Add to BookmarksIt’s been about two weeks since the elementalist was revealed, giving us plenty of time to digest the new information. Now we have an insight to questing in Guild Wars 2: The Dynamic Event
You can read the full article here and the general gist of it is this:
An event in the area/world will cause new events to become available depending on the actions of the players.
For those of you who have played various MMOs you’ll know that the general flow of a quest is this:
Go to quest giver → collect quest → kill x amount of y critter, who is minding it’s own business in a field a good journey away from the quest giver → return to quest give and collect reward, usually ignoring the small novel worth of text.
And after umpteen levels of this you can understand why people cringe at the thought of having to level a new character up to max. At least in WAR you could almost completely ignore PvE and level up by bashing the opposing realm’s skulls in.
Now with GW2 we’ll hopefully start to see a step away from the standard quest model and towards one that actually feels like you’ve had an impact on the world. Example:
I could be exploring an find a floating crystal. Me being me I decide to poke it with a stick. This causes the crystal to release the monsters it was holding, which begin to attack the near by village. Depending on how successful this is the village will either survive or be destroyed (until it is rebuilt) and from that a new line of quests will appear.
This also means that there are now consequences for failure in GW2 rather than ‘Oh noes I failed the quest. No matter I’ll just go get it again’ that so many MMOs have. It’ll be a fresh change to know that those Tengu over there will really raid that caravan and kidnap people if you don’t go and defend it.
Coupled with that everyone who takes part in these dynamic events will receive full XP and loot, thus abolishing the idea of kill stealing or queuing for a boss, GW2 looks to be redefining how quests work in MMOs and brings more focus on the player’s actions.
If Anet can pull this off and pull it off well then I will be the first to congratulate them as it will mean that other MMO developers will go ‘Oh hey that’s a good idea lets create a variant of it or lets improve on it’. We’ll start getting MMO’s that feel like you’re apart of the story rather than feeling like you’re just watching from the side lines as the NPC characters shape the world.
Overall this has me very interested and given that we’ve been told that the Devs are actually playing dynamic events rather than saying ‘This is what we’re planning to have’ I have strong faith that Anet will pull this off.
Have fun
Mal.
