Any Guild Wars Fans Here?
I always loved the idea of Guild Wars. I love their business model. I love so many of their game design concepts (full respec in town at will, great end game, many features designed to enhance community and social aspects, etc.). Unfortunately, when I played the game I just couldn’t get into it. The inability to jump was a game breaker, and the actual combat was kinda blah to me. Also, it never felt like I got stronger as I gained levels.
But the game was a huge success which is wonderful considering all the things they did well and right.
Some of my writers have been cranking out tons of great Guild Wars content lately, so I created a guide to all their guides. If you are a fan of Guild Wars, you definitely want to check this out:
Now, to make this something worth discussing, here’s are some questions for you all:
- Why was Guild Wars such a huge success?
- What is great about Guild Wars?
- Will ArenaNet be able to duplicate or exceed this success with Guild Wars 2?
There you go. Have at it!
I consider Guild Wars to be a very good game. Like you though, I just couldn’t get into it. Which is extremely odd to me, as I really enjoy organised/competitive PvP. I think the problem for me was solo PvP didn’t exist in that game, and I didn’t have a team to roll with(same reason I couldn’t get into WoW arena). The first MMO to do a solo arena type environment(or even a free for all arena) well will probably gain me as a lifetime player.
I played it for years, loved and still love it. I think the main appeal is that you do not fall back if you do not play for extended periods of time and that no progression grind existed. The stat and level cap meant people could focus on the strategy and tricks to beat a mission instead of focusing on gear and grind or overpowering through levels. Great of casuals and people who actually want to play instead of working on skills/stats/levels.
The reason to actually play is that it is pretty and the skill combos/builds are a lot of fun. You could also solo all the time, as the henchmen/heroes are quite good, in fact often better than a random human player, which is cause of some controversy. Later people could equip their heroes, some kind of better henchmen. They later added some title and stuff systems to appease people instead of adding new content, which was marking a bit a design change to the worse for me. In fact WoW’s faction grind is nothing compared to the dumb drink 10.000 beer, eat for 10.000 pts sweets and other of the odd achievement titles they added to the game. But well, it is all optional – some of it not really that optional, but in general it is.
Guild Wars is team based, there is no soloing except for specialized “farming” builds. But you can always have your heroes/henchmen. There is also a huge difference between pve and pve that always seemed wrong to me. I think this team-only design is the reason besides the heavy instancing that put people off, not the jumping so much.
That the inability to jump broke the game for you is quite pitiful, really. It is an odd thing for sure, understandable if you think about how the game works, as it is just not supported to jump over obstacles, but it was not a good decision. If only to prevent people bitching about jumping breaking the whole game for them, which is a bit pushed forward instead of thinking harder about their true reason why they did not like the game.
Some people saw it more as an evolution of Diablo than a proper MMORPG, but well, GW is quite special in its design and regardless if people call it MMO(RPG) or not, it has the features I would like for a proper non-DIKU-based MMO.
I think Guild Wars 2 will borrow the “open” instances of the early Aion zones and hopefully stay true to some of the early GW design ideas, but they think of an unlimited level cap already and more classical server “worlds” and stuff like that.
So I am not sure if GW2 will not just become a GW lore flavored Aion/GW mix with a lot of standard MMO progression. Which might be even more successful while being just another MMO game, but certainly not for early GW enthusiasts. It could be boon or bust, GW2 could be THE revolution, but also a spectacular failure or just another more standard MMO type game that is not DIKU, but otherwise quite the usual MMO standard fare.
I liked the “missions” instead of the usual K10R quests, Guild Wars 2 is going to have “events”, which sounds a bit like an evolved version of WAR’s public quests.
I am not sure what you mean by pitiful as far as my jumping example. Am I pitiful for that mattering to me? Is that a poor excuse for not liking a game?
You would be surprised how huge something like that can be for people. For example, people who play Threshold get so used to the ability to THROW items from one room to another, that it often ruins them for other MUDs. They try out another game, idly decide they want to throw something at or to someone in another room, and they can’t. The inability to do so instantly destroys all immersion, and makes them feel like their character is in a straight jacket.
