Guild Wars 2

I’m posting this with the realization that I’ll probably get an infraction, or banned, or both/the thread will probably get deleted.

Since people are kind of blind when it comes to the industry and tend to focus only on their self-centered views/needs/desires, I suggest this video to everyone:

http://www.gamebreaker.tv/video-game...never-existed/

The entire series is very educational and informative, but if you want to jump straight to the point it’s around 21:40

This video is extremely insightful on how WoW has changed the industry. Both the good and the bad. A lot of people don’t actually realize that without WoW we probably would have never gotten GW2, or any other big “AAA MMO’s” that we’ve received over the years. May that be for better or for worse. We’ll never know.

People always fall back on the default argument that “every MMO since WoW has been a WoW clone or failed or both”. Which is true and false at the same time. The reality of the situation is that Blizzard showed investors how successful MMO’s can be. Without WoW (or whatever would have taken the place of WoW), MMO’s never really seemed that lucrative and developers were never given the necessary funds they required to introduce things like Story. Removal of “The Grind” for more meaningful content since grindy MMO’s were the easiest to make. But the same argument can be made that Blizzard hurts other developers because of the hold they have on the MMO market.

Without creating a Wall-O-Text that no one will read, I’ll simply leave it at this. Things will always get worse before they get better. GW2 may inevitably fail, as is the risk that all MMO’s take (even before Everquest and WoW were ever a thing). But if people are going to fall back on the argument that “GW2 is turning into a WoW clone because they introduced a gear grind”, then at least take the time to educate yourself on the industry and reconsider if it’s worth it to you to hurt a game you love because they decided to introduce a new gear set with some higher numbers on it.

I mean that seriously. Is this one change really worth forsaking a title that most of you have played non-stop since release? Because if and when GW2 turns into a “WoW-Clone”, it will be the people that said “Yes” that helped push it down that road.

We would have gotten WOW, it would just be a different name with a different-ish setting.

If wow never existed we would all be playing Everquest 2.

Without WoW, most of the mmos will go down the Lineage 1 and RO path.

-Items won’t be soul bound and equipments will all be resellable.

-“End game” won’t be grinding a dungeons for gears just so you are replaced with the new ones when a new patch hits.

Instead, it would be focus on collecting different items that has almost no stat difference and enchant them via scrolls and such.

- There would be no gear tiers.

- Contents would actually be difficult and hard to access which would keep you try to explore them for months and still won’t complete them.

- There will be NO instances

- There will be NO queues to get into instances which made people to just sit and town and wait for the queue to pop.

- People would actually be hunting in the open world for crafting mats because mat tiers aren’t divided by zones. Hell, there won’t even by mat tiers because there are no gear tiers.

Hell… if you actually look at the early RO and Lineage, you would find that a lot of their elements are what we are actually asking… or begging for in gw2 before it came out.

Without WoW, game producers will not be chasing that 10 millions of sub… Instead they would be content with 1 mil of active subs and stick to their game plan instead of copying wow because the demographic chart told them WoW is the thing.

Without WoW, mmos will not be as popular as right now, but the genre will be a better genre compare to today.

Fey.2601:

GW2 may inevitably fail, as is the risk that all MMO’s take (even before Everquest and WoW were ever a thing). But if people are going to fall back on the argument that “GW2 is turning into a WoW clone because they introduced a gear grind”, then at least take the time to educate yourself on the industry and reconsider if it’s worth it to you to hurt a game you love because they decided to introduce a new gear set with some higher numbers on it.

I mean that seriously. Is this one change really worth forsaking a title that most of you have played non-stop since release? Because if and when GW2 turns into a “WoW-Clone”, it will be the people that said “Yes” that helped push it down that road.

You know, I was ready to agree with you until this bomb dropped. Are you seriously insinuating that it’ our fault that the game doesn’t currently offer what we look for in a game because of design changes? Do you really expect people to change their preferences as easily as the game shifts it’s focus?

Many of us came here because we loved what they did in GW1 with equipment and stuck around because from the looks of it, it was going to be the same way this time around. Now we have a new tier of equipment to work towards that doubles as a gated content key, another thing thankfully absent from GW1. We have no reason to believe this wont happen again and if that is how things are going to be from now on, many have no reason to stick around. Don’t act like it’s our fault. I didn’t beg for more gear nor did I game the system to get a Legendary in 3 weeks and then complain that my hollow life had no direction because I caught the carrot. Yet, they changed things to appeal to the small amount that did and took steps that made them emulate the rest of the MMO community when they claimed to be different.

