I saw this link from MMO-Champions which a player from the MMORPG World of Warcraft posted:
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/215069-i-already-have-a-job/
With many MvP forum titles posting in this, along side a blue (dev) post. This all started to make since to me and I have to also ask the question:
Why do I have to these tedious things to obtain (insert what you need)?
For example:
In World of Warcraft, you have things called Dungeons and Raids. These are PvE (player vs environment) game designs. You enter this game design and kill a boss or random creature within the Dungeon or Raid. Now the Bosses drop items every time and some random creature (mob) drops on a % base drop rating or Random Number Generator (RNG).
While the RNG is what it is "Random" your party/raid still will have an item 100% of the time when you kill a Boss and % of the time when you kill a Mob.
What the above poster is claiming:
Why do I need to do dailies to obtain 1 item or gold (highest level of currency in WoW) which takes weeks to finish? S/he continues to say that s/he already has a full time job and why should they have to grind (repeat said task over and over until you have enough of said item to buy or obtain said goal item)?
Basically, the "grind" is a cookie-cutter game design for this type of game. Thus, why hasn't the top grossing MMORPG gone away from the cookie-cutter design? I mean, look at their ideas of their next expansion: MoP (Mist of Pandaria); they are removing the cookie-cutter talents and just about everything that is a cookie-cutter from their game, to the best of their abilities.
So I'm asking the fellow Escapist, Should MMORPG's move away from these tedious game designs such as; Dailies and grind to obtain gear after doing so for a few weeks or months?
Should they find another way to obtain currency instead of doing these grinds/dailies over and over if they don't want to use an AH (auction house)?
Believe it or not, right before WoW came out MMOs were beginning to shift away from this type of design. Then WoW came out, made a shit ton of money from that type of design and made the entire industry figure maybe they shouldn't abandon it just yet. WoW's success single-handedly stunted the evolution of the MMO genre for about 8 years.
The reason why it is that way? Because people will not only do it, they will pay to do it.
These two questions conflict with each other a lot. If you make things quick to obtain, then the player has no incentive to keep playing after they already have everything. If you make things too grindy, then people feel that it's tedious.
WoW offers both, I find it a bit hypocritical that people complain that "it's too easy!" and then turn right around and say "it's too hard/grindy!".
Alternatively, like one of the blues said
Infinite content.
It's easy to design a better system than dailies, pump out infinite amounts of content, it's just not feasible to pull off. Some people want to spend more time in the game than others, maybe even every day, and we want to make sure they have something to do. While we'd love for that to be fresh and unique content every time, it's simply not feasible. Thus, dailies. Give people something to do each time they log in (if they choose to do so every day).
Grinding = more playtime = more money for subscription-based games. And all the free-to-play MMOs tend to copy WoW and other successful pay-MMOs of the past, so I don't foresee grinding disappearing.
I think, and I have said this about why I won't be spending money on SWTOR, that developers need to innovate in the area of combat to make things fresh again. The grind of daily quests and the dungeon/raid system isn't a bad system, they just need to innovate on HOW it works. i.e. what warhammer did and what wow is going to do with dungeon challenges and group world quests, world bosses, etc. Also, instead of 1,1,1,2,1,1,4,1,1,1,3... Which is how combat is now, add a little more flavor to it in some way. Some sort of interactive "proc" or something would be nice. Also, one of the things that bothers me about wow is flying. I hate flying mounts. It makes the world feel small and annoys me. I have some awesome ground mounts, but, they are no longer useful, even the ones I have gotten from current content that are awesome and pretty much useless.
Guild wars 2 will just be a different take on the same model we have been seeing for years now. it's nothing new. Hopefully, they will move away from the restricted play style that was guild wars 1 and actually care about the state of the game and it's servers after release.
Obviously some people like the "tedious" gameplay MMOs like WoW offer, otherwise it wouldn't be so outrageously popular. Sure, a diverse market is always a good thing, and we should never stop trying to push the formulas of MMOs or any other types of games. But just as there's an FPS for just about anyone these days, there should and will always be an MMO for everybody. MMOs are just slower to evolve because they're so much bigger, require such a bigger investment, and are extremely difficult to experiment with. It's difficult enough to get a large monetary investment for an experimental game that's single player, nonetheless an ongoing MMO that will constantly require servers and a large team to keep it updated and running.
