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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."
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...
I like basketball!!1!
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.
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
Guild Wars is a decent game, but it is no more an MMORPG than Diablo 2 is.
Waiting for Warhammer Online.
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.