I also agree about Guild Wars, there are some elements that are annoying and the whole maze-solving is again about the player fighting against the interface, or, in this case, the controls. If these games rely a lot about the conception and use of the space, it’s obvious that the element is important and irrelevant features like the possibility to jump become fundamental.

I wrote not long ago about the need to remove the interface as much as possible and this fits perfectly in the idea. Players like to jump because it’s intuitive. They want to climb a rock, lean over a bridge, trying to jump on or off an high place exactly because this is what they naturally expect. Functional rules and constrictions break the immersion and the natural approach to tackle and overcome problems.

In Guild Wars you don’t have to handle the space you see in a natural way, instead you have to figure out the pattern that the developers set in that precise zone. And too often you have to fight against the boundaries to figure out how to reach some other place.

Also, give a look to this 🙂

Btw, a quick fix to the boring flight paths in WoW: give the players the control over the griffons. Maybe with a functional “wind” simulation so you can accelerate or slow down depending on your position and altitude.

What is broken is the fact that they become nothing more than an animated load screen. Give it some active gameplay and everyone will stop complaining.

And now I’m doing Guild Wars, which I initially said I wouldn’t play because of no jumping, well, we’re all gaming whores, and I have a hard time not playing a game with a Jeremy Soule score, and made by obvious Diablo fans..

That said, indeed, the ratmaze factor is high in GW, looking down a small 10 foot slope, can’t hop down it, or even FALL off it (falling damage, yay!), you have to double back 3 days to get down there, damn!

Why’d they make it that way? It’s like it’s a 2.6666667D, not 3D world, or maybe the Diablo programmers just never figured it out? Dunno!

Give us jumping in there dammit! (SPACEBAR to attack, wtf?)

Movement Keys
Unless you’re left handed or keep your mouse on the left, the arrow keys are a hinderance. After a week of Guild Wars, I’ve brought away a strong sense of how effective a well-designed keyboard layout can be in improving the game (ASDW movement, QE strafe, and R for auto-run–genius!). By comparison, the original EQ layout and DAOC layouts were expressions of mind-buggery the likes of which have rarely been seen, and thankfully seldom repeated. And if those aren’t screwy enough, go play Nethack, with movement keys inspired by the editor vi (written before arrow keys were standard).

Mapping keys is, of course, the solution to most of society’s ills, as you stated.

Ground Speed Increase
“But if you move too fast, you’ll find out how small our world really is! It’ll break immersions!”

Bull. Again, my instructive foray into Guild Wars taught me map travel is godly and all other forms of transport, including mounts, are second-best. Take me directly to the action, and skip all the boring waiting for boats and zepplins and getting stuck on wyverns and hippogriffs from which I can’t leap to my death. DAOC got a couple things right with their horse routes: they’re relatively fast (twice as fast as the top speed chant), and you can jump off them anytime. A good as that is, map travel is better.

Jump
If I wanted to play a platformer, I would have bought a Gamecube with my MMO dollars.

That said, this is where Guild Wars falls down on its face and breaks its delicate nose. You really do feel like you have to figure out the maze of each level, and because of how the engine handles (a) collision detection and (b) walking up hills, you’re constantly running into stuff you’d walk over, jump over, or charge through in That Other Game (TM).

But, seriously, this isn’t a crtique of Guild Wars, since I already wrote one of those. This is to remind you that jump isn’t an excuse to make an MMO like U8: Pagan or a console game.

Killable Quest NPCs
You’re just inviting cock-blocking, griefing, and the whole gamut of anti-social expressions. I could go on, but I’ll leave you with much as I want to kill Nessingwary and his whole cheap crew, I’ll let them continue living in Stranglethorn and swindling players out of hard-earned quest XP rewards because someone, somewhere is doing that series of quests, and would have hurt feelings upon finding the collective corpses of the expedition artistically arranged around their campfire.

What you missed: a completely modelled world
It’s disappointing to look at the game world model in a viewer, and discover inconsistencies, like the watch fires above the walls of Oggrimmar float in air, and the sandstone city walls that are pixel-thin. Even though the design decision is often made to reduce meshes that need to be rended, and most games disallow arbitrary flying, the world should still be designed to to not have unfinished areas. Blizzard is halfway there, with “flavor” areas (the Ironforge Airport, for instance), but didn’t go far enough (cf, Oggrimmar). All companies should fill in these blank spots, if only for consistency in virtual world presentation, even if no customer will ever see the location or can only reach it because of a bug (falling through the world, getting pushed through a wall, etc.).