There's always going to be SOMETHING tedious in an MMO. That's why I get bored with them after a while. That's why I don't PAY for them. I can't handle that sort of thing.
The solution is to make tedious games for those who want them, and casual games for those who prefer that.
The problem is games that try and please both sides and end up pleasing neither. Typical example is to release an expansion that pleases the people who want a hardcore grind and scares away the casuals, then release a patch that gets rid of the grind to try and bring back the casuals, and in so doing alienate the hardcore players.
Guild wars 2 will just be a different take on the same model we have been seeing for years now. it's nothing new. Hopefully, they will move away from the restricted play style that was guild wars 1 and actually care about the state of the game and it's servers after release.
So in most MMO's I can be walking down a path and see monsters running up to a town and killing the civilians and if I do nothing they will destory the town. Or try to stop an army before it takes a hold of part of the zone and then slowly take over it.
GW2 offers SO MUCH new. It clearly shows that you don't even know anything of the game.
Combat:
Casting while moving
No auto attack (you can set any skill on your bar to autocast, and one of them will be spammable)
Attacks don't need a target, they'll hit whatever gets in their way
Dodging attacks and projectiles
Shield stance blocks projectiles from hitting you and people behind you
Limited skillbar
No holy trinity, players aren't locked into one role to the exclusion of all others
Skills fit into broad categories of damage, control, or support
Weapon(s) determine half your skill bar and give different skills than other weapons
Players can potentially switch roles in combat (if weapon/skill choices plan for it)
No ally targeted abilities
Everyone has a self-heal ability which is the most powerful heal
Downed state before dying, killing an enemy rallies you
Downed state gives you a new, limited skillbar to fight back with
Any player can rez anyone mid combat anytime, including NPCs.
Very minimal death penalty.
Picking up an environmental weapon changes your skillbar
Thieves can steal environmental weapons from enemies
You get full xp and loot for helping kill a mob whether grouped or ungrouped
Hundreds of cross profession combos to enhance the effect of your skills, even ungrouped
Mob aggro based on proximity and other factors
NPC enemies can dodge your attacks
NPC attacks may be deadlier due to ability of players to dodge and revive
No mana/energy for any class (subject to change)
Only four attributes. Power affects melee, range and spell damage
All professions viable at both melee and range
Underwater:
Desire to have underwater be huge part of the world
You have underwater only weapons
Skills change to underwater versions
Skills use the Z-axis
No breath meter
Drowned state, it's like downed state, but you can also get to the surface to rally
Underwater friendly races and towns
Rangers have underwater pets
Dynamic Events:
Completely replace quests in the open world
Run whether players are there or not
They actually happen instead of just being told about them
Failable and not necessarily repeatable on failure
Allow for victory and failure conditions not easily accomplished with quests
Run in cycles so they're repeatable
Encourage community by letting everyone participate at the same time
Instantly scale up or down with number of players participating
Reward everyone involved based on their amount of participation
Chain together to keep people working together longer
Affect the world in terms of what merchants sell and which waypoints are available
Don't always run so you'll see different things when revisiting a zone
Constantly adding new events to enhance replayability
Boss fights which scale with number of players up to 100
Open World:
Entirely PVE
No factions
Designed to be as griefless as possible
No race/class restrictions
Phased gathering nodes that allow everyone to have a shot at them.
Everyone can gather everything so no waiting on others/making people wait
No set path through zones
Automentoring keeps entire world's content rewarding and challenging
Manual sidekicking to a higher level friend
City to city ports so you can play with friends immediately.
