretical loss of $50k in interest is moot.

Re:An Excellent Idea

[C0rinthian]

This is correct. You can be invited into a new area without buying the expansion, but you cannot initiate that mission yourself if you havn't purchased it. Very interesting idea.

Something else to keep in mind, it is PVP, but it's all consentual. If you don't want to PVP, don't enter a PVP map. PVP is different from traditional MMO's, in that normal missions only have the people you are grouped with in it. You can't be attacked by other players while crawling a dungeon, cuase it's instanced. Noone else is in the dungeon but your party. There are competitive PVP "missions" that pit willing contestants against each other in a variety of settings. (ladder, Free for all, King of the Hill, etc) It's an iteresting mix of persistant and instanced play styles.

Re:An Excellent Idea

[bluesnowmonkey]

This requires that, expansions can't introduce 'phat lewt' in the traditional sense. If one gets appreciably stronger by acquiring an item/ability from paid-content, it'll imbalance any conflict with a non-paying customer (it's a pvp game). Imbalancing conflict with non-paying customers, in turn disincentivizes free players from sticking around, which will heavily diminish the viability of the 'free-play' option. Casual gamers won't likely hang out to be pummeled by paying customers with egregious PvP advantages.

You and I came to exactly opposite conclusions. I think they'll get a huge fanbase very quickly initially, on the simple basis that it's a great new game and it's free. Then when the first exansion rolls out, it will most certainly have (it pains me to use the terminology) "phat lewt." Everyone who can pay at that point will do so, knowing that it's required to compete. Those who can't quite afford it will be filtered out mostly, but they were just wasting bandwidth anyway. What's left is a large, dedicated community with money to spend.

It's a good plan if they've got the capital to survive until that first expansion.

Re:An Excellent Idea

[*weasel]

And then, in the best case, they're just another persistent game. Albeit with a slight 'free trial' gimmick - but a fairly stale PvP experience.

Healthy competition is seeded with a steady stream of new players and fresh ideas. If the 'skill' component of competition is trivialized through 'required' upgrades, the skill-based aspect will stagnate (because it's trivialized).

Such phat lewt, like any power-amplification-based 'advancement' system, disincentivize new players from joining. This is not healthy whatsoever and combined with the previous paragraph completely make moot two of Guild Wars most heavily promoted selling-points.

Take away the free-play-ability, and the skill-based PvP and all they have is a heavy reliance on instanced adventuring (maybe good maybe bad) and a relatively novel (in this genre) ability system.

Which is why I'd assume they'd try like hell to avoid such a situation - but who knows.

Download while you play?

[edwilli]

I wonder if they will use a BitTorrent or other P2P type download? Defer some of the cost on the server end, thus, giving it away for free.

Re:Download while you play?

[C0rinthian]

They don't need to I think, everything seems built into the client. If it uses a P2P back-end, you wouldn't know it.

It's quite incredible, the installer is under 100kb. When launching for the first time, you download about 30 mb to get to the login screen. Over half of which is downloading in the background while you set up your account. Dunno how much more needs to be downloaded until we can login, but it is very quick and painless on a DSL connection.

I recommend downloading the client just to check out the engine. Even the login screen looks really nice. And to see something really cool, start resizing the window. Go ahead, it's not constrained to any particular aspect ratio at all. You can do whatever you want with the game window. I don't think there's a DirectX game out that can do that. Multi taskers rejoice!

Business Model

[robbway]

Part of the non-subscription based MMORPG is to provide the user a seemingly free network. In fact, the cost is tacked onto the product. Then, as long as the markup is greater than actual usage time (and maintenance) costs per copy sold, they make a profit. Continuing upgrades keeps the money coming in, as an earlier comment mentioned. Neverwinter Nights is an excellent example. They must be timed just so that people who avidly play will continue to purchase the game.

It's a gamble, but they've got a good reputation.