None of the features the OP mentioned would be a draw for me. Hellgate sounds too grim and the PvP innovations of the other games you mention mean nothing to me either, since I am only interested in PvE.

In any case, I think GW will survive just fine and, moreover, will capture a large share of the market if they stay with the no-subscription fee model, as they have stated they intend to do.

I really think that the "free-to-play" aspect is their ace in the hole. Casual gamers like myself are not going to cough up a monthly subscription fee for just any game -- and preferably for no game at all. WoW was my only exception to this rule, but when I compared cost versus playing time, GW was by far the better deal. WoW is something like $150+ per year (in subscriptions alone [i.e., not counting the cost of the game itself]), roughly the equivalent to the cost of three GW campaigns.

As I have mentioned in other threads, I am not enthusiastic about the WoW-ward direction GW2 seems to be taking, but if they come up with a decent game that is a subscriptionless alternative to WoW (and other, similarly subscription-based MMOs), they will offer a very attractive alternative for many).

Of course, GW in its current form is not really an MMO at all, since, as others have noted, you probably play a good 90% of the game solo, maybe more than that. Frankly, I wish GW2 would offer an instanced/persistent server option, wherein you could choose which playstyle you preferred -- with the regions, dungeons, and/or missions scaled to match. The current predominantly instanced model is ideal for casual or (mainly) solo players, whereas the persistent world model is going to appeal to more social players who may have more time to dedicate to guilds, coordinating raids, and aother aspects of cooperative play.

Thanks for the very good review. We, too, have been trying out the 14-day free CoH trial, and the review reflected well our own favorable impressions of the game.

Thus far, my kids really like CoH/CoV. (It didn't appeal to me much and was in no way going to lure me away from Eye of the North.)

My chief complaint with CoH is that it didn't seem worth (to me) the price of the subscription. It seemed like the kind of game that you'd want to play for a while, then stop for a while, and then pick up again and play some more. Well, on a subscription basis, that just doesn't make economic sense and would be too much of a hassle.

If the initial admission price (game cost) was higher -- but the game was "free to play" thereafter -- we'd probably get a copy. As it is, our 14-day trial has expired and we are back to playing Guild Wars.

The irony is that I *would* willingly pay for a monthly subscription to Guild Wars IF they were continually adding new content, as they do in CoH.

Thanks for all the good information. I appreciate it. :)

Nicely put, Serling! :)

I haven't finished EotN yet (I'm trying to drag out the story as long as I can by playing different alts on different days).

But I am sorta hoping EotN might do well enough that NCSoft reconsiders developing additional campaigns like it. (Yeah, I know that's a longshot, but no harm in hoping. They did bring back Classic Coke, after all!)

The GW1 formula has worked awfully well. It stills seems odd to me that they would want to "reinvent" a game that has done so much better in the marketplace than so many other games that have come, tanked, and faded away. It would be like WoW coming out with "WoW2" as an FPS...

I would be far more interested in purchasing another EotN-type expansion than GW2, at least based on what I've heard of GW2 thus far.

Can anyone who beta tested the game comment on any or all of the following:

(1) How solo-able is this game (including instances, quests, etc.)?

(2) How strong is the mechanism for finding groups?

(3) How good is the story?

I'm really curious about this title and comments like "this game sucks" or "it's boring" aren't all that helpful.

Basically, my MMO experience is pretty limited, but I have enjoyed WoW and Guild Wars very much and CoH. How does TR stack up against those games?

Thanks very much.

(Never could get into TR's beta, though I wanted to.)

Well, as I suggested earlier, a simple link to the article would have been just as good, if not better.

The article was interesting, but I am sad about the dwarves. I am now wondering whether my favorite race will be playable in GW2. It doesn't sound like it.... :(

Reason to be depressed about GW2 number 4--

You can't be a dwarf. Then again, the dwarves in GW (apart from Ogden) have always been so darned ugly anyway. Maybe I'm not so sad about this after all.

Thanks. You were correct -- at least with Cathedral of Flames. The end boss (Murakai) was most susceptible to being DAZED, so having heroes with Concussion Shot and other Daze skills was enormously helpful. Zho was also quite helpful. I was able to beat the Cathedral , after all, using a different group of heroes and a different mix of skills.

