After playing MMOs as old as EverQuest and Ultima Online, through various other games including WoW, Rift, and EVE Online, I've come to appreciate that most MMOs are aimed at very specific sorts of players or even specific ways to get people to pay money. Only a few, of which Rift deserves honorable mention but Guild Wars 2 is the extreme standout, show a great deal of thought as to what is fun for many different types of player, and consequent design features that provide for most or all of those player types.
GW2 is particularly notable in that I find what I do in a play session is almost completely determined by what I'm in the mood to to do. It does not take hours of exclusive dungeon crawling to get gear useful in harder dungeons; players who focus on or exclusively play in the RvR (called "WvW" because the competition is between servers, not between game factions) areas do not acquire gear that makes mostly-PvE players unable to compete with them, and the structured PvP environment uses a completely different copy of each character than the WvW/PvE one.
Crafting is useful and fun - and specifically a crafter can make items useful to players at the level that the materials for them are available, so crafted items are always competitive with drop items. At the same time, crafted gear is not better than equivalent dropped gear, so the choice of whether to craft is purely about what the player enjoys.
Dedicated exploration of the world gives extra rewards, which are commensurate with what just wandering, questing, and hunting monsters would give. Ditto following one's individual character story or one of the max-level added plot lines. Ditto trying for exceptional achievements like defeating major world bosses or finishing every path through every dungeon.
One area that specifically stands out, and which does an even better job than Rift does, is free-form cooperation. The game design avoids any sort of resource-scarcity competition between players. Every mining/logging/harvesting node is instanced per-player, so you don't lose the excellent ore because you were the one who stopped to kill its guardian. Almost as important, there is no "tagging" or "ownership" or "stealing" mechanic on monsters; effectively any player who helped with a given enemy rolls separately for whether and what it drops for them. While you can form a "party" in the open world, this is primarily for convenience of communication, with almost no real game mechanical effects. Only for a dungeon or a story instance do you need a party to define who shares the instance.
When new features are added, the same careful attention to what is fun for different players is obvious. Unlike certain reigning (but fading) kings of the MMO mountain, each new expansion doesn't become more painful for new players, and the opening of a new zone doesn't make all the hard-earned gear from older content suddenly meaningless.
And, as I mentioned in the parent article, GW2 is not a greedy game. You pay once to play forever. There are no monthly or yearly fees (although the just-announced huge expansion with new game mechanics and new zones will have another one-time fee). The game runs on the combined income from attracting new players, and from existing players choosing to pay real money for primarily cosmetic and convenience items. (Some "convenience" items may sound more important than they are - for example a timed boost to XP gain. But because the other mechanics make "leveling" far less important than in other games, and there is so much content that seeing it all with one character will take much longer than reaching level 80, these are really not that important. Not to mention that just eating crafted food gives you a 15-60 minute boost to experience gain in addition to the food's own bonus...)
Having said all this, I should mention that there is one type of gameplay that GW2 really doesn't provide, which is "raid" content. If the logistics and politics of getting a big number of players to work together tightly is your thing, GW2 is not going to satisfy you. Because so much of the essential design of the game is free-form cooperation, the equivalent challenges tend to be shorter in duration (clearing the trash mobs is boring anyway, so just have the big boss fight) and not require special tactics. (Leroy will still get killed by charging into fire, but it won't cause the careful players to wipe.) Plus, because of the auto-mentoring mechanics, world bosses can be found in many zones, and even lower-level characters can participate in these fights to get level-appropriate rewards.
GW2 is particularly notable in that I find what I do in a play session is almost completely determined by what I'm in the mood to to do. It does not take hours of exclusive dungeon crawling to get gear useful in harder dungeons; players who focus on or exclusively play in the RvR (called "WvW" because the competition is between servers, not between game factions) areas do not acquire gear that makes mostly-PvE players unable to compete with them, and the structured PvP environment uses a completely different copy of each character than the WvW/PvE one.
Crafting is useful and fun - and specifically a crafter can make items useful to players at the level that the materials for them are available, so crafted items are always competitive with drop items. At the same time, crafted gear is not better than equivalent dropped gear, so the choice of whether to craft is purely about what the player enjoys.
Dedicated exploration of the world gives extra rewards, which are commensurate with what just wandering, questing, and hunting monsters would give. Ditto following one's individual character story or one of the max-level added plot lines. Ditto trying for exceptional achievements like defeating major world bosses or finishing every path through every dungeon.
One area that specifically stands out, and which does an even better job than Rift does, is free-form cooperation. The game design avoids any sort of resource-scarcity competition between players. Every mining/logging/harvesting node is instanced per-player, so you don't lose the excellent ore because you were the one who stopped to kill its guardian. Almost as important, there is no "tagging" or "ownership" or "stealing" mechanic on monsters; effectively any player who helped with a given enemy rolls separately for whether and what it drops for them. While you can form a "party" in the open world, this is primarily for convenience of communication, with almost no real game mechanical effects. Only for a dungeon or a story instance do you need a party to define who shares the instance.
When new features are added, the same careful attention to what is fun for different players is obvious. Unlike certain reigning (but fading) kings of the MMO mountain, each new expansion doesn't become more painful for new players, and the opening of a new zone doesn't make all the hard-earned gear from older content suddenly meaningless.
And, as I mentioned in the parent article, GW2 is not a greedy game. You pay once to play forever. There are no monthly or yearly fees (although the just-announced huge expansion with new game mechanics and new zones will have another one-time fee). The game runs on the combined income from attracting new players, and from existing players choosing to pay real money for primarily cosmetic and convenience items. (Some "convenience" items may sound more important than they are - for example a timed boost to XP gain. But because the other mechanics make "leveling" far less important than in other games, and there is so much content that seeing it all with one character will take much longer than reaching level 80, these are really not that important. Not to mention that just eating crafted food gives you a 15-60 minute boost to experience gain in addition to the food's own bonus...)
Having said all this, I should mention that there is one type of gameplay that GW2 really doesn't provide, which is "raid" content. If the logistics and politics of getting a big number of players to work together tightly is your thing, GW2 is not going to satisfy you. Because so much of the essential design of the game is free-form cooperation, the equivalent challenges tend to be shorter in duration (clearing the trash mobs is boring anyway, so just have the big boss fight) and not require special tactics. (Leroy will still get killed by charging into fire, but it won't cause the careful players to wipe.) Plus, because of the auto-mentoring mechanics, world bosses can be found in many zones, and even lower-level characters can participate in these fights to get level-appropriate rewards.
One comment about how the world bosses differ from wow raid bosses: Death isn't a ticket to sit & admire the floor for the next 5 minutes. You can release & run back. Plus - this means more fun time. Minus - the bosses include a lot more abrupt random death than wow does. If you're conditioned to "if I die, I did something wrong," you will be misreading the signals that GW2 is sending you.
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