The Guild Wars 2 Thread

[sgc_meltdown]

that is good news

don't judge me baby

 

[Mangoose]

Well you can instaport anywhere in the world map too. =\

 

[Excidium]

I think you need to either talk to one of those NPCs or discover the place first.

Either way, it's p. good since there are no mounts, having to walk everywhere would be a pain in the ass

 

[Angthoron]

Either way, it's p. good since there are no mounts, having to walk everywhere would be a fantastic since faster and flightier mounts have fucked up WoW's open world aspect.

Fixed that a lil'

 

[Excidium]

True that. Everyone loved crossing desolace or stv on foot, such wonderful open world content wow had.

 

[Angthoron]

STV was pretty cool actually, don't dis on it. Anyway, you haven't crossed STV on foot til you've crossed it walking. :ironballs:

Desolace kinda sucked, yeah. But so yeah - fast travel and hike should be the only options, with MAYBE somewhat faster mounts. Now everyone has 310% flying mounts, do you see people doing ANYTHING in the "open world" at all? Nope, nosirreebob. Can't even gank a noob or res some chick that would be so impressed you could drag her to the nearest bushes. Pff.

 

[Excidium]

Yeah, it's p. lame. But the lack of people out in the open world is because of the portals + instance queues, by the time I quit wow I only used my 310% mount to move between the mailbox and the AH.

 

[Angthoron]

P. much that, also, yeah. The whole "queue up without having to go to the instance" fucked shit up somewhat fierce. They could just take out the world and leave instances and BGs and that'll be that.

Oh yeah, and a capital city to hang out in.

Meh. That's what happens when you make your game so much for everyone that it ends up being for no-one.

 

[made]

With WoW's quest model, no matter how much world content they put in sooner or later you've seen it all and there's no reason to go outside cities. They introduced the daily quests at one point and it worked all right for Sunwell when there was a real incentive to do them, but the concept itself is pretty lame and a cheap way to get people to grind.

GW2 seems to be all about dynamic public events and it sounds great on paper, but I wonder how long until that too gets boring. They'd have to constantly introduce new, interesting events to keep it fresh, but with a f2p model I doubt that's feasible.

 

[Zed]

They're not even trying to find incentives for people to leave the capital cities in WoW anymore. Next patch they're adding "Looking for Raid" tools, and for the cooking and fishing daily quests you barely have to go outside the city walls.

Meh. That's what happens when you make your game so much for everyone that it ends up being for no-one.

Yup.

 

[Shannow]

GW2 is not f2p. Just sayin'.

 

[Angthoron]

Eurogamer convention's apparently being covered by TotalBiscuit again. You know what that means, good video quality, and a whole lot of the player being a total, well, biscuit. Some things that haven't been seen before, like sinking a pirate ship and so forth. Mainly high-level stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfE_Xu9H1Bw



Also, apparently there was some kind of an interview at the CD Projekt event as well, and I'll just blatantly copypaste the replies, obviously seems to be a fan-made interview though so don't expect stellar quality. Still, some interesting info like remade level caps and the planning of player housing and guild HQs.

The questions were answered by two people, one of them being Colin Johanson and the other Theo Nguyen. (Big thanks to Centaur for the info on Theo's last name )
I tried to write everything down word for word as it goes, so it may sound funny sometimes (especially the questions, funny guy ). Sorry in advance for the typos, it took me a few hours to get all this, got really tired near the end.

Q: I know you guys are focused on finishing the original game but I would like to know how are you going to handle the character progress after the release? Is the original game going to have some cap set on items/attributes, just like in GW1, or will we be growing in power as the content is added (DLC, expansions) and the maximum level will increase?

A: So, the maximum level in GW2 will be level 80 on the initial release of the game. And I'm sure as we add expansion content we're going to add more progression and add more levels to the game. However right now we are really focused on getting the release of Guild Wars 2, for core game to be done right, and we are putting all our effort into getting that put together.
And we're not really thinking that much about what we're going to do with expansions yet. We want to get the core GW 2 game amazing. And when we get that done, we will release it and we will sit down to figure out our plans for how are we going to tackle expansions from there.

