Guild Wars Diary #3

Overview: Guild Wars 2 is my first experience playing a massive multi-player online roleplaying game (MMORPG). It's an involving and sometimes overwhelming experience, since the game is steeped in genre conventions that have been built up over two decades, but also revolutionises and revitalises some of these conventions. My aim here is to record my critical response and analysis in such a way that it can be easily followed by gamers and non-gamers alike!

Links to previous entries:
Guild Wars Diary #1: Induction, The World
Guild Wars Diary #2: Character Creation

4. Story-telling

Although it's now normal for a computer game in almost any genre - from first person shooters to sandbox - to feature a story campaign, it's long been the defining feature of the role-playing game in particular, stretching back to Fighting Fantasy books I mentioned earlier, and the birth of tabletop Dungeons and Dragons. On some level, the genre is seen as part game, part collaborative story-telling, with the reader/player taking an active role in shaping the narrative.

In this part of character creation, the player can choose who their mentor was, a selection which affects the direction of the story.

It's no surprise that Guild Wars 2 promises a lot in terms of player involvement. At the time of writing, there is a section on the official website called 'Personal Story' which boldly claims that there are "thousands of possible variations" in the way the story can evolve and that "no two players will have the exact same experience". In an embedded video featurette, Ree Shoesbee, one of the designers, assures us that key decisions will affect the story's direction, and that "the story really reflects the game you want to see". The official Guild Was 2 sub-forum on the personal story section is bizarrely subtitled: "It really is all about you."

Emphasising 'you' and 'your' in marketing has been all the rage for the past decade, and it's perhaps unsurprising that the game falls far short of this enticing spiel. But before discussing the inevitable issues, it's worth taking a moment to reflect on just how ambitious the story-telling aspect of Guild Wars 2 is. In a game-world which is forever populated by dozens, perhaps hundreds of other players, many undoubtedly more skilful and experienced than you, there is still a sincere attempt to convince you that your own experiences are unique and that your skills might impact on the fate of the world. Plot points and events are divided between things that are visible to all players and things that are visible only to individuals (and anyone they've brought along for the ride). In the latter, of course, your avatar becomes a central character and a sense of chronological progression is allowed to pervade, as schemes are thwarted and dire eventualities draw ever nearer.

Cleverly, as certain areas of the world become explorable, they seem to reflect events in your personal story. For example, the Straits of Devastation zone features an imposing metal military outpost called Fort Trinity. It's always there, but players will likely only be strong enough to advance into this area once they've got to the stage in their story where the races of Tyria have formed a pact and elected to build the fort.

By the time you're strong enough to face this dragon, you'll have likely reached a part of your story where an all-out assault by its allies has begun, even though the dragon is technically present in the game world from the moment you start.

The way this is interwoven with the multiplayer activities is appreciably clever, if not ingenious: at all times, a green star on the map tells you where you need to be in terms of your own personal quest. Once you get there, you're transported to a kind of alternative reality. The immediate surroundings are identical, but there are no longer other players crossing your path (unless you've invited others to join you on your quest). Stray too far from the flashpoint where the story is occurring, and you return to the multiplayer world. Finish that short chapter of the story, and again, you return to the multiplayer world, this time with another star in another part of the map to travel towards.

Because getting between the story points necessitates travel, usually on foot, it's almost inevitable that you'll become entangled in many of the 'subplots' of the world before your reach your destination. These subplots are divided into 'dynamic events' and 'renown heart' quests. The latter are activities you can take part in in a certain area to aid some general objective - say, helping out on a farm or disabling enemy traps. The former are ever-changing cyclical mini-stories that can affect the surrounding area and often invite participation from large groups of players.

So for example, in the Harathi Hinterlands, there is a constant territorial war between humans and centaur. Help the humans take control of an outpost, and they will begin planning an all-out assault on a large piece of land which necessitates more players joining in. Leave the humans to their fate and the centaur may well in turn occupy a larger area, meaning less friendly faces as you continue your journey.

