Guild Wars 2 Devs Aiming For the Top

As various MMOs have been released over the past several years, their developers have been wary about the inevitable measuring against World of Warcraft, often saying that "second-best" is more than good enough for them. Not so for ArenaNet as they work on Guild Wars 2; they're aiming right for the top. And according to a detailed preview now up at Eurogamer, their effort is paying off : "Two huge and risky decisions have been made in its design: junking the 'holy trinity' of character class roles (protective 'tank', damage-dealer and healer) and doing away with the quest-style architecture for game content. Yet, in moment-to-moment play, Guild Wars 2 looks and feels instantly and reassuringly like a fantasy MMORPG – just a noticeably fresh one. It's a question of flow. Combat is still hotkey-based, but faster and smoother and more streamlined, involving more movement and positioning. The levelling curve is now an almost flat line, replacing the epic ascent with a steady journey where content, not advancement, is king."

Comments

Damn!

[Kokuyo]

This sounds rather good. Correct me if I'm wrong, but might this be the MMO that does away with mindless grinding? At least a big chunk of it. Might this be the MMO that does away with standing right before the enemy, slashing your ten foot two-handed sword diagonally and freaking missing (I optimistically read that into the whole 'positioning is important' part)?

Time will surely tell.

Re:Damn!

[osu-neko]

Either you have completely different ideas of what the word 'auto-hit' implies than I do, or I didn't make my point particularly clear.

You said...

Might this be the MMO that does away with standing right before the enemy, slashing your ten foot two-handed sword diagonally and freaking missing.

Guild Wars does precisely that. You never miss unless your opponent uses some skill to counter your attack. Failing that, you simply cannot miss -- your hit chance is 100%.

Re:Damn!

[gl4ss]

uh no. it's going to be the nwn clone you play with friends. that's what content means in this sense, it means a tunnel cave of scripting. dunno what top they're going after though. and their business model needs there to be this "2", they can't just evolve the existing.

I'd prefer a mmorpg with a truly dynamic world, not a circus fair ride.

Re:Damn!

[Feinu]

I'd prefer a mmorpg with a truly dynamic world, not a circus fair ride.

Sounds like GW2 is exactly what you want. While I agree that the original Guild Wars series was highly linear in terms of plot, Guild Wars 2 includes lots of dynamic events which have a tangible impact on the world you experience. Have a look at this description of dynamic events for more detail.

Re:Damn!

[PhilHibbs]

That's an incredibly difficult goal for a game with tens of thousands of players on a server, all trying to change the world. Unless they stick with their "instanced world", but that isn't really an MMO, it's a single-player or small-group game with "3d avatar chat rooms" called "towns". What I like about WoW is that you can bump into people doing stuff while you are out there doing stuff. I've made friends by seeing someone having a tough time in a fight and going and helping them out. That never happens in GW. Having that flexibility and a dynamic world seems impossible to me, but I hope I'm proved wrong some day.

Re:Damn!

[Luckyo]

It's also worth noting that one of the aspects of "skill" in guild wars has been kiting projectiles. Unlike wow et al, they do not auto track, and in fact, rangers' choice of bow was always based on three things: bow's range, bow's attack speed and arc in which bow fires the arrow (the higher the arc, then longer it takes for arrow to reach the target). In many cases, picking a bow with highest arc meant that it was very easy to just sidestep the arrow completely through movement.

So yes, positioning-based hit was always in guild wars.

Re:Damn!

[SharpFang]

It is doable,
epic missions - battles involving hundreds of players,
massive events (enemy assault on a town, siege progressing day by day),
timed progress of situation as players complete their tasks,
stalemate situations that need heavy power to throw them off balance
important positions relatively easy to take over but difficult to hold, so they continuously change ownership
significant guilds shaping the politics, economy, influencing the world,
VERY difficult missions which would be attempted and failed over and over until someone succeeds and the result is permanent,
construction of massive structures progressing by tiny phases, so your contribution is permanent ("I built THIS door of the castle"),
active environmental engineering (channels, lakes, dams) controlled from well defendable positions you can take over then hold or protect with traps,
portable structures that can be built anywhere by consolidated effort of a moderately sized group ("let's build a fortified checkpoint HERE.")
Instantiated personal space (a room in a hotel or a house) so that every player has a fully customizable personal area without cutting into the massive bulk,
expensive, prestigeous public locations for rent/sale and personalized use. ...want more ideas?

Re:Damn!