Third person games almost always allow you to jump. Isometric Diablo style games are the types that generally do not. The lack of jumping in GW made me feel like my feet were glued to the ground, and it gave me an overall uncomfortable feeling when playing the game.
If you speak to a lot of people who dislike GW and are sad about it, you’d be surprised how often the lack of jumping comes up.
Or just login to a typical MMO and watch how much fun people having hoping around trying to climb up stuff. Or for that matter, watch children. They do the same thing in real life.
The lack of jumping probably cost them a lot more customers than you’d imagine. I have heard GW2 has jumping, so I think they learned there lesson there.
Yes, I believe people cannot really express why they do not like GW and the only thing they can come up with is something simple as jumping. But is this really the thing that makes or breaks GW?
I think the lack of jumping is a very shallow reason to not like the game. The gameplay isn’t marred by it in any way. The only thing that is broken is player expectations. I’ve written about this before in my “Vestigial Design” article. It’s a metagame concern, not a game design concern. People just aren’t willing to take a game for what it is.
Shallow as it may be, though, it’s enough to put people off, which is something that devs need to take into account. King’s Isle obviously caters to that itch in Wizard 101, where characters can jump, but the game world is just as “glued to the plane” as GW. Jumping is totally superficial (occasionally annoyingly so, when you think you can jump over something small), but it’s there, and people like it.
GW is a brilliant game, though. It’s one of only a couple of MMOs that I’ve given money to, and will always be a shining example in the field in my book. The business model, narrow level (and gear) band, atmosphere and art design are all top notch. That it’s very soloable is great in my book, too.
I believe that the use of such personally degrading words such as “pitiful” and “shallow” to describe someone’s reaction to anything is an despicable way to think about things.(Oh wait… (No no, I did that on purpose to prove a point)) If it’s nothing else then it’s plain and simple egocentrism, and that kind of thinking doesn’t help anything.
Jumping may be superficial, and it’s alright to say that it is, but to tell someone that their opinion is stupid or doesn’t matter always looks the same no matter what you’re talking about.
Now that I’ve said my bit about that- Jumping is part of the games overall presentation, and as such is subject to discrimination on those grounds. Hasn’t everyone looked at a piece of art. What kept me from ever getting into WAR was how your shield remained stationary while running. I could get over all of my other misgivings if only the game didn’t constantly assault me with an animation that just looked robotic and wrong. I’m not even a stickler for those kinds of things usually, but it was so infuriating that I had to stop. Ysharros recently brought to my attention the Uncanny Valley, and let me tell you I was there! ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley )
So as strange as it may sound no jumping is as legitimate a reason to dislike a game as disliking the focus on endgame or the subscription model. Why? Because it’s something that keeps people from shelling out the dough for your product. Them not playing means the exact same thing to you regardless. One person not playing because there’s no jumping is the exact same as one person not playing because they don’t like your gameplay.
Before you say differently think about the “artist” that throws a pile of garbage together and calls it a “sculpture” then complains about people “not understanding their art.” That person’s idea of what constitutes as art is created by himself and everyone that appreciates it does not see exactly what the artist sees but their own version of the same idea. They might see something the artist did not intend and percieve it as brilliance, and in that setting it would be acceptable- while if someone were to critique it for an equally unintended reason then they would be dismissed as “not understanding.” People might even say that their reasoning is “shallow” or “pitiful.”
I’m hoping you see the parallel here. I’m trying hard to make it obvious. Just because you value the way your game mechanics work in your combat system doesn’t mean that someone elses opinion about the way you run around doesn’t matter. In the world of business one unsatisfied customer is just as equal as the other in terms of your revenue. It’s the same way in real life when you converse- just because someones values don’t line up with yours, it doesn’t make their opinions any more or less valid than yours. You can say “okay, but I disagree because blah blah blah” and remain civil, but the moment you begin to besmirch someon’s character you are beginning to tread on the rocky ground of the logicless masses.
It is interesting that you get worked up by the word “pitiful” so much. I do not want to attack Muckbeast, I appreciate and enjoy his articles very much.