Here, a couple argue. He is thinking of joining a rogue enemy faction; she thinks he's betraying her. By following him and preventing him getting killed by the very faction he wishes to join, you can reunite them.

These mini-stories often feature the best and most immersive writing in the game. Help drive centaurs out of a village, and a child will tell you: "You were amazing!" A simple touch, but one which helps in convincing you your actions have real impact. The battlefield dialogue is largely uninspired, but the real treasures are in the smaller quests, where you're more likely to find flawed and witty characters. At the Meatoberfest celebrations in Diessa Plateau, one character insists he's the mayor of the event.

"Mayor? We never elected you," replies another.

"I won the barbecue competition ten years in a row. That qualifies me."

Here, a treasure hunt has ended badly for the leader of the expedition, but well for her comrades; they've uncovered a keg of beer!

The player isn't forced to appreciate these instances. In fact, they're easily missed if you don't pay attention to your surroundings, since the interaction is often between other characters. Sometimes a quest won't even begin if you ignore the pleas of a particular character, because they need your help to even make a start on their task.

Unfortunately, as you return to already traversed areas, the artificiality of the experience becomes harder to ignore, as the same events play out again and again. Occasionally, though, this is the source of a good joke. When you fail to save a particular captain from a man-eating spider, his second-in-command stoically says, "We'll have to make do until his brother comes along." His brother, presumably, is fated to the exact same demise, and so on and so forth through an infinity of family tragedy.

But what about the personal story itself? This is the part of the game where you are the hero, where you can't rely on other players for support, and where the main narrative of the game unspools. Alas, it's something of an ambitious mess. Firstly, there is a jarring disconnect, in that the principle actors in the personal story fawn over you, praise you, promote you and generally treat you like a world-famous superstar, while the rest of the time you travel the world as an unknown adventurer.

Secondly, in attempting to stay true to their aim of giving each player a unique personal journey, much of the story is fragmented into individual assignments that have little to no connection to each other and offer no satisfying character development over the long term.

A particular problem is the rate at which characters enter and exit your story. Many will only be present for a single ten-minute mission, during which their role is purely perfunctory: to provide an info-dump and make it seem as if you aren't quite on your own. Those that hang around for longer are, for the most part, one-dimensional and dull, their dialogue rendered all too often in a monotonous drawl, whether they're caught in the heat of combat, arguing or providing sagely advice.

Two recurring characters, who also feature in the novelised prequel to the game. I would struggle to define them by anything apart from their looks and ''great warrior' status. Eir, on the right, is my character's personal mentor, yet there is a pronounced lack of chemistry between the two of them.

By way of emotional pay-off, there are several attempts to establish close relationships with certain characters. These are almost always forced. Typically, a friendly, bubbly character is appointed as your partner for a number of missions. To be fair, these characters are fairly memorable and fun to be around. They will then be unceremoniously removed or killed off in a contrived scene, causing your character to deliver a dour monologue about honouring their memory.

To make things worse, the way the in-game engine delivers narrative denouements is clumsy at best, ridiculous at worst. Most of the conversation takes place against a flat background, with two participants standing facing each other, taking it in turns to say their lines. The acting is wooden, and the models seemingly incapable of physically emoting beyond a flinch or wave of the hand.

Often, the characters in these staged scenes don't even make eye contact.

When a dramatic interlude is rendered in the midst of the action, Guild Wars 2 fares little better. One particularly poor example sees an offshore fortress being overrun by an endless tide of Risen enemies. At all times, the doors to the fortress remain wide open. The number of troops manning this supposedly important outpost seems to be not more than a dozen at full strength. The commanding officer remains rooted to one spot throughout the battle, at first refusing to believe an attack is imminent, then insisting that a loss is unthinkable, finally dying from a blow I never actually saw. At the end of the battle, with escape looking less and less likely, an ally takes an absurd amount of time to make his farewell speech before sacrificing himself. The sacrifice consists of finally closing the doors to the fortress - him on one side, my character on the other. To all intents and purposes, there's no reason he couldn't have remained on the less dangerous side.

A similar death report, later in the game, is delivered while the screen is filled with nothing but featureless sea.

