Leading up to October, there was a ton of hype around the popular Guild Wars 2. A massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG), it’s a huge online game in which the player creates an avatar and is thrown into a digital realm with thousands of other players with the task of levelling up, completing quests, fighting against other players, or collecting unique “skins” for your items.
MMORPGs are incredibly social games, and you will almost always encounter players no matter where you are in the in-game world.
Guild Wars 2 tasked itself with the challenge of differentiating from the ever-growing collection of MMORPGs that are “traditional.” The vast majority of MMORPGs all try to be like one of the world’s most popular games, World of Warcraft.
Often taking many of the basic features of WoW, clones tend not to change a whole lot in terms of gameplay and usually just personalize the game’s graphics, story, and player classes.
Guild Wars 2 threw the whole market on its head three years ago when it was released. ArenaNet, the company behind the game, vowed to change how players experience MMORPGs forever. Were they successful? Yes!
I remember playing the game for the first time and being blown away. Combat was more interactive; traditional quests such as “kill 10 rats and return for your reward” were non-existent and were instead replaced with dynamic events that involved the player in a changing world around them. Through regular updates, new content and story was pushed out in large-scale events and individual content.
Now, the game has transitioned from buy-to-play to a new business model of free-to-play. This change flooded Guild Wars 2 with thousands of new and eager players.
The other new change was the release of an expansion set to change the way players play Guild Wars 2. Both were executed superbly and brought both new and returning players into the fantasy world. If ArenaNet continues to revolutionize the market as they have been, I would go so far as to say that Guild Wars 2 will surpass the popularity of World of Warcraft in the future.