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Is it fun? The hubris of bucking convention.
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By gear grind i guess you mean going thru the game obtaining new pieces of armor right? or ignoring quests and go straight forward for armors? because the second option isnt possible, the first one its obvious in all mmo's, hell, you need equipment.
To me, "grind" in a game means:
An unpleasantly boring/repetetitive task required to achieve a specific goal, often over a long period of time.
It comes from the terms "daily grind" or "nose to the grindstone" describing real life working conditions in post-industrial revolution times.
I don't see how it's hubris at all to build a game with the idea that it should be fun rather than unpleasant. In fact, it strikes me as quite odd that the idea of "grinding" in games has become such a widely accepted standard.
There is definitely progression in GW2. Level/skill/trait/gear all progress over time, just by playing, without the need of repetitive grinding. Once all that is "done" there is cosmetic progression; working on sets of rare armor is possible, but optional instead of required. Even after all that, they will be constantly adding new dynamic events throughout the world, so exploring should offer some degree of replayability.
It's nice that I can put it down any time and come back at any point without having to pay for time I don't play, but I don't really see myself getting bored any time soon (unlike most games I've played in beta where I already know I'll be quitting a couple months after release).
I absolutely agree with the first part of this post, honestly I couldnt have put it better myself.
I also understand what the OP means when he talks about grind and he should have defined grind to begin with, I dont think he means grind in the sense of the classic korean grinder, but in the sense that truly and when you look at all activities objectively your always on a mouse wheel in any MMO there is no real shift in paradigm, the game doesnt really become different, its essentially broken down into X amount of tasks and different combinations form the in game activities you can do. The replayability of this depends on how ell these activities come together and how well they can disguise the fact that they are essentially the same at its core.
I cant stop feeling after nearly 14 years playing MMO's that I sort had a peak behind the curtain and that very little surprises me nowadays, there is a difference in execution but I can easily see past the those and see that the core mechanic are multiple tasks essentially on repeat with different text, dialogue, stories.
Might be why I long games like DayZ and Skyrim that in their simplicity offer unexpected content and interactions after many hours of play, I still long for this in an MMO however to share the experience with others and have that immersive long term experience.
I think we are still a long way away from an MMO that can shift its paradigm over time, that changes will create different opportunities and different mouse wheels that will surprise me. This doesnt mean I cant appreciate current MMOs and GW2 while a bit away from my classical MMO definition is a good game and I will surely play it.
Gear grinding is dead, quest hubs are dead, the players have spoken.
I can only see this being the beginning of even more freedom, like a morph between TSW and GW2, for the next generation of MMOs. Who knows!
If you look at a dynamic event and judge it by 'do you kill things or not', then yes. Yes, at the core, it's the same. On the other hand, that can describe most video games at their basis. That's not what has anybody excited. Nobody is like 'HO CRAP, new way of killing things!'
I'll explain what has me excited, and what is different. Your mileage may vary.
1. Generally in an MMORPG, quest givers are lying straight to your face, and it's REALLY blatantly apparent. 'Help, bandits are attacking my farm!'. Well. No. No they're not. They're just standing there. Picking their nose. The bandits aren't there to attack the farm, and it's really obvious to anybody who looks. They're standing there SPECIFICALLY for the purpose of being killed. That's all they're there for, that's all they'll ever do, wait for the next people to come along and slaughter them as they wander around aimlessly. Yes, it's still an illusion, but it's a vastly better one. ... and hey, they really DO attack places. It makes a difference.
2. Dynamic events are cooperative, rather than competitive. In most MMORPGs, everybody else I run across is specifically competing with me to kill 10 hapless bandits standing around. If other people kill those bandits, they're thwarting me. If I help kill them, I'm interfering with them. ... and heaven forbid it's one of the drop quests where we're both trying to get 10 bandit ears.
3. Dynamic events are based off of the world, not the player. This may seem like an issue in semantics to you, but it's a fairly basic, deep core design shift. Events happen with or without me. They have consequences and move even if I have absolutely nothing to do with it. MMORPGs, for a game that is supposedly multiple and multiplayer, have generally been extremely tightly focused around the player, with everything crafted as an illusion to support the idea that you, the player, are special, and that these tasks are just for you. In fact, the tasks WAIT for you. That's all they're there for. To satisfy your character moving along.
