This year, 2012, Diablo 3 and Guild Wars 2. Two games that, to me, are going to be an evolution of epic proportions. Not revolution, though, and that's a good thing.
Diablo 3 sets out to bring about the next evolution of the aRPG genre, doing away with skill trees and trying to remove the ability of creating a "broken" character.
I played Diablo 2 and it's expansion since it was released, but I only leveled ONE character past 90, EVER. I re-created more characters than I can possibly count simply because I came to a point during the came (sometime during act 2 or act 3) in which the skills I had leveled were no longer working and I kept dying. Playing a game like Diablo 2 and having to build your character a certain way (read: not MY way) in order to play the late-game is not fun.
Diablo 3 changes this, in that it makes ALL skills viable throughout the entire game. The damage of your skills are based on the weapon you are carrying. So, if I am a wizard carrying a two-handed greatsword, my skills will do a lot of damage but with slow attack rate, and I won't be able to use an off-hand orb. Or I can have a knife and be a fast caster with an off-hand orb, or I can find (or craft) an awesome wand and just devastate everything. I'm not limited to only using wands and staves!
Also, attributes are auto-assigned when you level. This has caused quite a stir in the community, but again this prevents players from creating broken characters. Plus, anyone can modify these stats by using gear that adds to them, and using gems in crafting to beef up certain stats.
Blizzard seems to have done an amazing job making sure that everyone who plays will have a viable base character with which to customize via skill-set, gear, crafting, gems and anything else we haven't seen yet. Plus every class gets more than 100 skills that all work with your character and wont get obsolete in late game, and you can outfit your character with the skills that work well with your play style, up to 6 skills assigned at any given time.
So, if I get my wizard to level 30 and I find that my current skills and tactics aren't working on mobs anymore do I need to re-roll? NO! Just search through the myriad of skills for other working combinations, find better gear, and upgrade the artisans for better crafted gear!
Guild Wars 2 sets to bring about the next evolution of MMO's, doing away with the standard quest structure, "skill cancer" bars, and in general players competing against players for EVERYTHING. Need to go and "kill 10 rats" but that other player doing the same quest killed the last one in the area and now you have to wait for another rat to spawn? No, not fun. Player competition should only be in PVP, PVE should be player cooperation!
I think the only time that I had to talk to an NPC quest give was during the tutorial area, since then I just roamed around and events would pop up in my hud and I would stop by and help out!
I also like how there is very little hand holding when it comes to events: I remember my first event in the human starter world, it was on a farm and I could help the farmer by doing many things:
-Water crops
-Weed out worms
-Feed cattle
To weed out worms you had to find their burrows and stomp on them to get them to come out, defeat them and move on. To water crops you had to FIND buckets of water and pour them on the crops. To feed the cattle you had to FIND some feed and bring it to the cattle.
All this was done WITHOUT hand-holding markers on maps, exclamation points over objects, or tooltips in the event description or hud. Seriously it actually took me several minutes to find the crops to water with the bucket I was carrying! I like that kind of difficulty, the kind that actually rewards players for thinking it through or discovering it for yourself. Also, this is when I noticed that there aren't any enemy dots on the map with easy to read aggro circles. When you target an enemy; if an enemy is orange he is docile, if an enemy is red he will aggro you if you get too close, but you don't really know how close is too close.
After helping the farmer for a while, the mother worm shows up and she's huge! That's when the dynamic event popped up and everyone around joined the battle to take down the worm without having to group up, everyone got experience and loot. When we all finally felled the beast the event was cleared. And just when I was thinking "where do I go now?", I walk down the road a bit and another event pops up in my hud, a different challenge with different goals.
This has encouraged me to discover, to walk off the beaten path, and explore the map even beyond what the map obviously shows. Explorers are rewarded in this game, and it's so much fun! If you walk the beaten path you still get events, but there's just so much more if you just take the time to explore off the road.
I better stop now, I could go on forever. 2012 is a year for evolution, the game mechanics of ye' old are dead, it's the start of a new era where fun and cooperation without needless mechanics to get in the way are here!
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