1. Induction
First things first: as a follower of gaming culture, why have I avoided the MMORPG genre until now? Two main reasons: firstly, I tend to buy games on the cheap years after their original release. Gaming would otherwise be too much of a strain on my modest income. By this stage in the life of a typical MMORPG like World of Warcraft, the online world is populated by players who know the whole game in and out, have developed very powerful avatars and are often the loudest voices in the community. It all seems rather Johnny-Come-Lately to enter into the experience at this stage.
Secondly, the standard model of payment for MMORPG is a monthly subscription. This is a model with dubious merits. It compels players to participate in order to get their money's worth, rather than strictly out of pleasure, and it brings up the ugly spectre of gaming addiction. How do you get people to keep paying for something, month after month? You keep giving them more to do. How do you make sure they don't run out of things to do? The standard solution is to implement a systems whereby the player accumulates in-game rewards and advantages at a torturously slow pace through simple, repetitive actions - the lowest level of emotional and intellectual investment in any game system, computer-based or otherwise. You make sure that these rewards are not only desirable, but necessary in order to access the drip feed of new content. As another side effect, the players who have spent most on the game over the years expect progressively more in return, and a sense of entitlement poisons the community.
I've always tended to prefer the idea of a computer game as a complete work, like a novel or film. You buy, play, put down, share and evaluate. But Guild Wars 2 promised two things which caught my eye: firstly, no monthly subscription; one-time purchase only. Secondly, a mixture of single-player story and multi-player events interwoven throughout the game, so that the satisfaction of a narrative arc is mixed together with the intrinsic emotional rewards of playing together cooperatively with other people. Since the game was only released last month, it seemed worth jumping in.
2. The World
The single most impactful aspect of Guild Wars 2 on start-up - that is, after the player has registered their account and created an avatar - is the gameworld itself. Guild Wars 2 takes place in a largely pre-industrial fantasy land called Tyria. For the most part, the explorable surface is somewhere between agricultural and wilderness. There are caves, plains, peaks, forests, rivers and coastlines, as well as farms, mills and vineyards. The major settlements are made of stone, wood and iron, and embedded into hillsides and slabs of mountain. They are vast as far as installations go, but miniscule compared to a city like London.
 |
| It's not unusual to spot an imposing silhouette in the misty distance. |
Since Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone founded the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series in 1980 (and probably before then), the role-playing game has been somewhat at odds with more conventional ideas of what a game consists of. Rather than focusing on skill and strategy in a transparently functional arena (think of how purely practical the design of a chess board or football pitch is), RPGs emphasise an alternative reality experience, encouraging the player to immerse themselves in an imaginary world and frame their decisions in the context of their impact on that world.
MMORPGS hand the responsibility of imagining and maintaining that world over to the developer's creative team. In Guild Wars 2, you and your fellow players are plunged headlong into a sprawling landscape and armed with a map, the scale of which indicates you could travel for hours in any direction and not find the edge of the world. Since my character is of the Viking-like Norn race (who are giants compared to the game's humans), I began in the foothills at the base of a massive range of snowy mountain peaks, not far from the Great Lodge of Hoelbrak, my character's home settlement.
There are no strict limitations on what you can do next: seek out hot springs in the mountains for bathing, go hunting the local wildlife (some immediately recognisable, others imaginative variations on various creatures of fantasy and myth), feed fish to hungry bear cubs, join in the occasional battle against local rebels, and so on. As you tentatively explore the immediate region, the list of potential activities grows and grows. The game rewards you for nearly all of them, even for simple exploration, with 'experience' - a measure of your character's growth that eventually makes them more physically powerful and gives them access to an ever-expanding range of offensive and defensive abilities.
'Vista' points - particularly difficult to reach, high up places - not only award you with experience, but give you the option to have the camera pan over the landscape, taking in the sights from new angles.
The only thing stopping you exploring this whole virtual world on foot, peaceably and without partaking in any story-based adventuring shenanigans, is the wealth of hostile creatures. Venture too far at a low level of experience, and you will soon find beasts that are able to knock you cold with a few swipes, forcing you to teleport back to an already-explored area (although you never die as such). Guild Wars 2 therefore gently (but not subtly) encourages you to balance your wanderlust with the completion of personal quests, aiding the locals to each region with various tasks, banding together with other players, accepting skill challenges, material-gathering, smithery and small-scale arms trading - all activities that help increase your survivability when heading out on your own.
One might ask: why play a game at all for the scenery? What's the point? How does this improve at all on the chess board or the football pitch? My answer would be that playing Guild Wars 2 invokes awe, which is a particular pleasure not always found in games. It invokes awe on two levels: firstly, the quality of the graphics and design, even on the lower settings captured in my screenshots, is high enough to stir some of what our brains might feel when actually staring out into a real life landscape. In the icy mountains, one looks out from a priory carved out of the rock and feels something of the chill and desolation of actual tundra, while in the verdant foothills, there is a pervasive warmth and serenity. This, despite the fact that if you removed the surface textures and sound effects, the two regions are near identical - your character moves at the same pace through mud or snow, there is no shift in temperature, little change in population and no greater or lesser need for provisions. Throughout the game world, there are only three types of surface: water, traversable terrain and unclamberable steep terrain. There is no 'uphill' or 'downhill' that impacts on travel; you can either move across a piece of land or else you slide off it.
