One of the ideas that I see frequently this week in Guild Wars 2 guides is that the game is about exploration. And to be perfectly honest, that sounds quite lovely even if the game itself isn’t for me. But why is that attitude gaining promenence now? Relaxing and exploring a new world is great advice for most other MMOs too, so where were the throngs of people declaring that we were all doin’ it wrong?
I was specifically reading this 10 Ton Hammer article on “How to Love Guild Wars 2” when I was struck by the relative newness of this emphasis on exploration. To quote the article, “If you want to find Tyria fun, embrace your inner explorer. Get yourself out of that quest-driven mindset,” and I am seeing similar advice being given all over the internet.
Certainly, there are MMOs where exploration is almost entirely out of the question — I’d say the revamped old world questing in WoW’s Cataclysm was a good example of actively dampening exploration. Often if you didn’t finish all the quests from the first hub, you’d subsequently miss out on quests through the entire zone. Someone even vaguely invested in seeing the content really had no choice but to go from A to B to C.
That wasn’t always the case in WoW, though, and while other MMOs have arguably not put the same emphasis on exploration, they certainly would benefit from such an approach by players. What’s going on in SWTOR? Go exploring! Find odd things to click on that would kill you, and datacrons. Stumble across a small town and help the citizens, then roll back on out into the space night. What’s up in RIFT? Climb a mountain and find some weird group of dwarves up there just hanging out, and maybe get an achievement for it. And classic WoW… well, anyone who says they didn’t enjoy the exploration back in the day was, indeed, doing it wrong.
I am a little put off that some of the same people who were the “go go go” types have changed their tune to “it’s exploration, stupid”, but at the end of the day they’re right — it IS about relaxing and having fun and exploring. I’m not entirely sure how that became the current hot gameplay ethos, though. Maybe I just haven’t seen the right conversations, but it strikes me as odd that many players will fight to make WoW ever more of a lobby-based game while exhorting the joy of exploration in Tyria.
Perhaps it’s the newness and novelty of the content?
I guess what I’m saying is that a lot of the advice that I see applied to playing Guild Wars 2 right now also works very well with other MMOs, should you find yourself playing another MMO. In fact, some of us have been treating our games that way to some degree this entire time. I heartily recommend it.
Herding Cats is the blog of Liore, known in the real world as Jessica Cook. She writes mostly about MMOs and RPGs, and believes in 
A new world is just that, new. There is essentially no choice but to explore. Everything is new, so not only is the land explored, but the classes, races, ‘quests’, and lore. Eventually people will have the game more or less figured out. There will be little left to explore and short of adding a new continent (and the devs retaining the style needed for exploration), not much new either. WoW is in this latter stage, with most figured out and the devs simply show no interest in encouraging or rewarding exploration. Players are making the best of what it is becoming, perhaps pushing it closer to its logical conclusion. But they still want to explore and a fresh new world gives them that opportunity where the Cataclysm expansion did not.
Klepsacovic´s last post: Time to stop apologizing for Guild Wars 2 because it’s an ‘MMO’
I would imagine people are emphasizing all the exploration because there is nothing much else to fall back on.
I actually read and enjoy quest text. The Renown quest guys do say things, but in the reverse WoW problem, actually talking to them is discouraged. If there is an Event nearby, you might finish the Renown quest without even realizing you were doing anything (e.g. killing invading centaurs applies to both tasks simultaneously).
The instanced story quests are fine thus far, but considering the “meat” of the quest system is supposedly the Events… well, yeah, let’s focus on Exploration, eh?
Azuriel´s last post: The GW2 Quickstart Guide
I also think it’s the depth to which you can explore in GW2. I agree you can explore in the other games mentioned (early WoW, SWTOR), GW2 takes it a step further. SWTOR had a few easter eggs that were fun to find, but most of those were found pretty quickly. One of my guildies had ALL of the datacrons within the first 2 weeks of launch.
For GW2 there is so much more to find, and it’s so much HARDER. Did you ever do the imperial fleet datacron in SWTOR that took a full group and like 30 minutes to do? I can think of the same type of scenario in GW2, but they’re all over the place, and can be done multiple times (daily), not just a one shot thing.
The most important piece I think is that in GW2 you are *rewarded* for exploring. In the cases of not just “you discovered this area! Have some xp!”, but also with Vistas, which provide xp, a completion bonus to a zone, and a nice cinematic, but there are also extremely random out of the way places that are hard to get to that have chests, skill points, and the like at the end of them.
And they’re *hard*. I think that’s the key. All of the exploration in WoW and SWTOR was pretty easy (aside from a couple datacrons). You have to seriously earn your exploration in GW2, and I think that’s what makes it feel more fun.
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I think a lot of this “Go and explore!” hype is in response to people feeling lost because there aren’t NPCs standing around with ! marks over their heads.
Personally I find exploration in Rift more rewarding than exploration in GW2 so far. In GW2 you get a cookie every time you arrive at a place marked on the map, and that makes the whole experience feel cheap and contrived. I find that rather than truly exploring, I’m just following the map from point-of-interest to point-of-interest without really paying attention to the terrain I’m traveling through.
I’m told there are un-marked goodies to find out in the world in the same way there are in Rift but I haven’t gotten that far yet.
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So true! I remember getting up to the gnomish airport in vanilla WoW and being so proud. It was pretty much my greatest achievement in Warcraft at that point. Plus, once I was done exploring, I jumped from the top of Ironforge and it was amazing.
I’m having a lot of fun exploring in RIFT right now, actually. I like that you can find random puzzles, gear, or just get achievements for it. I also appreciate that you can actually climb the mountains and that getting places doesn’t involve crazy amounts of jumping. Being a dwarf is pretty awesome for exploring, too, because you take half damage when you fall, which means I die basically 50% less while trying to run up cliffs. It’s changed my running commentary from “shitshitshitshit.. damn it, dead.” to “shitshitshit… ohmygod I lived!”
But yeah, exploring is fun and it’s always been fun! I think it’s easy to forget after playing WoW for so long since basically everything had been explored on multiple alts so there really wasn’t any point in doing it anymore.
I totally agree with this. I am pretty sure I still have screenshots of The Great Ironforge Leap somewhere. I think I mentioned this somewhere else, but one of the things that I love about RIFT right now (as part of my path away from “end-game raider” and back to “fluff-is-awesome”) is that RIFT seems to actually reward exploration, as opposed to punish it – or deny that it is an interesting thing.
The WoW devs always seemed to view things like mountain-walking and water-running to Dev Isle and Old Ironforge as exploitative and things that needed to be shut down in case someone saw something they weren’t supposed to see. So they ended up getting patched out, eventually. I get the feeling that, in RIFT, you would have gotten achievements for all of those.
Exploring is absolutely one of my favorite parts of getting into a new game. Seeing the art from a difficult vantage point, or just seeing “hey, I wonder if there’s something up there!” is always a lot of fun. WoW had a number of years where that stuff was possible, but eventually I’d just done it all. Or I just flew up there and it was a lot less rewarding.
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Thing is there’s exploration and Exploration. Of course you can explore in any mmo and have fun with it, but it will only take you so far. When you have for example so end-game centric WoW, exploring is just can only be fun distraction from time to time. On the other hand GW2 is exploration. Most of fun stuff you find by cause you were close enough, and not cause some npc sent you there.
Im not saying GW2 is better than any other mmo, but by simple fact that GW2 was designed to be played that way it has advantage over other games expl-wise. It really comes just to simple game desing choices and time devs spent to enchance exploration. You just have more toys to play in this exploration sandbox than in other games.
Again, im not comparing games overall, only their exploration aspect.