Five Years of Integrity and Fair Play

Guild Wars turns five this week. Actually I think it was April 22nd, but close enough. The game for me was an incredible experience, a giant world to explore and share with my friends, or strike out alone on my own to overcome any obstacle and make a name for myself.

The victories in the game were sweet. Conquering the core story missions, perfecting missions, clearing elite zones, vanquishing zones, and gaining titles. A successful dungeon delve, made possible with Eye of the North, was the best kind of experience, bringing an almost table-top RPG feel to video games.

There were frustrating times, too, not due to the framework of the game, but within the game, failures to prepare and react. The failures were fair, and never took away from the game, and in fact allowed you to keep playing even though you'd failed. This type of measured penalty, when other games, especially MMOs, imposed crushing penalties in the event of player failure and death, really opened up the game to me, allowing me and my colleagues to venture farther and wider without fear.

So it's with great hope that I read words from the Guild Wars II developers and smile, because it seems that they're at it again. Five years ago they broke away from all the things that made MMOs no fun to me, and they continue to rethink what it means to play in a persistent world.

I loved Guild Wars combat for the skills system. At the time, I was huge into Magic: The Gathering, and I saw the parallels from a very high level. In Guild Wars, you got to go out and collect the "cards" and build your "deck", where the cards were skills (usually elite ones) and your deck was your character's skill-set itself. It was hugely compelling to me, and to a lot of people, where you get to set things up the way you want while coming up with clever interactions. Guild Wars II takes that a step further by increasing the physics of the situation, by allowing objects and effects to interact the way you think they would, with conjured clouds and whatever. Add into that the increased amount of customization that come with a total of five races and so many classes, and you have a great mix to play the way you want.

One of the things that really hooked me in Guild Wars was that it merged online play with a single-player story experience. Especially in the first game, the sweeping, epic story of the fall of Ascalon and the flight westward really captured me. With Guild Wars 2, there will be even deeper story immersion, and it will come out with the choices that you make in the game itself. In Mass Effect 2 style, the story will wrap itself around your character, rather than the other way around. This, maybe more than anything else new, is what gets me the most excited.

A new way to play the game with other human players also promises to change the entire landscape within Guild Wars 2. The developers have talked a lot about wide open expanses and encounters involving dozens or hundreds of people. They system that they intend to set up will allow players to group organically rather than pair off into a bunch of five-man groups. When a huge monster sweeps down on a trade route, nobody travelling through is going to shout "Healer LFG" or "Group LF tank 7/8". Everyone's just gonna grab their weapons and start beating the crap out of the baddie. Healers will heal, tanks will tank, wizards will nuke. Under the GWII system, everyone who participated in the fight will get rewards. No kill-stealing, no loot-ganking. Doesn't that sound like a ton of fun?

In short, Guild Wars II promises to be an evolution, not a remake, of the first game. But it continues the core belief of fun and fair play, building a system where players can help each other rather than be huge jerks. There's no subscription fee. There's no competition for areas and monsters. Loot and character levels take a sideline to skill and planning. Sounds like fun to me.