Q: So, Character progression. How will it look like? Is it like in the first game or maybe you changed something?

A: The most obvious change is that we raised the level cap to 80. In GW1 you'd hit the level cap really fast so a lot of the progress in the game was going and doing story and collecting skills.
In GW2, since the game is so much broader, we've worked really hard to pack it full witch different content for everyone. So we have the story,we have the DE, we have PvP, we have mini games. No matter what level you are you will always have a wide variety of things you can chose from and play. Our goal is not to force you to play content you don't want to play. The simple answer is: the content is much broader in GW2.

Q: As we all remember GW1 was a pretty much an instance based game. How open and dynamic will GW2 be? What can you tell us about the construction of the world itself?

A: The thing with GW1 was that it wasn't really designed to be an MMO per se. With GW2 we've aimed to make it a full on MMO world (? Too much noise,that's what it sounded like). Completely persistent, there are things going on all over the place. We're going to be sharing play spaces with hundreds of people.
Which is not saying we don't have instanced content. Some story steps and DE are instanced. But we only do instanced content when we feel that ,with all the scripting, it will give the player the best experience possible.

Q: When most people hear "MMO" they think "grind". You need to grind your to the levels by killing monsters and it's boring. So, how do you plan to avoid this boring grind in GW2?

A: One thing we are fighting hardest against is grind. We don't want the player to ever have to grind and do something they don't want to do to progress in the game. As mentioned before, we have a wide variety of things we can do. If you are really in story then you can follow your personal story. If you want to experience events with all the people you have the DE, you can do PvP all the way through the game. At any point of the game you will have a choice of picking whatever you want to do and that's how we fight grind.


Q: You said that Guild Halls and Player Houses are going to be introduced after the release. That it's going to be something really, really special. Not just another place to hang around. I'm especially interested in the player housing part, as I guess it doesn't refer to the players Home Instance. How will the players houses look like? Will we have some movable furniture or something like that?

A: The housing stuff in GW2 we've talked about, we've said that through expansion content we will add a very robust housing system to GW2. It's something we want to take our time to make sure we do that right and make it a really special system in the game. So that people can feel very attached to their house and really make it something unique for them.
To do that we really need to sit down for a while trying to design that system and, as I said earlier, now we are focused on getting GW2, the core game, as great as it can be for the release. We're not looking that much into the details of what we are going to do with the expansions yet. Housing is something we will talk about more down the road when we figure out exactly how we want to do that. Whether it will be within your Home Instance or something separate we haven't decided at this point.

Q: You said you want to make GW2 a lot like a single player RPG game. If I am a solo player and I'd like to play alone, how far into the game can I get without grouping with other guys?

A: We want the vast majority of the time you play in-game to be available to a solo player, completed by a solo player. We don't want you to feel punished because you don't have friends to run around with every time. That said, we do have a lot of content that is group oriented like there are certain very difficult events that will require a group with good team work to get through. Similarly, dungeons will be group oriented. But as a single player I wouldn't be worried about not being able to get through content, you should be able to get through most everything.

Q: I know you are focusing on finishing the game and co-experience but what about the end-level and high-level content for players who max out their characters? What's in store for them?

