Giant Robot?
I’ve been reading Kill Ten Rats for quite some time. Long before I ever started blogging about MMOs. Guild Wars was my first step into the genre and KTR was one of the few places that actually blogged occasionally about the game.
Ravious posted about Guild Wars 2 over at Kill Ten Rats yesterday. He actually went ahead and did that whole, emailing the Studio about the subject you want to talk about so that they know you exist and might actually respond to your thoughts, thing. Crazy.
He talks a bit about the change in function, the loss of quests and specific purpose, and then goes on to post a lengthy description from Eric “Surprise” Flannum of how an actual tester played through the game for a bit. It’s a pretty interesting insight into the mind of a player in GW2. People going right by obvious events because they’re too used to looking for quest markers. Avoiding clues to events and heading straight toward more obvious signs. Actually finishing a quest but not pressing further into the events that follow. There’s the first mention of titles here too, actually.
It’s a fairly good read and I like Ravious’ take on it. The comments that follow are a bit too doom scenario for me. People worried that somehow the wiki will funnel people to the path of least resistance, therefore the game is ruined! It just seems silly, every game out in the past couple years has a wiki, and of course people will speed through it, on their second or third go around. It doesn’t worry me at all.
Syncaine seems to think Arenanet doesn’t get how the mainstream MMO player plays through things, but coming from someone who is completely at odds with most mainstream MMOs I’m not sure that argument has much weight. He’s an advocate of Sandbox games (rightfully so) yet for some reason, at least when it comes to GW2, he’s completely against removing the hurdles and treadmills of amusement park MMOs.
Julian, another author at KTR, agrees with Syn. He’s convinced people will avoid Events and do the least work possible. Part of me agrees on some level, but I’m really not worried about it. How is this any different from people power leveling alts, or otherwise gaming the system in any game?
I don’t think it will be quite that easy anyway. Lets say the optimal route is to do a poisoned resevoir Event. Guess what? Somebody did that a half hour ago and now the bandit cave Event is going on. You know what else? The bandit cave event wasn’t active last time. I guess that means you’re doing new content.
I could go on to mention that a lot of people criticizing the Event System aren’t even reading the material about the Event System, but I guess I shouldn’t expect everyone to be super informed about a game that’s at least 8 months away.
Personally I think Arenanet knows exactly what the mainstream, wiki reading, min/maxing, optimal path players are doing and this is their attempt to change that.