If the game goes under, it will be because of poor design choices and communication. Not because those of us put off by changes didn’t just suck it up and keep drudging on like nothing has changed.

LOL, WOW copied EQ, and plenty of other older MMO’s.

The only thing WOW DID do, was make MMO’s carebear easily accessible, and dumbed down to the masses. And I hate them for that. But what do ya do? We live in the age of entitlement and “I want everyone to have the same things I have with no work because I don’t have time to invest in a game” guys.

MMO’s by original design were timesinks that took months, if not years for the community to figure out how everything worked. Nowadays, MMO’s are uber easy, and ppl burn through the content so fast just so the minority doesn’t feel left behind.

I miss perma death, stealing ppl’s crap out of their bags in towns and ganking. Back when playing an MMO was a brutal experience and everywhere you went you had to watch your back. It was thrilling and there was nothing like it. A simple trip to town could end you, if you where there at the wrong time. It was exhilarating.

Nowadays, it’s all about, pvp here and only here in this area, no where else. Give everyone uber gear with little to grind (and they still cry about grind, when they don’t know what grind is).

We would of seen more creativity. We wouldn’t have people screaming for mounts everytime a new mmo hits the market. I could go on and on, but shall leave it there, and as someone already mentioned, someone somewhere would of created the WoW.

DegoLocc.5976:

LOL, WOW copied EQ, and plenty of other older MMO’s.

The only thing WOW DID do, was make MMO’s carebear easily accessible, and dumbed down to the masses. And I hate them for that. But what do ya do? We live in the age of entitlement and “I want everyone to have the same things I have with no work because I don’t have time to invest in a game” guys.

MMO’s by original design were timesinks that took months, if not years for the community to figure out how everything worked. Nowadays, MMO’s are uber easy, and ppl burn through the content so fast just so the minority doesn’t feel left behind.

I miss perma death, stealing ppl’s crap out of their bags in towns and ganking. Back when playing an MMO was a brutal experience and everywhere you went you had to watch your back. It was thrilling and there was nothing like it. A simple trip to town could end you, if you where there at the wrong time. It was exhilarating.

Nowadays, it’s all about, pvp here and only here in this area, no where else. Give everyone uber gear with little to grind (and they still cry about grind, when they don’t know what grind is).

lol you’ll always have EvE. I actually wonder if people are still suicide ganking afk Hulks.

If wow never happened we would have worstgrinding games from korea….

To tell one lineage 2….

When i saw NCsoft near to guild wars 2 i started to doubt if buying it or not, but due to reputation of gw1 and manifesto i bought the game…

Now i will remember what ncsoft means……

Wow took the bad things from korean mmorpgs and changed FEW for the better…..at least.

If WoW had never existed, GW2 would probably be far more of an actual sequel to GW1 than it is.

If only.

Cod Eye.1632:

We would of seen more creativity. We wouldn’t have people screaming for mounts everytime a new mmo hits the market. I could go on and on, but shall leave it there, and as someone already mentioned, someone somewhere would of created the WoW.

People would still want a faster way to travel around, it just wouldn’t be treated with such disdain because they are associated with WoW. I prefer super-hero travel speed, but obviously thats rather context sensitive.

Funny thing is, didn’t EQ1 and DAOC both release expansions that had mounts before WoW was even out?

LordByron.8369:

If wow never happened we would have worstgrinding games from korea….

To tell one lineage 2….

When i saw NCsoft near to guild wars 2 i started to doubt if buying it or not, but due to reputation of gw1 and manifesto i bought the game…

Now i will remember what ncsoft means……

Wow took the bad things from korean mmorpgs and changed FEW for the better…..at least.

I bough this game a cause of Lineage 2 reputation long time ago from NCSoft (before they gave up in battle vs bots/cheating).

in my point of view wow took away the best things from mmorpgs and added worse stuff ever, instances, queues, bound stuff(which actually was put in place by another game first), and so many more.

the only complain i had in L2 its you needed to kill mobs to lvl up no matter what, quests didnt reward you in xp but in items/crafting/classes, etc but the world open pvp, castle sieges, epic open bosses, and even the pve beautiful content was so kitten good that was enough to keep you playing, and still had a wonderful art game for that time, big world with so many places to go around, politics, i could type an essay about it, but wow lovers will hate it.

