Guild Wars 2 - no more MMORPG grind?

Or so the makers claim in this interview:

They do seem to have a new approach to 'questing' - mainly by replacing it altogether;

Quote:

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RPS: You were talking about needing 10,000 designers to make a proper solo experience – what’s the comfortable middleground between having that meat of content and where you have to have some of the traditional MMO treadmill content purely to be practical?

Martin Kerstein: The good thing is that events are, like I say, cyclical but the cycles vary. We have small events, which might cycle a little faster; we have really big challenging events… I don’t know the exact cycles, but it really isn’t like you hand in your quest and then you see a respawn of exactly the same thing. You defend the fort against Centaurs and you push them back, all of a sudden you will see the NPCs and the merchants come back, they bring in guards and you keep pushing the Centaurs further, maybe back to their stronghold. Then as long as you keep them confined, your village is safe. If the players then decide ‘ah, I don’t want to stay here anymore’ and go somewhere else, then all of a sudden the centaurs find there’s nobody there to keep them from taking over the village so they start pushing forwards.

The good thing is those events run even if there are no players involved – if there are no players, the enemy will take over and you’ll have to get it back before you can actually do anything. That’s why it feels more organic and breathing. If you log out in the evening and you know ‘ok, we had control of that stronghold over there’ but you look in the next day and it’s ‘holy crap, what happened? Where did all these monsters come from, where are the merchants, what happened to this town?’ It’s changing all of the time, not having the exact same guys standing in the exact same spots, always saying the same stuff.

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More interesting info through the link.

CR

I am not sure I understand exactly what is being proposed, but you are right - it sounds interesting.

I really liked the public quests in Warhammer Online, so if GW2 develops them, that would be cool. Making more "events" in MMOs seems a very good way to go: when you have a virtual world with many players, leaving it static with fixed quest givers seems a great waste of an opportunity.

However, an alternative to getting rid of quests altogether is simply to have more interesting ones. SP games tend to do this and most MMOs - at least Warcraft - seem to be becoming essentially SP games until level cap. "Kill 10 boars" quests are awful. But anyone with half a wit can improve on that. I think Star Wars the Old Republic is trying to bring SP game quality quests to an MMO. Even Warcraft's quests are getting much better; its ails may be more to do with the endgame - once you've hit max level, quests become irrelevant.

I just hope they get the PvP right. GW1 was the best team-oriented game I've ever played, and the blurring of character classes in GW2 sounds a bit dangerous IMO. The Monk was an awesome support class, and it won't be reappearing in GW2. :no:

I wish they gave players the ability to DM Dungeon Crawls, set the types of enemies the players are going to encounter, the number, rewards, etc. Give the players a relatively open world, with the ability for groups of players to manage the types of quests they want to go on.