Guild Wars Expansion, Sequel Officially Announced

katalin writes "Arenanet, makers of the Guild Wars Massive game, have announced the first 'true' expansion pack to the game - Eye of the North. Next year will also see the beginning of a Beta test for a true sequel to the original Guild Wars. The new game will be substantially different from the current offering, with many elements similar to a more traditional fantasy Massively Multiplayer game. It still, however, will not require a monthly fee to play."

Comments

I'm looking forward to this.

[Tokimasa]

I currently play Guild Wars and I love it. It's an MMORPG the way it's meant to be - no monthly fees, a fun game, and one that you can just sit down and play with a group of friends or random people from the Internet. Both the expansion and GW2 look nothing short of awesome. I can't wait for more details!

Re:I'm looking forward to this.

[Puff of Logic]

The thing that really killed Guild Wars for me was a feeling of isolation. Regardless of its other bad points, WoW at least had a sense of community even for the non-guilded player. Of course, my experience was on Feathermoon, the oldest and most populous RP server, which tended to have a reasonably friendly crowd. What I liked about WoW was that a player could be struggling with a quest, or getting ganked by a random mob, and another player just happening to come by could leap in to help. I made some very good friends that way and it really fostered a sense of community.

In contrast, GW felt like going into a Counterstrike server. This is fair enough, I suppose, as GW has always billed itself as not a MMORPG but rather a competitive online environment. But the often offensive names, general foulness on the chat channels, and complete isolation due to instanced everything really prevented me from feeling any kind of connection to the game or the people playing it. I enjoyed the PvP aspect of GW and made a genuine effort to enjoy the PvE storyline, but just couldn't maintain interest. I periodically load up the game to give it another shot, but the result is always the same and for the same reasons.

That said, I'm glad that GW has been successful as both a game and a revenue model, and I hope that GW2 will be similarly successful. I just hope GW2 will foster a bit more community.

Re:I'm looking forward to this.

[jfodale]

Guild Wars is a decent game, but it is no more an MMORPG than Diablo 2 is.

Re:I'm looking forward to this.

[NUBlackshirts]

This is the reason I enjoy GW and not other online RPG's I have played. My Wife, my daughter, and I have created our own little adventuring group and really couldn't care less if anyone else joins in or not. We wanted a game where the 3 of us could play when we want and not feel obligated to play just because we were paying a monthly fee for it. GW fits our gaming needs perfectly. We have tried others, most recently D&DO, but quickly tired of the need to go find a bigger group to join with in order to do certain quests. I realize that we are probably in the minority here, but we will be playing GW for a long time.

No level cap

[Sciros]

I'm still curious to see just how the concept of a very high or nonexistent level cap is going to factor into the Guild Wars design of PVE-even-with-PVP. Considering how focused ArenaNet has been at keeping PVP a very level playing field for everyone, any levels above something like 20 or 30 I assume will provide PVE-only benefits, if anything. Gaile Gray says the high level cap was a direct result of player request, but I imagine that request came from predominately PVE players. PVP-oriented players tend to want nothing to do with PVE and many resent the two modes of gameplay being so closely related. Guild Wars suffered more than anything from poor, linear level design. There were no open-ended quests, no two ways to go about solving a particular problem. Replaying the game with multiple characters truly amounted to doing the exact same thing all over again. That is what I hope they are able to avoid with GW2, although I think the design team would need to be replaced by another for that to happen...

Re:No monthly fee, no free content

[jandrese]

I love how MMORPGs can charge their players $10-$15/month and still get to say that they're giving away "free" content. When you consider how each additional piece of "free" content takes 3 to 6 months to develop and deploy, you're really paying somewhere between $30 and $90 for that "free" content.

And don't try to sell me that "it takes $10 a month to run the servers" crap either. The total bandwidth you suck down in those games isn't all that large (even though you do have to download great big patches every so often, which can add quite a bit), and the storage/admin costs are negligible when spread across the entire population of players. You're really paying for that new content, which is why it is such a shame that it's often lackluster.

Take City of Heroes for example. The original game had around 15 zones, not to mention the rest of the game. Well worth the $50. However, after that each expansion comes with maybe 1 zone (albeit better designed than the starting zones) and a handful of new features, yet it costs more than the original game when you add it up. It's no wonder MMOs are crazy popular with game publishers right now, it's like printing money after the first couple of months. You can even pare down the development staff to apparently almost nothing and still rake in money hand over fist.

You've missed the whole point of GW then

[Morgaine]

But the original got VERY tired after the second rehash.

This merely indicates that you approached GW as if it were EQ or WoW or AO. It's not.

GW isn't about grinding over and over again, with just the geography changing to make you think that you're doing something different. That's the old traditional tedium that GW was designed to leave behind, and it succeeded, superbly.

Instead, GW is about exploring the universe of SKILLS and CHARACTER BUILDS, and making yourself more and more competent by being ever more skillful with your builds and your use of those builds. It requires true player skill of the very deepest kind, full understanding of how the thousands of complex skills work, and also ability to use them well through sheer player practice and experimentation. For those who want to press the Attack key and then go to sleep for 10 minutes as in some traditional MMOG raids, this is the wrong game. But if you like to use your brain when playing, then GW is THE game to play -- it should definitely appeal to the computer science types. :-) And it even requires high manual dexterity in the harder zones, and a good sense of tactics.

GW is a joy to play once you're really skillful. Before GW, I completed two traditional multi-year MMOGs, and they were utterly empty of real player involvement and gameplay compared to GW, despite each of them requiring many years of level grinding.

So, your "got very tired" is no reflection on GW ... it's merely that you totally failed to understand the game, because every profession is *utterly* different once you understand their skills and begin to master the builds.

GW is extremely easy for casual play, and extremely hard and complex for deep play. You were at the casual end.

Love GW, not sure about the No-level-cap idea

[mbourgon]

I love GW, and have waaaaaay too many hours in the 3 thus far. However, part of what I like is that the level cap is basically non-existent (albeit not in the first game, Prophecies, where you hit the cap about half-way to 2/3rds into the game). In the latest, Nightfall, you can basically hit "max" in 15 hours, and after you leave the "training island" you're in the thick of things. Which is great - no worrying about having to "level up", you find new skills as you hit new areas, and so you gain flexibility even though your power stays the same.

I'm unsure who wanted "no level cap" - PVP is designed around everyone having equal power, while PVE is set as "you versus the environment", with the monsters getting more powerful (and thus requiring more intelligence, both in strategy and use-of-skills) as the game progresses. I love this model - I don't have to "grind" unless I really want to (Factions was pretty bad about that, relatively speaking, and though there are some artificial constraints in NF they're nothing horrible. And in Prophecies the only grinding you did was for money to buy cool new stuff). I'm also concerned about how this affects things. The number of skill points you currently get is by level (Level + 1 attribute points for each level - this means at 17th level you have 100 attribute points, and at 20 you have 200 (there's a quest to get you from 170->200)). So a level 24 character would have about 300 attribute points, and a level 100.... well, that's getting silly.

Anyhow, what I want to say - I'm one of the many people perfectly happy with the way it is. But, given their few missteps so far (aka "Factions"), I'm fairly confident it'll be fun. And if not, I'll still have Tyria, Elona, and (um, the other one) to keep me busy. :)