Here is a horrible, horrible thing I discovered in GW.

That is as far forward as you can move in that spot – the grey gravel texture is as impassable as a brick wall. My Guildmates don’t seem to think this is conversation worthy and would rather talk about Mel Gibson’s latest zany antics, BUT COME ON PEOPLE. IT’S AN IMPASSABLE TEXTURE.

GW always did give me the feeling of being a gerbil running through a series of tubes….

We always must mention Hellgate when talking about success/failure,

Agreed.

Just adding jumping and a level grind will double their sales.

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.

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.

Yes…I have no friends

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.

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 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.

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 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!