Most of the mmorpg’s nowadays are likely to centrum its gameplay on hours and hours of grinding, leveling, farming, and harvesting gold. On this side, Guild Wars 2 will try to innovate this concept by turning the old fashioned way of grinding and farming in getting the best items and diplomacy in the game into an absolute question of — “Is it fun?” In a recent post in Arenanet blog, Lead Content Designer Colin Johanson discussed a number of a company’s approach pertaining to weighing the achievements of Guild Wars 2 and the ways on how to achieve that kind of success. Guild Wars 2 is different from other subscription-based mmorpg’s since ArenaNet’s subscription-less style lets the designer to give focus and make the content offer more fun for the user, and definitely not how long it will take for gamers to accomplish tasks. He also said that subscription-based mmo’s usually undertake along with the threat of “sacrificing quality” to be able to impliment content that will need a period of time to do.
“When your game systems are designed to achieve the prime motivation of a subscription-based MMO, you run the risk of sacrificing quality to get as much content in as possible to fill that time,” said Johanson.
“You get leveling systems that take insane amounts of grind to gain a level, loot drop systems that require doing a dungeon with a tiny chance the item you want can drop at the end, raid systems that need huge numbers of people online simultaneously to organize and play, thousands of wash/repeat item-collection or kill-mob quests or dailies with flavor text support, the best stat gear requiring crazy amounts of time to earn, etc.”
Accordingly, he pertains how the somewhat typical gear tradition have been pretty much taken out of the game. Although you will find that there is an item advancement by way of levels, rare items are designed ideally with aesthetics, not statistical, variation. Dungeons, instead of possessing a little possibility of dropping rare items, compensate players with tokens which can be exchanged for nice items. Throughout these dungeons, distinctions have been designed likely to ensure that users can come up various paths to discover instead of having to undertake the similar work over and over.
“If our model was subscription based, we might be spending all this time racing to add as much filler content as possible to keep players chasing the carrot. Instead, as content designers with the goal of creating fun, we get to spend this time refining our content and making it amazing. As designers, this is both liberating and refreshing in an industry in which developers rarely get time from publishers to actually polish their games.”
Dynamic events along with personal back-story, Johanson says, are designed to get diverse so gamers can get unique and individual experience each time they choose to begin once more or take another look at a place his/her character. Lastly, group dynamics have already been re-structured for optimum approach of its concept. Individual loot and experience tables for every character, scalable content to guarantee that there is evidently sufficient for everybody to perform, universal revival abilities, as well as independent resource node monitoring are all developed to motivate players to interact personally and share their thoughts.
