Guild Wars: Polymock

You know what the one feature is that I didn't get to see during the Sneak Peak that I wish I had? Polymock. Not quite enough to make me break down and purchase GW:EN but, it's definitely captivated my interests for the moment.

It was locked during the event, since you needed to travel to the forbidden Asuran lands to start the process but there was a little guy in Gunnar's Hold just waiting to play you. I was a bit intrigued and, after looking into things post-release even more so. The point of the mini-game is to pick from three pieces out of a total of 27, each representing a different monster form with different abilities which you'll assume and then battle against your opponent. You start with only a few pieces and can collect more by winning those duels or through exploring the PvE campaign (They apparently will drop from the end chests in dungeons, which would probably annoy me even more than the paltry diamonds I got. If I wasn't so interested in it myself, anyway.). You know what that sounds like to me? Skills. Hunting down skills from the game to use to create your own builds and characters to use in PvP. Polymock is probably poorly executed and lame, given that you can only fight against the AI (Just like Dwarven Boxing, I mean, what gives? I want some two-fisted PK action here!) but it also sounds like one of those mini-games that serves a useful goal in teaching and preparing players for other aspects of the game. Actually, the Norn Fighting and Dwarven Boxing are pretty good at that, too.

My point, in so far as I should probably come up with one so I'm not just ranting to myself, is that it's the sort of thing the game needs more of. New, deep formats, like HvH or even Alliance Battles only help to further splinter an eroding player base. To spread out the available players amongst too many niches and making sure that no one has anyone to play with. Instead, the game should be concentrating, so to speak, on its core competencies, and making sure that everything is leading to a few solid choices to pick from. Which isn't to say that minor formats like Random Arena don't have their place because they do. But that place is luring the uninitiated in and channeling them into avenues that are more productive for everyone involved (And as a place to goof-off when you're not up for serious, competitive play and just have a moment to play or some steam to blow off.). And the way to do that is through small, self-contained mini-games that have stripped away a lot of the complexity of those quote unquote greater formats. Even as they remain fun to play, they're subtly instructing players on the finer points of the larger game. Take something like Dodgeball, for example, which is a blast and is occasionally made available in-game as the Dragon Arena (I'd obviously like to see it put in full time, along with the Snowball fights, but that's just me. I'd also like the party size reduced a bit from the six or eight I think it is at the moment. I've played a lot of Dodgeball variants over the years and I like the basic setup of the DragonBall, but with so many players it just turns into a scrum where you're going to get randomly pegged sooner or later. Fewer players means your skill is much more of a factor and turns the game into a much deadlier game of cat and mouse instead of a pair of oscillating lines waiting to zerg on the first person to make a mistake. Again, that's just me.) which strips away all concerns about builds and skills and reduces the game to simply making the most of what everyone has with your twitch based reflexes and innate cunning. Snowball Fights are much the same although by including a slight variation based on professions they teach players how to look through those slight changes in style to find the one they enjoy best. Which is a lot like what Dwarven Boxing does.

Polymock, cuts the other way. Teaching players about putting together builds and teams by disguising it as a game of picking the right piece at the right time. Norn Fighting, too, which is going to force players to come up with Arena-esque builds that can handle the randomized off-the-wall stuff flung their way if they want to proceed. What you come up with is going to be optimized for one on one fighting, and for fighting against some of the jankiest stuff ever – I saw Aftershock Eles and Hamstorm Warriors and 55 Monks, in my brief look during the preview – and, thus, isn't going to be viable anywhere else but in that small little corner of the game. But you can take the knowledge of how to construct a character elsewhere. Meeting the challenge of defeating those builds out there is applicable in any number of other venues and it's a valuable one to learn.

Rollerbeetle racing, by the way, is awful for precisely these reasons. It's too far from the actual GW experience, too alien to the core skills you need to play the game. So, it's a fun little diversion but it doesn't add anything. When everything, every last single part of the game should be adding up to a greater, coherent whole. I've never played Polymock but just the thought that it could do just that makes me want to.