Sunday In The Park: GW2

Over many years, on many forums and in the comment threads of many long-suffering blogs, I have banged on about my belief that any MMO can be either sandbox or theme park depending on how you choose to approach it. For all that I hold this to be self-evident, however, I have little in the way of personal experience to offer to back it up. The plain fact remains that I don't really know what a Theme Park is. In fact, before I learned the term through its use in gaming, if it meant anything to me at all it would have been something like this.

Such a lack of personal experience of the original has always left me at a disadvantage when the term gets thrown around in relation to MMOs. I could dimly apprehend its relevance but nothing resonated with my own playstyle, which tends towards the chaotic. I act often on whim and sometimes on whimsy. I create my own goals, pursue them for as long as they interest me then drop them without a second thought.

I am not, nor have I ever been, in the habit of slavishly pursuing any path set out for me by a game or its developers. The concept of moving from ride to ride, waiting patiently or impatiently for each to start, whirling around and around until the music stops then staggering off towards the next is alien to me. Well, it was until yesterday.

Last Friday my Thief dinged 80, the sixth of my Guild Wars 2 characters to reach that milestone. Rather than jump straight back on the horse with my Mesmer or Guardian I thought I'd goof around for the weekend. I spent all Friday night and Saturday morning sorting the bags and bank vaults of six characters. Then for an encore I organized the guild bank.

There were a lot of weapons and pieces of armor strewn around and in the course of tidying it all up it became apparent to me that I had a lot of level 80s dressed in level 50-70 gear. At best. I spent most of the rest of Saturday on the Trading Post, buying and selling. People will buy anything. I was amazed. Throw any old rubbish on there and it's snapped up in seconds.

Anyway, by late Saturday evening all six 80s were in what I would consider to be basic level 80 starting gear with upgraded Masterwork or better in every slot, but between the lot of them they could barely muster an average of one Exotic each. Now, I don't believe I they need Exotics to do anything I'm likely to ask them to do but I was enjoying playing Barbies so I decided I'd spend Sunday farming Rares to convert to Globs of Ectoplasm so that I or Mrs Bhagpuss (who has all craft trades maxed) could make whatever I fancied. That's how I came to see the true horror of the MMORPG Theme Park Experience in action for possibly the first time in my life.

GW2 has a number of open-world events that conclude with the dropping of a chest the size and appearance of a commercial freezer. Inside this chest can be, but rarely are, Rares. Not counting the Temple events in Orr there are six of these chest-droppers. Three feature lieutenants of the Elder Dragons: Claw of Jormag, Tequaatl the Sunless and The Shatterer. The other three are The Frozen Maw, Shadow Behemoth and Fire Elemental. They keep to a strict schedule which you can find handily recorded, tabulated and regularly updated at the Guild Wars Temple website.

People use this like a railway timetable. Each event has a margin of error, presumably in an attempt to create some spurious sense of spontaneity but in practice all of them pop at numbingly regular intervals. If you keep an eye on the timers you can waypoint from Frostgorge Sound in the Far Shiverpeaks to Sparkfly Fen in the Steamspur Mountains before bouncing back up via Queensdale to Wayferer Foothills and you won't be alone.

On a busy Sunday the resemblance to what I imagine a real Theme Park to be like was unmistakeable. A few minutes before the earliest point at which an event could begin people would begin to gather and mill around, becoming increasingly fractious the longer they had to wait.

With the exception of Tequaatl, who just appears at the ominous cry of "There's something in the water!", all the events require some chain of pre-events to be completed. If these are right at the main location, as they are for The Claw and The Maw, the whole zerg sets to with a will. If they happen somewhere out of sight, as at The Shatterer or Shadow Behemoth, everyone shuffles around where they stand, complaining that someone ought to be doing the pre-events.

Someone always is, and they are the ones who often miss out on the main event because of their public-spiritidness. By the time they hoof it over to the where the action is, the action isn't. The ride has stopped and everyone has has moved on.

The dragon driven out, the Maw quiet once more, the air is filled with the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the disappointed chest-openers. "Nothing but blues" is the common refrain. In Frostgorge you could get crushed in the scrum at the nearby vendor as everyone rushes to unload their worthless rubbish. Anyone lucky enough to pull a Rare out of the box is honor-bound to link it in Map chat, mostly to prove it really can happen. Sometimes the class clown will throw in a link to a Legendary. How we laughed.

I did this most of the day. The only event I didn't do was the Fire Elemental. Never done that. I did the Shadow Behemoth for the first time (the first several times) thanks to reading The Egg Baron's recent fine walkthrough. It's been bugged as long as I can remember but it's working fine now. I did The Maw, which pops about every 30 minutes or so, many times; Claw of Jormag and The Shatterer a couple and Tequaatl once.

I got half a dozen or so Rares, a couple of which were upgrades that I used. I blew the rest up for Ectos. It was a fun way to spend Sunday, but it really brought home to me how mechanical and gamelike GW2 can be. This morning I read J3w3l comparing the open world of Firefall to GW2 "...every time I try to level in GW2 it is just ticking off the check list of stuff to do so I can progress to the next zone. Fill in that heart, see that vista", she says. "It could have been an amazingly large, open and complex world but now it feels entirely compartmentalised."

It certainly can feel that way. Usually I don't even notice it but yesterday was a true glimpse into the Dark Side. ANet have said they intend to add more events so that any given event is seen less frequently. I would suggest they also remove Chest rewards from events completely. Increase the chance for better quality loot from any event instead. Encourage people to do events because they are interesting, intriguing, odd or amusing, not for the slim chance of a yellow weapon to destroy to make an orange one. Make it more about the park and less about the rides.

Still and all, I did have fun.