Guild Wars 2: The 2nd M

One of the downsides of online gaming for someone like me is that, while I'm not really averse to grouping up with other people, for the most part I tend prefer to play with, well, just me and my SO, really. It's not that I won't play with others, certainly, but when one has an erratic gaming schedule (and even sometimes drops a game for several months at a time to do something else), it's very hard to get into and stay in any kind of guild... and even in the one case I have, the people involved were always moving much faster in various ways because they had more time in-game. So as you can imagine, I tend to prefer solo- (or, well, duo-) friendly MMOs.

However, there's one type of exception to this, and that's what you could call area or world events. The introduction of Rikti raids in City of Heroes, for instance, gave players a chance to temporarily group up to defeat a major menace, one that needed a fairly large number of players working together to take down. And I've always wished there would be more of that sort of casual, temporary grouping in MMOs.

Well, guess what? Guild Wars 2 appears to be planning on giving me that.

In your traditional MMO, the world is a very static place. Oh, there might be people wandering around, and you might catch NPCs conversing with one another, but the actual game world itself changes little, if at all, over time. Quest givers stand around with an exclamation point (or whatever) over their head, giving you a story in text, with maybe a little animation accompanying it. The bosses are always more or less where you last saw them. The groups of enemies may wander a bit, but they're generally contained in a specific area. And the boars almost never have a heart. At least not if you need one, which also brings up the question: why the heck does the quest giver need one?

And (more to the point of my earlier paragraphs) at the time that you're out slaying boars and wondering how they functioned with no innards, it's possible so will 12 other people be... or no one at all. You either have competition for resources, which can get kinda unfun (and sometimes involves some nasty chat on other people's parts), or you can not see a single other person doing what you're doing. And when you're done, the quest giver still wants another dozen boar hearts... just not from your current character. But he'll be there waiting for them when you make the next one!

ArenaNet would like to change all that, by offering a world that consistently changes based on what players do in response to events they witness. It's a rather ambitious goal, but judging from the information they've released, they just may be able to pull it off.

Their plan for doing this is by replacing the traditional quest and quest-givers with a dynamic event system. Instead of a farmer standing in his field complaining about the ogres ransacking his farm (when in reality they're actually standing about 50 feet away, waiting for you to get into aggro range, and the pumpkins are just sitting there, being orange), they want to show the farmer running up to you, pointing to the actual ogres tearing up his actual pumpkin patch, and screaming for help.

But it won't just have to be you that helps. If two people (or parties) come by at the same time, they can all gang up on the ogres. This may make more ogres show up, so the fight is a bit more fair ("dynamic scaling" is what they're calling this), but whether it's two players or twenty, everyone involved will get the same basic reward. So while you're knocking "static quests" and "static area appearance" and "static mobs" off the design plate, you can also knock off "kill stealing"; no one's going to get experience and loot instead of you for helping finish off a creature.

And you don't even have to help. You can say "Sorry, my good man, but I don't like pumpkins anyhow," and walk away. (Well, probably without the saying part, but, y'know, I sometimes type things in response to NPCs. Shut up. I find it funny.) And if no one comes by to help before the ogres are done ransacking, when you travel back past the farm, the ogres may still be gone... but so will the pumpkins be. And, given the tastes of ogres, the farmer might not be there anymore, either.

Of course, this brings up a possible downside, which is this: will the world be entirely different when you start playing as when J. Random Earlyadopter did? After all, that's soon going to be a problem for World of Warcraft players; Blizzard is going to be permanently altering the landscape, so if you don't play WoW much or haven't had a chance to try it yet, you're never going to see the old version. (Probably. I did surmise they have the moolah to put up classic servers, though. But that's another topic.)

However, the devs have an answer for this: things will cycle; they may not be exactly the same 10 minutes later, but eventually the farmer will replant his pumpkins, or the town will rebuild, or the centaurs will find a new leader to replace the one you killed.

And that type of dynamic, as-you-see-it-happen system, combined with equal rewards for people involved, should lead to at least inter-party cooperation. Your solo player may continue to be solo, but she and the group of five who came across the farmer can both work together for long enough to solve that problem... and maybe the problems that one itself generates. Because part of the reason they're calling it "dynamic" is that each result to an event can spin off another event, or chain of events.

Of course, this does require some particularly good implementation. Not only do they have to have a generous way of measuring who participated in a battle—support characters, for instance, are rarely going to do a significant amount of direct damage, but should still get credit for aiding the DPS types—but they have to have ways to cut down on griefing potential. One thing in particular I can think of (but that they say they have measures in place to handle) is simple leeching: standing in the area, but not participating in the slightest, in the hopes of getting some reward credit. Or even without that hope, simply to increase the mob count so that the other players stand less of a chance of succeeding in a fight.

Ultimately, how cool this is will directly depend on their ability to make it work as they say it will... and for that, we'll have to just wait and see.

Lastly, if you're like me, you may be wondering what the actual point of these dynamic in-world events will be. Is there not going to be a traditional storyline that your character participates in towards a more or less specific end goal? Just a bunch of running around, putting out fires (possibly literally)? And the answer seems to be: well, yes and no. The individual dynamic events will themselves lead to other events, as mentioned, and it's possible (though I'm not completely clear on this) that some of what you do may affect that more usual storyline... except that the "more usual" storyline apparently will itself not be a static storyline, but rather, one with many different possibilities towards a similar end goal. That part is what they're calling the "personal storyline", and information on that is being released this week... so I'll tackle that part after more information is out.