Teleportation to any waypoint you've unlocked
Hidden events to reward explorers
Day/night cycle which can affect your weapons' procs as well as trigger DEs at certain times
Dynamic weather can trigger DEs (when snow falls) or be changed by DEs (NPC causes snow)
Tasks to fill hearts in the open world, for completionists and NPC goodwill
Boss fights at the end of all the tutorials put you right into the action
Personal Story:
Everyone has one big storyline from creation to level cap
Choices made at character creation affect it
Choices in game have consequences and can branch it
Each player has a Home Instance section of town
Character personality gives different dialog options and affects how NPCs react to you
PVP:
3 Faction World PVP against two other servers in large 4-zone maps
No fixed limit to number of participants (though eventually technology would limit it)
W/L record is kept
After 2 weeks, your server is matched up against new, equal strength servers
Winning server gets PVE buff of some kind
Castles and keeps to hold, dynamic events to fight over, trade routes
Destructable environments
Players can level up entirely in World PVP
Enemy players drop loot as if they were PVE enemies
Hot joinable Structured PVP
Structured PVP with custom rulesets
Players in structured PVP are max level with all skills and gear so it's a level playing field
PVP balanced separately from PVE
Dungeons:
Dungeons have a story mode separate from your personal story
Completing story mode unlocks 3 explorable mode paths
These show the consequences of the story mode
There are random/hidden events in dungeons
No raiding
Get a token for armor/weapon everytime you complete a dungeon, no hoping for random drop
Miscellaneous:
Flat leveling curve
Players can be in multiple guilds
No endgame vertical gear progression in power
30+ Minigames in cities
400 dye colors, each piece of armor has three color sections
Gear that can take up more than one armor slot
Grindless crafting with discoverable recipes
Use an iPad to see what your friends are doing in game and send them messages
Auction house available from outside the game
Translatable fictional languages
Unconventional NPC races with deep lore
Add your own music to ingame playlists, your battle music will start when you enter combat
Playlists revert to in game music during cinematics
Carrier pigeons deliver your mail to you
No subscription fee
Well to start I think there is a misrepresentation of what grinding really means. Grinding is not just doing the same thing over and over and over again. Thats part of it but the real definition of grinding is when you do a task over and over and over again that is not fun.
That said, fun is also subjective. For example in Warhammer I could do world PVP or scenarios for hours and always have a good time. However PVP in WoW, Aion, or City of heros was absolutely abyssmal for me. Its because these actions were fun for me that they werent tedious grinds
The same can be said for raiding. I have always enjoyed high skill raiding that required heavy coordination and difficulty. Fighting increasingly harder encounters and creating new strategies to overcome the encounter is something I really enjoy. However other people dislike wipefests and just want to get in, beat an encounter, and get their loot. They dont want to (or due to RL problems cant) put in the time it takes to really raid. So to them there is no fun so raiding becomes a grind
Get what Im saying? Grinding is pretty subjective in and of itself because it revolves around what is fun for the group and the individual.
Now there are some things like dailies that I think are grinding for everyone. A questline can only be done once with some amount of interest. Replaying it takes away some of the enjoyment factor. When you have to do a quest 20, 50, or even 100 times or more all enjoyment is sucked out of it till its just a soul draining grind.
There are ways around this, for example WoW's reputation rewards. Why cant they extend quest lines or bring in more side quests in zones so that people can have a bunch of different stories or one big one till they get to Exalted level reputation? On the note of special currency, why cant it be given while doing regular quests for the faction it involves? I see no reason to require daily quests for that currency. Now for PVP and raiding it makes more sense or has a history of requiring multiple completions. In PVP thinning the enemies numbers or winning objectives that are similar/the same for the war effort makes sense to me. However in raiding, I think people just have to accept that to gear out a guild and see harder encounters requires a lot of boss fights because thats what raiding has always been.
Guild wars 2 will just be a different take on the same model we have been seeing for years now. it's nothing new. Hopefully, they will move away from the restricted play style that was guild wars 1 and actually care about the state of the game and it's servers after release.
So in most MMO's I can be walking down a path and see monsters running up to a town and killing the civilians and if I do nothing they will destory the town. Or try to stop an army before it takes a hold of part of the zone and then slowly take over it.
GW2 offers SO MUCH new. It clearly shows that you don't even know anything of the game.
