Only a few days after revealing the Guardian profession (a Paladin archetype) for Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet has been inundated with complaints that they’re catering to the Trinity crowd — those that favor classes capable of fulfilling any of MMO gaming’s three key roles. For a game that aims to break genre paradigms, such a concession would understandably be a big no-no.  Game Designer Jon Peters believes this backlash to be the product of a lack of familiarity with GW2′s combat system.

In a blog post seeking to catalog all of that information in one place, Peters quotes fellow employee Isaiah Cartwright: “Our professions aren’t dedicated healers, DPS, or tanks because frankly, we built a combat system that just doesn’t allow it.” It sure isn’t easy attempting to break both the jack-of-all-trades class system and the traditional tank/healer/dps combo, so how exactly does ArenaNet plan to do it?

• Healing Skill Slot — Every class has a Healing Slot where they must place an appropriate skill. Sure, not every profession will have access to the best heals, or even those with special, conditional uses, but ArenaNet plans to make using them the best way to sustain yourself. Added bonus? It should make you more aware of what’s going on in battle.
• Downed, Defeated, and Revival — Any player can revive any of their allies, provided that they can get to their buddies in time. And the “Downed” state insures that just being incapacitated doesn’t mean you’re entirely out of the fight, either.
• Shared Boon System — This is Guild Wars 2′s version of buffs. Though they can be applied in many different ways, those available always boil down to the same seven: Regeneration, Might, Fury, Swiftness, Protection, Vigor, and Aegis (you can probably guess what most of them do by name). World of Warcraft now does something similar, but is set up so that at least one of two or more people bringing the same buff is less useful to the group. Boons, though they don’t stack in effectiveness, do stack in terms of duration, meaning that everyone is able to contribute.
• No Allied Targeting — Guild Wars 2 features a semi-action-based combat system. Though it doesn’t seem as flexible as TERA’s at the moment, it is still highly dependent on positioning and spatial awareness. That’s to say that you won’t be able to directly target your allies, and will have to rely on movement and skill to effectively deliver your helpful spells.
• Diversity — That’s a bit of a loaded word, isn’t it? With Guild Wars 2‘s weapon-switching mechanic allows roles to be switched on the fly. Think “Warrior stances,” but for all classes, and with an automatic swap to appropriate equipment. Undoubtedly, there will be some restrictions, but the key is to allow players to adapt to constantly-changing situations.
• Mobility — Movement. Is. Key. Skills and spells work in conjunction with movement instead of against it, and that means you might be playing GW2 more like a first-person shooter than your typical MMORPG. You’ll be able to dodge and find cover while enacting more interesting tactics than “sit in one spot and spam fireball.”

The basic philosophy seems to be, oddly enough, that all classes are Trinity classes. But instead of giving every profession access to every skill, ArenaNet is simply democratizing the more critical aspects of traditional roles — those bits that would otherwise slow down or stop the flow of combat because they are dependent on time or certain archetypes being present. In the same turn, no profession will be able to accomplish such things as healing and buffing in precisely the same way, preserving class diversity. Continue Reading

The MMO genre of gaming is not a particularly young one. In fact, I’d say it’s only a few years younger than the modern RTS and FPS genres (I remember playing my very first graphical MMO in 1997). So, suffice it to say, I was a bit surprised when I found out that not one MMORPG has made it onto GameRanking.com’s top 100 list. I’ve checked the list and I’ve checked it twice (ho ho!) and I’m telling you there are no MMOs to be found which raises the question: why haven’t any MMOs made it there yet?

Believe it or not, despite the genre being over a decade old now there really aren’t that many MMOs in the market. In fact, of the actual “pay2play” model of MMO there are typically only a handful of games released each year, as opposed to the thousands of Wii, 360, PS3, PC games that are released each year. This probably has had some sort of impact as to why there are no MMOs on the list. Let’s face it, when there are so many games coming out every year the MMO is bound to slowly get pushed down the list until a new one makes it back up there. In fact, GTAIV actually pushed World of Warcraft right off the list (who now sits at #101). However, that said, this logic does seem to conflict with the “quality over quantity” saying. Despite putting out fewer games than most other genres, there are still many quality issues that exist within the games upon launch… which brings us to our next issue.

One of the most obvious reasons as to why most MMOs never make it to the top of review scores is primarily due to quality. MMOs are HUGE worlds with many aspects of gameplay all running simultaneously with thousands of gamers. The sheer scope of programmability within these games would probably dwarf about ten single player games of near any other genre. Because of this there are a number of quality issues that must be tested and, unfortunately, the best test usually occurs after the game has gone live. As many MMOGamers know many of the biggest fixes and features aren’t readily patched until a couple months after the games release, which cites the mantra of many gamers today: “An MMO on launch day will be completely different 6 months later.” Perhaps if reviewers would put up two reviews of an MMO there would be a better “leveling off” of the scores…

Anyways, take from this what you will. World of Warcraft still sits at a very respectable #101 right above Zelda: A Link to the Past (one of my favorite games) with the next “MMO” being WoW: Burning Crusade at #142. After that there is nothing until beyond the 200 mark. It’s very clear that GTAIV effectively pushed WoW out of the running, but even before then WoW was only at #99 which is just barely scraping it by. No telling what MMO will make it there next. While Age of Conan looks like it will receive fair scores, I seriously doubt it’ll reach the top 100. Anybody want to take bets on Warhammer Online?

Check out the full top 200 list HERE.