F2P MMOs ITT |OT|

[A Black Falcon]

It's not a instant warp, it's an auto-walk. You click the highlighted location on the quest display and your character automatically walks to the destination.

So there are no monsters in the overworld or something? I mean, GW has autorun, just press R and your character runs forward. You'll have to turn, but lining up with a quest marker isn't hard. The monsters along the way will be the main delay. :)

I use R a lot, it'd be pretty tedious if you had to hold W or up the whole time, and click-to-move is no fun.



Also, this was the part of that post that was the most important, and you don't even have a word to say about it? Really?

As you say, that isn't a problem with Guild Wars. That's a problem with the entire genre, and no other MMO I know of does things any differently from GW -- get quests in a town area, then go out and do them. That's how GW works, with modifications (the story-based missions, for example, aren't like anything in most MMOs, but they're one of the things I like best about GW), and it's how everything in the genre works.

I should say, though (because it's one of the many things I am very worried about, conceptually), the upcoming Guild Wars 2 tries to change that. See this: http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/dynamic-events/

We'll see how it works, but they're definitely trying something new again. Guild Wars 2 really is a new game, and not a sequel to Guild Wars in many basic ways. Bad for big GW fans like me, good for ... um, their potential WoW/other MMO playing prospective audience I guess? Yeah, I don't quite get it, but it's what they're doing.


Anyway, I agree -- one of the biggest problems with the MMO/online RPG genre as a whole is the lack of gameplay variety. All you do in MMOs is kill things, and yes, it definitely gets old after a while. Even in GW, I definitely get bored sometimes, and that is why I've played it off and on for years now -- like all online RPGs it has little variety.

I do wish that there was a way for online RPGs to have the kinds of puzzles and conversations of a single player RPG, but sadly it seems impossible. GW2 for instance is trying to make quest-getting and the world more dynamic, but I don't see any sign of puzzles or dialog trees... somehow they just don't happen in MMOs, just go back and kill more stuff. I can understand this to a degree -- writing a good story that would branch enough to keep MMO players occupied would be borderline impossible -- but still, why not have an online RPG with puzzles and stuff in the dungeons, beyond the extremely basic stuff you see in these games...

Some of the GW EotN special dungeons try to mix things up more, and implement some basic puzzles. They do somewhat succeed, and those are some of the most interesting areas in the game, but they really do require other humans (the EotN dungeons are hard!), so it can definitely take a while to find a good group, and you still mostly do just kill stuff. Still, for an online RPG, they definitely tried there, and it's a good start at least...

But yes, until the genre can come up with ways to have more of the gameplay variety single player D&D-style RPGs have, online RPGs will not be the conceptual equal of games like Torment, BGII, etc.