Combat:
Casting while moving
No auto attack (you can set any skill on your bar to autocast, and one of them will be spammable)
Attacks don't need a target, they'll hit whatever gets in their way
Dodging attacks and projectiles
Shield stance blocks projectiles from hitting you and people behind you
Limited skillbar
No holy trinity, players aren't locked into one role to the exclusion of all others
Skills fit into broad categories of damage, control, or support
Weapon(s) determine half your skill bar and give different skills than other weapons
Players can potentially switch roles in combat (if weapon/skill choices plan for it)
No ally targeted abilities
Everyone has a self-heal ability which is the most powerful heal
Downed state before dying, killing an enemy rallies you
Downed state gives you a new, limited skillbar to fight back with
Any player can rez anyone mid combat anytime, including NPCs.
Very minimal death penalty.
Picking up an environmental weapon changes your skillbar
Thieves can steal environmental weapons from enemies
You get full xp and loot for helping kill a mob whether grouped or ungrouped
Hundreds of cross profession combos to enhance the effect of your skills, even ungrouped
Mob aggro based on proximity and other factors
NPC enemies can dodge your attacks
NPC attacks may be deadlier due to ability of players to dodge and revive
No mana/energy for any class (subject to change)
Only four attributes. Power affects melee, range and spell damage
All professions viable at both melee and range
Underwater:
Desire to have underwater be huge part of the world
You have underwater only weapons
Skills change to underwater versions
Skills use the Z-axis
No breath meter
Drowned state, it's like downed state, but you can also get to the surface to rally
Underwater friendly races and towns
Rangers have underwater pets
Dynamic Events:
Completely replace quests in the open world
Run whether players are there or not
They actually happen instead of just being told about them
Failable and not necessarily repeatable on failure
Allow for victory and failure conditions not easily accomplished with quests
Run in cycles so they're repeatable
Encourage community by letting everyone participate at the same time
Instantly scale up or down with number of players participating
Reward everyone involved based on their amount of participation
Chain together to keep people working together longer
Affect the world in terms of what merchants sell and which waypoints are available
Don't always run so you'll see different things when revisiting a zone
Constantly adding new events to enhance replayability
Boss fights which scale with number of players up to 100
Open World:
Entirely PVE
No factions
Designed to be as griefless as possible
No race/class restrictions
Phased gathering nodes that allow everyone to have a shot at them.
Everyone can gather everything so no waiting on others/making people wait
No set path through zones
Automentoring keeps entire world's content rewarding and challenging
Manual sidekicking to a higher level friend
City to city ports so you can play with friends immediately.
Teleportation to any waypoint you've unlocked
Hidden events to reward explorers
Day/night cycle which can affect your weapons' procs as well as trigger DEs at certain times
Dynamic weather can trigger DEs (when snow falls) or be changed by DEs (NPC causes snow)
Tasks to fill hearts in the open world, for completionists and NPC goodwill
Boss fights at the end of all the tutorials put you right into the action
Personal Story:
Everyone has one big storyline from creation to level cap
Choices made at character creation affect it
Choices in game have consequences and can branch it
Each player has a Home Instance section of town
Character personality gives different dialog options and affects how NPCs react to you
PVP:
3 Faction World PVP against two other servers in large 4-zone maps
No fixed limit to number of participants (though eventually technology would limit it)
W/L record is kept
After 2 weeks, your server is matched up against new, equal strength servers
Winning server gets PVE buff of some kind
Castles and keeps to hold, dynamic events to fight over, trade routes
Destructable environments
Players can level up entirely in World PVP
Enemy players drop loot as if they were PVE enemies
Hot joinable Structured PVP
Structured PVP with custom rulesets
Players in structured PVP are max level with all skills and gear so it's a level playing field
PVP balanced separately from PVE
Dungeons:
Dungeons have a story mode separate from your personal story
Completing story mode unlocks 3 explorable mode paths
These show the consequences of the story mode
There are random/hidden events in dungeons
No raiding
Get a token for armor/weapon everytime you complete a dungeon, no hoping for random drop
Miscellaneous:
Flat leveling curve
Players can be in multiple guilds
No endgame vertical gear progression in power
30+ Minigames in cities
400 dye colors, each piece of armor has three color sections
Gear that can take up more than one armor slot
Grindless crafting with discoverable recipes
Use an iPad to see what your friends are doing in game and send them messages
Auction house available from outside the game
Translatable fictional languages
Unconventional NPC races with deep lore
Add your own music to ingame playlists, your battle music will start when you enter combat
Playlists revert to in game music during cinematics
Carrier pigeons deliver your mail to you
No subscription fee
Apparently you haven't played a lot of the MMO's on the market or read what I said. What I said still hold's against that list...