1. The trinity isn't tactics. It's "One guy stands there spamming threat. One guy stares at health bars and doesn't even get to see the game. A buncha guys fire off the rotation that someone with a spreadsheet tells them was optimal. Mob dies." GW2 has tactics, only people keep standing there expecting to tank like in a trinity setup and wonder why they keep dying.
2. What do you want? I always here this complaint, but I NEVER hear a concrete example of how you want every quest to be. They can't all be "kill the huge uber boss monster". And I'm not saying I totally diagree, sometimes fetch quests and kill the minion quests are repetitve. But I'd like to see, instead of blatant negativity and complaining, one of these people that hates these kinds of things show me in detail what you DO want.
3. Keys drop in game. I've twice now had more keys than boxes. Although it is usually the other way, it's not that big a deal. Esp since the boxes have mostly useless fluff in them.
4. WoW PvP takes being whatever the hell OP class spec/combo someone came up with this week. especially arenas.
5. You're right. And the same can be said of ever MMO since the first one. That doesn't mean they're bad games. Heck, a taco is just a cheeseburger presented differently. But I love me some tacos. Presentation counts for a lot.
That is all fine and they are all good reasons.
I just want to add the word I was missing when I wrote my other post which really sums up what is missing in MMOs, EMERGENT gameplay, you go to a dynamic event or to a quest sure its different, sure it adds the illusion like you said of more immersion and more logical and part of the world but my point is, you are still going to kill the bandits, when that quest starts or when the bandits are attacking the village you know you are gonna kill some mobs, it doesnt surprise me. The same with dynamic events, you have X type of interactions you can have on these events and they change the skin and add cooperative gameplay but they are the same paradigm.
When I say emergent gameplay I truly mean something completely different, I mean, I see some bandits attacking a farm and I decide to actually help the bandits not kill them, we slaughter the villagers, I join the bandit crew and we now proceed to go and sack other villages, now other players are aware of me being a bad guy with those bandits and they hunt me down along with my gang that may or not get disbanded, hell maybe lots of people decide to join the bandits and wipe out the villages on one area, two months later, that area is completely bandit controlled there is no law and the "government" of the game started a campaign against me and the other players along with the bandit crew.
Now other players also get a chance to help the villages that have been destroyed, someone can just decide to start building a new city for the people that have been left homeless, this region becomes properus and a comerce hub with lots of trading, and now a new capital city has emerged.
Man I know I am asking for lots and this is not something that will happen anytime soon but that is what is truly needed for a paradigm shift in MMOs in my opinion emergent gameplay.
You're just slightly confused. What you mean is 'That's what's needed for the paradigm shift that I want'.
Which is fine. We all have our own tastes.
I happen to like the direction dynamic events went in. Since they went in a direction that involves LESS player conflict (To the point where not just mobs, loot and xp is shared, but nodes as well), they're obviously moving in the opposite direction from what you want.
I'm sure that could be a fun sort of game, but moving specifically in the direction you want isn't what it takes to be different.
Sure, which is why I said, in my opinion just in case it isnt clear. I dont see current MMOs as a different paradigm than previous MMOs but then again that is my opinion. This is conditioned by my experience, I also wouldnt say GW2 really falls on the MMO framework very well.
Edit: Also by definition emergent gameplay is not what I want, is what you want aswell, its what anyone wants to do, its gameplay that is created out of your specific interaction and decision that is not conditioned by X, Y or Z interaction frameworks, but instead is only influenced by it.
Or is it the fact that they don't use the internet and it's an offline game?
Opinion doesn't really apply to definitions. You can believe it's a type of MMORPG you want or not, but to say it isn't even... what? It's not massively multiplayer? Not online? Perhaps it's not a roleplaying game?
MMORPG has a super convenient definition, its very own name.
Just because you're used to certain conventions, doesn't mean that defines an MMORPG. Reminds me of the people who say that without the trinity, a game isn't an MMORPG.
I edited my post aswell to add some information I think is crucial aswell. And yeah I should have said my MMORPG framework definition, not the definition of the acronym but what I consider to be a roleplaying experience, yeah I suppose that is it. When I think of MMORPG's I always go back to the old pen and paper as a good reference as to what the experience should be like the type of immersion just translated into a medium where you dont need to imagine but instead can interact directly.
