This weekend I played Guild Wars a lot, because it was a beta weekend. It was the first MMORPG to not annoy me a lot, which makes it as some magazine is quoted as saying somewhere, "the MMORPG for people who hate MMORPGs". One is still, unfortunately, subjected to a lot of "WTS some crap objects for an unreasonable price" and "WTB objects I don't understand for an unreasonably low price" being yelled, though I expect the developers will implement some sort of auction system or at least a trading space for such dialogue by full-release time.
Why is it for people who hate MMORPGs? Because it's not really massively multiplayer, a lot of the time. Whenever you're on a mission you get a special mission space just for you and your team, so there's no hassle with kill-stealing or waiting for monsters to respawn or the like. In fact, monsters don't respawn, which is nice too - if you want to kill the same things again you can restart the mission, and if you want to do the mission carefully, you can, because any spaces you've cleared will stay cleared, assuming monsters don't walk in from nearby spaces. That's one point by which tactics work in Guild Wars where they don't in most MMORPGs. Also, the combat while it occurs is much more tactical - it's more like playing a 'heroes' level of Warcraft 2 or Starcraft than like playing an RPG. You want to lure monsters away from their companions, watch the back of the rest of your team, have your archers take the high ground, all the stuff you'd expect to have to do. And the monsters also behave appropriately - human baddies behave particularly intelligently, often deliberately targetting the spellcasters of your party, summoning help if there's any nearby, and being very persistent if you try to flee.
It also intends to conform to my requirement for playing a MMORPG - that it not charge per-real-world-time-period. In fact, they don't even intend to charge per-in-game-time-period (which in some ways would be worse, as, eg. encouraging the game-makers to make things take a long time, as they'd get more money that way). Instead it's a buy-it-once price, as games should be, with non-mandatory future extensions to also be bought. On those grounds, and the grounds that it's fun, I might buy it. Also, they have done most of the things I would have done in making a MMORPG (though their alleged streaming of content is a bit inferior - they don't use your idle bandwidth in the pre-mission room to download the mission, they just download it when you enter, which is a bit of a shame), which is nice of them since it means now I won't have to make one of those. Well, not a 3D posh one anyway.
[13:19]
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