[GospelHead821]

I can only assume that griefing has crossed their minds and they have some mechanism of coping with it. I am extremely excited about this game but when I read the bit about events scaling...
"To help ensure there is always enough for everyone to do, our events dynamically scale, so the more players who show up and participate in the event, the more enemies show up to fight them. If a bunch of players leave the event, it will dynamically scale back down so it can be completed by the people who are still there playing it." ...I grow concerned. They're talking about how they've solved the problem of kill-stealing but is PvP interaction enabled in public areas? If ten people are "participating" in an event but two or three of them are attacking the other players, that's a problem. Heck, if ten people are participating and two or three are just hanging around doing nothing to make the event scale harder for the remaining players, that's a problem. I can only hope and trust that this possibility is obvious enough that there was some consideration of it in the development of these interactions.

Re:Damn!

[WhirlwindMonk]

...want more ideas?

Since every single one of those has been suggested dozens, if not hundreds of times on the boards, and I imagine every single one of them has had a reply from a developer saying they are doing it or explaining why they aren't doing it (with good, legitimate reasons every time I've seen it), yes, you are going to have to do better. A few examples.

epic missions - battles involving hundreds of players,

They've had a 40 vs 40 battleground for half a decade. Then they introduced a pvp area that could take unlimited players. The servers strained near the point of crashing constantly and it was unplayable for anyone without a decent computer, so they had to change it. Now it maxes out at...80 vs 80, as I recall. They've said they like the idea, but until they find a way to do it without those issues, they won't try it again.

important positions relatively easy to take over but difficult to hold, so they continuously change ownership

Just implemented that in Tol Barad.

VERY difficult missions which would be attempted and failed over and over until someone succeeds and the result is permanent,

So lots of development time, play testing, and balancing for something 0.0001% of players will get to see? No thanks. I pay just as much for this game as everyone else. I should have the opportunity to see and experience all of it without having to sacrifice my job and life to make sure I'm part of the "elite" guilds that can get that first kill. And if you're talking about individuals...good luck balancing that such that it isn't more difficult for some classes than others (see the Death Knight videos of them soloing content from near the end of the last expansion, whereas some classes probably still have a hard time soloing stuff from two expansions ago).

Instantiated personal space (a room in a hotel or a house) so that every player has a fully customizable personal area without cutting into the massive bulk,

Been mentioned hundreds of times, and each time, people point out the devs would rather work on content that encourages the social aspect of this MULTIPLAYER game, rather than separating everyone into their own little worlds.

expensive, prestigeous public locations for rent/sale and personalized use.

Woohoo, more stuff that 0.0001% of the player base can use.

significant guilds shaping the politics, economy, influencing the world,

Been done in Eve Online. Some like it, some don't. Blizz also tries to avoid implementing mechanics that encourages everyone to join up in a few large guilds. Sure, large guilds do have advantages, but right now, they aren't overwhelming.

construction of massive structures progressing by tiny phases, so your contribution is permanent ("I built THIS door of the castle"),

Again, this is a MULTIPLAYER game. Blizz tries to avoid things that encourage people to say "screw everyone else" and just play on their own. That said, they have done it, to an extent. See the Opening of the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj, though, despite it being a questline that individuals follow, required multiple raids that needed large groups working together.

Re:Damn!

[Luckyo]

In guild wars, there is an auto attack if you target someone and either click attack or hit space, i.e. it's a default action for hostile targets.

Unlike wow auto-attack is interrupted when you use any skill other then "on next attack" skill. So if you're a ranger and see a hostile approach you can select + space him, shoot him a couple of times, then hit crippling shot skill, execute it, and after finishing the crippling shot your character will again default to start auto-attacking.

In many regards it was kind of like having a fast firing low damage weapon with powerful secondary that requires you to stop primary fire while secondary executes.

Re:Damn!

[Solandri]

No, it wont. When you have people that are willing to sink 12hrs+ a day into a game it is impossible to develop enough content to make it non-grindy unless you wanted to sink billions into development.

GW and GW2 are not very level-dependent, and use a skill system where you don't have access to all your skills. You have to pick and choose which skills you have available to you at any given time. That and the interactions between skills creates a complexity and depth of play which provides plenty of replay value for the same scenarios. In other MMORPGs, each class uses pretty much use the same 3-5 skill combos for everything because they're the best. In GW, there are literally millions of different combinations of skills to explore, with dozens and sometimes hundreds of effective combos. The "best" combo will vary almost with every fight. So no, they don't have to sink billions into development to give you something new to try. When the player gains new skills or they add new skills, suddenly the old content becomes new content. It has a very high degree of replayability.

Most MMOs turn into grindfests because that's the best way for the company running them to maximize revenue. People are paying $15/mo to level, so its in the company's best interest to slow down your leveling as much as they can. That way you stick around playing longer, which means they collect more months of fees from you. Sinking 12+ hours a day into the game is also a consequence of that. You want to level faster, but the game deliberately slows down your leveling, so you spend more time playing it every day.

