Awaiting "Old Republic" here myself
That said, I will say that in listening to this trailer while it looked decent (though not exceptional) some of the things that were being said had me thinking that this must be a satire, but I guess it wasn't.
To be honest pretty much every game out there has made very similar promises in recent years. While they superficiallly sound good, there are a lot of reasons why you don't see them. For example it's a lie to say people "hate grind". When people want to develop a character or get some abillity before moving on, and can't they tend to get irritated. In a lot of cases with both single players and MMOs "where do I grind" is a very common question from players. The issue isn't that grinding itself is bad, but the simple fact that a lot of games can make it boring.
The bit about having players change the world is wonderful in theory, but in general you can't really feel like the hero if other people are making desicians you don't want. The only way to do this is to introduce morphs and instances for such things with each character functions more or less in their own little universe, however that isn't the approach they are going for here since they said they wanted a persistant world this time, which is pretty much contridictory to that philsophy of doing things.
To be honest some of the very first MMORPGs *DID* introduce worlds that players could alter to a very high degree. People tend to forget what "Ultima Online" was like when it first came out. In UO the game used a "resource bank" concept where there were only so many resources of each type out there in each region, period and very realistically people would have to compete with them, and when they were gone they were gone. You also had an economy that fluctuated based on the amount of gold in the game, and merchants with limited funds to buy garbage from players. Not to mention the abillity for players to build houses, towers, castles, and shops pretty much anywhere they wanted.
In a persistant world this basically amounted to an enviroment where the world was ravaged and there were no resources for anyone to gather, the economy was totally broken and people pretty much delighted in seeing how badly and how quickly they could rape it and keep it there. You had people literally racing to buy hides from the merchants who had a limited quantity since every hide bearing critter was murdered and skinned as soon as it would spawn, the same was true of monsters which were prtty much hunted to extinction. Not to mention the horrible brawls that would break out every time people wanted to sell stuff to merchants when they had more gold. This lead to the joy of situations where you say had people walk into a lagged out, overcrowded shop with a million people shouting "guards, hail, sell, guards" off of macros (or some variation), lobbing exploding potions (characters were very fragile) and then looting the bodies, or when they finally fixed thing so exploding potions counted as a crime having their buddy loot the bodies. Of course since everyone was lagged you might wait 15 minutes to find out you not only failed to sell, but were also murdered and had your corpse raped of everything of value by someone with a faster connection (along with the other 20 bodies piled around you in the same state). Not to mention the simple fact that Origin wound up having to delete people's houses (one of the reasons I quit) because literally every single clear spot in the entire game was covered with a house.
I'm not saying that this will turn out like UO specifically (it won't) but the central point is that if YOU can change a persistant world, that means someone else can do it as well. That inevitably means that you will see organized groups of "someone else" like channers, something awful goons, or just general idiots especially in a free to play game, trying to change the persistant world in the most obnoxious way possible... and some of these people will even make articles about it on their sites "for the lulz". >
Nothing these guys have said is original, and while it sounds good on paper, pretty much everything they tried has been attempted by someone and it did not work. It seems like they are pretty much hyping a game that seems to be designed to fail.
Besides which being "Guild Wars" I am guessing that even if you don't wind up grinding monsters and quests, like the first one the end game is ultimatly going to be PVP and the point is to get to where you can "grind" other players in competitive ganking. That's fine mind you, endgame PVP can be fun, but don't misunderstand that this is as repetitive as anything else out there. Especially when people get the system down to a science and pretty much everyone rolls the same types/builds of characters based on statistical effectiveness.
I wish them luck with it, but the original "Guild Wars" didn't impress me, and while this sounds good superficially, if you really think about a lot of this and how other attempts at a lot of this have gone, along with the unchanging variable of human nature, and the simple fact that various things like "grind" have continued because they work for the genere better than anything else (and people are always going on about trying alternatives), you can pretty much see the train wreck this is destinied to be.
Before anyone flames me or whatever, I will say that I actually do hope they succeed, I mean it's a nice dream. I just don't think they can. Nothing they have shown is any differant than other attempts to try and accomplish the same things. The hype also seems nearly identical to what other MMOs have been saying for years when they are coming out. "Age Of Conan" was going to liven up the combat too with it's "real time, combo based, combat system" while okay it wasn't quite the change it was hyped to be in actual practice, simply a more complicated and arguably user unfriendly way of doing what people had been doing to begin with, and a new challenge for people to mod custome programs for to optimize. I game up on "AoC" despite my high expectations early on, but "Age of macro combo wars"could be an alternate name for the game.
