F2P MMOs ITT |OT|

[A Black Falcon]

Isn't what your talking about with Guild Wars almost exactly what D&DO does? It's got the town where everyone is and the combat zone where only you and your party is. Anyone town is getting ready to head out to one of the zones. I don't know if it has the party search, but it's not a wide-open MMO like World of Warcraft.

You really didn't play Guild Wars much at all, did you?

No. In Guild Wars, Missions have their own lobbies, or "towns" if you will. You do not have to gather a group for a mission from a city or outpost. You go to that mission's specific lobby area, and either ask for other people to join you or use Party Search to find a party. Party Search is accessible from the menu (or of course you can drag the icons onto the screen whereever you want), and it's something they added at some point to try to make finding groups easier. You can set it for the mission, if you're in a mission lobby area, or for questing, or just for exploration/hunting, and choose normal or hard mode (you have to beat a campaign to unlock hard in that campaign), and can fill in a little box for a short text description, ad, whatever. It somewhat automates the process of having to advertise for a group, and makes it a little easier.

Who'd need a universal party search thing, or whatever? Guild Wars has lobbies, you go to the area you want to do something in and use that as the hub.

In DDO, in comparison, you have to just find people in town. Most of the people there aren't there to do your mission. It's much less focused and is definitely a worse design.

Eye of the North, as I said, gets away from this and has a bunch of special dungeons that you'll need to gather groups for in outposts, and GW2 seems to go even farther with this, but the first three campaigns are very good at separating missions out, with their own lobbies.

Oh yeah, and despite the fact that it has zero required grind, GW is a huge game, with four separate areas (Prophecies, Factions, Nightfall, Eye of the North (which expands the Prophecies map)). There's a lot of stuff to do. I love just wandering around, exploring, and mapping out and clearing areas (because remember, until you go through a portal to another zone, enemies you kill in the area you'e in stay dead)... you can't do that in an MMO, the monsters respawn and there are other people wandering around fighting them too, and maybe trying to do a quest or something (quests are the ones in your questlog you do in overworld zones, apart from the missions, which of course are in their own areas and follow each campaign's story). One more reason I dislike the direction GW2 is taking, I like that GW can be played as a single player game if you want, outside of the cities/outposts (cities are the gold ringed ones, visible from the zoomed-out map; outposts are other towns that aren't missions or cities), and it's really good at it. From what I saw D&DO is different in that respect, it seemed to mostly just be cities and quests, not cities, missions, and free exploration zones with quests in them. Not as good.

Which one came first isn't an issue for me. I'm playing them right now and a lot of them play very similarly.

Yeah, I know, that Super Mario Bros. game has so few features compared to modern platformers, who cares that it came first, pretty much?

No, of course when something came out matters. GW is a World of Warcraft contemporary -- went into public beta before WoW, was released after it. And yet it has much better graphics, and better art design too. Of course its graphics aren't as good technically as new games, years have passed. For its time though it looks very good, and runs on a pretty moderate system too -- it ran fine on my old WinME machine, and I can't say that about many PC games released in 2005. By then most either required XP or a GeForce 3 or better. And it still looks pretty good, it's aged fairly well. Of course it's not as amazing looking as it was when I first played it in May 2004, but it definitely still looks good.

Oh yeah, and I should mention the camera. I love Guild Wars' camera, you have real, free control over it -- you have much better camera control than games like WoW. Hold down the right mouse button and you can move the camera all over, or use the scrollwheel to zoom. It's very well designed, and works great. I haven't seen many other MMOs with camera controls anywhere near as good. I mean, how many MMOs have cameras that let you clip through things, and look at the insides of polygon models and stuff? :)