this is why i find funny when all this complaints about ascencion gear…i find it so easy to do, all i need to do is invest time…nothing else, just a little of time, and not much just like 40 mins runs like used to be for a whole ac clean up paths or even less, all i was doing before this patch was just log in one hour a day and do my daily in wvw, already had top gear in the game, 100%, like 3 classes lvl 80, etc, and i didnt even go hardcore mode…not have enough time but i know how to work my time and what to do and set goals like in any other mmo to just have fun while reaching the top, i enjoyed so much winning valakas and aden that made me good in this games, the day you complainers realize isnt about grind…is about manage your online time and do the stuff efficiently, you ll notice this game is sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ez.

speaking about the OP you have to remember wow went to the top very fast not because was being sold as a fantastic game, it was because their playerbase from sc: brood war, wc3: frozen throne, d2 lod, did a transition to that game along with other mmo seekers so it was a huge plus they should atleast upgrade their engine and art for make the game more fluid and so on…so it wasnt about wow, it was about the company which had a really huge playerbase which were willing to try anything new from them, then mouth to mouth worked like wonders.

There is no point in dwelling on questions “What if”. It does exist, deal with it.

In my opinion World of Warcraft is one of the worst things that has ever happened to MMOs or to computer gaming in general. Blizzard somehow managed to get extremely lucky and hit paydirt, and every developer on earth noticed and only saw dollar signs. Blizzard put greed into MMO development and pretty much stifled any creativity or thinking outside the box that might have happened over the last several years. I’d rather be playing a game in a moderately successful niche genre that I really enjoy, than playing a game in a massively successful money machine that I can barely get into.

Sabo.1485:

In my opinion World of Warcraft is one of the worst things that has ever happened to MMOs or to computer gaming in general. Blizzard somehow managed to get extremely lucky and hit paydirt, and every developer on earth noticed and only saw dollar signs. Blizzard put greed into MMO development and pretty much stifled any creativity or thinking outside the box that might have happened over the last several years. I’d rather be playing a game in a moderately successful niche genre that I really enjoy, than playing a game in a massively successful money machine that I can barely get into.

This basically.

WoW showed investors how much money there was in the MMO industry and those investors have been interfering with development ever since. I think we can all name a whole slew of MMO that were promising in early development then gradually either changed to be more like WoW or were forced out the door too early due to investor schedules.

The boom of the MMO industry has done nothing but hold it back.

NVM FFXIV be out next year, they know how to treat players and create epic moments.

WoW was a good thing for the industry early on, it innovated and set new standards in 2004-2006.

Now however WoW acts as a dampening effect on innovation and sets lower standards due to people being “stuck” in its ego-massaging rat race gear treadmill.

I have nothing but pity for people who are still stuck playing WoW. They are like people still using video cassettes in the age of DVDs… or DVDs in the age of streamed content.

They are just behind the curve, desperately sticking to what they know.

Hrmm, if WoW didn’t exist I’d probably still be playing UO…

That’s assuming they hadn’t still felt the need to try and compete with other games by going with that gawd awful disjointed 3D and neon colours(those two things really ruined the whole feel of the game for me to the point that I just didn’t enjoy being in the world anymore).

I figured instead of staying with a game that I had loved for it’s sandbox simplicity that was really only limited by the players’ imagination and an almost believeable fantasy environment that had been visually ruined for me anyway, I may as well give the game it had been trying to emulate a try, cartoon characters and all it was getting rave reviews.

Too bad for UO the ease of gameplay I found with it’s intuitive controls spoiled me and when I did finally try to go back for a visit, I honestly missed my old virtual home so much, I couldn’t even make my way through to the first gate without feeling the strain in my forearm and even WoW with it’s “toons” was easier on the eyes than all those neon tiles spread throughout the world.

I have to admit that this game is just a filler for me until ArcheAge gets here, hopefully it too won’t be a big disappointment. That’s not to say that I’m not still having fun here, just that as the game development heads more and more into endgame tiered content instead keeping the lower levels fresh for both new arrivals and those who don’t like the typical endgame content(pvp/raids/dungeons, dungeons, dungeons) I’m starting to look elsewhere for my future entertainment dollars.

Hey, be optimistic! Hopefullly it doesnt, but if gw2 does fail, gw3 wont!

Sort of an irony is that Anet would of never existed if WoW didn’t. Anet started out as a culmination of blizzard and blizzard north, possibly from seeing WoW in the making and abandoning ship. I’ll never know, however I noticed from a web graph it(Anet)started about the time WoW was near the end of development. Is there a correlation there? I guess only the people who have been with Anet from the start could tell the tale.

