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Originally Posted by Virgil
I whipped up a short article talking about Guild Wars 2 that might provide some starting points for discussion. Hopefully, I'll be available to listen and contribute, although, I think it would be very beneficial to your listeners and the greater GW community if you could have the show recorded and hosted.
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I think it's important before talking about expectations for Guild Wars 2 that you determine whether or not even having Guild Wars 2 is a good idea. The short answer is yes. By 2009, Guild Wars will have fairly obsolete graphics. Even now, after 3 chapters, the gameplay is largely the same. If ArenaNet continued their current business model, eventually current players would get sick of the same structure, regardless of how many improvements are made, while new players would continually be discouraged to pick up Guild Wars due to increasingly complex gameplay. As mentioned in a recent interview, every new chapter adds new layers of gameplay, making tutorial sections bigger and bigger. So, for a new player looking to get into PvE, there will be an overwhelming amount of choices and pure data to comb through. For a new player getting into PvP, which many players already feel is difficult, the thousands of skills and firmly entrenched PvP crowd. There are a lot more factors, like the current declining hardcore PvP fanbase, but, suffice to say, GW2, combined with GWEN, is the right move.
Onto speculation. From the strictly PvE side of things, Guild Wars 2 is likely to be a hit. It’s going to have a high level cap, a semi-persistent world, new playable races, jumping and swimming, and areas designed for solo play. Some of those aspects are great for every player, assuming they’re done right. But, ArenaNet is playing a dangerous game by appeasing to the hardcore PvE crowd. Essentially, that crowd wants Guild Wars to compete with WoW. But, from the very start Guild Wars was never meant to compete with WoW. It was meant to diverge from all the MMO stereotypes that WoW has come to represent. Remember skill > time spent? While that famous mantra hasn’t been seen for quite some time, it’s evident that Guild Wars was build around that philosophy, simply because character level is insignificant. The rest of the game might not have fallen perfectly into the skill > time spent category, but it is undeniable that ArenaNet effectively removed leveling. And now they want to remove the one, the only, irrevocable example of skill > time spent? To anyone who picked up Guild Wars because it promised to be different, this is a grave mistake.
As for the hardcore PvP crowd, Guild Wars 2 also promises to be a hit. UAX in a structured PvP type that promises to be like GvG. Assuming it’s balanced, that’s really the bread and butter for a great Guild Wars PvP experience.
But what about the casual player? For PvE, my gut reaction says that any game with a 100+ or endless level cap can’t possibly be good for the casual player. And, for PvP players, there is “Unstructured PvP” in the Mists. While I don’t doubt that this will appeal to a lot of players, I can’t help but to worry about the small number of PvP modes. Guild Wars now has GvG, Heroes’ Ascent, Team Arenas, Random Arenas, Alliance Battle, Hero Battles, and the Faction’s competitive missions. That’s a lot of options, ranging from hardcore competition (GvG), to more casual but very coordinated PvP (HA, TA), to casual (RA, AB), and PvE/PvP hybrid (1v1, AB, Factions Competitive missions). Unstructured PvP has a lot of ground to cover.
But can that be right? Can the company that built a game for the casual audience fed up with the treadmill of MMOs be neglecting that very audience? It’s really hard to believe, and, in fact, that isn’t what I’m expecting. As a seasoned TGHer, I am adept at preparing for the worst case scenario, but there is a lot of talk that promises to keep Guild Wars 2 worthy of the Guild Wars name. Here are some excerpts of interviews that highlight just that.
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“We're not trying to make a different game that appeals to a different audience; we want Guild Wars 2 to be the game Guild Wars players want to play.
We've been working on Guild Wars now for quite a few years, and realised many of the directions we tried worked out really well, while some didn't work out the way we wanted them to. So now we have an opportunity to go back and redo some of those decisions, to really make the game Guild Wars could have been all along.
Guild Wars 2 is going to feel similar to people who liked Guild Wars.
People who loved Guild Wars because it had very interesting strategic combat, or because there were lots of decisions for players to make, like choosing your strategy before a mission; it wasn't just about leveling up.
Those people who loved Guild Wars for its competitive aspect. People who loved Guild Wars for the fact it's so easy to get into and didn't make you sit around waiting to form a party, but let you jump into a mission and even solo most of the content in the game. All of those people are going to love Guild Wars 2.
But at the same time we're making improvements to the game that are really going to make what we view as the ultimate Guild Wars experience. And hopefully people who liked Guild Wars will like Guild Wars 2 a whole lot more.”
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“So what we're doing with Guild Wars 2 is letting people have that fundamental feeling of progression, without being all about how much time you've spent on your character.”
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“The basic mechanisms of the Guild Wars 8-skill-system will also be in Guild Wars 2.”
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“Guild Wars is lacking public recognition of character development, because the level does not increase any more. That's what we're going to change in Guild Wars 2 by rising the level cap a lot. At the same time, we're flattening the power curve, so the difference between a level 50 and a level 100 character would be much bigger than between a level 100 and 150 char. This increases freedom in character development without making Max-Lvl-Characters too strong.”
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To be frank, developer promises don’t always come true. That’s not a cheap shot at ArenaNet, but rather a caution against over optimism. At the same time, I know that ArenaNet is going to try to keep the current Guild Wars audience interested in their new product; they’d be foolish not to. There is a lot to be wary of, but, even as GW jaded as I am, I still have faith that ArenaNet can provide a great game.
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-Virgil |
