guild-wars-1
Latest
Working As Intended: It's not the journey or the destination
If you play MMORPGs, you've no doubt been told, hundreds of times, "Slow down! Don't rush! Stop to smell the flowers! It's the journey, not the destination!" Typically, you're being told to slow down in an MMO whose focus is the destination: the endgame. All the good stuff is at the end. The best dungeons are there. The best gear is there. The best PvP content and titles and achievements are there. The players the devs cater to are there. Patches and expansions provide new content there. In fact, the only reason to play the rest of the game is to level up to get there. The midgame is a hindrance, a barrier to the "real" game, and it's usually neglected by developers once most players are through it. So if games themselves reward you only for arriving at the destination, why on earth should you feel bad for not savoring the journey?
Jukebox Heroes: Guild Wars Eye of the North's soundtrack
The final Guild Wars soundtrack not only took the first game out in style but instantly became one of the best of the series to date. I'm not willing to put it above Prophecies, but it's not too far behind, either. As a whole, it's a wonderful symphonic journey through new lands and new themes, and just about every track is quite listenable. You can't deny that this is Guild Wars to its very core, as composer Jeremy Soule only adds on to the franchise's legacy rather than supplants it with a different direction. Even so, it represents a mastery that wasn't quite there in past albums. If I listened to this soundtrack without knowing its source, I would have pegged it as a major motion picture release rather than a video game with angry bears. It was definitely a difficult score to pick a mere six examples from; I'd recommend that soundtrack enthusiasts listen through its entirety. For a Guild Wars 2 player, it's really interesting to go back and hear the early versions of tracks that Soule would later reprise for the sequel.
The Daily Grind: What MMO would you like to see locked in time?
I logged into classic Guild Wars for the anniversary last month, and all it did was break my heart. I truly think it was one of the more original MMOs to launch in World of Warcraft's wake, and I'm still sad that it's essentially in permanent maintenance mode and eclipsed by Guild Wars 2, even though I understand the reasoning and am grateful that ArenaNet didn't just pull the plug. On the other hand, sometimes locking a game in time might be a good thing. My recent attempts to return to Lord of the Rings Online have been thwarted by several years' worth of expansions, the deflation of my characters' currency, multiple class reworks, and combat and crafting levels that have continued their powercreeping march upward. I don't really recognize much about the game, and it'd take me a lot of time (and money) to get caught up again. At least my Guild Wars characters are exactly the way I left them! LotRO is probably a bad example because it really does need to get to Pelennor Fields and beyond some day, but I'm sure many of you have an MMO you'd love to see locked in time for your own personal reasons. Which one and why? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
