Azuriel, I know what you mean, because I’ve seen players who accept quests without even reading the quest text. When every quest is a kill-quest or a delivery quest or both, it’s hard to make the stories interesting. But if you are playing an RPG game for 80 levels and you aren’t interested in the stories, what exactly are you playing for? It seems to me that in many cases it’s for the “achievements”, the gold-stars that many RPGs hand out instead of interesting and immersive stories. Can you imagine enjoying a book where the story was dull and repetitive, but the publishers sent you a framed certificate for every chapter you completed?

I think we differ in how we enjoy RPGs. I don’t play them for the gameplay. I play for the roleplay. Like you, I just loved Skyrim. I immersed myself in the stories and in the world. The gameplay in Skyrim was atrocious, to the point where you had to break immersion by pausing the game to change spells! But the world and its stories are what made that game fun, and that’s what makes fantasy worlds like Azeroth and Tyria and Westeros come alive for me: immersion. Hell,there’s no gameplay at all in books!

You do realize how silly that sounds in an RPG with 80 levels, right? Or any RPG, really.

Levels and area’s that are essentially blocked off as a result are game design conventions that promote the idea that particular area’s of the environment are yet still too dangerous for your game piece. They’re artificial, but are there to give you the sense that you are on a path, a quest, a journey, a progression so to speak. And the world is a big and dangerous place, but some day, you’ll be prepared to face what lies beyond that wall…

Obviously, in guildwars its all kind of confusing though because you can scale down, but not up, and theirs really nothing there thats dangerous anyway, and that is indeed why you are even compelled to raise this question in the first place. If they were pulling it off successfully, it would feel natural.

Something is wrong.

Once it came out I started asking people, probing to see if anything had meaningfully changed and strongly got the impression that it had not. Your post is one among many that confirms it. I will not be spending $50 on GW2.

Assuming for the sake of argument that housing will eventually make it into the game at some point, I think how that is implemented will go a long way to determining overall longevity. If your house is just a place that exists in its own safe little haven, that won’t be all that compelling. If they do something like creating a mist area where your house exists in a village that can be attacked, much more interesting.

Exploration and lack-of-hand-holding is cool; I dig the weapons=skills scene. It’s nice.