And bear in mind no MMORPG release completely falls into the framework, but some are more distant than others, doesnt mean I dont enjoy them and didnt play some of them for years at a time.
That seems like a selling point rather than a negative. That is, in fact, one of the major reasons I bought it.
Well. In the very broadest sense, all games have emergent gameplay, in that it's your actions that define what happens to some extent.
In the narrowest sense, not everybody wants emergent gameplay of the type you're talking about. Especially when you're talking about 'not conditioned by frameworks'. With full freedom and emergent gameplay, what you have is Second Life.
Unless what you want is for players to beat you to death with giant penises until kittens explode out of your eyesockets.
Hey. Not judging. Just...
... okay, yes I'm judging.
All games fall within a range. Not everybody wants what you want. It's true! GW2 has emergent gameplay ina sense, but I honestly dont' feel like playing a game where other players can turn around and gank me and join the enemies.
So no. That's not what 'anyone wants to do', except only in the loosest possible definition of the word (ie: Peopl want games where when they press a button, something happens based off of that)
Yep and I agree and not you or me have got it figured out so it works for everyone on either end of the scale, I see this as the equivalent of new programming paradigms, object oriented programming ( OOP ) is the paradigm of choice for most languages out there and certainly the most used, people for many many years have tried to come up with many other paradigms that are "better", with functional programming being the latest fad, they have yet to defeat OOP, this is not because OOP is the end all, or the best thing, there are lots of problems with OOP that functional solves but as a whole OOP still works much better when you put it all together.
And one day someone will come up with a paradigm that truly works better for both ends of the scale and it may be something no one even dreamed off, and like this we just havent found the solution and the paradigm that is going to be the true game changer.
And that is the problem with envisioning and really thinking forward on another paradigm because we always tend to think in terms of the framework that we have now, like I understand your concern about people putting up a penis in the middle of a dynamic event, but that is a problem with the current paradigms we have, that if you give too much freedom for people to do what they want then mean time to penis will surely happen.
Well, in THAT case, I think your change isn't good enough, and to be a real game changer and paradigm shift, what we need is AI where each and every NPC and character could pass the Turing test, and where the interface is so realistic that as long as you're playing the game, you can't even TELL you're playing a game, and in fact they need to create timers to forcibly eject people from the 100% immersive experience.
My paradigm shift is better than yours!
(Uhm. More seriously, I'm not going to argue whether GW2 is a paradigm shift or not... after all, shouldn't it wait until AFTER it's released, and to see if other games shift to change and accomodate what GW2 brings to the table? ... but I still say that it's weird to define paradigm shift as 'a change of the specific sort I want'. It could be a complete paradigm shift in a way neither of us could predict.
Sometimes paradigm shifts can be something that even seems deceptively simple)
TOR didn't 'buck convention.' TOR -- When in doubt, copy WoW. Only badly. Then graft on a second-rate, over-hyped single player CRPG on top... Or as they said in the design world...
So let’s deal with the inevitable WoW comparisons. As expected, SWTOR is fundamentally a variant of WoW with a sci-fi themed skin circa the Burning Crusade era with standard WoW mechanics, itemization and crafting. Even the talent trees are copied from WoW of those days. Bioware has also opted to use the familiar two faction system employed by WoW with the Empire and the Republic.
Questing is pretty much the same as WoW which is basically a treasure hunt. Players get a quest, complete tasks by killing mobs and fetching items and then return for a reward. Player interaction with other players is almost non-existent as everyone was madly running from one quest-giver to another.
One thing they should have copied from WoW was how much it cost to make. Vevendi, WoW's original publisher said it cost $50 million Euros to make. Which was, back then, $63 million USD.
Its not really about being better or not honestly, maybe what you describe is the solution who knows, I am saying that paradigm shifts have been part of great push forwards in technology for the last 50 years from the enigma machine to your i7 processor.
