This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. I suppose that people wouldn't complain about massively multiplayer RPGs all seeming the same if they didn't all have the same perspective, interface, combat system, and progression models, to name just a few things (there are many, many more). Yet I think the most important similarity is in how MMRPGs all use time and space - what you spend your time doing and where it happens. It seems that no matter the game in the genre, you spend roughly the same amount of time questing, walking, fighting, or crafting in similar places - this is part of why The Secret World's investigation quests felt so fresh.

Compare the lack of variety on these terms with first-person shooters, and it's easy to see that MMRPGs (with the exception of EVE Online) lack variety in their rhythm. It doesn't have to be this way. There's no conceptual reason why many persistent worlds have to be notable only for how much it deviates from models set by game such as EverQuest and World Of Warcraft.

Guild Wars 2 doesn't change the common perspective, interface, etc., making it look and play much like just about everything else in the genre. However, in terms of time and space, and how accessible (both in the literal and metaphorical sense of the word) it is. It's a dramatic shift for the genre. Guild Wars 2 makes traveling easy.