Anyone who's been keeping up with Guild Wars 2 development news knows that there's some new feature dubbed "dynamic events" in the MMO sequel. It certainly isn't something from the first game.
To start, GW2 Leady Content Designer Colin Johanson points out that traditionally, MMOs introduce quests with walls of text explaining how the task ties into the in-game world and events within it. Most people skip over these walls without a second thought, but they're missing out on a lot of lore and backstory. So what is ArenaNet doing to fix this problem? Dynamic Events.
Johanson explains that these events happen in the world around you during exploration. When players see sh*t going down, they can rush right in to begin the quest.
In Guild Wars 2, our event system won't make you read a huge quest description to find out what's going on. You'll experience it by seeing and hearing things in the world. If a dragon is attacking, you won't read three paragraphs telling you about it, you'll see buildings exploding in giant balls of fire, and hear characters in the game world screaming about a dragon attack. You'll hear guards from nearby cities trying to recruit players to go help fight the dragon, and see huge clouds of smoke in the distance, rising from the village under siege.
Then there's Johanson's "second fundamental flaw" with traditional questing, and its immersion. You can rely on a wall of text to explain the NPC's problem, but you only have that person's word to go by, rather than experiencing the dire consequences for yourself.
For example, in a traditional MMO, the character who gives you a quest will tell you ogres are coming to destroy the character's home, and you need to kill them. You then get a quest which says, "Kill 0/10 ogres" and you proceed to kill a bunch of ogres standing around in a field picking daisies. Since every player in the game needs to be able to do this quest, the ogres will never actually threaten the character's home - they will just eternally pick daisies in the field. The ogres aren't actually doing what the quest says they are - the game is lying to you!
At ArenaNet, we believe this is NOT good enough. In Guild Wars 2, if a character tells you ogres are coming to destroy a house, they will really come and smash down the house if you don't stop them!
We'll obviously be learning more about this epic quest system in coming months. Guild Wars 2 is currently set to launch early 2011, and as with Guild Wars, there is no monthly fee.
Section:PC Games
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