GuildWars is rollicking along, and I’m discovering it to be a rather strange gaming experience, and quite different to most of my previous online excursions (see sidebar). It has a strange duality to it.
One the one hand the extensive use of instancing, and story-driven mission areas, with cut-scenes, makes for a much greater sense of actually being in a story, than any MMO I’ve come across, and only Asheron’s Call 2’s ‘Vaults’ had offered a similar level of participation in any non-‘event’ type capacity. My own personal version of this epic story is moving along (no spoilers here), and despite knowing exactly how the smoke and mirrors are employed, I do still feel like I’m a part of it all, and an actual bone fide hero, which is a bit of a rarity for someone who usually runs a mile from any GM ‘Events’.
My earlier fears about living in Ash City forever turned out to be unfounded, and I’ve already pushed through a snowy mountain range, and am now down in a lavish jungle region, all of which are quite breathtaking, and extremely well crafted, right down to the white spray plumes on the rock shorelines, as the waves crash against the cliffs there. They use a clever system that turns extremely distant landmarks into blurry sprites, creating a real sense of scale and distance not otherwise found in 3D games, and the tantalisingly enigmatic distant mountains, towers and forts loom over a landscape filled with interesting corners, and it all very much appeals to the Explorer in me.
Unfortunately, you’re only new once, which gives rise to the less attractive side of GuildWars, one which is causing me a great deal of annoyance. The problem is that pretty much everyone in there has already done it all, at least once, since the levels and treadmill seem virtually non-existent, and it's been out for some time now, and on the whole seem mostly concerned with getting the tiresome business of actually playing out of the way so that they can do…well, whatever it is people do at the top of GuildWars…PvP presumably.
This leads to a massively jaded and dismissive population, more interested in metagaming than any kind of appreciation of the world they are in. I can appreciate that come the third or fourth go at it all, the sheen of wonder might be a little tarnished, but seeing the message ‘5 of 6 members of your party want to skip this cinematic’ two seconds into the sequence really does shove the sharp pin of min-maxing, into the bright red balloon of escapism, I find. It’s not as if I even ‘Roleplay’ anymore, long since having had all that naive idealism ground out of me, but I am quite interested in the story and am trying to make the most of my first sightings of all these wonderfully detailed places and monsters. I’m not expecting any kind of method-acting, but it might be nice to get any kind of reaction at all from the other five people I’m doing the mission with. The only way I could tell they were not NPC Henchmen was the fact that Henchmen follow me, and don’t race on ahead and pick their own targets.
They also seem to have dispensed with the Holy Trinity of Tank, Healer and Crowd Control, and the thing degenerates into a hectic DPS zerg often. This irritates me a bit, but that’s probably just my own fault, having spent a lifetime obsessively overanalysing the usual MMO combat ballet. The idea that it can be as hectic and frenetic as just ‘Everyone attack that one!’ is still sinking in a bit.
All this is assuming that you can actually get five other GuildWars players to sit still in the pre-mission lobby areas long enough for the group to fill up. It’s the usual thing; jumping around in circles, spamming ‘gogogo!!1!’ on team chat, and generally committing the heinous crime of Making Me Think You Are A Liability. I blame lack of credit card registration, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a high concentration of ADHD sufferers in any one place, ever before. The towns are no better, filled with the most inane prattle I’ve ever seen in text form, along with attendant calls to ‘STFU’, invitations to ‘Make me’, the usual massive floods of WTB!1!! and WTS!!1!, etc etc. I know enough not to feed the flames, but the accumulated cacophony soon floods out the chat window beyond usability, and turns the brain to mush.
What made me finally turn off ALL general chat channels, for the first time ever in any game, was the overwhelming ridiculous faux ‘lesbian’ attention whore ‘/dance’ love-ins, complete with inept flirting going at the various banks. YA RLY, we all know that sometimes, boys like to pretend to be girls while on that thar interweb – stop that spamming and go play the actual game! Hell, they could be real lesbians for all I know...point is they're very annoying.
I mean for godsakes, in terms of sexual expression, the game is more frigid than World of Warcraft, consisting of one ‘/dance’ and no ‘/flirt’ soundclips, but still they spam this crap. Really…if you want to explore your sexuality online, it’s Second Life for the win – you can make your own animations in there, which is at least marginally creative, and considerably less disruptive and cringeworthy. As it is, ‘Lion’s Arch E-1’ makes Ironforge Auction House sound like a quiet evening in a Victorian Gentleman’s Club Smoking Room, complete with after-dinner brandy and cigars.
It seems the best one can expect from the average GuildWars player is stony silence and methodical efficiency. At worst, abuse, ridicule, one-upmanship and ill-phrased and misspelled smacktalk. All in all, it’s a good job that the majority of the world is Instanced, and there are enough NPC henchmen to effectively solo and still have a full party. Step through any town gate, and all is bliss again. This does have to be the first time I’ve put everyone on Ignore though…I can still be surprised by the Internet…who knew? What I do know, is that GuildWars presents a strong case for why you should have to have a Credit Card, even for a free game. It won’t filter them all out, but it’ll help a bit.
Still, it’s not all a loss. My friend, who recommended it to me in the first place, also recommended me to their guild as well, and this does seem to be the best way to enjoy the game – with a small group of regular friends, or at least, bearable people, and to hell with everyone else. With everyone muted the towns and villages take on a whole new character, and become the tranquil rest-stops between campaigns that they were probably supposed to be.
It all leads me to the conclusion that GuildWars isn’t really an MMO – at least not in the way I understand them, but makes for a decent hack-n-slash LAN-game, best enjoyed with existing friends. I guess it’s possible to meet new friends in there, but on the whole, you’d be better off bringing your own.
It is also not going to satisfy my long-term obsession with the MMO as a gaming lifestyle, being neither deep enough, nor long enough, compared against the more usual MMOs; EQ2, WoW, etc. So I’ve gone and grabbed an Anarchy Online freebie account too, for those evenings when I just want to veg out and grind something. It was that or EVE Online again, and I really need a clear deck before I try that one again...