This post continues the discussion I began in “Chillin’ at the OK Corral;” In that post I re-evaluated both Guild Wars 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic based on their pre-launch claims concerning the revolutionary transformation they were about to unleash upon a helpless planet earth. Since their release, the Massively Multiplayer Game environment has seen some interesting changes over the last year or so. What might these changes indicate about the fate of existing MMORPGs and ones still in development?
Posts Tagged ‘MMO’
Backpedalling into the Future
Posted: August 17, 2010 by Twitchdoctor in Exemplary Games, game design, Games and MarketingTags: Arenanet, Fantasy, Guild Wars 2, Massively Multiplayer, MMO, MMORPG
If you watch a lot of old movies, particularly those that have a vaudeville-inspired dance number you will have seen this move. A guy or gal is dancing and they are swinging their arms in huge arcs forward and back, with an enthusiastic smile on their face, and their feet are similarly moving forward and back but they are actually dancing on the spot, sometimes even moving backward.
Well, ArenaNet did its own version of this move this week as they posted a followup to the launch of their MMO Manifesto video: basically a Guild Wars 2 trailer with `tude.
The video is, naturally, thrilling, sexy, sophisticated and full of all the visual splendiferousness that you would expect from any trailer for an MMO. Every MMO now promises to change the way we play MMOs; you don’t get invited to the party without making such a claim. What most gamers especially don’t seem to remember is that for the most part that claim has proved to be complete and utter bullshit, steaming layers of it simply covering the fact that the developers came up with a different and better-looking grind mechanic. The video, therefore, makes some bold claims about how this won’t be your grandmother’s MMO, that traditional MMOs have lost their way, that they don’t make you feel like a hero, and that Guild Wars 2 is going to remedy all that. In particular, the video puts a lot of emphasis on the game’s dynamic events system and the much hyped capacity of the game to change in response to player actions. This isn’t substantially different to anything that ArenaNet has been saying for months, but the claims are now accompanied by art which seems to be making its own kind of visual claim for the kind of world-shaking changes that the fevered digits of the player base would be able to perpetrate on other players.
