An interesting article at IncGamers looks at some of the implications of the recently announced design decisions in Guild Wars 2:
An event in the area/world will cause new events to become available depending on the actions of the players.
For those of you who have played various MMOs you’ll know that the general flow of a quest is this:
Go to quest giver → collect quest → kill x amount of y critter, who is minding it’s own business in a field a good journey away from the quest giver → return to quest giver and collect reward, usually ignoring the small novel worth of text.
And after umpteen levels of this you can understand why people cringe at the thought of having to level a new character up to max. At least in WAR you could almost completely ignore PvE and level up by bashing the opposing realm’s skulls in.
Now with GW2 we’ll hopefully start to see a step away from the standard quest model and towards one that actually feels like you’ve had an impact on the world. Example:
I could be exploring an find a floating crystal. Me being me I decide to poke it with a stick. This causes the crystal to release the monsters it was holding, which begin to attack the nearby village. Depending on how successful this is the village will either survive or be destroyed (until it is rebuilt) and from that a new line of quests will appear.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m quite interested in the innovations the folks on the development and content teams are working on, and I really do hope they can pull it off: it’ll be much more compelling than the current standard.
