I got your Guild Wars 2 right here, buddy
No, seriously, I do. Just got up my impressions from the closed beta event over at Citizen Game, along with a very tasty designer interview with a couple of guys from over at ArenaNet. Spent about four hours of my day off transcribing the worst dictaphone recording ever made, but it was worth it. Still better than learning shorthand. Anyhow, here’s a couple of choice extracts, firstly from the interview:
“GW2 does not have traditional quests, like you’d find in most MMOs. You have your personal story, which at any time you always something available for you to do for the next step in the narrative, and then you have dynamic events. These are things that occur in the world which are there for everyone, so for example things like a town under attack, or a merchant trying to take a caravan through a mountain.
…
All of this is happening in real time, bouncing back and forth through the world and creating this content for everyone playing the game to experience. That’s a big part of our game world, to make it feel like the decisions you make actually have an impact, the decisions you make in your story actually affect that, branch the story, and the decisions you make in dynamic events will change the world for everybody. That’s what GW2 is all about.
And there’s no monthly fees, you can play the game forever once you buy it.”
And secondly, from my preview:
“The joy with this kind of system is that it is up to you, and your style of play, what content you see. Keen to whizz through to the next area, and forget about cleaning up all the corners of this map? You can do that, and the game won’t penalise you for having a log full of unfinished quests. On the other hand, if you’re the type who won’t be satisfied with patches of the map still covered, you can chip away at the mountain of content on offer to your heart’s content.”
We’re still waiting for a firm release date, but I know writing that lot really got me back in the MMO spirit. I’m pretty keen to see more.
