To be honest, I like MMOs to be uncomplete-able. If I'm paying £30+ I don't want to finish it in an afternoon. Hence subscription based MMOs offer value for money. Guild Wars to me looks like a quick game followed by lots of essentially clan battles with a pretty backstory.

Thanks for reading my opinion.

They both have their +'s and -'s. However MMO's being persistent and needing more people to conquer certain aspects of the game lead to more comraderie imo.

I have played both Guild Wars and Fury and there just doesn't seem to be a sense of achievement "team" wise. Although being able to not have to log in for hours at a time is a huge plus for corpg's especially at my age!

But LoTro has changed my opinion on that. I don't feel the need to be at EVERY raid, the people in the game are a little more mature than other MMO's I have played and it is a big relief for me.

Great article btw Hades you have been around a long time and your articles are always very informative.

As a casual MMOer I hate this idea. Most of the time I have less than an hour when I login, only enough time to do a quest or two. I don't want to waste my time find a good group.

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention A Tale in the Desert which predates Guild Wars. A PvE game (without fighting) and definitely a CORPG, though I never heard the term before today (and I've played Guild Wars), ATitD took crafting to another level.

Nice article. One thing I do and don't like about MMOs are exploring. Its fun to see all the new things, but I don't want to spend 12 hours doing it. I hope in the future they make exploring fun with out making it tedious.

Hopefully we'll see a lot more of these in the future. Thanks for the comment Stinger.

Nice article, I am a fan of the Guild Wars model and I am sure they will improve on the model greatly.

I feel RP is different for everyone. I do am an old pen/paper player and i always felt I was a role player, but some that i played with took it to a whole different level. One doesnt have to completely act out the part to enjoy role playing. What is a Warrior? Hacker, slasher and killer correct? If I am hacking ans slashing and killing and i dont do that in real life I am role playing although it may not meet someones particular criteria that doesnt mean I am not role playing. Most games have an RP mechanic to them, even FPS, you are some dude that is mindlessly killing a bunch of crap and you wouldnt dare do it in real life.....its a role and you are playing it.

Enjoyed the comments by W@M and the article!

You are right about the raids. I think that the ability to enjoy the content at your own pace and not need a mega guild (and I'm talking 50-150+) to get to the end game stuff is certainly appealing.

Good comments thus far!

Hmm, I'm an old pen paper role player. It's a pity no ones addressing the real issue here. It may be nice to dress like, and cast spells/fire bows/swing swords like an ancient 'fantasy' hero, but that in no way makes you a ROLE player. It just means you have a colorful, well animated, avatar.
The industry, and players are complicit in the delusion, have Co-opted the word RP into their games.
A more accurate description would be : COG's or MMOG's and at this point, I feel its due to the irrational psychosis of representation.
PLANETSIDE is a SCI/FI military COG. And to a lesser degree, the lobbies of ALL FPS' are the verbal staging grounds of the CITY areas you find in GUILD WARS, guild wars just allows you to 'run around' in the lobby and 'strut'.
That was called SANCTUARY in PLANETSIDE.
So why the total dedication to co-opting the word RP to extensively ( bar a few exceptions ) the 'ancient-tolkienesqe' fantasy genre.
I have an answer.
We are all coping with the 'realization' we live in a world where for 4/5 of the population, violence and HARD unrewarding work, is a part of life.
We on the other hand, live in a world where its unlikely your house will be raided, bombed, targeted by opposing militia's etc etc. BUT we also wish to play games that get OUR adrenaline running.
So we sanitize it.
By being an ELF with a bow, by being a MAGE with a fireball, by being an ORC with a Meat cleaver, we get to BE violent, and aimlessly destructive, almost in sympathy with the state of our world, but we feel totally immune to the effects, since our actions were VIRTUAL, as all our AVATARS were NOT a simulacrum of any soldiers/terrorists/militias/mobs we see performing those acts for real on our media.
If we were ROLE PLAYING, surely that would send us all psychotic, having and ORC avatar, or even an ELF, if all it ever did was mindlessly go forth to 'Kill' every day from some virtual lobby?
So FPS genres that are militaristic are almost totally excluded by the MMORPG and CORPG discussion because in those games, your avatars ARE whats going on in the world, and most people don't want to confront the utter brutality of what that means to those taking part.
My advice is we start being much more honest about the true consequence of 'slicing your opponent limb from limb, frying them in a haze of fire and or ice, impaling them with bolts from your weapon of wood', it dulls you to the real world.
In ROLE PLAY, used in the workplace, conflict RESOLUTION is the reason it is used.
In Games its used as a sanitizing TAG to exempt certain non-reality facing individuals, with their more base nature, that its easier to KILL your opponent, rather than reason with him/her.

Look, I'm not advocating we abandon these games, I'm just saying that RP has been incorrectly co-opted to sell us 'kill the opponent' games, and that no ROLE PLAY actually goes on.
I have run a guild where ROLE PLAY was at the CORE of the guild, and story lines and telling were made much of, but the game engines themselves are really just 'combat zones' surrounded by nice trees. weather, and sounds. So it is hard to keep it focused on a ROLE PLAY centered environment.

In conclusion, I have no issue with people playing 'fighting' games, we live in a violent world, and maybe the catharsis of joining in, helps us cope with an otherwise untenable situation. That issue is for future historians and psychoanalysts to look back on and wonder at why we all went 'killer/respawn/kill again crazy'.
BUT, i wish the word RP was dropped from the pretense, so we would all just enjoy the adrenaline release, and not delude ourselves that we ROLE PLAY our chrs really well.

Long live COG's and MMOG's ( well at least till we decide to become more peaceful )

Peace..

Now if only we could find a happy medium betwixt the two. I really enjoy elements of both, but I hate the whole 40-man raid concept. 25> raids are pretty quick to put together and don't seem to take 2 decades to finish - would definitely like to see more casual-gamer-friendly games.

Thanks for sharing your opinion Sensational! Care to elaborate on your carefully crafted point of view?

Oh, and the article is good.

MMORPGs pawns CORPGs.

Pretty sure I read in a recent article that Guild Wars sales have hit the 3.5 million mark now, including all 3 chapters (there's been so many articles recently promoting GW2/GW:EN that I can't remember which of those it was in).

Nice article! CORPGs are fun, MMORPGs are more like work.