Guild wars 2 will just be a DIFFERENT TAKE on the SAME MODEL we have been seeing for years now.
notice how I said DIFFERENT TAKE.. Most of the things on that list are things that wow, warhammer, CoH, Aion, and others are ALREADY DOING changed just slightly. Hell 99% of that is available now or with an addon in wow. Clearly you have little experience with the current and past MMO's on the market.
Guild wars 2 will just be a different take on the same model we have been seeing for years now. it's nothing new. Hopefully, they will move away from the restricted play style that was guild wars 1 and actually care about the state of the game and it's servers after release.
So in most MMO's I can be walking down a path and see monsters running up to a town and killing the civilians and if I do nothing they will destory the town. Or try to stop an army before it takes a hold of part of the zone and then slowly take over it.
GW2 offers SO MUCH new. It clearly shows that you don't even know anything of the game.
Combat:
Casting while moving
No auto attack (you can set any skill on your bar to autocast, and one of them will be spammable)
Attacks don't need a target, they'll hit whatever gets in their way
Dodging attacks and projectiles
Shield stance blocks projectiles from hitting you and people behind you
Limited skillbar
No holy trinity, players aren't locked into one role to the exclusion of all others
Skills fit into broad categories of damage, control, or support
Weapon(s) determine half your skill bar and give different skills than other weapons
Players can potentially switch roles in combat (if weapon/skill choices plan for it)
No ally targeted abilities
Everyone has a self-heal ability which is the most powerful heal
Downed state before dying, killing an enemy rallies you
Downed state gives you a new, limited skillbar to fight back with
Any player can rez anyone mid combat anytime, including NPCs.
Very minimal death penalty.
Picking up an environmental weapon changes your skillbar
Thieves can steal environmental weapons from enemies
You get full xp and loot for helping kill a mob whether grouped or ungrouped
Hundreds of cross profession combos to enhance the effect of your skills, even ungrouped
Mob aggro based on proximity and other factors
NPC enemies can dodge your attacks
NPC attacks may be deadlier due to ability of players to dodge and revive
No mana/energy for any class (subject to change)
Only four attributes. Power affects melee, range and spell damage
All professions viable at both melee and range
Underwater:
Desire to have underwater be huge part of the world
You have underwater only weapons
Skills change to underwater versions
Skills use the Z-axis
No breath meter
Drowned state, it's like downed state, but you can also get to the surface to rally
Underwater friendly races and towns
Rangers have underwater pets
Dynamic Events:
Completely replace quests in the open world
Run whether players are there or not
They actually happen instead of just being told about them
Failable and not necessarily repeatable on failure
Allow for victory and failure conditions not easily accomplished with quests
Run in cycles so they're repeatable
Encourage community by letting everyone participate at the same time
Instantly scale up or down with number of players participating
Reward everyone involved based on their amount of participation
Chain together to keep people working together longer
Affect the world in terms of what merchants sell and which waypoints are available
Don't always run so you'll see different things when revisiting a zone
Constantly adding new events to enhance replayability
Boss fights which scale with number of players up to 100
Open World:
Entirely PVE
No factions
Designed to be as griefless as possible
No race/class restrictions
Phased gathering nodes that allow everyone to have a shot at them.
Everyone can gather everything so no waiting on others/making people wait
No set path through zones
Automentoring keeps entire world's content rewarding and challenging
Manual sidekicking to a higher level friend
City to city ports so you can play with friends immediately.
