Interesting Jeff Strain Guild Wars interview.

[Lyion]

While I don't believe Guild Wars addresses the issues he states, I hope more developers take the same approach.

http://gw.jeuxonline.info/index.php?article=1020

Q:Could you tell us what are the ideas that you wanted to achieve, while designing Guild Wars?

Jeff Strain: Guild Wars was designed to be an online RPG that is very different from a traditional MMO, or what you think is a MMO. Guild Wars has the technology of an MMO with the 100 000’s simultaneous online players, but in terms of the core design of the game, we chose not the follow the recurring ultima online, everquest, wow model. Guild Wars was design to be really different game than those, and the fundamental difference that we wanted to achieve was to design a game that reward you for your skill as a player rather that on the amount of free time that you have, to play the game.

Q: What were the reasons that made you chose to rethink the online RPG design?

Jeff Strain: When I said that the game was design to reward you for you skill rather than your time, what I am talking about is that, the traditional MMO, will often take 50 or 70 hours of content stretch it out over a 100 hours putting a lots of mechanics that require you to spend a lot of hours levelling from one lvl to the next, and the problem you see with this it that it hurts you the players in 2 ways. First of all it’s very difficult to ever have any kind of interesting PvP in a game like that, because ultimately what makes the difference wherever your going to lose or win the PvP is your level, and your level is function of how much time you invested in the game. If you spend 400h playing a traditional MMO and are lvl 40, and I spend 100h hours and I’m lvl 20, there really no reason for us to compete. There is absolutely no chance I am going to beat you, your just higher level... And that’s the traditional role playing game mechanic that was establish all the way back to you know the pen and paper games D&D in the 70 ‘s , mechanics that has been cloned continually since it mutated to the computer game industry.

The other problem with it is that the whole point of a online RPG is that it should be a social experience. You should be able to have fun with friends. But if you have 20 hours more every week to play than I do , then I cant keep up with you and we quickly get to a point where you are able to do things, take part in challenges and go to part of the world that I cant go to, so it stops being fun for us to play together, it just breaks the community apart. So by creating a game that focuses on skill rather than time we are solving both of those problems. We think that for the first time on a online RPG PvP is really competitive meaning full and exiting, you make the difference not your timetable. We believe that there are a lot a player who don’t have 40 hours a week to play a game, and what we wanted to do is make a game for those people, so that everybody can enjoy online RPG.

[runamonk]

I really liked the beta I played in, I'll probably give this a shot and just check it out with some friends.