A rare instance of genuinely witty dialogue in the personal story.

The story is not entirely without charm, and the over-arcing plot is suitably epic. But GW2's developers have, to some extent, ended up with the worst of both worlds when it comes to combining an event-driven story with a player-driven story. The merit of an event-driven story is that it can be tightly plotted, but that is not in evidence here. The merit of a player-driven story is that the player is immersed in the role of their character, but that opportunity is squandered by the character appearing in cut scenes and delivering dialogue (as well as making decisions) that fails to take into account any of the player's own ideas about who their character is. In fact, once you reach a certain point in the story, whatever you experiences leading up til then, all player characters will behave identically: a serious issue for a game that is supposedly about role-playing.

As a final remark, perhaps the single most disappointing part of the personal story is that at around the half way mark, the player's role as chief protagonist is subsumed by another character: a Sylvari scholar who is fated (Harry Potter style) to defeat the arch-enemy. This would be agreeable if this character were a well-drawn, complex personality who begged some degree of emotional investment. Unfortunately, he's a foppish charisma vacuum with a put-on upper class English accent and a cod-Shakespearean diction, who quickly pronounces himself a Marshall after seeing a vision of his future successes. As a result, the story quickly runs out of steam.

Twat.

Guild Wars Diary #2

Overview: Guild Wars 2 is my first experience playing a massive multi-player online roleplaying game (MMORPG). It's an involving and sometimes overwhelming experience, since the game is steeped in genre conventions that have been built up over two decades, but also revolutionises and revitalises some of these conventions. My aim here is to record my critical response and analysis in such a way that it can be easily followed by gamers and non-gamers alike!

Links to previous entries:
Guild Wars Diary #1: Induction, The World

3. Character Creation

In most computer gaming genres, it's someone else's job to create the character avatar. Although you might be the one who guides Lara Croft or Manny Calavera towards their eventual destinies, their histories (and their futures) are already written. Western role-playing games have ploughed an almost unique furrow through the past half century of gaming in persistently asking the player to conceive of their own avatar and mould him or her through a combination of possible characteristics, such as race, profession, class, sex, special skills, moral alignment and some elements of their past.

The trade-off is superficially simple: the player is likely to feel closer to, and more protective of, their avatar if he or she is responsible for creating them. In a way, they're like children. The avatar might also represent personal fantasies of the kind of person we might like to be, and enable us to live out these fantasies in a safe environment. On the other hand, with the game developers unable to predict or account for the thousands of iterations of character which a player might opt for, the ensuing story inevitably revolves less around the character and more around events at large.

Guild Wars 2 reliably follows the RPG route, offering you five races (of which human is one), eight professions and an array of physical characteristics with which to distinguish your character. There are also a few choices which determine your personality. For my first character, a Norn, I chose to be defined by 'charm' (as opposed to 'ferocity' or 'dignity' - the other options), wisdom (through the choice of Raven as my guiding spirit of the wild) and drunken antics (through the selection of a recent memorable incident in the character's life).

The first two of these, as far as I can discern so far, have little to no impact on the way the game plays. My character is generally a braggart and a brawler and not at all who I envisaged when I was putting her together in my mind. My 'charm' simply gives me very occasional dialogue options when speaking to non-player characters (NPCs). The last choice, the recent incident, does affect which path you take in the story - it turns out that in my drunken stupor, I absconded with an expensive war machine and lost it, which results in me being seconded to a Charr warband in an effort to retrieve the lost vehicle. After this arc of the story, however, nothing more is said of it.

Norn ranger Soudoutsubame

For a profession, I chose ranger, a choice which gives me the option of an animal companion, which held some appeal for me. The profession choice, however, only affects combat; it changes the story not one iota.

As for the options for physical appearance, these appear to be expansive but are actually oddly limiting. I chose a female avatar because male Norns can only be hulking goliaths. Skinniness is not an option (unless you opt for the Sylvari race instead, who are half-plant). The women, on the other hand, are not permitted any girth whatsoever, and although I picked the smallest possible chest-to-hip ratio, my Norn still has ample bosom and a lithe figure.

