MMO Thoughts: Guild Wars 1, the MMO that isn't?

Guild Wars 1 might very well be my favorite game of all time.  It's at least my favorite MMO.  Though lately people have been trying to say it isn't an MMO.  These are mostly people who didn't like it but like its sequel, essentially trying to discredit it to explain the conflict.  They call it a CoRPG now (including the creators) which according to Wikipedia is one and the same, but if that isn't enough, there's the fact it won all of these awards for being a great MMO, and is categorized as an MMO on all of these different sites.  So I am going to call it sufficiently duck-like to be considered one.

Not that I don't understand people's confusion on the subject.  It is a very unusual game.  It came out around the same time as WoW, and can be viewed kind of like its antithesis.  Where WoW was this subscription based, persistent world, open PvP (less than previous MMOs) game, GW1 was this one time purchase, instanced, factionless game (unless you count the factions in the Factions campaign, but you shouldn't) with an absolute distinction between the PvE and PvP sides of it.  Since most games tend to follow the WoW model, GW1 sticks out as a bit odd.

But the reason for the oddness in design is because of their rather extreme approach to solving the sorts of issues that MMOs tend to have, with instances being the main solution to those problems.  I will now list the advantages of instances:

• Other players cannot enter your instance and kill you.
• Other players cannot steal your loot.
• Enemies don't need to respawn for other players to kill, giving you a clear path backwards.
• Sharing rewards is fairer when all players are guaranteed to be in a party together.
• Instances can be reconfigured based on the active quests and difficulty, or just for variety.
• Enemies that are vital to quests are guaranteed to be in the instance already. 
• Instances don't need any sort of cooldown timers, they just start anew when entered. 

You may have noticed that much of it has to do solely with interacting with other players, or in this case avoiding it.  I would list the disadvantages of instances, but it basically comes down to not having other players show up while you're in an instance and not being able to stay in an instance when logging in and out of the game.  I think it's safe to say that genre conventions aside, the advantages of the instances far outweigh the disadvantages.  If they didn't, all the other games wouldn't have all their difficult team oriented content in instances as well.  GW1 just took it to its logical conclusion.  

Beyond instances though, was this overall feel I like to call "A Convenient Challenge" which basically means that the game makes it really easy to tackle its challenges.  Many people don't understand how the word easy and challenge can even be used in the same sentence, so I'll try to explain.  When someone fails at a given challenge, it should feel like it is their fault and correctable in the next attempt.  More importantly, failing that attempt should not cause them to waste time completely unrelated to the challenge that was failed.  This last bit is probably the thing which the game does best.  First off, is map travel, which lets you go to any outpost in the game (persistent areas that you can enter instances from) for free, with no restrictions.  If you want to go to another continent even though you're in the middle of a battle, it's perfectly fine.  Earlier campaigns tended to spread outposts out more than later ones, but it never tried to punish you solely for getting closer to your objective.  The previously mentioned zone resets was also helpful, since there was no waiting to retry a quest if you failed it.

The greatest convenience of the game was by far the computer controlled henchman and heroes that you could add to your party in lieu of other human players.  The AI for them was kind of a perpetual work in progress, and were initially far worse than having human players, but better than trying to run solo.  Heroes were essentially full fledged characters, and by the time they came out the AI had improved to the point that they were a viable way to get through the main campaign.  By the time they stopped making regular updates, a full party (your character and seven heroes) could take on the vast majority of the game.  Some players such as EFGJack dug down so much into the mechanics of the game that there was nothing that could not be completed with just heroes, even if it meant a very slow and methodical approach and micromanaging the heroes.

I didn't follow the public sentiment surrounding the game much while releases were still being made, but I hear that the heroes were a great point of contention amongst players.  I can see why, since always having competent party members available made the majority stop looking for or joining other players.  Human players are capable of much more sophisticated strategies, and a well coordinated team can just tear through the highest difficulty areas at seemingly impossible speeds.  But in a game like GW1 that required very tight team builds for maximum effectiveness, Pick Up Groups were generally a waste of time.  Besides, for those who really enjoy coming up with builds, the ability to devise and try out entire team builds is fantastic.

