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[werothegreat]

More and more MMO's arenow also going the FTP model with microtransactions as they have realised they cannot cope with big industry behemoths on subscriber numbers.

"behemoths" meaning WoW and only WoW. A friggin ten year old game that has stripped out most of its original game mechanics, where the writing is basically assembled by random phrases at this point, and developers are obviously exhausted and bored and waiting for people to go somewhere else so they can work on something interesting. Yet no company out there can summon the basic competence and innovation to unseat it.

Sorry, offtopic.

*cough* GUILD WARS 2 *cough*

Tell me in a year when GW2 and WOW each have 5M subscribers.  Heck, at least wait until NCSoft has released the game.  Every new MMO for the last five years has been hailed as the WOW-killer.  Conan, LOTRO, Rift, TOR, etc.

Except Guild Wars 2 actually might be the WoW-killer.  Guild Wars 1 proved that you can have a financially successful MMO without a subscription fee.  It's getting a lot of good press, and drumming up a lot of excitement.

[Kahryl]

I'm happily playing GW2 right now and it's accessable, reasonably challenging and fun. And the fact that it doesn't require a subscription commitment makes it pretty painless for WoWaholics to try. It's made by guys who really know how to design games - who are knowledgeable about how it's done elsewhere but who don't mindlessly mimic successful formulae - and it shows in a lot of small and big ways.

I am a bit concerned about its staying power, though.
-You essentially get all of your abilities - save for some very long cooldowns - within the first few hours. There's a lot of abilities (25ish that you can have equipped, 75ish for your class total), but the "shape" and general strategy of your character won't change over time like it does in WoW.
-Areas feel smaller than WoW's. Part of this is how much more convenient everything is - you're just running around filling nodes instead of doing questlines, so there's less of a sense of direction and place.
-There's no mana bar or equivalent. Abilities cost nothing to use. They have cooldowns - some of which are very significant - but taking the resource-management dimension out of the game makes it a bit flatter. I don't have the feeling of wanting to hunker over a torn-out piece of paper, theorycrafting my character.

I'm not sure that the GW2 guys are even *aiming* to dethrone WoW. Their business model seems not to be the subscription MMO's call of "Stay awhile. Stay FOREVER!" but instead "Here's a bunch of content for you. Once you're done, grats! Get lost. Come back when we have more ready."