Either way though, if WoW never happened. The MMO world would be a better place. It’s honestly nothing special, it was a right place right time and already had large fanbase from the RTS series.

Garo.5304:

Sort of an irony is that Anet would of never existed if WoW didn’t. Anet started out as a culmination of blizzard and blizzard north, possibly from seeing WoW in the making and abandoning ship. I’ll never know, however I noticed from a web graph it(Anet)started about the time WoW was near the end of development. Is there a correlation there? I guess only the people who have been with Anet from the start could tell the tale.

Either way though, if WoW never happened. The MMO world would be a better place. It’s honestly nothing special, it was a right place right time and already had large fanbase from the RTS series.

I actually think the original ANet team evolved from the Diablo team at Blizzard, not the WoW team. The original GW1 plays a lot more like Diablo than a normal MMO as well.

Another game would have existed. The one thing that made a big scale MMO possible at the time was broadband internet becoming more common. It is the only reason WoW could exist at that particular moment, just like how Xbox live started at the right time even though it wasn’t the first online service on consoles.

An interesting thought. What they did with WoW was look at all the current MMOs at that time and take all or most of the features everyone liked and designed a game around that. And to the poster about mounts, I’m almost certain at least one MMO prior to WoW’s existence had mounts. I agree with another poster as well that if it wasn’t WoW it would have been done by someone else and called something else with a different lore as the basis. Because at that time the MMO industry needed a shake up to make it what it is today. For an industry to grow and thrive it has to improve and please it’s audience. This is why today many MMOs fail. They don’t try to improve on the previously popular and only clone them. The result is players who give them the been there done that already unless there is something particular about the game that makes it stand out from the rest.

Lord of the Rings online, when it first released what stood out for it was a really well written epic story and side plots in many of the side quest chains. It was the only MMO I had played out of more than a dozen others that from the first moment of logging in you were a part of an epic story that drew you in. It was clear at that time that they cared more about telling an epic story than about how many people played and for how long. They took their time to make a well designed game around the story driven focus. This much they shared with arenanet’s philosophy. Unfortunately that changed at some point during their content design. Where they fell to the pitfalls of past MMOs where making the user base grind to keep them playing became the focus of game design rather than having a well written story the drive to keep people playing. And that is the main reason why recently I have lost interest in playing the game. I however did prepurchase the rohan expansion but have yet to play it. I will at some point and it probably will be the deciding factor of if I’ll spend much time beyond completing the story. Middle Earth being my all time favorite it would be hard to say I would not stick around until they have completed giving us all of Middle Earth but that’s not to say that the game isn’t still very popular.

But then any game that manages to break away from the same old same old of those games that came before it and stand out from them will be a huge success and rank up there in the top for quite awhile as long as they maintain the thing that made them stand out from the rest. Arenanet did this with GW1 even though there were some shortcomings that were never able to be overcame. In fact successfully showing to the masses that an MMO can be done without a monthly fee has trended to more MMOs offering their games in that way. It’s one of the reasons I recommend a couple other MMOs to people.

Also arenanet with GW2 has shook things up with successful design of features that do away with some of the other shortcomings of MMOs. Once such feature is the everyone contributing to a kill etc without the need of forming a group to do so get full credit (XP loot etc). As this is a feature that Lord of the Rings Online has adopted into their game. And I give them kudos for doing so as it will bring something back to their game that more or less lacked from the start, that is the community working together on instead of competing for content. Now if they were to take resource nodes harvesting and adopted that into their game it would be another great improvement.

But anyways sorry for the long post to provide my point about industry changing games examples. Hopefully most readers will have stuck with it and read my whole post.

I know there are some folks that like ‘the old days’ (which is why a game like Vanguard spawned), but I remember playing EQ and UO, and while back then everything was new and exciting, there were mechanics in them that made me scratch my head and wonder why. Why was I being punished to ‘play’? Corpse runs, experience loss on death, de-leveling (remember how hard it was to get a level and then how you felt when you de-leveled when you died). UO was amazing because it was a sandbox. I couldn’t stand how everyone was forced to hang out with griefers all the time. That experience is pretty much what soured me to PvP over the years, and it’s only been recently where I’ve been willing to try it again, in a much more impersonal way, which is what WvW is like. It’s just plain fun.

I could go on and on, but WoW solved many of those problems all at once. Questing was there. Not so much in UO. Very ‘limited’ in EQ. We started to see it in DAoC, and what I remember feeling then was how fun it was to get some quests every level or two, and how that maybe got me half a level, but then I’d have to go find a ‘spot’ somewhere like I was playing EQ and grind. That wasn’t very fun. WoW solved that by going quest heavy. No corpse runs, no experience loss on dying, death penalties were negligible. It was ‘fun’ (imagine that).