Perhaps more interestingly is how the AI that controls henchman and heroes is essentially the same one that controls enemies and other NPCs in combat.  The vast majority of skills that enemies use are also available to players.  This is part of what makes coming up with the intricate builds viable:  Everything you learn from an enemy's use of skills can be used against them.

Or perhaps the most interesting thing is how minimal the grind tends to be.  Three campaigns and an expansion make for an awful lot of ground to cover, and Hard Mode practically doubles it.  The actual missions that make up the storyline generally have varied win and loss situations.  Enemies can vary greatly between areas.  The daily Zaishen quests that were added last were the sort of time gated thing that normally can get grindy, but with a repeating schedule of at least a month and the ability to store 3 of each kind at a time, it is pretty flexible and immensely rewarding if you can manage it in Hard Mode.  Even the titles managed to avoid the grind by being things like complete all missions or vanquish all areas.  The really long term ones like Treasure Hunter (Open ten thousand chests) generally don't benefit from grinding and are best handled while playing the game normally.  Those ones are also account wide, which also helps.

As far as the monetary grind is concerned, it can certainly be there.  There are groups who spend all of their time repeatedly doing speed runs of the high end areas, which is probably the most efficient way of making money.  That generally isn't viable for most people due to the level of coordination and consistency needed among a group.  It also doesn't sound very fun.  Fortunately, there are very synergistic ways of making money in the game.  For starters, the daily quests provide ample monetary reward, especially in Hardmode.  These quests also tend to fill up pages in books that can be turned in for further money when completed.  Finally, the improved enemy drops in hard mode along with the gathering up materials that can be made into valuable consumable items that can be sold to other players brought in a good amount of money as well.  It may not be as efficient as speed runs, but it is sufficiently varied and doable by most players.  Since most everything can be bought and sold, you don't necessarily have to go to the especially hard areas to get the especially rare items.  This also helps reduce the grind, since it isn't forcing you into a specific area just to get a single item.  You can choose what you are willing to do and just do that.

The game isn't without its issues, of course.  It's just that it probably had less issues 6 months after release (about when I started playing) than most MMOs.  It has typos that have never been fixed, errors on the world map (such as portals being in the wrong place) and weird design decisions like all of the gates around Cantha and all of the mission bonuses there being timer based.  There are a number of really long missions that can be failed right at the end, requiring a complete restart.  There were more personal peeves as well, like how later releases felt more like a collection of maps instead of a coherent whole and how belabored pop culture references started to seem more common than original ideas.  The voice acting steadily improved, but could be painful at points.

Overall though, the complaints are pretty minor.  The game was something that looked really good and performed well (and has held up pretty well for 9 years old).  The skill customization in GW1 is really something to behold, and being a game I can fully play solo or with just another player or two is unique among MMOs.  I am grateful that it wasn't immediately shut down after the launch of its sequel, though I am disappointed by its overall lack of support.  The last releases really felt like they had perfected the gameplay and learned from their previous mistakes.  It's really a pity that they decided to just scrap it all.  There really isn't any reason for it to not get another campaign or expansion, or at least wrap up the things they were planning on doing, such as the Elona epilogue story and releasing hardmode versions of the rest of the quests.
But seriously, It's worth a play. I think I might try to finish up the stuff I missed now.  

MMO Thoughts: The Genre in General

I have weird feelings towards MMOs.  I can and will openly decry the genre as stale on the whole, and repetitive and uninteresting individually.  And yet, I find it hard to avoid wanting to partake in them.  The concept of these massive worlds, with these massive amounts of players waging wars and taking out massive challenges together.  Of course, the reality of the games once you're actually in them tends to be far from that.

My first experience with MMOs was Tibia, a game that is very old school, and still available if you want to see what pre-WoW MMOs were like.  I did not enjoy the experience much.  I spent most of my time killing rats and spiders, and scavenging loot that higher level players deemed not worth their time and left on the corpses.  All this while hoping that the random passersby wouldn't kill me just because I was there, and hoping that there would be some level appropriate monsters in the otherwise picked over areas.  Any time you died for any reason, you lost 10% of your experience totals.  That plural is intentional, as not only did you have character levels, you also had skill levels for the different weapon types and magic. At low levels this was a minor inconvenience but at higher levels you would be set back several levels each time you died.  And you lost your entire inventory.  And a 10% chance for each item equipped on you.  And enemies were not organized in nice, curving scales.  It was pretty common to be wandering around an area that I had a decent handle on, and then get one shot by something way more powerful that just happened to be there.  So after this happens to you and on your way back to gather your belongings from your own corpse you get attacked in town by a guy walking around with a pet fire demon (true story by the way) that tends to make you pretty reluctant to log back in.  Especially since the combat and all that are pretty bland.  Nonetheless, it wasn't a terrible thing to keep your hands busy while watching something on TV or split screen on your computer.  

