Yesterday marked a new brick in ArenaNet’s wall on their way to building a successful house with the launch of their new blog and for their first post, Mike O’Brien, president of ArenaNet, wanted to talk about Guild Wars 2 and the MMORPG genre.

It sometimes feels like our industry has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. When you play an RPG, you want to experience a compelling and memorable storyline. You want your choices to matter. You want your actions to leave their mark on the world. Let’s start demanding those things of MMOs too.

True and True. The genre is called a mmo”RPG” for a reason, not that you level up and gather more powerful equipment as you progress, but because you are role-playing as a hero in a danger-filled world that needs more than just your help to save it. The original Guild Wars told a wonderful story (though a bit cliché) and it did this through the use of in-game cinematics that helped put you in the middle of the story instead of on the sideline reading quest-related text that got tedious after a few hours (There still are side quests you get to read through though) and with each released Guild Wars campaign and expansion, the world and lore expanded in bits and pieces without overwhelming the players. This is especially true with Nightfall which introduced players to heroes who had their own dilemmas and backgrounds that fleshed out over the course of the game. And it’s glorious. Even now, with Anet hard at work on GW2, they still have time to expand the story with a little here and there with the War in Kryta, which has players choosing between two in-game factions on who should be the leader of the Kryta nation, with community interaction being the key. And all of it lends to the GW2 story, so obviously ArenaNet knows what it is doing and that makes me all the more excited for Guild Wars 2.

With traditional MMOs you can choose to solo or you can find a good guild or party to play with. With GW2 there’s a third option too: you can just naturally play with all the people around you.

Another great feature I’m sure many will be hesitant about but it’ll somehow work out in the end. “When someone kills a monster, not just that player’s party but everyone who was seriously involved in the fight gets 100% of the XP and loot for the kill.” Seriously involved being the keywords there, and this brings up the question, if we have this kind of system in place, who needs parties? Well, teamwork, for starters. I’m guessing it would be harder to heal players not on your team or to coordinate without a clear party leader, but enough about that. This game mechanic almost eliminates kill stealing and boss camping which would be fantastic. I say almost because nothing is perfect and players will find a way around it (maybe) but I will remain optimistic because it sounds oh too sweet.

GW2 shares this flexible skill system. The big difference is that now skills are much more visual in explaining what they do. The process of actually discovering combos, or understanding them when they’re used against you, is a lot more clear, because you can visually see how skills combo with each other.

The first Guild wars had a fantastic combat and skill system, limiting players and hero companions to just 8 skills over two professions, depending on which profession they are. It gives a strong sense to prepare for anything the player could encounter in the wild and how players in a party had to play around each other and off each other’s skills while not taking the fun away from creating skill combinations that were fun for the individual. And with this system being reworked but not thrown for GW2 out is even more fantastic news from ArenaNet as the skill system is a big reason why I and others like Guild wars so much. It takes actual skill to prepare a proper bar. Or you could always be a tool and go to PvX.

At the end of it all, after reading the post, my love for ArenaNet and Guild Wars is renewed once more and I look forward to seeing how Anet will take us back to our MMO roots with Guild Wars 2. Whenever that will be released.

Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto via ArenaNet Blog