Teleportation to any waypoint you've unlocked
Hidden events to reward explorers
Day/night cycle which can affect your weapons' procs as well as trigger DEs at certain times
Dynamic weather can trigger DEs (when snow falls) or be changed by DEs (NPC causes snow)
Tasks to fill hearts in the open world, for completionists and NPC goodwill
Boss fights at the end of all the tutorials put you right into the action
Personal Story:
Everyone has one big storyline from creation to level cap
Choices made at character creation affect it
Choices in game have consequences and can branch it
Each player has a Home Instance section of town
Character personality gives different dialog options and affects how NPCs react to you
PVP:
3 Faction World PVP against two other servers in large 4-zone maps
No fixed limit to number of participants (though eventually technology would limit it)
W/L record is kept
After 2 weeks, your server is matched up against new, equal strength servers
Winning server gets PVE buff of some kind
Castles and keeps to hold, dynamic events to fight over, trade routes
Destructable environments
Players can level up entirely in World PVP
Enemy players drop loot as if they were PVE enemies
Hot joinable Structured PVP
Structured PVP with custom rulesets
Players in structured PVP are max level with all skills and gear so it's a level playing field
PVP balanced separately from PVE
Dungeons:
Dungeons have a story mode separate from your personal story
Completing story mode unlocks 3 explorable mode paths
These show the consequences of the story mode
There are random/hidden events in dungeons
No raiding
Get a token for armor/weapon everytime you complete a dungeon, no hoping for random drop
Miscellaneous:
Flat leveling curve
Players can be in multiple guilds
No endgame vertical gear progression in power
30+ Minigames in cities
400 dye colors, each piece of armor has three color sections
Gear that can take up more than one armor slot
Grindless crafting with discoverable recipes
Use an iPad to see what your friends are doing in game and send them messages
Auction house available from outside the game
Translatable fictional languages
Unconventional NPC races with deep lore
Add your own music to ingame playlists, your battle music will start when you enter combat
Playlists revert to in game music during cinematics
Carrier pigeons deliver your mail to you
No subscription fee
Apparently you haven't played a lot of the MMO's on the market or read what I said. What I said still hold's against that list...
Guild wars 2 will just be a DIFFERENT TAKE on the SAME MODEL we have been seeing for years now.
notice how I said DIFFERENT TAKE.. Most of the things on that list are things that wow, warhammer, CoH, Aion, and others are ALREADY DOING changed just slightly. Hell 99% of that is available now or with an addon in wow. Clearly you have little experience with the current and past MMO's on the market.
I have played WoW, I have played Aion, I have played Warhammer, I have played Age of Conan, I have played Guild Wars, Runes of Magic, Vindictus, Maple Story, APB, Mabinogi, Global Agenda, Forsaken World, Hellgate: London/Global, La Tale, Spiral Knights, Champions, Mu, Lotro, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Perfect World, Flyff, Lego Universe, Zero Online, Lost Saga, Allods, Dragon Nest, Silkroad, Ragnarok, Shin Megami Tensei online, Phantasy Star Online episode 1 and 2, La Tale, Alanticia Online, Everquest 2, DC Universe, and FF11.
Now that I got that out of the way lets analyze somes things.
Rift is a game that has somewhat Dynamic Events, a rift would open up, you need to go and defeat it or the enemies will overrun the zone. It's a basic system that only real hook is that it's random.
Warhammer had public quests, but these were static and even more basic then Rift.
GW2 on the other hand, takes these and makes it something special. They make them DYNAMIC. Enimies attack a town, and you lose, they take it over and then various other events will open up that would have them pushing you back. But if you fend them off, then you can bring the fight to them with various dynamic events leading up to going to their base.
But this is only a bit, Dynamic events take the form of quests, there is no grind, there is no go kill 10 rats. Dynamic events can be small things like helping some travelers or as big as stopping a dragon from wrecking the entire zone.
Now let's go to combat, more action mmo's have been coming out lately, Rusty Hearts, Vindictus, etc... But they all have one problem, they're COMPLETELY instanced. Sure they got the awesome combat, but you don't go exploring the world just going through the same dungeon for the tenth time.