I also agreed that not including jumping in the game and limiting the movement of the player was a very bad idea.
But as I said, this cannot be the major contributing factor for liking or disliking a game. It is just easy to name, about as easy as to get worked up by certain buzzwords. Neither Tesh nor me called Muckbeast “stupid”.
I have to say this, before you complicate and escalate a simple matter with a wall of text, while totally missing the point.
And I still hope nobody feels attacked if I say it again: While people often mention the lack of jumping in GW as a major point of criticism, I still think they just do it because it is easy to point out, and that there are other, harder to describe factors that made or broke the game for them. Peace.
Hee. I love GW so much I went and bought 2 more boxes to give to 2 old friends way back from my MUD days who are still heartily into WoW. >.> As soon as I stopped being on holiday, they stopped playing GW.
I have one more close friend I tried to get into GW, and he just returns, ‘Bored. Bored. Boredboredbored. Bored.’ XD
In short, it seems that GW either ‘clicks’ for you, or it doesn’t. Maybe it’s something like hearing a piece of music you know, intellectually, is beautifully done, but you just don’t ‘get’ on an emotional level.
As for some of the reasons why I love GW:
- I’ve always loved tinkering with ‘builds’, inventing them, then testing them, then tweaking them, etc etc. When I was MUDding, in my ‘home’ MUD, I think I had 50 max level characters by the time I left. (In my defence, I was there about 8 years, and I am a chronic altaholic.) GW’s skill system lets me build and tinker to my nuggetty heart’s content.
- Coming from a background of MUDding, in most MUDs that I’ve played, an infinite gear spiral is NOT considered a good thing. -_- Gear would tend to cap out early, or not really matter that much. That was one of my key dis-satisfactions with WoW (there were others). In GW, gear basically caps out so easily that it doesn’t matter. How much you know, about how to play the game, and how to use your skillbar/deck of skills – that matters. And that matters to me.
- No subscription fee! Now, here, it’s not actually the monthly fee I resent, because I don’t mind subscription fees. But it seems to me that *because* GW has no subscription fee, they can afford to put in wonderful things like clicking to get from place to place (unless you want to walk, for some reason, such as a VQ, or just to see the sights… or whatever. =)). Playing through Prophecies and Factions made me feel like the devs actually cared that I was having fun with my time, and not trying to draw me out in an endless longer and longer playtime needed to get anything I WANTED to get done, done – because that translates to longer subscriptions. In that sense, I was disappointed with the design choices made in Nightfall and EoTN, to link rep to characters, instead of accounts, as was done in Factions.
- The artwork is beautiful – and not just the people. The scenery is gorgeous (though post-searing old ascalon can get kinda ughhh the first time round). The way the scenery’s done shows a very real appreciation of the beauty of the natural world. The places are beautiful because they are lush and vivid without being cartoony. It’s as if the art dept in GW realises that it doesn’t have to be all sparkling purple lights and crystal towers and gewgaws to be beautiful.
- The quest text is hilarious – if not the actual text, most definitely the accept/reject buttons. I didn’t read the quest text at first, but once I started, I was hooked. I love how sassy your accept/reject options are. They more or less make most of the quests into wry/silly jokes. I also like that quests, other than the ‘main advancement’ ones are purely optional. You don’t get gear from most/any of the higher end ones, the gold is negligible, and who cares about the xp? This, oddly, makes the QUEST INFO itself… matter. The lore, I suppose it should be called. When I went and did some quests in the Realm of Torment, and found out more ’spoilery’ stuff about the Factions storyline, I really liked it. I went, ‘OoOoH neat.’ No WoW quest ever got that reaction from me. Probably because I took pride in not reading them. XD And me, from a MUDding background. There’s irony lurking here!