I never said a paradigm shift was "something I wanted" I simply suggested something I would consider a paradigm shift, and I even said that wouldnt be a paradigm shift that would be benefitial for everyone over the current paradigm, you seriously need to be wayyy less defensive about this, I am not trying to diss GW2 or say its bad, I am pointing out the parallels between the fact that the current framework obviously does not work for everyone, and like everything technologically and scientifically that has evolved in the last 50 years there was a paradigm shift that was a game changer, and I dont believe we are there yet, doesnt mean the current paradigm isnt good.
That's what I liked about GW1. I never felt like I HAD to play. The only requirements we had was we had to log-in once a week or we'd get kicked. And by early 2010, even that went away..
This how a lot of us feel. Is it a bad game? I don't think so. Is it a long term mmorpg? I doesn't feel that way. It doesn't seem like it was designed that way.
I notice it. Lots of people notice it. Others don't. It's like being color blind. If you're color blind, you're color blind. We don't see the same things and no matter how much I tell what red looks like... If you can't tell it from blue, I'm barking at the moon...
And such is level progression. In BWE I was in a bit of a rush. I exited to Kessex Hills pretty fast and missed some skill points. In BWE2 I went back. Everything was easier, even if I was scaled down, because I progressed. I had Level 15 armor, Level 15 weapons, more skills, more traits, more abilities...
It was easier. Far easier than the first time through.
All because of progression that gave me better gear, skills, traits and abilities...
Now, is it WoW progression? No. But I think that kind of prorgression is stupid. Being invincible to huge areas of the game is just silly.
If I designed an MMO, I'd do what they did in Gothic II. Everything is scattered and there are no safe areas. You can find enemies that can one-shot you for the next 30-levels right outside the gates of the first town you find.
They've also put exploration back into the game. There are lots of areas with no DEs, no hearts, no quest-givers whatsoever. And stuff to do IF YOU EXPLORE and FIND IT. There are also hidden areas. Some of them right under your nose!
NPC interactivity beyond being PEZ-QUEST dispensers. So many MMO have virtually no non-quest NPCs and what they do have tend to be static 'quip' delivery NPCs for 'background' chatter.
Just be thankfull this isn't a story driven mmo ...then you would be screwed after a couple of weeks . Not sure I've seen any WoW clone game have any growth post initial sales since about 2007 so perhaps the 12 million or so x-WoW players will hook on a game like GW2 that's totally different and the vocal minority that likes to chase gear carrots and act like seagulls at a feeding will stay with raiding in WOW and it's clones .
Seeing that Guild Wars is "only" a CORPG (despite not doing anything essentially different from most MMOs, especially if you look how they are really played, with people wanting to solo everything) and holding the interest of some people for years..i don't think we really have to worry that Guild Wars 2 is only suited for "short term".
Yes, it depends a lot on your play style. If you no longer have fun once you're max level, it won't hold you long. If you do not have fun if you can not acquire better gear, you won't have fun for long. But if you have fun trying to get a very specific armor, like in Guild Wars the vabbian armor or even more so the obsidian, or even every armor there is, maybe even crafted by yourself, you will be busy a very long time.
And then there is also structured PVP which works like shooters, so it will certainly allow some people to play Guild Wars 2 for years without ever taking a step outside. And some surely will try to get a character from 1 to 80 only playing WvW or the want conquer all bases on the central map for their side etc.
Make up your own goals, don't let yourself be limited by the game not providing it.
I'll wait to the day's end when the moon is high
And then I'll rise with the tide with a lust for life, I'll
Amass an army, and we'll harness a horde
And then we'll limp across the land until we stand at the shore
"SW:TOR" and "they bucked the genre conventions" are not things that I expect to see in the same sentence.
Bucking conventions is risky. Bucking conventions and assuming nobody will be offended - yeah you could call that hubris. No doubt there is a population out there who honestly believe that gear, profession and achievement grinds are required in an MMO - depressing though that sounds. But the genre would be a poorer place without developers willing to challenge the status quo by taking a step back and asking "is the conventional wisdom actually RIGHT?"
well that game is designed and focused for casuals, its PVE/WvW content for a "hardcore"(someone with no life) could end in a few weeks ..!
about the hardcore players the designers they have in mind, they created sPvP, but i dont say it will work even the designers dont know if it will work, but they try towrd this direction ...
so if you have no life, yes the game will end fast, thats why it's b2p ..! i believe also if SWtoR was b2p, it would be great success even me i would bought it : )