04.24.08

Hidden Gems

Posted in Game design, Games at 15:02 by Jonas

Just came across a surprisingly pretty place in Guild Wars. Although it was a part of a quest (you had to find something which turned out to be in this crypt), coming across it felt very random and surprising. It was almost like we were just running through the catacombs, and suddenly - there’s this incredible room.

Guild Wars crypt

This brought two thoughts into my mind. First of all, it’s really fantastic what ArenaNet have achieved with relatively limited details. Guild Wars isn’t very graphically advanced (anymore, at least), but the art is all beautiful. It’s a bit like World of Warcraft, though since I’m still in the starter area, I haven’t seen nearly as much environmental variety in GW yet as I did during my four months in WoW.

Secondly, the main attraction of MMOG’s for me, if not games in general, is exploration. These are massive worlds, taking the typical open world design of RPG’s one step further. It must be a lot of fun to design the world of an MMOG, cramming anything you can think of in there to keep the player interested. I always love just idly wandering through a virtual world and then coming across something fantastic like the crypt above. World of Warcraft has a lot of this, but it looks like Guild Wars may have even more. We’ll see how long that will keep me playing.

2 Comments »

  1. Razumasu said,

    April 24, 2008 at 18:54

    I´ve had the same experience in WoW. I was running around doing a bunch of roleplaying with some guildmates and suddenly i was at the top of a huge waterfall…. i can´t remember what the name of the place was, but it was the the left of of the Wetlands (which most people know). The way the light shone and the water was falling was just brilliant and i was complete awestruck…..right after that i was attacked by bomb wielding dark dwarves….but they died…and then i could stare at the waterfall again :-p

    I was thinking about picking up GW - but now that the new Conan is right around the corner i think that will be my new vice in life instead.

  2. Jonas said,

    April 24, 2008 at 19:26

    Heheh if anything you may want to hold out for Guild Wars 2, which will be a “real” MMOG :)

    But still free to play!

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