- Heroes and henchmen (h/h). This is a wonderful feature. It allows me to play alone, when I’m feeling cranky, or just… feeling antisocial. I get to use the entire party as my ‘weapon’, a-la oldschool RPG (Wizardry, Might & Magic, etc), rather than just my character. It allows me to be more easy-going in PUGs, because I can PUG when I feel like being social, safe in the knowledge that if it all goes to Hell, I can almost all of the time, get whatever I want to get done with h/h. Because GW doesn’t kick you off its servers no matter how long you idle, it means I can start a ‘caravan vanquish’ and leave for work, buzz off to have dinner, see a movie, etc, and waddle back and pick up where I left off.
…
There’s a lot more stuff, but I’ll stop here for now. XD
Spammy nuggets is spammy!
nuggets is spammy, but right.
I also tried to interest several people to Guild Wars, and it often did not work out.
Let me talk ex negativo, listing WHY and WHAT might have people scared away:
1. No progression. People hit level 20, max level, and wonder what to do. They already have max stats sword, crafted by a crafter or someone just gave them a max stat sword with a nice skin at level 15 already. They wonder “what to do, how to progress”.
Later they added achievements called titles, most optional, some not so optional. The beef is most of the achievements were what I would consider quit against the GW mantra skill > time, as they rewarded/demanded grinding and repetitive actions.
2. Only 8 skills. Out of a list of skills that has grown by far too long, IMO. How many skills do we use with our various chars in certain other MMOs. GW lets you redo your build/spec on the fly in towns, it actually offers a lot of variety.
3. Heavily team based. Yes, Guild Wars is team based, not based on your char. You need henchmen/heroes or other players, solo playing is mostly using certain “farming” builds, but in general not possible. This might also be the reason why many players LOVE the pre-searing area, which allows soloing among other things.
4. It’s not WoW (OR: It is not a MMO!). Many people want something new, but it must be like WoW and play like WoW. But it must be something new or at least very familiar. This is unfortunate, as this wish is full of contradictions, nevertheless many games are judged by the WoW standard.
5. Closed instances. IMO the main reason, you cannot team up on the fly while playing outside of the outposts/towns.
7. Jumping. Yes, this is missing. I still refuse to say it is the killer argument why people did not like GW!
8. PvP is hard for newcomers. The random arenas are not everyone’s favorite, and getting in organized team as a newbie is hard. There is a lot of elitism (for good reason) in the Heroes’ Ascent tournament area, as player skill and knowledge are really valuable in winning there. Player skill/experience is judged by RANK, and it does not matter if you grinded your HA rank in the dumbest and repetitive way ever possible, actually. (There are the more casual alliance battles though, which were very successful, much more than the name giving Guild vs Guild or Heroes Ascent, and might be their future template for GW2 pvp modes)
9. The spam and community in major outpost are really really bad. What’s up with NCsoft games, GW and Aion have no particularly nice ingame communites.
10. People hear this is a pvp centered game and do not even bother to try it. This is a bad result of marketing GW as a PvP game, while the bulk of the community is actually people playing the PvE game. The hardcore pvp gamers are indeed a minority having trouble recruiting new bodies into their rank!
“[a lack of jumping] cannot be the major contributing factor for liking or disliking a game” Much of what I wrote was attempting to explain how it CAN be a legitimate major factor for liking/disliking a game. :/
I was simply pointing out that a video game can be rejected for any number of legitimate reasons that a designer might not ever consider. That’s what I was trying to say with the artist metaphor. Humans are complex creatures and to say that one feeling is not as legitimate as another is a judgement none of us are in a place to make. We are just not in a position to judge the way another person creates meaning.
I understand that you think that people are using “no jumping” as an easy answer to the “why don’t you like it” question, but I ask you this: Could there just not have been enough positive pulls into the game for the person that jumping was all it took to pull them away?
I believe that any answer to the “why don’t you like it” question will inevitably be far more complex than what someone can say in response.
I understand all of the personal criticisms you made of me in your post subsequent to mine, and I would have you know that I tried very hard to conduct myself with the utmost civility and make a solely intellectual argument, and I would appreciate the same in the future. I also never used the word “attack.” You misrepresented me there. I said “besmirch someone’s character” which I consider to be far less inflammatory than “attack.” I also felt that using “stupid” or “doesn’t matter” was a fair equivalent to calling someone’s reasoning “pitiful” but I may have made a logical jump there, my apologies.
