Reading through this article by GW2 Lead Content Designer Colin Johanson shows that the game is going to be significantly different from other MMOs:
When building an MMO, we had to examine every core piece of accepted content from traditional games in the genre and ask, “How can this be improved?” By looking at the traditional quest system used in basically every MMO ever made, we’ve come to the conclusion that quests have a lot of areas for improvement. To address these flaws, we’ve developed our dynamic event system.
[. . .]
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.
[. . .]
In traditional MMOs, when a quest is completed it has no real effect on the game world. You receive your reward and then move on, looking for the next quest to do. The world appears no better or worse for your actions. In GW2, the outcome of every event will directly affect the game world around you. If an enemy dredge army is marching out of their main base, players will be asked to mobilize with their allies and help destroy the army. If the dredge army is defeated, other events will cascade out from there. Players will be able battle their way inside the dredge base, face off against their commander, rescue captured friendly troops being held in the dredge prisons, and even hold the captured base while fighting waves of dredge, who arrive from deep underground to try and take back their home.
This sounds great, and helps to explain why Guild Wars 2 has been so long in development: you can’t use off-the-shelf programming for something that hasn’t been done before.
I’m quite looking forward to the new game (the original Guild Wars has been my main online addiction for years), although I am concerned that the development team may be attempting to change too many things away from the MMORPG default models. The whole “the world changes based on player activity” thing could get quite messy — although it’ll certainly take away a lot of the “been there, done that, got the reward” feeling you can get in games of this type.
