Everytime something similar to WoW shows up, and indeed many MMOs after 2005 looks very similar to WoW, someone start saying: “this is the same as WoW…”. Yeah, you´re right, there are a lot of things similar to WoW in OR and GW, but so what? Does this mean that we should all play WoW instead of its clones? People always forget that many features of WoW were inspired, and some of them copied, from EverQuest, Ultima, and some others.
When it comes to fun, play whatever pleases you and don´t bore justifying this and that. Entertainment is not a rational subject.
Wasn’t Guild Wars extremely instanced so playing it was more like playing alone or in a small group rather than playing with thousands of players?
They said it would be a persistent world in this one, but then they keep talking about “When you save a town it stays saved”, “When you kill a boss he stays killed”. How would they go about that in a MMO with thousands of players if they didn’t instance a lot of things?
Sounds to me like each player will be given his own instance of every quest which I think is against the whole concept of a MMO.
Seems like idea is that you really save town for everybody. Of course you have only saved it from this one particular attack and some time later it will get attacked by someone else.
Guild Wars is like an MMO that is based around you, not everyone else. If you played the first one you’d know.
When you go outside of town and go hunting or something, there’s no one else there unless you invite them. That way you don’t get guys who come in and steal your kill. It’s also a downside seeing as how you can’t meet new people out there, but it’s still a neat feature.
That’s what they mean by when you kill a boss it stays killed, or you save a town, it stays saved and everyone remembers you. It’s not the same for others who haven’t however. It’s probably one of the better features of GW and hopefully even better for GW2.[/i]
It’s certainly possible to do this without instancing everyone. The issue just becomes how do you keep people interested… if actions affect the world permanently then not everyone can be a hero.
EVE Online achieves this by making most of the game player driven and there are some epic stories created by the players. However this mode of play doesn’t really become interesting until end game, and most players leave before they ever get there.
Years ago I was working on a university project which was about creating interactive dramatic stories involving many players. There were some nice ideas in the field, although getting a practical system that scaled up to MMO size was a distant dream.
Will be interesting to see how far they have gone.
PS Reiterating what other people said, WOW’s setting, look, game mechanics, etc really aren’t revolutionary.
Ahh but Baracuda they are giving the impression that its a persistant world and you play with others, that is why I said they are prolly going to use the system World of Warcraft uses with the instancing. Its one persistant world but when you go into one of these instance parts, not talking about dungeons, you have a totally different experience based on the progression you are in on that instance, dont remember the technical name for this. It was introduced in Wotlk, one notable place was in the icecrown at The Shadowvault.
Completely agree. It’s the same with FPSes; people judge them based on how different they are from the best one’s on the market, rather than as their own game.
Chances are the developers sat down and thought, “how can we make a game better than WoW?” rather than “how can we make the best MMO possible?”
Whatever kills WoW is likely to be very, very little like it. There’s no way they’re going to beat WoW at their own game…WoW has had a decade of work put into it.
I think it entirely ruins the whole concept of a MMO game, but to each his own.
If this is indeed how GW works then it is almost no more a MMO than Diablo 2 was where you could chat with all the players in the lobby, but only play with those you wanted to play with. Diablo 2 is one of the best games ever, but I wouldn’t call it a MMO.
Why Guild Wars is not my kind of game is explained in the video. One of the developers says something about how everyone hates grinding, but that’s not the truth. Grinding is fun. I hated WoW because grinding gave you nothing and the extremely boring raiding gave you everything. Grinding should reward you based on your efforts just like anything else in a MMO in my opinion. Also, grinding is just so infintely more casual friendly than quests etc. which require you to complete them to be rewarded.
