Julio Santos

I played some Guild Wars Factions (their new “expansion”) yesterday. Though Guild Wars and the new expansion, Guild Wars Factions, have some flaws still, they introduce a few fantastic ideas. It’s hard for me to understand why other games don’t try to come up with something similar, except maybe if the reason is laziness or lack of skill.

Some would say that’s a good thing, that at least these other games are not a rip-off of Guild Wars. I’ve heard that, and I would say that first, it’s not a rip-off but a source of inspiration, and second, these other games do indeed, copy existing games. Most new games are heavily “inspired” by Ultima Online and Everquest I. What I’m saying is that perhaps they should start getting their inspiration somewhere else.

A while back I already talked about the great patching/loading system Guild Wars has, as well as the whole non-shard approach. In my list of MMO features that should become standard, I’ll add those two things again. If nothing else, for completeness:

No-Shards
There are no shards (or “world servers”) in Guild Wars. You create a character, pick the profession, etc, but you never get to say in which server you want your character to live. And why should you? Why should you have to choose a server? It’s not like they’re different, they’re just copies of each other anyway. Instead what they did, is that they created a load balancing system where you’re automatically put on a server that’s not heavily loaded. If needed they dynamically add servers and distribute the load accordingly.

You might say “but how can I meet my friends if I can’t pick the server I’m in?”. In fact, the games puts your character in the best server possible, but you can move around servers, by simply pulling a drop-down list and selecting the server you want to be in. If that server is so full that it doesn’t take new players (momentarily), your friends can meet you in your server. Nice and easy.

Lazy-patching
Don’t force me to wait for 5 hours (or more!) when there’s a patch. More often than not, I don’t care about what’s being patched anyway. Maybe it’s some dungeon on the enemy side of the world, maybe it’s a zone I no longer visit. Why should I wait for those things to patch? Because the developers were lazy, that’s my guess.

Guild Wars uses lazy-patching. The first time you visit a new place (zone) the game needs to download the files, but only the first time, and only because you wanted to go to that zone. This makes for very fast patches and the hit you get the first time when you enter a zone, is no different than the hit you get in other games, which had the zone already pre-loaded.

No monthly fees
I already paid for the game, typically $50, why should I have to pay again every month? Before Guild Wars, I use to laugh at this argument. I would tell people that they had to pay a little extra every month, because there were bug fixes, server maintenance, etc. The online model was different, and people should get with the program.

Then Guild Wars comes along and there are no monthly fees. How do they do it? For one, their servers are never down, maybe it’s because of their lazy patching approach, maybe it’s something else. But frankly, everything works so well, they make it look so easy, that they could not justify a monthly fee. Maybe that’s the trick, make something crappy, then you can charge people for making it somehow hold together, “these are hard problems you understand?”.

Guild Wars shows it can be done. And I think it should be done.

Charge for expansions
I realize that Arenanet (they’re the Guild Wars makers, by the way) needs to feed their people. Rather than making one game, once, then charge you every month for the priviledge of playing, Arenanet uses the time they’re not rebooting their servers, to work on new expansions. The game is big as it is, but more content is always a good thing.

Guild Wars Factions (GWF) is the latest (first) expansion, and in fact it’s not even an expansion. It’s possible to play GWF without buying GW.

Why is this smart? For people like me, who get bored easily, it’s the only way they’re going to get my business. I’ve played many, many online games. From Ultima Online to World of Warcraft, from Everquest I to City of Heroes and Earth & Beyond (ouch). But eventually I get bored, and eventually I got from playing a lot to not playing at all. That’s when I cancel my $15 monthly subscription. If I could make my own money, maybe I wouldn’t cancel, but $15/mo x many games, that’s some dough.

So I cancel my subscriptions, and since I can’t access the game if I’m not paying, I might as well just uninstall the game as well. I might be a little forgiving here, because I know that I do go back to games from time to time, and because of that, I don’t always uninstall. Though I imagine most people uninstall as soon as they cancel their accounts. Once you cancelled and uninstalled, you probably won’t check the forums and other related game sites. You turned the page. So now you don’t know what’s going on with the game. You know you played it at one point, and you remember being bored towards the end.

Not so with Guild Wars. You can stop playing because you’re bored, but since you don’t pay to play the game, you can always check out the game once a month or once a year. Play just enough to stay in the loop with what’s coming. Then a new expansion comes out, and you know about it. You might even buy it. Then again you want to pass, but if you uninstalled and are not at least logging on 2 or 3 times a years, you will pass for sure.

I read somewhere that they’re already working on the 3rd chapter, and even on the 4th. Hungry people they have there it seems. But at least they’re not making me pay to fix their bugs.

No downtime
What is with the weekly or sometimes even daily(!) downtime? What kind of flawed system needs to be rebooted every day, and then it takes an hour or two to come back up? I don’t know what kind of problems all the other game companies have, but apparently it doesn’t have to be.

Sometimes I just want to watch
Guild Wars lets you observe a battle happening in the other side of the world. Also when you die, you can click on the name of your teammates, and observer the game from their point of view, while you’re waiting for a “res”. This is a fantastic feature I think. I can learn PvP tricks, by watching what the experts are doing. These are live matches mind you, not just some movie that someone made. At any given time, you can press the “B” key for oBserve, pick an ongoing battle from a list, and participate as an observer. What a great idea.

