Time, Space and Guild Wars 2

Ever-writing Rowan Kaiser has penned yet another of his Joystiq columns, this time dedicated to Guild Wars 2, and also, as he puts it, the general use of the player’s time and space in the MMO genre.

Here’s a snip:

Guild Wars 2 doesn’t change the common perspective, interface, etc., making it look and play much like just about everything else in the genre. However, in terms of time and space, and how accessible (both in the literal and metaphorical sense of the word) it is. It’s a dramatic shift for the genre. Guild Wars 2 makes traveling easy.

Traveling is something that you spend a great deal of time on in a massively multiplayer game. In most, you start by running from place to place, setting up a hearthstone (or whatever it’s called in the game) to return to the most important town. You set up travel paths to fly or taxi to, a process which can take 5-10 minutes of nothing, followed by several more minutes of traveling where you want to go, if it’s far away from the travel hub.

The defining events of a leveling World Of Warcraft character come when they can afford their mount, their epic mount, their flying mount, and their epic flying mount. It’s not battles or stories; it’s potential ease of travel.

Guild Wars 2 has no mounts. It has some buffs which let your character run a tiny bit faster, but that’s it. But what it does have are a series of waypoints which can be traveled to instantly at any point once you’ve run to them, for a few copper or silver pieces. You can also immediately travel to the Player versus Player hub from your character menu, and from there to the central city of Lion’s Gate, which offers free teleportation to all other cities. It’s a system that encourages to take your time and see the world when you go somewhere new, but makes accessing older areas easy once you’ve found them.