Getting Ready For Guild Wars: Factions, Not the Game

One thing that's perked up my ears about GW:EN is this little tidbit:

There are sort of ’story bubbles’ that lets you experience a bunch of content in one area. There are the three racial representatives when you first get into the gameworld, and (within those racial bubbles) you can pretty much play things out of order.

That, I like. Because it reminds me of an idea of my own which I've probably stolen from elsewhere but the basic gist of it is that a branching, hubbed structure to gameplay is a lot better than points all a line. Like spokes from a wheel, content should branch out from a central hub, allowing players to explore and experience what they want, unlocking further and further paths along separate but mutually inexclusive lines that all eventually lead to the next hub. It gives them options. The players who want to see everything and anything can take their time, try out all the different paths and finish each and every one. While players who want to feel like they're accomplishing things can race ahead and leave what's, to them, optional behind.

Guild Wars has done this before, by the way. In Factions, after being introduced to both sides, you could go the Luxon route or the Kurzick route. Both led to the same place, Unwaking Waters and the battle with the Celestial Dragon before heading back to the megatropolis for the end of the campaign. And each took a similar (though slightly different) way of getting there. There was only one real reason to pick one over the other and that was a single elite skill which you could only find on the Kurzick side of things. Otherwise, it was a matter of personal preference and aesthetics. You could also do both paths, although not at the same time thanks to the faction points thing. But the storyline cleaved at that point and you could follow one path or another or both.

In Nightfall, you had the choices between various heroes. You got them all in the end, of course, and the only choice that had a big impact was picking between the Master of Whispers and Magrid the Sly. It's a no-brainer because Necro heroes are awsum but depending on which one you picked you got a different set of a few missions. And you couldn't get to the others until you went ahead and finished the game off. Similar thing happened later on, too, with Koss and Meloni, where you had to pick which mission you wanted to do.

The other part of the game was still there, still accessible, just a little harder to reach. You had to work for it. And the way it works out with the storyline means you're jumping back in time to a point where that stuff mattered which it shouldn't since you already saved the world. But that's a systemic problem with the model of Guild Wars missions and, to a lesser extent, quests. Once you finish them, the storyline moves on and it's really disconcerting to go back because there's no in-game reason. There could be, of course, but it means disconnecting the missions from the main storyarc or writing more content for them that's unlocked once you complete them once, a series of missions for each map depending on where the story is and you can guess how much work that'd be to figure out why that doesn't happen.

But a hub model gets past that because you don't have to worry, so much, where the rest of the story is. You can get to it in any order, because in the storyline it all happens before the next hub point. It's concurrent and each player gets their own little timeline of events without messing up the overall sweep. You can still tell a grand, sweeping story that way all while giving players options about how they follow it along.

Only catch is you have to accept working up areas of content that might get passed over by the majority of players. Not exactly the most efficient use of limited design resources, of course.

But “story bubbles” sounds to me like hubs. It seems you'll have to finish off all the spokes on the wheel before moving on which isn't how I'd like it – I'd say you have to finish one and then the others become optional – but it seems to flow from the same basic idea.