Across the five races, there doesn't seem to be any option at all for overweight characters, or even middle-age spread, and precious few chances to inscribe age and experience into their faces (I found one face with battle scars and opted for that). And although noses can be lengthened, chins squared and eyes angled, the most extreme settings only result in a look like cosmetic surgery gone wrong, rather than faces full of character, or anything that conveys everyday oddballness.

Things are even worse when creating humans, as these pictures demonstrate:

The widest frame available when creating a female human character.

The only face available with any 'lines' or signs of ageing.

My best attempts to stray from bland prettiness, resulting in a sort of Asian look.

A similarly problem exists with regard to the height slider. Shorter characters are not, as you might expect, stockier, and taller characters never come across as willowy. Instead, the game permits a world of perfect miniaturisation and proportionate scaling that is quite disconcerting when you get close to other players:

Here, a human stands next to a Norn (not the sword is behind the human). Fair enough; the Norns are supposed to be giants. However ...

... here my Norn character stands in front of another Norn.

There are a number of options for tattoo patterns on the Norn, in a choice of colours, as well as a wide range of colours to choose from in customising clothing. In the end, I did manage to create a black Viking with a Japanese name, so there is, at least, the possibility of doing something unusual.

I've also spent time creating human and Sylvari characters (the other two races, Charr and Asura, being more animalistic) and the upshot is this: character creation in Guild Wars 2 denies the player the ability to create characters who are physically representative of the vast majority of human beings. What it does attempt to do is to suggest other features - primarily colour and personality choices - as the principle way of expressing individuality. This is both a strength and weakness of a genre whose appeal lies at least partly in finding ways for human beings to explore aspects of their personality that modern life doesn't permit.

Sylvari thief Weatherteller. You can choose what colour he glows in the dark as well as kitting him out to be a walking  rhubarb stalk with autumnal beech leaves for hair. 

This potential for self-expression is particularly evident in the profession system, the part of character creation that has the single most noticeable impact on the way the game plays. Arguably, this is where Guild Wars 2 is most steadfastly conventional, for although its professions have unusual names and features, many of the archetypes are instantly recognisable: the weak but highly dexterous thief, who attacks from the shadows, giving life to our predilection to exercise subterfuge and predatory cunning; the Prospero-like elementalist, whose intimate knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the four elements speaks to our need to be endlessly adaptable and balanced; the simple warrior, whose brute force is for those players who tire of thinking their way through problems, and so on.

And rangers? They just like having wild animal companions. Here is Shodoutsubame again with Nook the juvenile raven.

It's a shame, however, that this mode of exploring the self has to be enacted through a gaming system that adheres too readily to Western standards of beauty. The humanoid characters may not always be sexy, but they never stray too far from the symmetrical sportsman/sportswoman physique which we hold to be more desirable. The clothing is, thankfully, somewhat practical on the more heavily armoured classes, if not on the lightly armoured magic users. As a 12-rated game, it's unsurprising that Guild Wars 2 treads the somewhat hypocritical ground of avoiding frank treatment of sex and nudity entirely whilst still allowing for titillation (not to mention excessive violence, which I'll come onto).

Human mesmer, as ready for battle as she ever will be.

It's only through the non-humanoid races that Guild Wars 2 strikes a blow for acceptance of the wider field of physical individuality, and I wouldn't be surprised if many players identified more readily with characters from these races than the mannequin-like humans, the women descended from Barbie, the men from Marks & Spencer catalogue models. The most played race, as I write, however, is human, which perhaps suggests that many people are more interested in the fantasy of being 'normal'.

Guild Wars 2 Diary #1

Overview: Guild Wars 2 is my first experience playing a massive multi-player online roleplaying game (MMORPG). It's an involving and sometimes overwhelming experience, since the game is steeped in genre conventions that have been built up over two decades, but also revolutionises and revitalises some of these conventions. My aim here is to record my critical response and analysis in such a way that it can be easily followed by gamers and non-gamers alike!

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.