6/20/2023 0 Comments Guild wars utopia![]() ![]() Next to the libertarian work ethic espoused by most of these games, Guild Wars 2 is practically a socialist utopia. One small change one giant, wonderful result. Isn't this what massively multiplayer gaming is supposed to be like? In their place are happy, noisy scrums of players, digital flash mobs coalescing and dispersing around dynamic events: an army of adventurers fighting together for the common good. And the result is that in Guild Wars 2's world of Tyria, those wary queues of self-interested souls don't exist. You're rewarded for helping others, because many hands make light work. ![]() Is that fair? Did you earn it? Who cares? It's more fun - and just as importantly, it's more social. It doesn't matter if you just hit auto-attack and took a sip of tea while someone you've never met did all the hard work. It doesn't matter if the monster was killed by two players or 20. It doesn't make any difference if you're in a group or not. Experience, loot, quest progression, the works. Here's how Guild Wars 2 handles tagging: you so much as land a single blow on a monster, you get full credit for killing it. They're encouraged either to keep their distance or indulge in quick-draw contests to "steal kills" as they queue for spawns. The end result of this policy is that adventurers meeting each other by chance on the monster-infested fields of some hostile landscape regard each other with suspicion and frustration. Guild Wars 2 is a visual tour de force, right down to the superb animation blending you've never played an MMO where your character felt so rooted in the world before. Things are done this way because someone once decided that it was fair. If you help to kill a monster that's already been tagged, you get nothing. If you're playing in a party, these things are rationed between you. Its experience points and loot belong to you alone, as does any quest progression associated with killing it. In most of these games, it's traditional that once you attack an enemy in the open world, it's tagged as "yours". Let's start with one apparently small change to the MMO rulebook. To understand what ArenaNet has achieved and how, it's more helpful to look at the details than the big picture. At long last, it's the changing of the guard. In fact, Guild Wars 2 is by far the most important - and plain enjoyable - massively multiplayer game since 2004's World of Warcraft. But don't let its familiarity blind you to the fact that this engine has been re-engineered from first principles, and purrs sweeter than any has before. From its high-fantasy head to its role-playing toes, it's an unashamed genre piece, an MMO through and through, a giant engine designed to grind out experience points and loot beneath the tattoo of a hundred thousand hotkeys. It's true that you can hardly call Guild Wars 2 an iconoclast. But deflated expectations can be just as deceptive as the hype that led to them. After claims that Guild Wars 2 would shake up the stagnant genre of massively multiplayer online games, many were surprised, and a little disappointed, to find that it looked and played just like an MMO. Funny thing about expectations: they can blind you both ways. ![]()
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