I’ve been having something of a Guild Wars renaissance of late. Part of it has to do with a few friends getting into the game again and part of it has to do with having time to breathe, which means time to play Guild Wars. And that’s how I found myself dashing madly through the Shards of Orr. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Shards of Orr, here’s the skinny: It’s a dungeon in the one true expansion in the Guild Wars collective, Eye of the North. Specifically, it’s a dungeon with a chest that has a tiny chance of dropping a high-value staff (also, inhabited largely by the undead), which means that a bunch of very clever people found a variety of ways to run that dungeon over and over again with minimal expenditure of time and effort. I’m a big fan of those kinds of people.
To me, MMOs at their heart are a way to interact with other people, and that’s where a lot of the fun I find in them comes from. Sure, I may enjoy beating a new boss all on my own, but not nearly as much as I’d enjoy re-doing a mission for the sake of a friend who’s behind me in the storyline or running through a dungeon several (dozen) times with cool people. It’s the social experience, for me, that shapes the fun of the game.This is the point where I admit that I’m one of those people that keeps the RNG alive and well in MMOs.
Go ahead, throw tomatoes and stones and other unkind things. Speed clears and farms account for an unseemly amount of my time logged into Guild Wars.I don’t know how I managed to make it this far without “everything’s pretty good but there are people with concerns,” but the more interesting topics, to me, are farther toward the end. The first is about release date, or even the date on which a release date might be released. Tin foil astrologers and internet soothsayers seem to be in agreement that the stars are almost in line for an announcement, which hopefully means that they’re only slightly more out of line for an actual release.
The other bit was about replay ability of content, especially in light of the dungeon reward system. As mentioned above, I don’t particularly mind the RNG reward system, mostly because it leads to cool interaction, but I’m not going to put on sack cloth and powder my nose with ashes if that goes the way of the dodo because I know that I’ll still get my interaction else where. I’ve played Guild Wars 2; I know it fills my needs in that respect. For another, the timing of this event should be much more European-friendly, which means that more people across the pond will hopefully be able to partake without contorting their schedules overmuch.