GW and GW2 don't have a monthly fee. You pay for the game, you pay for expansions, and you pay for certain upgrades. That's it. So they have no incentive to make the game a grindfest. In fact the opposite is true - they want to do everything they can to get you through the content quickly so you'll buy the next expansion, but they also want to make every minute you play as fun as possible so you'll feel it's worth spending the money on the next expansion.

Couple this with levels not being very important, and there's no incentive to play 12+ hours a day (unless you find it fun enough to play 12+ hours a day). You just play for as long as you're having fun. I've played GW 12 hours a day, I've played it 1 hour a day, and I've stopped playing it for months at a time. It's very friendly to casual gamers, and the amount of fun per hour is much higher. IMHO it's a much better model than the level/grind fest that other MMOs have become.

Re:Damn!

[Arjes]

Might this be the MMO that does away with standing right before the enemy, slashing your ten foot two-handed sword diagonally and freaking missing

I agree it has always annoyed me as well. But since most of these games are one way or the other based on the game play style of D&D (and its very predecessors) I feel like I should point out that a miss in D&D isn't a swing and a hit to the floor. It could be a parry, or just a glancing shot that didn't do significant damage (armor deflection). It will be a nice day when our games display all of that easily, but then we will complain about the slight distance between the weapons.

Re:Damn!

[tsm_sf]

Here you go.

Re:Damn!

[Quirkz]

I think you may have just sold me on trying this game. I've stayed away from many other MMOs because real-world time is a huge barrier for me (and also because I can't stomach monthly fees, though part of that comes back to feeling like I need to play to get my money's worth). But this sounds like something I can enjoy casually, or in depth, as time is available and the mood strikes.

Re:Damn!

[thesandtiger]

It's quite doable. Take a lesson from the real world, where we have billions of people all trying to change the world (to some extent).

Star Wars: Galaxies has a really flexible (albeit buggy as hell) system of professions and virtually no content at all back when it launched. So, it was a sandbox, basically.

Yet you had players having a massive impact on their servers - crafters would set up business empires employing dozens (or, in some cases, hundreds and maybe up to a thousand) people, politician classes would build and manage player run cities. ALL of the content in the game, except for really crappy theme parks (Work for Jabba the Hutt, win a fishing pole! For use on the desert planet Tatooine!) was player generated basically.

There was an incredible economy going on - it was subject to hyperinflation because there were no money sinks and limitless money generating missions - but it was still pretty amazing.

Scale that concept up - put some actual development talent into it instead of the "minds" behind SOE and you can have an amazing game where players can change the world in meaningful ways.

Re:Damn!

[DarkJC]

I thought this was supposed to be a tech site? How does a bullet point wishlist of features with absolutely no regard to the difficulty of implementation on the technical side or pitfalls on the game implementation side get modded to +5 insightful?

Re:Damn!

[praxis]

In my dream MMO (such a game already exists in a different setting) if the community didn't agree with that penis, they'd get together a posse and destroy it and kill the guy who made it.

Re:Damn!

[Onuma]

SWG was an amazingly social game in its early form. One of the best parts of the game was joining up with 19 random players (iirc 20 was the max group size) and ravaging the interplanetary countrysides to be [temporarily] free of Banthaas, Rancors, and a slew of other critters and enemies. You didn't have guaranteed archetypes, as all skills could be learned by all characters -- so many players chose to have some healing abilities combined with ranged and melee damage potential, perhaps even a couple of pets (old school CH ftw!).

You also had an immense amount of people RPing on the same servers where others were raiding and PVPing. You had town politics, owned property, instanced and non-instanced zones, a player-driven economy, and lots more.

Before the "combat revamp", the game was uniquely fun. Once they broke it down into X-number unique classes with zero cross-train ability, it just was not as enjoyable of a game.

When I was at PAX East, I didn't even bother checking out GW2. The lines were not that long numerically, but each person got about an hour of gameplay to themselves! I'm not waiting in line for 2 hours just to try a beta version of a game that seems too-familiar to so many others at first glance.

Re:Feeling bad for them.

[Anonymous Coward]

ICQ's momentum?

Myspace's?

Halo? TV? CDs? VCRs?

What about every single fashion and fad in the history of mankind?

When the momentum is "too big", time and time again it has proven to be "too big".

Tell your theory to the next guy you see cancelling his facebook account.

Re:Feeling bad for them.

[Nocturnal Deviant]

WoW is going seriously downhill, the developers are making horrible decisions, I cancelled my account and havent gone anywhere near looking back. to be honest when guild wars 2 comes out I along with many others, specifically PvPers will be moving to it.

A lot of people have lost faith in blizzards ability to balance recently, sorry to say but soon there will be a new MMO king, and I do not think it will be made by Blizzard.

