All that happened is Guildwars 2 found an identity, and tried to run with it. The vanilla game didn’t know what it wanted to be, so it spitballed everything. Some was good, some was bad…. but not nearly enough of it work in concert.
In the time since then, particularly leading up to HOT, the game was forced to pick a path, and used that choice to make itself more coherent. So while it gave up some of its potential in one area, it became cohesive in several others.
There is a running joke in the industry about how the MMO market base wants “something like WoW, but different”. Guildwars 2 tried to be the Anti-WoW, thinking that if they avoid being compared to WoW, that it wouldn’t have to compete with it. What they weren’t expecting was getting the attention of half the WoW population, much less a sizable chunk of them playing the game just to check it out. Even to this day, WoW players who get burnt out on it will ask about this game to see if they want to try it.
And to its credit, Guildwars 2 manages to avoid the more egregious traps WoW clones tend to fall into when trying to replicate concepts popularized by WoW in its hayday. Most people forget that, despite the game play it enabled, the design of Guild wars 1 is a cosmic horror when it comes maintaining it. The fact GW1 didn’t implode under the weight of its skill list, is a testament to how good a job they did for coming up with very distinct, coherent skills and effects. But there is no denying that the movement was awkward most of the time, the kind of things they could mechanically was actually very limited, and that the popularity of the game rested very heavily on the locations, presentation of the story, and very heavily integrated exploration aspect in the game play. Even to this day, the most recalled aspect of the game was wandering around, enjoying the scenery, and treking to remote locations to find rare or unique things. I myself would replay the whole Prophecies story line at least 3 times a year just to relive the story. There are very few single player games I would play more then once…… so that says a lot about where the strength of the Guildwars franchise seems to be found. Which is odd when you consider, overall, the story summery being very mediocre, standard fantasy fare.
Simply put…. Guildwar’s greatest strength is its sense of presentation. If you look at the past complaints of this game, much of the loss of depth in the buildcraft was a secondary concern to how little mileage we get from the game’s story, locations, and sense of purpose. Even today, there are still prominent arguments about figuring out what to do with your time; where as in GW1, that was only problem if you were the type that never thought to look past the quest markers.