You may be right about some of the dungeons being "non-soloable", however. I can't imagine ever getting past Vloxen Level 3 with an NPC team, but I intend to keep trying. :)

Actually, there is a lot more out there than just the PCGamer article (which is probably copyrighted so you really shouldn't cut and paste articles from it here, I wouldn't think). Might be better to just post the link.

I was going by the interview with the GuildWars developers at Gamespy and articles published elsewhere. All three of my points have been announced in various ways by ArenaNet and/or in interviews with the Guild Wars 2 development team.

"Unconfirmed"? LOL. How much more confirmation do you need? This is what the developers are saying. I have to figure they would probably know what they are planning to do. One would hope so, anyway.

Try the interview at Gamespy for starters.

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/guild-wars-2/784302p1.html

Looking over these list items makes me think the folks coming up with these "most despised" points probably oughtn't be playing MMOs at all.

Sheesh.

Most of the really successful MMOs have some or all of these features, and yet they are still *very* successful. Despise all you like, but developers are going to develop what people are willing to pay for.

Taerus, I think you are taking the OP far too seriously. ;)

I've just recently finished reading the "history for Guild Wars 2" article in the recent PCGamer special edition on GW. I think the backstory for GW2 sounds really interesting.

Having said that, I just thought I'd mention why I, too, am (mildly) depressed about GW2 -- and it has nothing to do with losing a beloved avatar.

What concerns me most about GW2 is--

(1) The move toward less instancing. I love the current instancing feature of GW. It allows for better story immersion. I understand that the purpose for this change is to have more of a community/MMO feel to the game, but what I would have preferred would have been a better mechanism for grouping. Instead of multiple mission staging areas, I wish GW had allowed you to sign up for a particular mission *regardless* of what outpost or region you were in. Once a team was assembled, it would take but the leader to set the mission in motion and transport all other players to the mission site. If I wanted "open, free-for-all areas" (i.e., noninstanced), I'd play WoW or EQ.

(2) The (apparent) elimination of henches/heroes in favor of (correct me if I'm wrong) a single "Companion" (hero type NPC). Half the fun of GW for me has been in the hench/hero choices and skill sets. I also like being able to solo most if not all of the content if I happen to feel like soloing--something the henches have always allowed me to do. If I wanted enforced grouping (with Player Characters), there are plenty of other MMO games that do that.

(3) The elimination of the level 20 cap. I am very "depressed" about this, as I think the original level cap was a stroke of genius. It allows players to be "competitive" very quickly and to hold their own in virtually any mission or quest. Having a large level range is going to create "level prejudice". I'm irked about this. In Guild Wars, you could follow the main storyline straight through or you could quest along the way. A wide range of levels will probably mean you cannot do certain missions/instances until you reach the requisite level. Again, if I wanted that I'd play another MMO.

I am puzzled that ArenaNet would mess with such a fun and entertaining game. I just hope this is not going to be a "New Coke" sort of disaster, wherein a company decides to "fix and improve" something that really was not broken in the first place. Most of the changes I have heard that are in store for GW2 sound like it is moving in a WoW-ward direction and losing the very distinctives that made GW so unique and so fun.

Of course, I will wait and see (and probably try out) GW2. My loyalty to the game is strong. But it sounds as if many of the features I so appreciated about GW are going to be shelved. And that *is* a bit depressing.

Speaking only for myself, I would have preferred they had simply scaled TBC upward in some sort of even, natural way that didn't, in effect, nullify all of the lower-level instances (Dire Maul, Stratholme, etc.). It seemed really bizarre to me to invest so much development time into instances that now cannot compete with TBC. Even now, Blizzard could retool these older instances in a way to make them fun and worthwhile for players.

The odd thing about Blizzard is the way they seem oblivious to their player base in a lot of small details: druids have been asking for new (less stupid-looking) animal forms for years to no avail; players have been asking for longer, better ignore lists; speedier flight paths; etc. Worse, if you are new to WoW, you will soon note that 90 to 95% of the patch fixes, tweaks, and enhancements have NOTHING to do with the increasingly barren level pre-TBC areas. I was beginning to get the feeling that Blizzard's official stance was "We have a zillion subscribers -- we don't have to do anything." And maybe they don't, but I think they will start losing their player base if they don't start listening to their customers a little better.