Have real content variety
In most games, the monsters you fight at level 1 are pretty much the same monsters you will be fighting 40 levels later. Except of course that the name changed. You went from killing “A Rat” to “A Big Rat” to “An Elder Big Mofo Rat”. Woopdeedo! Sometimes the size and the colors have changed, but not always.

Adding more hit points to a rat, multiplying its size by 3 and making its color black instead of brown, is not a shortcut that the folks at Guild Wars took.

In Guild Wars you get to interact with lots of different monsters. Every new mission and level brings new stuff to keep the game fresh. And you’re not even paying $15 a month, so I don’t know how they do it, but it seems that it can be done.

Don’t make me walk everywhere
Flying or riding your horse between places gets old very quickly. Do it once or twice and that’s it, you don’t want to it again. Make me walk to some new place once, that’s fair. I need to discover the surroundings, brave the dangerous creatures, etc. That’s all okay. But for chrissake, don’t make me sit in top of that stupid bat for 5 minutes in a row!

Guild Wars nailed it. Just press “M” for Map. It shows all the places you’re already visited (places you’ve discovered on foot) and click on the place where you want to go. Bang! There you are.

Other games let you recall to *one* pre-designated place, and even then, only once in a while. Some games don’t even allow the single insta-travel, so people commit suicide (well, their characters do, it’s not that bad! :-) so they short circuit some boredom and go straight to the fun stuff, the actual game.

At least in Ultima Online, I could have runes for the places I cared about, and recall there whenever I wanted. Someone (who probably doesn’t play the game anyway) must have decided that it would be much more fun to force people to run, swim, ride a horse, fly, walk on their hands. Everything but to actually play the game.

No ads
Most new games will force me to go through a series of screens filled with ads before I can actually play. If I’m lucky I can even click/press ESC and move on to the next screen. If I’m not, then I’ll just have to watch those things now, won’t I?

With Guild Wars, you launch the game, it asks you to authenticate, pick a character, and you’re in.

Let people talk
This is not really something that games should add, but instead something that games should stop removing. Why can’t I talk to other side? I mean, it’s a game, not war! On any game that you can think of (real life games I mean), it shows good sportsmanship to acknowledge your foe, even shake their hands. But not in online games. There you’re not even supposed to talk to them. Games do this by converting your text to garbage to the other side (and vice versa). I think it’s stupid and brings nothing positive to the game.

Let me solo when I want to solo
I don’t care if it’s an online game, sometimes I just want to solo. Sometimes people like me, who insist in soloing on an online game, we get some heat. Somehow if you’re going to solo, you shouldn’t bother playing an online game. If you ever been to a bar to have a drink, but didn’t want to make friends with the other patrons, well, that’s what soloing in an online game is. You want to know that the things around your character are controlled by real people, but you don’t want to talk to them.

Now, I don’t mean to say that I never want to talk to other folks in the game, but sometimes it’s true, I don’t want to. Maybe I have some time to do something in game, but I don’t know if it’s going to be 10 minutes or 2 hours. If you join a group and leave after 10 minutes, let me tell you, it’s the other folks who won’t want to talk to you after that.

Anyway, whatever the reason, I should be able to solo and group when I feel like soloing or grouping. Certain, in fact, most games, won’t let you have access to certain content unless you’re grouped.

Guild Wars has a nice little feature for when you need to tackle high level monsters and you don’t want to bothered with a group of people. Just hire (for free) some NPCs in town. Instead of waiting for ages to find a healer, just click the NPC healer in town, and add it to the group. Sometimes AI > NI anyway. So now I can access high level content, and if I decide to leave in the middle of quest, no one will tell me to do things to my mom.

Let my characters share stuff
Most games do this now, so it’s not that revolutionary. But that plus the no-shard thing, really gives a lot of freedom. Oh, I know that the RPG purists out there will screm foul, but this is a game, not a religion. Think of it as having 2 jobs. One you do during the day, and another you do in the evening. Would you buy gas to go to your evening job, with money you made on your day job? Prolly yes, right?

See, nothing to be ashamed of. It’s helpful, and it should be a standard.

Other features
These are some of the unique features (some are more unique than others) that I think should be standard. Guild Wars also has a couple of features that though I find really cool and interesting, I would not necessarily expect in other games. For example, before you enter a mission or a PvP instance, you need to be smart about what skills you will bring in, as you cannot change the skills once you’re in the mission. There are hundreds of possible skills you could be using, but you can pick just 8.

This calls for really interesting strategies, if you want to win more than you want to lose. For those who have played RTS games, and decide to boom, turtle or rush without knowing what the person is doing, this is a little bit like that. You pick your strategy, and hope for the best. The difference with the RTS approach, is that you can’t correct it. If you went for “melee only” skills, and your opponent went for “root and cast” skills, you’re screwed.

Interesting feature indeed, but if other MMOs don’t want to implement that particular one, but decide to learn from the others, I’ll be happy.

The astute reader will notice that a lot of the Guild Wars super features don’t apply to online games only. If you build software to be used by online communities, maybe there is a trick or two you can borrow from Guild Wars, such as “lazy-patching” (aka jit installing) and “no-shards” (aka mirrors).

The game has its flaws of course, but it’s nice to play a game that doesn’t play games. (hah)