Also Dungeons. Dungeons in MMO's are simple, you get into a party and you go on the set path. Or maybe there will be two paths but mostly you have to do both becuase they lead to the big boss. In GW2 you have to make desecions, if you go the left path, or the right path and you don't get the go back. But even on these paths various other events can come into play. Let's say you're in a corridor, a giant troll or cyclopes could rush in and steal one of your team mates and you have to get them back.
What MMO has that?
No Raiding. Tell me what MMO has no raiding? Maybe you can find that odd one but almost all MMO's have raiding. You get into a large party you go through a dungeon and then you roll to see who gets the gear. It starts becoming so formulaic that you have to start making schedules.
In GW2, the whole game is the End game, once you get to 80, you don't jsut begin to farm, and the game becuase a whole lot more tideous. You go through the world, exploring, doing your personal story. And let's say you want to do a dungeon and you don't get the gear you want? Switch it out with an NPC so then you do get it because no one likes to grind. Real success doesn't come from grinding a boss for eight hours, it comes from doing awesome things and not killing a boss that will spawn two minutes later.
No set path through zones. My brother and me, and our friend when we played WoW, anytime you made a character you followed a path. I would go to Zone A then B, then C, and so on. There was no choice. I couldn't be like: Oh, now I want to go up North and see what's going on there then to make it worse that they were higher level. Now while leveling will matter and there is higher level enemies, you can still make your own path and explore like how you want to, and not how the game wants you to.
And it makes you feel like a badass from the get go. In most MMO's like the developers say, is a boring grind to get the good stuff and even then you will only do very few that will make you feel awesome. GW2's world doesn't want people to be sitting around killing rats and then leveling up by talking to static npcs who do nothing but stand there all day. Straight from the start you fight bosses and hordes of enemies. It also helps in the sense of the world that it is in danger.
In Wow, it would say how the world is in such choas, the war between the Alliance and Horde. A farmer will say: Stop those monsters from attacking my farm. You will look over and the monsters are picking their noses in the field doing nothing.
How many MMO's make it so when you go to zero health that you can stay in the battle, try to get a kill so then you stay alive. Always keeping you in touch with whats going on. What MMO allows for every class to hold their own, heal themselves and revive their allies in need. In MMO's that the healers job, and no one elses, but in this everyone is responsable, and no one is there standing and looking at hp bars going up and down all day long.
Also underwater combat in this is way more dynamic. In most MMO's underwater combat is ground combat, just underwater. You can't move around, you stand there floating while attacking an enemy. It doesn't even give you the feeling that you're underwater. This is also helped by the fact that in GW2, your skills will change to accomidate being in water.
The MMO's that this game truly is similar to is old fanshion mmo's like Ultima which are sandboxy.
That question is silly. What I read was, "Should MMORPG's move away from large amounts of repetitive, boring content?" Why, yes, they should. Though, I suppose it wouldn't be as profitable then.
Making things difficult, but not too difficult, to obtain is what hooks most people in, whether or not they like it.
Same goes for the random rewards of killing bosses. It takes some time and some skill and then you *might* get the item you want. If not, try again. And again. And again...
Skinner box, anyone?
While I think it could be possible to make things very easy to obtain, I doubt such an MMORPG could be very successful. People would be pimped out in no time and then... quit until the next expansion? Probably.
I don't know about anyone else, and I have a friend who says its going to be a total MMO failure; but frankly I'm looking forward to White Wolf moving World of Darkness to the MMO scene. I'm hoping like crazy it'll be as impressive and as much fun as 'Redemption' and/or "Bloodlines'. I never finished 'Bloodlines' though, thanks to the bugs it took them YEARS to patch/fix. Nonetheless, I have hope, and, until then, I also have City Of Heroes.
sorry to say, but WoD development has slowed, as CCP (White Wolf's Parent Company), has decided to focus for now on EVE (a very different MMO, which I absolutely love) and DUST 514
This is why I like Phantasy Star Online and Monster Hunter. They remove things like the grind to max level to enter the "hang out in the hub city all day" part of the game. You're there as soon as you create a character! I also like their action-focused gameplay. I think it's a lot more exciting than memorizing a never-changing rotation. It feels like the game is put before the grind.
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