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In terms of 'MMO-ness', Guild Wars is pretty close to WoW. Sure, the game is heavily instanced, but then WoW relies on the fact that most players aren't bunched up in a small area using skills. The game is designed so that the server can completely ignore anyone farther than about 80 yards of a given player's position, with respect to that player doing anything at all. The average case of which isn't much different to Guild Wars handling 16-32 players in a small area.

Instances are bigger in WoW, but WoW doesn't bother with dynamic collision detection. Nor does WoW allow commands to be queued up. Sure you can travel around in WoW instead of clicking to teleport to places, but Guild Wars simply has no need for timesinks like that.

So I can't really see why you would want to separate Guild Wars from other MMOs when in fact it really isn't doing much less work in the multiplayer regard.

I'm quite aware of what Guild Wars does -- I work at ArenaNet. What it does, technically, is not the issue at hand. Guild Wars plays like a slightly-larger-scale Diablo II with a glorified graphical chat. It doesn't fit the large scale persistence requirements that most people dream about when they dream up their MMO.

I personally am working on a MMORPG style game in my free time. Personally I do it for fun, programming exp, and hopefully it will look good for college when I need to apply next year.

I think that the main obsession with mmo's is that people think they will hit it big and make lots of money. Not that it doesn't happen, Bungie was started by some guy that made pong for a mac so. Personally I would like to see an MMO like guild wars on a console, preferably xbox (i don't think WII or PS3 force broadband and WII doesn't have a mic).

Quote: Original post by gonegaming12
I personally am working on a MMORPG style game in my free time. Personally I do it for fun, programming exp, and hopefully it will look good for college when I need to apply next year.

Can you show us or tell us about anything related to the MMORPG you've been working on. Not conceptual game play stuff, but actually working product?

Quote: I'm quite aware of what Guild Wars does -- I work at ArenaNet. What it does, technically, is not the issue at hand. Guild Wars plays like a slightly-larger-scale Diablo II with a glorified graphical chat. It doesn't fit the large scale persistence requirements that most people dream about when they dream up their MMO.

Very cool that you work at ArenaNet. And presumably you know the limitations of the Guild Wars engine rather well. The fact remains - in neither GW or WoW can I affect the game world permanently in any way, both are completely static, and both require actions to be highly localised. In terms of "large-scale persistence" I can't see a huge amount of difference.

Quote: Original post by ibebrett

Quote: Original post by gonegaming12
I personally am working on a MMORPG style game in my free time. Personally I do it for fun, programming exp, and hopefully it will look good for college when I need to apply next year.

Can you show us or tell us about anything related to the MMORPG you've been working on. Not conceptual game play stuff, but actually working product?

It is still a work in progress. Nothing fancy atm you can walk around and attack stuff. Attacking is messed up atm though since i changed the draw order and I can't seem to track down the bug. I'm thinking its in the map editor but i dont know for sure. http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=490886

theres a link with some screenshots on it.

I have played guildwars and world of warcraft. Guildwars and WOW are very similar except GW has separated map sections and pvp is separate from pve. From what I have heard GW2 is basically going to be WoW but with no monthly fee.

Oh god... GW2... I hope it doesn't go that path. Free or not... the gameplay is so primitive and terrible!

What about the classic text based MUDs? Those were early MMO's that have dedicated followers even to this day. I think the craze about 3D MMO's is the same craze that struck people when Quake came out.

yeah its all about idealism. everyone from outside the industry who plays a video game thinks "wow wouldn't it be cool if you could..." and then suddenly they realize what a tremendous gift they have for game design. Its why these forums are constantly flooded with people posting stuff like "I want to put together a game, I can't program and I can't draw or model but I have these great ideas and I just know I could manage a team..."

fairly aggravating to anyone who's actually put work into making a game. I remember about 4-5 years ago, a friend of mine had me meet with some young businessman. My friend is a fantastic artist (2D and 3D) and I have been programming for over a decade. This businessman (not sure what he did exactly, but he had some money to support his idealism) had an idea for my friend and I to make a game about.

He wanted us to allow the player to run around sandbox style in a photo-realistic rendition of New York City. Wow, he sure was right, it seems pretty popular.

MMO is obviously one of the most (if not THE most) money-sucking genre. So, until some genius find any other money-draining genre, MMO craze will still be around us.

Because of World of Warcraft.

All aboard the bandwagon!