MMO Weekly: Why Guild Wars 2 Will Rock

08 Dec 2009 at 00:00:00 by Jeff Hollis

Hello there, my fellow sojourners in geekspace, and welcome to this week's edition of MMO Weekly. In this week's adventure, we'll explore a little MMO production company known as ArenaNet, and we'll talk about two of their MMO projects.

As you may (or, if you've only been playing MMOs for a couple of years, may not) already be aware, ArenaNet published an MMO called Guild Wars (GW) waaaay back in April of 2005. GW was, and is, a groundbreaking game full of great features. There are so many things about GW that are beyond good, it would be hard to list them all. GW allows players to make hybrid classes, the art is utterly fantastic, the expansions are actually full versions of the game, the music is great, there is tons of content, blah blah blah. GW is simply a great MMO.

The problem with GW is that it has committed two mortal, deadly sins. The first of its major sins was that it launched within six months of another huge, successful MMO - in this case, World of Warcraft. GW dropped off the radar because WoW was simply so big and successful at that time. WoW overshadowed Guild Wars in a very significant way 

The second sin GW committed was racial exclusivity, or the "humans only" error. While I don't want this to cause a big debate, here's the skinny:-
Years ago, an analysis of MMOs was done, and it was determined that Asian players don't care much about race options in an MMO. However, western players care about race options deeply. As you may have already guessed, players could choose to play a human, a human, or a human in Guild Wars, and nothing else. Sure, there were different kinds of humans, but the variety was...well, there wasn't any, really.

The problem with committing these two sins is that both of them seriously gimp the potential success of an MMO. No matter how many things you do right, these things will limit an MMO's appeal to the public. In the case of GW, too many people were simply too excited about WoW to give GW a second look. If they'd launched six months later, GW might have become a much, much bigger game. What's more, the humans only error limited the appeal of a game, particularly in the West. Go figure.

Despite this, and to no one's surprise, GW is a game that remains huge in a number of Asian markets and has a much smaller following in the US, EU, and elsewhere. Five years and three expansions later it's still a very, very good MMO.

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