I got to the point where I would basically abandon most every "Group" or "Dungeon" quest for the 1-58 level range. Might as well not even bother. It was too much of a pain to find a group; even in TBC I'd bag the "Group" quests. What is going to draw new players into the game to play Wrath of the Lich King when you have to buy the original WoW and TBC and then level your way through both of those before you can get to level 70 and even set foot in Northrend?

Wrath of the Lich King will help keep long-time WoW fans happy, but other players will drift off to other games and Wrath, I would guess, is not going to bring a lot of new players into the game.

I would have been more interested to see a discussion of how WoW intends to remain competitive against the next generation of MMO games. This description essay on Shattrath sounded more like something you'd find in the lore section of the WoW website.

Frankly, nothing I have seen in Wrath of the Lich King is all that interesting. I played halfway through TBC before getting kind of bored with WoW and canceling my subscription. That's not to say WoW is a bad game; far from it, WoW is a most impressive and creative game. I just don't think WoW will be able to hold onto its subscription base if they don't come up with something "more fun" than what I experienced in TBC or what I have seen from the previews of the Northrend expansion.

Yikes. A "HARD" mode for these dungeons? Like they aren't hard enough already...

But you make a good point. Cookie-cutter teams are not going to cut it here. I will try Cathedral of Flames yet again, with a different build of heroes. It was like that for me with Gate of Madness/Gate of Abaddon. I must have wiped I don't know how many times till I brought along a Hero assassin (Genmai), etc., with the right skills to end Shiro's self-healing stance (Shiro was the only really hard part of the Gate of Madness mission, in my opinion). Likewise, with Abaddon, the trick was getting *away* before Abaddon revived and then coming back again after killing the monoliths (and torment claws).

I got masters on both of those missions using only henches and heroes and playing a warrior.

The thing that bugs me about the dungeons in EotN is that they are so long and you have so much time invested and you get to the end and find it's hopeless -- again, this is if you are playing with an all-NPC team.

The respawn rate of the Ancient warriors et al. at the end of Vloxen Excavations, for example, is just crazy. Worse still, the revived undead come chasing after you long after you have left their aggro range and, worse still, you cannot even work off a death penalty fighting them.

I just think that is over the top. The least the devs could have done was make the dungeons playable with a hero/hench group. If you read Jeff Strain's speech about the future of MMOs, he makes the point that MMOs need to be solo-player friendly. Apparently, this ideology didn't apply to EotN's dungeons -- at least not to very many of them.

As for the Powerstone of Courage, it is very nice. :)

I left WoW because so many of the quests left you dependent on finding real players to move forward. With the dungeons in EotN, the Guild Wars franchise seems headed in that same, unfortunate YOU MUST GROUP OR ELSE direction, and it irritates me.

I bet if you polled Guild Wars players about this, most would say they do 80-90% of their questing on their own with henches. (With me it's probably more like 90 to 95%.) The dungeons should have been designed with that dynamic in mind. :)

Actually, I think it's very *fun* questing with all-hench/hero teams, but to each his own. I also enjoy grouping with live players on occasion.

The list at wiki is not really what I was hoping to find. It does not list the dungeons by difficulty; they are listed in alphabetical order.

Maybe in time the dungeon descriptions will offer solutions for us hero/hench-only questers--but not yet.

I appreciated his point here:

"Don't underestimate the importance of solo play! Sometimes your friends aren't online, sometimes you want to kill 30 minutes while everyone groups together, and sometimes you just don't want to go to committee on every damn decision. The quality of the solo play experience is just as important to the success of an MMO as the quality of the multiplayer experience. "

While it sounds like a contradiction, I really do believe the best MMOs are going to be the ones that allow players to proceed effectively alone if they choose to do so. I have enjoyed Guild Wars very much for essentially that reason more than any other -- and have beat most every mission in the game with hench/hero-only (HHO) teams.

However, I am disappointed by how solo-unfriendly many of the dungeons in Eye of the North are. While I am able to progress just fine through the main storyline missions with HHO teams, many of the dungeons and associated quests seem impossibly difficult with HHO teams: Vloxen Excavations, Cathedral of Flames, etc.

This has been one of my major frustrations with Eye of the North: clever, challenging dungeons whose final level/boss are, for all intents and purposes, impossible to beat. It makes me wonder if the developers "solo-tested" these dungeons? Offering players a range of "difficulty settings" for the dungeons (with appropriately scaled rewards) would have been a better way to go, in my opinion.