This of course does not count Blizzard's new MMO that is coming out, That might have a chance to topple the replacement for WoW. Of course any replacement probably will be short lived or niche being that blizzard has the marketing capability to move people to it's next big MMO, however after watching how they have squandered away WoW I personally will probably not be moving to it.

Blizzards main strength are its casual players who play because friends do. at this point however people still look up to the Elitist people, most of which 2400+ arena players or progressive PvE guilds, all of which are really searching for something new, myself included.

Re:Feeling bad for them.

[rasmusneckelmann]

I've played WoW since release and I share your view that the game is going downhill (since end of TBC). The reward/effort ratio is simply too high for the average old-school MMORPG player. But we need to realize that we're a tiny minority, nobody cares if we stop playing. We can go play Rift or Guild Wars 2 or whatever, Blizzard isn't going to notice it.

WoW caters to a huge spectrum of player types. The cartoonish style of the game appeals to casual players ranging from young kids to housewives. Just looking at the screenshots of Guild Wars 2 I can tell you that it's not going to have the same impact. Realistic looking hot chicks? I don't think the average casual housewife is going to enjoy that the same way as nerds like us.

Sure, if you read the MMO-champion forums you'll easily get the idea that all WoW-players hate WoW and want to quit... But it's just a (very) loud minority. WoW isn't going anywhere in the near future.

Re:Feeling bad for them.

[CarbonShell]

I think what caught most players in the WoW trap was that they did not want their investments to be for nothing.
Think about it, they spent a lot of time any money on virtually nothing and if they quit, they will lose it.
The hype lured them in, by the time they had noticed it was 'rinse&repeat' gameplay, they had already invested so much time and money.
Then they went for the raids, hoping it will bring back the enthusiasm, but that wears off quickly and their last resorts are trying to get the super-duper-epic-drops.

I really loved GW1 and it was a great game and I will definitely stay true.
Not only the game itself really was fun and always a challenge, but the love for detail and the creativity really won my heart.
After lvl 20, it no longer became a question of grinding and what armor you had, it became about your skill with your specialized char and your team play.
The class, skill and specializations were phenomenal. You not only had to create a character, you had to 'learn' the character style, as each had their own flow.
And just when you think you had mastered them, you get whipped in the arena by a better team.
Plus the fact that you only had to buy the game and NO monthly subscription crap really helped it also.

From what I hear GW2 will also have no subscriptions.

Re:Feeling bad for them.

[realityimpaired]

You know, people said that about EverQuest, when WoW came out. That the idea of WoW beating EQ was simply absurd because there were so many people playing EQ who wouldn't want to simply switch.

Of course, GuildWars doesn't have to sink WoW to win. It just has to have a large enough player base to succeed financially. And that's going to depend on the quality of the content and gameplay. And if it's good enough, then it will slowly win out over WoW... those social connections that you mention? They're WoW's achilles heel as well. Lots of people cancel their WoW account because the game's not fun any more, but stay in touch with their WoW friends through social media. I cancelled my account a while ago, but I still have friends I met through WoW on various friends lists... I was talking to three of them within the last 24 hours on MSN, even. Word of mouth will spread, and as more people get frustrated with WoW, more people will try it out, and some of those people will cancel their WoW account and sign up to play GuildWars. 7 degrees, and all. :)

It's a ripple effect. No game is going to kill WoW overnight. But sooner or later, a game will come along that brings WoW down. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Re:Feeling bad for them.

[Yamata no Orochi]

You know, people said that about EverQuest, when WoW came out. That the idea of WoW beating EQ was simply absurd because there were so many people playing EQ who wouldn't want to simply switch.

I'm pretty sure that it was a different kind of people who played EverQuest. The appeal of WoW is just so much broader. I'd say the current WoW has more in common with FarmVille than Everquest :P.

Oh my god, this is the best line I've ever heard. I'm going to troll the shit out of the WoW-players with this.

Thank you, so much.

Re:Feeling bad for them.

[bckrispi]

I'm pretty sure that it was a different kind of people who played EverQuest. The appeal of WoW is just so much broader.

Six years ago, WoW started out more like "Casual" EverQuest. Keep in mind that "Casual" here meant you needed to coordinate a group of 40 players who could dedicate a four hour stretch to raiding if you wanted to see 80% of the end-game content. Burning Crusade replaced the 40 man raids with 25 main raiding. Wrath allowed the flexibility of each raid supporting either 25 or 10 man teams. Cataclysm stuck with this model, but instead of 25 man raids dropping better loot than their 10 man counterparts, they simply drop more loot. The increase in appeal to a broad audience and casual players and guilds wasn't designed into classic WoW, but evolved over the past six years.