May 14, 2014

  • A preview of ArcheAge through the eyes of a Guild Wars 2 player

    Kristyna and I are looking into ArcheAge and seeing if we want to give it a try. Her and I share the uncommon perspective where Guild Wars 2 is the first MMO we've really invested a lot in. Naturally, your first experience of something is one that is fundamental to shaping your understanding, expectations, and standards for everything of its kind. However when it comes to online gaming, GW2 isn't exactly a representation of your typical MMO. I originally wrote this for Kristyna, but hopefully it'll help others who are familiar with GW2 to gain a deeper understanding of ArcheAge.

    The first thing you should know about ArcheAge is that it is fundamentally different than GW2, and most MMOs on the western market today. GW2 is classified as a "theme park" MMO. This means that, like an amusement park, it is the producer's responsibility to release new content or provide new "rides" for our amusement. I'm sure you've noticed, as far as what there is "to do" in the end game, it depends on the living story releases, filling out dailies, or doing dungeons. So in order for the game not to become stale, in order for us to keep having things to do, Anet has to keep coming up with new releases or new dungeons, or at least, revamping old ones (like FotM- it was introduced after the game was released, then was revamped, then new fractals added, etc.). In my opinion, Anet has been more than faithful in releasing new content (at least via living story). However, after a while, this structure kind of burns me out a little- always a cycle of chasing after the newest achievements and making sure I keep up with all the limited time dyes/skins before I lose the chance to attain them forever, or the cost in gold becomes a prohibitive factor. In comparison, ArcheAge is a "sand park" MMO; a unique term coined for its attempted fusion of "theme park" and "sandbox" elements. While AA will still have "theme park" elements such as dungeons and PvE quests, I'll focus on the "sandbox" elements since that's what's going to be new and different to us. In a sandbox MMO, the developers do not provide the content for players to enjoy; instead, they provide and refine tools for the players to create their own content. You can build a house, build a farm, build a castle, lead an army into war against other players' castles, become a pirate and wage naval battles, become a sky pirate and attack people in the air, be a jury in the justice system, be a mercenary... anything you want. Ok, let me slow down a bit and talk about one aspect at a time. First, exploration and transportation. GW2 is a huge world and doing map completion for the first time (or the first few zones) might be cute at first, but after a while, it can seem like just chasing after one point or the next on your map, making it a chore. Furthermore, after you complete the whole map you can instantly travel anywhere with waypoints for a negligible fee. While this is extremely convenient, it kind of demystifies the world and makes the world seem much smaller. You never really experience all the zones and areas and scenery in GW2 more than once; instead, you experience the Queensdale swamp, the Thermanova Reactor, the Frozen Maw, etc. 45,396,268 times because that's where all the world bosses are, and you just teleport to the exact spot you need to be. AA exchanges this convenience for the journey, you travel to where you need to go. Along the way, you experience the scenery, and the vastness of the world. There are no zones (unlike in GW2) which I think makes the world feel more natural and continuous. You can get attacked (by players or monsters) making the journey all the more perilous and exciting, and rewarding when you reach your destination. You can travel with other players (for protection or company), and the time you guys spend together becomes ground for unique memories and experiences. There is a vast variety of mounts and vessels, of all different looks and abilities that help you get to where you need to go faster. There are gliders that allow you to fly around, and naval ships of all different shapes and sizes with different offensive, defensive, and special abilities. And there's balance too; I'm not sure the full details on it, but I know that you can still teleport in AA (so it's not always going to be super tedious/redundant to travel). Speaking of dangers of the road, there's open world PvP with with special safe areas as well as areas that go through periods of war (open PvP) and peace (no PvP). In GW2 WvW, it's your server against a different server, in an isolated map. In AA there are four races and three factions. One faction consists of two races and is located primarily on one continent, the other faction comprised of the other two races and located on another continent, and a third pirate faction which can have any of the four races. You can PvP someone from a different faction any time you see them not in a safe area. You can PvP and steal crafting materials from people in your own faction; but if you get caught, you accumulate crime points and can be sentenced to prison (by other players). Do that enough, and you get kicked out of your home faction and you join the pirate faction, with their very own pirate island. Crafting and building is a major factor in this game. In GW2 you impact the game through dynamic events- the zerg completes the event, and now, yay, you get a safe area and some merchants or an entrance to a dungeon. In AA you literally shape the surface of the world. As I mentioned before, you can build anything you want, from houses to castles, all in the open world, seen by all, not instanced. (Your home is safe, you can set different privacy settings to choose who you allow inside.) You can craft/build the best armor and weapons in the game, ships, potions, gliders, etc. With all this crafting, you're going to need a lot of different crafting materials. Crafting materials are harvested or mined either from the open world or farms (you can raise plants or livestock). The materials are then condensed into a "bundle" which can be placed and picked up in the open world (like the boulders in GW2 or the Dwayna's Tears in the fractals with Old Tom). These bundles then need to be transported- to your house/storage from the mining site, or from your farm to the location where you want to build your house/castle, or just to be traded- either by foot or by various mounts/vessels. Along the way you can get attacked (or you can be a bandit and attack others) by players or world bosses, so it's safer to travel in groups. I feel like the risk/reward/punishment is very well balanced in the PvP in this game. It's not so extreme that if you die your character gets deleted (permadeath) or you leave your corpse behind and people can loot all your hard work and armor. (Imagine how much it'd suck if you got ganked in WvW and someone stole your Eternity.) But it's not so trivial that all that results is you waypoint and repair your armor (for free). Instead, if you get attacked in PvP then what you lose is not any of your hard earned weapons or armor, but the trade packages or bundles that you were transporting. So as you can see, the various systems in AA are all intricately tied together. Crafting, PvP, travel and transportation, exploration, housing and group housing (guild halls, castles), trade and the economy, and player freedom and choice are all synchronized and balanced. One thing to note though, is that for better or for worse, unlike GW2, you are strongly incentivized to collaborate with others. In fact, because of the open world PvP in a sense you're forced to interact with others to some degree. In GW2 you're rewarded to play with others (party up for easier tags and loot, zerg down the world boss for easy rewards, etc.) and are disincentivized from trolling others (individual mob loot/drop system, everyone can harvest from the same resource node, etc.) but are not specifically punished either way. You have to run dungeons with others or with pugs, but for most other things in the game, you can do on your own. In AA it's pretty much impossible to build a castle unless you have a huge group working together, and even if you could amass the funds to craft a super big boat, some of those ships require multiple people to man. And even if you don't work with other players, you can still get ambushed by other players if you try to carry trade packages all by your lonesome. While I'm sure that there are still goals you can pursue on your own and things you can do by yourself if you're feeling particularly anti-social, the core driving factor of the game is social interaction with others, whether positive or negative. I guess the only concern I have with that is if, for example, the best glider in the game drops from the Krakken (a world boss) and it takes an entire group of people to take that thing down, I might never get my hands on that thing unless I join a guild or establish myself in some entitled position in some community. I don't mind mega community stuff (castles, big ships, etc.) requiring a community to attain, but it bothers me that individual rewards can only be obtained by group effort. (Unlike in GW2 where you can get your legendary weapon or ascended gear from farming and saving up empyreal fragments, dragonite ore, dungeon tokens, etc. from dungeon runs, world bosses, and basically all stuff that you can do on your own.)