Then most games followed that formula, adding one or two neat ‘ideas’ along the way, but nothing really ‘evolutionary’.

To me, and maybe many would argue against this, GW2 made some really big ‘evolutionary’ (not ‘revolutionary’) changes much the way WoW did back in it’s day. They have also done some questionable things recently, but that was another thread.

Hearts are awesome because the take the idea of questing (which is still a great way to mask the monster grind) and make them more organic. Rather than having 10 specific quests to do in an area before you move on, and you have to clear your list out before you go to the next area, it’s just “do any combination of these things to help me out” and then you move on. It’s nice because it lets you pick what you want to do, for the most part, there are some hearts that were a pain. I’m playing with some friends now that mostly just like to kill things (I prefer feeding cows and watering plants myself, mostly because there’s plenty of time for killing, and one day the hearts will be gone and you haven’t fed a single cow, and you’ll regret it!), and some of those hearts don’t have much killing.

The ‘big group’. I know there is an armada of people who never really got behind this, and think you must join a party so you can talk in /p to have a social experience, but really at the end of the day, a party was always a bit of a ball and chain, for everyone. We all like to meander and do things at our own pace. I like to work on hearts of DEs but I’ll get distracted by things. Maybe I realized that monsters are dropping a ‘lot’ of blood and I need blood to craft, so I’ll just start doing that for awhile. Parties like to join up and methodically do things as fast as they can so they can race towards the end game. Blech.

In this game, we’re all in one big group. That, since WoW, has been one of my biggest pet peeves, just as death penalties and open world PvP and generally punishing players were before WoW. We all just show up, and kill things. There’s no monster tapping. What did that lead to? People helping each other more, or better yet, just being more social by loitering near and around someone else, which often times leads to conversations, and “hey let’s go try that DE now that there seem to be 5 of us loitering around together?” And we’re not in a party. :p

We all get our own loot. Amen. Now, I said there was no monster tapping, but there is a little imbalance if you don’t get a chance to tap something, where people with lots of fast area attacks will get more loot, and I think the simple solution would be to do some cost averaging at the very least for those people. If there are 5 mobs, and you only got a chance to hit one because Captain Rain O’Fire (he’s Irish) melted all 5, then maybe since you are ‘near’ what is going on, you ought to get rolls on 3? Or heck, all 5!

Much to the chagrin of people who get their jollies (when was the last time you saw the phrase ‘get your jollies’, hunh? That ‘alone’ should be reward for reading my drivel) by finding ‘any’ mechanic in a game they can use to grief someone else, we all have our own nodes! There’s no node stealing!

I could go on, but there are lots of great mechanics here that once you put them all together at once (yes, some of them existed before in small doses, Warhammer comes to mind), it makes for an ‘evolutionary’ experience much like WoW was in the day.

(to be continued)

(my first 5000+ post. surprised it took this long)

The ascended discussion aside, and how some of these ‘sand box’ MMOs might turn back that are all on the door step and what they might mean, I think for a theme-park style MMO that has some ‘parkishness’ to it, if theme parks are to continue and survive, I would hope they would start to mirror a lot of what GW2 has done mechanically moving forward.

But as with all opinions…

Never liked wow,played it for about week and stopped,i just didn’t like a single thing about it,especially not the art style and graphics being used.I cannot understand why this game is so popular,besides being hyped to death and people being thrown dead with wow commercials.it’s the only mmo ive ever seen a commercial from on tv btw,hype hype hype and the sheep will buy.

If WoW never existed, the structure of mmo + rpg will still continue.

WoW is not the founder of rpgs. There’re so many mmorpgs that existed before WoW and has the elements of rpgs. Doesn’t mean the game is big which makes the game the founder of those elements. E.g. Final Fantasy existed way before WoW and it has gear-grind and progressive levels and gears. WoW simply adapt the rpg elements.

So any mmo that takes in the rpg elements = wow clone?

GW2 is simply just an mmo that mixed with action/jumping-base genres in multi-player setting. In other words : “mmo + action games” instead of “mmo + rpg”.

If there’s a new mmo that makes action/jumping-base games like ninja gaiden/street fighter in multi-player setting, does it makes that mmo into GW2 clone?

Hi,

Since this topic was not exactly related to Guild Wars 2, it will now be locked.

Thanks for your contribution and understanding