The only reason I bring up Tibia is because MMOs have improved greatly, and that is important to note.  The reason that people complain about MMOs not being like Tibia anymore is more because they are secretly the people who like to crap on other people's good time, and said crapping is the only reason they were playing them in the first place.  The only reason people put up with being crapped on is the hopes that some day they will find other people to crap on.  They obviously aren't going to be able to return the crapping to the right person, because that person will always be above them in level or equal because of a level cap.  I suppose in this sense MMOs are a microcosm of the world and why groups of people will kill each other if they think they can get away with it, no matter how much they have been on the other side of that situation.  

Beyond that, the gameplay is generally grindy in the best of them, with long term goals being built around the repetition of mundane or trivial tasks, sometimes with these tasks acting as prerequisite to anything more interesting, but more often than not it was just prerequisite to something just as mundane and trivial, but handing out bigger numbers for doing them.  And it's not entirely the designer's fault either.  But it's not the player's expectations that are causing it, like so many people like to blame it on.  It's more to do with the impossible logistics of a game that is meant to go on forever.  If games are like delicious meals, then MMOs are kinda like a really watery soup.  The soup is plentiful; where most games can be 100% complete in 40 hours (less being more typical), MMOs are designed to encourage players to play for THOUSANDS of hours.  And MMOs actually do have more unique content than most games, possibly hundreds of hours. So it's a plentiful soup, but it's still a magnitude away from what is intended, so then it starts to get watered down.  Larger goals like killing ten thousand of an enemy occur, and higher gear that is incredibly rare but provides the necessary stat boost to survive the most difficult areas get added.  Time gates are added to rewards to prevent people from progressing to quickly.  More water gets added to the soup because it's easier to do than to create something new and interesting.

So then why do they remain popular?  The social aspect of it is a big part of it.  I wouldn't call the card game Uno deep or interesting, or anything but a bunch of random luck, but it can be a fun time if played with your friends.  But then you're not playing Uno because you especially like the game, but because it is something you can do with your friends.  And at that point it doesn't really matter how good the game is, it's just something to do with people.  My best moments in the MMOs I have played have lied with playing them either with a close friend, or with friendly guildmates.  At the end of the day however, I don't play videogames for the social interaction, but because they provide something inherently fun and/or challenging.  And while people normally argue that I'm missing the point of an MMO, my counterpoint is that you could have that fun with ANY game that allows a sufficient player count (a number that really doesn't need come near the definition of massive), and there is absolutely nothing in the conventions of the genre that makes it superior in that respect.

If there is another aspect to the genre that is actually interesting in its own right, it is the character building (and by extension combat to a point).  Nearly all of the games break characters down into a series of roles that need to be fulfilled for a group to overcome a challenge.  The more interesting systems are more open ended, allowing for balancing and tradeoffs on a single character in order to find the ideal mix that can overcome the challenges of a game.  As someone who came from playing JRPGs of the 16-bit and following generation before trying any MMOs, I was used to a much more straightforward approach, where if you were sufficiently high leveled you could power your way through the end of the game.  Maybe some bonus dungeons or bosses would require some particular strategy, but in general you could brute force your way without much more though than making sure you bought the latest gear and fully healed before leaving town. There isn't really any other genre of games that have quite that sort of depth.  If other games imitate something from MMOs, it more often tends to be the less savory grind and questing mechanics.

And thus why I keep having an interest in MMOs despite so many negative aspects to the genre.  Ultimately there is this deep strategic concept that is so rare elsewhere, and this huge amount of stuff to conquer with it (in theory at least).  So those are my thoughts on MMOs as a genre.  Next time I will talk about some noteworthy examples.