MMO Blog

The MMO world is strange. It took years – decades – to get a game that at all resembles the traditional console game we all know and love. Think about that for a moment, that when the MMO world was obsessing over Ultima Online, the console world was playing Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX. Games like Skies of Arcadia were in development, and Shenmue. As World of Warcraft began to dominate, the console world was exploring San Andreas, hunting down The Boss for betraying her country and web swinging across Manhattan to take down Doc Ock. Even today MMO gamers are yet to see experiences akin to Fallout/Elder Scrolls, despite those series being the perfect springboard for a massively multiplayer game. With mod that turn Just Cause 2 into a 2000 person blood bath and DayZ hooking subscribers by the thousands, just what are MMO-specific developers doing wrong?

Step aside, TERA, there’s a new MMORPG in town. Guild Wars 2 is the very definition of the term long awaited, with thousands of people spending hours and hours pawing their way through interviews, screenshots and trailers looking for a nugget of excitement they haven’t relived a million times before. Thankfully, it delivers – it really, really does. How does extended play work out though? Is it something worth buying now? The answer to that latter question is pretty obvious if you’ve seen the gaming charts lately, or if you’ve bothered to read any of the thousands of professional/amateur reviews available on the internet since launch. This is the first in our new weekly series on Guild Wars 2. In it we’re going to examine the world, the characters, the people and the culture, hopefully learning a little bit about what makes it such an exciting game. Where’s the best place to start? The beginning of course: from character creation onwards.