The second level of awe one feels is for the technical competence of the level architecture. It's the same kind of awe we feel towards any well-executed piece of art; we recognise the huge number of man hours, the attention to detail and the level of skill that has gone into manufacturing this vast world with its myriad pseudo-natural formations and individual installations. There is sometimes even a sense of history in the way the world has been constructed: the ruins of the ancient kingdom of Ascalon, replete with angry ghosts, speak to the sacking and conquering that took place in the first Guild Wars game. The central city of Lion's Arch (pictured above) was previously destroyed by a flood and has been rebuilt, mostly out of the repurposed wrecks of pirate ships, some of which lie stranded on high cliffs, where they would have come to rest when the flood waters receded.
So too are territories particularised depending on the dominant race. The lion-like Charr build towns mostly out of metal, with a particular fondness for dome structures and watchtowers. They also work on sawmills, farms and factories which pepper the countryside. The Norn, meanwhile, seem to rely on hunting for their food and live in over-sized log cabin structures, some of which lie forlorn and abandoned. In the north of Snowden Drifts, the lonely and dilapidated Owl Lodge is a reminder of one of the lesser spirits of Norn mythology: Owl, who died fighting the ice dragon Jormag.
When you come to a stretch of sparse, muddy land pockmarked with tree stumps, on the other hand, you know you're entering centaur territory. The centaur decimate their surrounding natural resources and build skin-and-bone encampments on top of huge mounds of earth which they festoon with sharpened branches to keep intruders out. In the far south lies a completed eradicated culture - the land of Orr - which has been overtaken by the Risen (Guild Wars 2's zombies). The air is thick with flies, the shores rainbowed by oilspills and in ruined structures you find the few remains of a once-prosperous civilisation: books, busts and tapestries.
Then there are the individual details, which seem to be endless. I was delighted to find what seems to be a printing press in the secret basement of a limestone fort: an indication that the room is used by one of the game's secret societies.
 |
| Printing sheet after sheet of militant propaganda no doubt. |
It's easy to understand why some gamers become so involved in these online universes. Tagging along to get a new phone from one of the three Orange shops on Oxford Street the other day, I couldn't help but think of how preferable it would be to adventure endlessly in a world where form and function are divorced, where you move at the same pace, with the same level of comfort, across snowy mountains or through rich groves, instead of picking your way through a sea of partitioned property, requiring money and a passport to go any distance, serving chiefly as a walking wallet to half the human beings you interact with.
Speaking of interaction, Guild Wars 2 is designed to make working with other players relatively simple on various levels. After you start, you will quickly be invited to join a guild, which puts you in touch with dozens of other players, no matter where they are in the world. You can talk with them via a messenger system at all times, which proves to be fast and inefficient way of seeking help and guidance without needing to exit the game. Any player, whether they're in your guild or not, can be seen and addressed when you're physically near them. You can help them in their battles, heal them, even resurrect them, and then disappear from their lives, all in the space of a few minutes.
One of my early experiences involved spying a chest on top of a stack in Lion's Arch. I put out the word that I'd spied this chest, and two other members of my guild came racing over to help me puzzle it out. Between us, we scoured the city for hidden entrances, eventually finding an underwater tunnel through a well that led to a cave system. Inside the cave system, there was a series of difficult jumps that had to be performed in order to emerge on the plateau from where the chest could be accessed. Since my Norn character is fairly large, I found the cave network headache-inducingly claustrophobic and kept fluffing my jumps. One of the other players stayed inside the cave to literally coach me through it, and eventually, with my thumb knackered from jamming the space bar, I made it out.
At another instance, I entered a town to find the local soldiers, merchants and villagers laid out unconscious and a giant rampaging. Foolishly, I decided to take on the giant myself, and was knocked down in one blow. My character lay there, in some sort of between-death state, unable to move. The game gave me the option of restarting from a point some way back, but I decided to go and make a sandwich instead.
When I came back to the computer, someone was reviving me, and a party of players had turned up at the village. Between us, over the course of about 20 minutes, we managed to take down the giant, taking turns playing cat and mouse with him while allies poured arrows into his back.
 |
| Me and a party of strangers joining forces against a common foe. |
There are criticisms to be answered though: some critics refer to Guild Wars 2 as a 'themepark' game. The world is ultimately not only artificial, but unchanging, held in stasis so that visitors who arrive a year or more apart have identical experiences. The player moves through it, being entertained along the way, but all the alterations they make are illusory. Because there are no stakes, there is ultimately no game - just endless distractions. This is distinct from computer games which run particular instances of their worlds. You may always be able to restart or relive the experience, but these are arguably in parallel realities - in each distinct game, you are permitted to alter the world and ultimately succeed. In chess, the board is reset, but no individual game is kept in an eternal cycle.
To some extent, this criticism hits home, and it's more accurate to think of Guild Wars 2 as an online space in which games can take place, rather than a game in itself. It is, in one sense, a stadium, one on a grander scale than we can ever achieve in the realm of the physical.
The other serious criticism at this stage is that the field of view (the extent of the world you can see at any one time) is fixed, and is oddly restricted, particularly vertically. This is medically proven to cause issues for some players, including migraines and nausea, and most modern games feature a 'slider' to enable adjustment of FOV for the comfort of the user. Arena Net, the developers of Guild Wars 2, have published a press release saying they have no plans to introduce a slider or to make alterations to the existing field of view, and although they have provided justifications, these have been justly criticised as illogical. Even though I haven't experienced any headaches as yet, it is noticeable at first how 'unnatural' the camera set-up feels, and it's difficult to avoid the feeling that you are always seeing less of this brilliantly imagined world than you should. This also causes issues in combat, but I'll come to that later.
No comments:
Post a Comment