I am sincerely sorry that this response could not be relayed via e-mail, half of what I’m saying doesn’t belong here. I suppose I should create an e-mail address for situations like this in the future.
Longasc, I think you really underestimate the effect something like no jumping can have. I don’t want to repeat my THROW example from Threshold, but it is pretty dispositive.
UI design is incredibly underrated in games. But if people are not comfortable with the way they interact with the game, EVERYTHING in the game will feel wrong.
LOTRO has some kind of weird aspects to its powers that results in a consistent delay between hitting a button and having your character execute the attack. It is actually something hard coded into their combat. It has probably cost them a few hundred thousand customers. It basically feels like permanentl, constant lag, but its weird because everything else you do (move, chat, use other commands) is *NOT* lagged.
The inability to jump while playing a 3rd person 3D character just feels brutally wrong. It is like you are in a wheelchair almost.
And once you feel like your character is crippled, it colors everything else you experience from that point forward.
I agree, not being able to jump in a 3D environment totally feels wrong. We just debate how much impact it has on the player in the end. But it was definitely stupid not to have jumping in Guild Wars.
I can add some more examples of similar blunders, but let me comment on LOTRO first: Yes, I know what you mean. My LOTRO Champion has an interrupt skill, that does not work/start before the animations of the skill used before is over. It is VERY hard to interrupt something this way till you get used to it. Most interrupt skills in GW cancel all other animations and immediately execute the interrupt ability, which makes a lot of sense for PvP. Keen from Keen & Graev called LOTRO’s weird combat delays “UI lag”, other people found different names for it, but nobody liked it. It makes the combat feel unresponsive and slow.
They have a second blunder of this kind: STUNNING world graphics, but the faces of the characters are often horsefaces, empty or have a totally fixed gaze. The animations are also very poor. Especially female characters have such an awful running animation that I often think this is the reason why some people play Hobbits and Dwarves, as the awful running is not as apparent there.
Needless to say, I am used to start creating a hot female char nowadays. But in LOTRO I could not stand them and made a human male, as all females in LOTRO seem to have serious hip luxations.
Aion’s graphics are made in this eastern style that usually is not my cup of tea, but they look good. Why? Because the chars are perfectly animated. The combat feels very responsive, the total opposite of button queueing in LOTRO (Aion has the queue at login – SCNR). The chars can blink, wave their hands, have gorgeous idle animations and feel very much alive. And while some players like to create abominations in the char creator, there is potential to create one angel after another in the really good char creator. Champions Online also has a very good char creator.
Now the list of blunders: In LOTRO you can swim, but you cannot dive. And the swimming animation is very cheap and looks very bad. Just feet and legs going up and down, does not look real.
In Aion you can fly, but it is very limited in most areas, and you cannot loop and the flight mechanic always feels a bit clumsy to me. But what is even more apparent is that your char just walks into the water like King Ludwig of Bavaria and drowns – angels apparently can’t swim. I thought this would be fixed in Aion 1.5, but it apparently still is not even fixed in the upcoming 1.6.
This is odd, as they finally added swimming to Lineage II after years. Given the great effort they put into Aion’s animations, many of them fluff, it is really weird that they did not think about this.
For some reason they also disabled “click to move” and changed how you control the camera in Aion to “westernize” it. But this control scheme is VERY disadvantageous and cumbersome in Aion. With click to move and using the right mouse button to change the camera angle you can react much faster and have less buttons to press or keep pressed to move, really. I personally did not have any problem with the Korean input method, which is better IMO. But they westernized the control scheme to make it more familiar to people.
Cannot help, sometimes I feel there cannot be any change or innovation if even a rather tiny change or difference to the usuale control scheme can disorient people so much!
I wonder how SWTOR will solve the “evading blaster fire” issue. I have seen a video where the player char was cowering behind a wall, this looked good. But then I also saw one where the char stood stiff and upright in the middle of a firefight and just took the blaster hits like a metal column.
