Guild Wars 2

Horizontal progression can also mean gaining increased customization, not only in character appearance and such but in gameplay terms (e.g. more abilities to choose from that aren’t necessarily more powerful) which may in practice make you more powerful because you can tailor your character to suit your preferred play style, but doesn’t rely on stat increases and result in a max-level character being able to take on literally any number of low-level characters as is the case in games like WoW. (Guild Wars of course also artificially levels you up when necessary, but you could in theory design a game with progression where even that wasn’t required.)

This can even include passive stuff like some of WoW’s talents: For example, let’s say your character is an archer. When you start off, you have a perfectly equal balance of range, damage, crit chance, attack speed, etc. As you level up you can start to specialize into one or several of these areas to have, for example, long range and good burst damage but poorer sustained damage, or shorter range and good sustained damage but poor burst. You could be the kind of archer that takes careful aim with every shot and makes it count, or that fires off arrows as fast as they can knock and draw them. And this isn’t even taking into account other abilities that you might have that would also play into such a system, like mobility, stealth, toughness, etc. etc.

I keep waiting for a game that really uses this model, where a Level 1 character is not ostensibly any weaker than a Level X, but just has fewer options, is less specialized (maybe, based on player choice), and looks less fancy (maybe, again based on player choice). Guild Wars isn’t quite it, but it’s about the closest thing around right now.

Another advantage of such a system of “true”, “pure” horizontal progression would be that anyone could go anywhere in the world and PvE at any time.

Is it possible, maybe, that the insane difficulty of getting this stuff is meant to actually deter most players from even trying to do so?

In other words, is ArenaNet saying: “Hey, those few of you who like to/can grind for 10 hours a day, here’s this one thing for you. There will be 20 of you per server and you can all form a guild and run Fractals all day or whatever, whilst everyone else (95+% of players) continues to play the game based on our original design philosophy”?

The slippery slope argument is really tempting to accept but it often is a bad argument. ArenaNet might just do this and then go back to designing the game the way they’ve been advertising it, to throw a bone to grinding masochists and show off some gear that, even though almost no one will realistically have it, will be there to assure anyone who cares that there is (theoretically) a traditional MMO endgame of sorts in GW2, if they want it, which they probably won’t when they see what it really is.

I like the idea of the personal story and wouldn’t say that it would have been a better game without it … but then again I’m only level 21. So far I’ve found it pretty amusing in parts, fun and interesting in that it allows you to do things that otherwise wouldn’t be possible in an MMO (unless you just wandered into random instances and these things happened in an undetermined order, but that would have to be worse). I’m playing a human commoner who regretted not joining the circus as a child, and the parts of the carnival story (especially Clown College) were genuinely funny. I have already noticed that my childhood friend is kind of left behind, but then again she does appear in scenes, even if she doesn’t do anything much. (Well, I saved myself from dying by throwing rocks at her to rally when she was hypnotized, which was pretty hilarious.)

So at least on the early levels I give it a B+. The only thing that’s bothered me so far is that Logan Thackeray is super boring and two-dimensional, but maybe he’ll become corrupted or something. Oh, and the fact that monarchy is represented as being a super awesome form of government, and parliamentarianism as evil. Can’t there be some reasonable folk who don’t like having a queen?

Awful idea? That’s the first thing I thought when I saw Quaggans, and heard them talk. They’re such an original race when AN could have just made “fish people”, and they’re adorable, and hilarious, yet with potential to be more than just cute sidekicks and background characters. Let’s just say they’re infinitely more interesting than a certain race of panda-people based on lame Chinese stereotypes in a certain game which certainly won’t be mentioned here.

They could also probably use modified Charr armor models because their postures and proportions might be close enough, which gets around one major problem with adding strange-looking (no offense Quaggans!) species as playables to MMOs in general.

The tech in this game is Victorian steampunk level at best (plain Medieval at worst), so I think anyone imagining our guns are “sniper rifles” is stretching it. The best they’re likely to be for range and accuracy is a rifled musket (like an American Civil War rifle), but since they fire rapidly I guess you have to imagine that they’re lever-action or have some other mystery action that you can’t easily see from looking at them. Anyway, point is, they’re probably loaded with black powder (some skills reference it) and then whatever kind of shot you want. You could load them with pellets, which explains how you can use the Blunderbuss skill when your gun looks like a musket rather than an actual blunderbuss (though some do), or even exploding shells, which can explain some other skills. I mean a lot of it’s pure fantasy and doesn’t make any sense, but TL;DR they’re 18th-19th-Century muskets, rifled muskets, and blunderbusses that somehow miraculously fire really fast and don’t need to be muzzle-loaded.