Guest author Lexton “Lunarhound” Collins discusses the upcoming Guild Wars 2, believable NPC drama, heroic errand-running, and shares his perspective on what makes a good MMO great.
Most gamers, both fans and detractors, would agree that MMO’s need shaking up. It’s happened before, when City of Heroes and, shortly afterward, World of Warcraft made camp grinding a thing of the past and brought quest-based advancement to the mainstream. Suddenly, characters had purpose-driven lives. Other games followed suit, and life was good in cyberland.
Now, several years later, gamers are growing weary of the new grind. It’s tough to ensure that every single one of the hundreds of quests necessary to keep an MMO going are interesting, and players are growing weary of the endless variations on “kill ten rats and bring me their tails”. Mini dramas acted out by NPC’s cease to feel immersive when sticking around for a minute afterward lets you watch the world reset before your eyes so that the next players in line can ride. Collecting exclamation marks and running errands for people too lazy to deliver their own letters or fight their own battles feels less like an adventure and more like checking off a list of chores. Few want to go back to the way things were, but developers, and many players, seem to be finding it difficult to see a way forward.
There have been efforts to do something different but they’ve gone largely unnoticed. Guild Wars came hot on the heels of World of Warcraft, and attempted to remedy many of the ‘theme park’ issues that came with a static world that had to reset each quest for the next player by making heavy use of instancing. Players see each other in towns, but once outside, you and your party had your own private copy of the world. This allowed them to change things permanently based on your actions. Unfortunately, this lead to many players not considering it a real MMO and, despite its commercial success, it didn’t inspire many imitators. Additional problems came from the fact that players could not jump, climb or swim and the world was full of invisible walls that forced strict adherence to the current mission path. Dungeons & Dragons Online came along a few years later with a similar world structure coupled with much better implementation of the mission-based game play and a great new action combat system, but the facts that it couldn’t (at the time) effectively be played solo and it required a monthly fee, it also ended up being relegated to niche status.
Now, Guild Wars has a sequel on the way. ArenaNet was very secretive about it for quite some time after its announcement, and even now information is limited, but what is beginning to emerge paints an interesting picture of a title that is trying to shake up the genre all over again. With the inclusion of open world areas and much greater mobility (players will be able to jump, swim and climb as they can in most other MMO’s), as well as new attitudes toward creative use of instancing, they might actually succeed this time.
In a preview at Eurogamer, back in August, lead designer Eric Flannum states that “I think I can safely say that you won’t see a single exclamation mark floating above a character’s head in Guild Wars 2.” This one little sentence makes for a pretty bold statement considering the direction of MMO’s for the past few years and, luckily, he elaborates:
“We actually don’t have a traditional RPG/MMO quest system… Instead what we’ve got are Events. Think of them as group-orientated activities. This is one of the many things that will encourage the player to explore the world – you can wander through and never quite know what you’re going to see. You might come across a fortress that’s being attacked by centaurs, or it might be that the centaurs attacked half an hour before you got there and they hold it now. You might start walking along a road you’ve walked a hundred times and suddenly there’s a caravan traveling along that road that you may not have seen, and you can go help that caravan out.”
Supposedly, these events will form a complex web within any given public area, spawning new ones and phasing out old ones based on cause and effect. An older example given is that of a dragon attacking a bridge. Players can band together to defeat the dragon, which might open up a new chain of events that can be participated in. Alternately, they might fail, choose not to help, or simply not be there when the dragon attacks, which would result in the bridge being destroyed and a completely different chain of events opening up, revolving around repairing the bridge. The difference between this and something like Warhammer Online’s public quests is that they will not simply reset repeatedly so that players can do them over again. The assertion that there will not be a traditional quest system seems to indicate that public areas will consist of countless such events and, rather than wandering around looking for someone with an exclamation mark to tell them what to do, players will spend their time looking for something actually happening. The potential of such a system to change the way questing is seen in online games is staggering.
That isn’t to say that all adventuring will be completely directionless. Each player will have a personal quest chain to play through that reflects his or her own character. From an interview with MMORPG.com in December:
“When a player creates a character in Guild Wars 2, they will be able to answer many questions about their personal character history. These answers will help determine your personal story in the game. As many fans have theorized, one of the first things you choose is a ‘subdivision’ of your race, which provides a more personal feel to your character’s history. For the humans, that means their ancestry–Elonan, Krytan, Ascalonian and Canthan–and also their social status as gentry or commoners of the city of Divinity’s Reach. For charr, it primarily means their legion, whether Blood, Ash, or Iron. The asura choose between the three most respected colleges of learning; Synergetics, Dynamics, and Statics. The sylvari follow the path of their seasonal cycle, or the time of day in which they awakened, being Dawn, Day, Twilight or Night. The norn choose their personal totem, and may choose to walk in the path of bear, snow leopard, raven or wolf. From these and other initial determinations, a wealth of personalized storylines develop, so that each player in the game experiences a story that is individually tailored to their character.”
According to ArenaNet, these choices, though part of character creation, will not affect class or power in any way. Their sole impact is on the player’s own personal narrative. This sounds tantalizingly like the Origins system in Dragon Age: Origins, and is an exciting thought when considered in the context of an MMORPG.
There’s no telling, of course, how much of an impact any of this will have or how well it will be received until the game is available to the public in some form. And if these claims were being made by a smaller developer without the experience or budget to back them up, they might be only a faint cause for hope at best. But ArenaNet has the budget and the talent to back up its big ideas, and it has already proven with one successful series that it knows what it’s doing.
Most seem to believe that the ultimate feat for an MMORPG would be to topple World of Warcraft. I’m not so sure. I think the ultimate measure of success is moving the genre as a whole forward. With a new approach to quest content, a strong focus on providing the player with a personal storyline, and the lack of any sort of monthly fee, Guild Wars 2 stands poised to do exactly that. Will it topple World of Warcraft? I doubt it. But it may force Blizzard to change in order to compete, which would almost certainly lead to other games following suit. Now that would be an accomplishment.
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It’s not often when my interests in China and gaming collide. Nate, of the China blog 