We are deviating quite a lot from the original topic! But it is interesting!
This is definitely interesting! One of the things I do professionally is User Interface Design. This discussion has made me realise that hmm… When a web app (or any other ‘normal’ app, wherein people want to get things done) fails to work as expected, the user blames the app designers/developers. Which is, much of the time, justified.
But when it comes to games, and games fail to deliver on an easy-to-use UI, users either blame the game (and leave, never to return), or they stay and…blame themselves. O.o
…I’m not sure if this is a wonderful luxury for game UI designers or not. lol.
I actually consider LOTRO’s “unresponsive” controls to be one of the greatest parts of the game. I do not feel like I’m playing a game where I have to be making sure I hit every correct button immdediately after the global cooldown interval. I appreciate the way this makes combat feel slower paced. It does take some getting used to, and does feel quite unresponsive at first, but when all is said and done I would count it as something they did right by me, if not by the glorious hordes of popular culture.
*shrug*
I say it’s shallow because it’s a superficial *reason* to dislike *a whole game*. It’s like complaining that Windows Vista is lame because of the Aero visuals. It’s a very minor aspect of the *functionality* of the software.
Note that Vista has other, deeper problems. Someone complaining about GW’s perhaps excessive soloability or AI is one thing, but jumping just isn’t in the same vein. You can play the whole game *as designed* just fine without jumping if you just let go of your expectation that 3D avatars jump. Again, it has more to do with *player expectations* than with game design.
…and now I’m wondering if it will cripple the 3D Bionic Commando. Somehow people wound up liking the original, no jumping and all. Maybe because they learned how to play the game instead of expect the game to play the same as others.
Smart devs will cater to player expectations, but at some point, players also have to step up and accept a game for what it is, superficial warts and all. Otherwise, we’re stuck in Cloneland, always complaining that the New Game isn’t the Old Game and Innovation Sucks.
In Vista, if I don’t like the visuals I can change them. I can’t add jumping to GW. Also, its not like I actually have any choice in OS. I either learn to like whatever version of Windows is or I don’t play games.
If I do not feel like I have adequate control of my character, then everything else is ruined. I couldn’t get into Metroid on the Gamecube because you couldn’t strafe (or perhaps you could only strafe via shoulder buttons rather than left/right controls). It killed the whole game. I have played a few MMOs where you could not rebind the keys to make A and D strafe left/right. Game instantly ruined. The rest of the game could be great, but if my UI/control scheme sucks, there’s no point in suffering. There are plenty of games out there that are also good that don’t screw up the UI like this.
You should note that jumping wasn’t my ONLY issue with GW. But honestly, it was a huge one.
I do not think devs should always cater to player expectations. But I think it is a giant step backwards to give someone *LESS* physical control over their 3D character. Games should be moving in a direction where people have more control. For example, at some point in the future, instead of just stock emotes, there should be ways to somehow control limbs, head, etc.
I love the business model for GW. Subscriptions are what stops me as a casual gamer from getting into a lot of MMO/MOGs. WoW tenuously retains me as a customer because I can buy a prepaid game card when I feel like playing it, and let it lapse when I don’t.
I love the addition of NPC henchmen, especially as an Aussie player. (I have spent so long on LFG channels in the past on other games that I’ve actually ‘greyed out’ the quests that made me want to do the instance in the first place!)
I’m undecided on the instanced wilderness factor. On the upside, I don’t have to worry about someone ganking my quest NPC or plowing through an area only to find the miniboss I need has just been killed. On the downside, it all but eliminates the possibility of spontaneous PUGing, which is kinda why I’m playing a multiplayer game as opposed to a SP game in the first place, amirite?
The phasing aspect is fantastic, but I think WoW is catching up with WOTLK/Cataclysm (Has that got an abbreviation yet lol?) and I enjoy Blizzard’s utilization of the technique a lot more than GW’s predictable and oh-so-linear ‘cutscene, phase, next chapter’ sequencing. (I actually kept away from the DK starter quest spoilers and had a few vocal “OSHI… EVERYTHING’S DIFFERENT!” moments in WOTLK.)
