Guild Wars 2 Preview
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ArenaNet's founder, Mike O'Brien, knows that devoting their overworld entirely to these events, rather than quests, is a risk. But, he says, it's a risk worth taking. (Starting this project, we spent some time thinking back to the dawn of MMO gaming, back to what we were all hoping MMOs would be. What we all hoped, and what everyone hopes today, is that MMOs are really a world, and that the things you do in that world have an impact. If you come across a town and the people are running around screaming '˜the centaurs are attacking,' you want to see the centaurs attacking. You want to drive them back. You want to put out the fires. And then you want to help them rebuild the town. That's the starting vision for Guild Wars 2: let's make a world we all inhabit together.)
The payoff for this approach, Mike points out, is in making other games look stupid. (MMOs are supposed to be social games, yet too often everybody in an MMO is doing their own thing. There are the NPCs who you have to cure from being poisoned, but right after curing them, they lie back down to wait for someone else to bring them the antidote. There's the basics of kills: players not having the same motivation to cooperate, maybe stealing a kill and the associated loot and XP.)
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The final risk ArenaNet are taking is financial. There's no doubt that they could charge a monthly subscription for Guild Wars 2 this is as fully featured an MMO as World of Warcraft, Rift or The Old Republic. But they have chosen not to. Instead, ArenaNet are placing all their faith on players enjoying the game so much that they'll be willing to buy in-game items. And, I speculate, on them buying sidegrade expansion packs such as Guild Wars: Factions or Guild Wars: Prophecies released at a rapid pace.
(We sold around seven million copies of Guild Wars 1,) Mike says, (and have been really successful. You see a lot of people launch as a subscription MMO and discover that it's really hard to compete with WoW as a second subscription. We've seen it time and time again you get to the end of your 30-day trial period and '˜PSHOOOM'. your playerbase drops through the floor.)