Character modeling was a definite step up from WoW’s cartoony avatars, but I still felt that they were too wooden, not to mention they still all looked nearly identical. I also didn’t like the fact that you kept the starter gear for what seemed like aaaaaages. I know the quests are supposed to promote the lore, but would it kill you to give me a new pair of boots or something?
Skill system, really not a fan. Double Classing, good in theory but it came dangerously close to throwing the whole thing in the ‘too hard’ basket by level 9. Apparently that doesn’t even come into real relevance until you hit the level cap anyway.
That’s also another thing which bugged me. Once again, the game ‘really starts’ at the level cap.
UI – I’m with Muckbeast on this one. Not jumping SUCKED. I know a lot of you are saying it’s a trivial thing, but I felt like I was just following a series of yellow brick roads to my eventual destination. I felt like my character was almost detached from the environment around him. Not to mention I learned to hate the never ending stream of ‘ambush spawns’ at the SAME FREAKIN POINT on the SAME FREAKIN ROAD the FIVE BILLION TIMES I walked up and back doing this and that. Entry road to the city =/= a good place to stick an endlessly recurring spawn.
GW was a good game, but not good enough to keep me coming back.
Why I could never get into it rails, no jumping, all zones instanced, and sad sad sad sounds.
Yes…I have no friends
Thank the robots for pulling up old posts.
Why was Guild Wars such a huge success?
I think on one level they were an utter failure – those people who’re playing World of Warcraft, a number of people that’s somewhere between 2 to 5 times as many as Guild Wars, are people paying a utility bill for the privilege of not having to play Guild Wars.
But in the sane world, where we don’t compare ourselves to Coke or Pepsi Co., it has a great profit margin. And it did that by not having a subscription, it looks beautiful, it had online play, and it isn’t completely awful. If it had an ongoing fee, was fugly, or was awful, it would have crashed and burned as bad as Hellgate did.
(We always must mention Hellgate when talking about success/failure, yes we must. In this case, we note that development on Guild Wars was laser-focused to a single purpose – Hellgate was had diffuse effort, with its split single-player / multi-player modes.. and one of the worst stories I’ve heard of it is that at one time, they had a version of the thing running on an XBOX. An X-Box.)
If you saw the early prototype versions of Guild Wars (I did – I spend all day with my eyeball against the computer screen watching what Blizzard employees who leave the nest do. Remember Hyboreal Games? Good times.) you’d note it was fuglier than Quake 3. That game would not have soared as high.
What is great about Guild Wars?
I suppose the lolore is adequate. While lolore isn’t the reason we play these games, there are a couple memorable moments, such as Prince Rurik’s rants as he suicidally runs from nest to nest of monsters alone.
Otherwise. Guild Wars is only good as a Soccer simulator. If you have the OCD need to outfit the perfect team setup, with builds and timing, then it has quite a bit to offer.
It lacks almost all the food pellets of the DIKU model: you collect skills, pokemon (the ‘heroes’) and there’s nuthin’ else. And it lacks a slot machine mechanic like Diablo. So it’s appeal is for munchkins I guess.
What is really weird to me, is the people (or if you prefer, “[no]Care Bears”. Anyone who uses Healing Breeze on a monk is not playing the same game I’m playing, full stop.) who’re driven by the “achievements” – ones that don’t even empower skills! I imagine the psychology works thus:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/3/12/
And they stay filled when you max’em out. What’s more satisfying than that?
So Guild Wars has much more in common with Blood Bowl than other RPG-type games.
Will ArenaNet be able to duplicate or exceed this success with Guild Wars 2?
They will triple the units sold, and they’ll probably make the shop more lucrative… so it will be vastly more successful for them. Just adding jumping and a level grind will double their sales. But you won’t be able to build a soccer team of NPCs.
Agreed.
I think you are right about jumping, and I am glad someone else is echoing how major that missing feature was. It just weird in a third person RPG to be so “tethered” to the ground.
If they add a level grind, however, I think they will be giving up something that is unique and special about Guild Wars.