A: GW2 offers an extremely rich end-game experience for players. We talked a little bit earlier about the personal story your character has, it's a unique story for your characters as you play through the game.
One of the options that is available to you is the re-play option, you can actually go back, you can create a brand new character and you can play through level 1-80 experiencing a completely different story and learn a different story of the world through that character. There are tons of different story lines available through the game. (...) And as you re-play the story you will experience some new DE through the world that you've never seen before.
You can also take your level 80 character and you can go to high level parts of the world and you can participate in DE that are going on there. (...) We have our dungeons, which we mentioned earlier. Dungeons come in two forms, there is a story version which is a more casual, pick-up version of the dungeon and that tells you the story of important characters in the GW2 world. When you finish the story dungeon you unlock the explorable dungeon and the explorable dungeon is our difficult, five-man raid content. This is intended a lot for the max level characters.
When you do explorable dungeons your party gets to actually vote on which path you want to take through the dungeon and every dungeon has at least three paths you can take through. So unlike a traditional MMO where basically there is a dungeon and you beat it in a very specific way and if you want to play it again you do it the same way all over again. We offer three different, or more, paths that you can pick from so each time the dungeon can work differently. And as you play through that dungeon there are DE in the dungeon, just like what you find out in the open road.
These DE have a random chance of occurrence and can actually change the content you experience in the dungeon so, every time you play through it, it feels like something different and unique.(...)
Another thing we have is our competitive PvP which is our hot joinable PvP or tournament PvP, we also have WvWvW PvP which is your server matched up against 2 other servers in a two week long battle royal. This is hundreds and thousands of players fighting across multiple maps to earn points for their server. At the end of two weeks the server that wins gets bonuses, then the servers are matched up against new servers to fight again.
You can play that all the way form level 1 to 80 and you can play it constantly at level 80. There are also mini games, there are achievements you can earn, there are world tournaments that you can do as well. There is all sorts of endgame content available. And we will have a lot more, we'll constantly add more free content to the game once the game has been released so people can go back and experience more and more content not just as the game goes out but also as it continues to go from that point forward too.

Q: Tell us a bit about "The Sea of Sorrows", the third and last GW2 novel. All we have so far is that is that it's going to be focused on Lion's Arch and the dragon Zhaitan. But it's actually what the second book "Edge of Destiny" was about. Does it actually mean that the characters from EoD will reunite and comeback? Does it mean that SoS will be a direct continuation to EoD?

A: (...) It's probably best to avoid spoilers at this time so I won't really get into the details of the story. Sorry.

Q: Let's move to PvP questions. Generally, how important is the PvP component for you? I remember that GW1 was pretty popular as a multiplayer game. How are you planing on expanding that component and what are the ideao for it?

A: PvP is incredibly important to us. We talked a lot about the rich PvE experience we are going to have in GW2 but PvP is also extremely important to us. One of the things that we've done to show that, when we first revealed PvP in GW2 we showed it at GamesCom and we had a playable PvP e-sports gaming booth and there was a lien outside the booth, going around the booth all weekend long to play the game. We had professional sports gaming folks coming over, playing the game all weekend long and getting back in line to play it over and over again. And we put it there for a very specific reason.
We want to send a message that GW2 PvP is a game to be taken seriously. We want to be considered right there up the high tier of competitive on-line games and when you think of on-line PvP for an MMO we want GW2 to be the first game you think of. So it's a huge component for us.
GW1 competitive PvP was very strong, it had a lot of tournaments across the globe, that's something we're going to do again in GW2. We've also added this new type of PvP to GW2 which is WvWvW PvP, that I talked a little bit earlier, and that's our giant open world PvP with tons of players running around playing together.
And our hope is that that will breach the gap between the PvE players and the hardcore PvP players and give them a sort of middle ground where people who are into both PvE and PvP can play together. And maybe people can build skills that will alow them to get into competitive PvP as well and competitive PvP gamers have a place they can go and have a more casual game experience that's part of this open, epic, giant world battle that's going on.

Q: You mentioned that you can go strait to PvP when you start the game. So is it like the first game, where you can make a PvP character and you don't really need to play the MMO part at all, you can just ignore it and go straight to PvP and stay there, right?

A: There is the content you play through at the beginning, the tutorial, probably about 5-10 minutes but after that you can immediately jump into PvP and if you want to PvP all the time we totally support that, we want the content to be what you want to play and if it's only PvP you're after it's perfectly fine with us.

Q: Arenanet is considering to allow players to create their own PvP servers with specific rules for different maps. Could you please elaborate on this topic? What exactly will be possible to change? Beside how many players can participate because everybody saw that at GamesCom.

A: We haven't revealed a ton of information yet about how are we going to handle players setting their own PvP servers. It is something we support. You will be able to set the number of players and the maps you will play on but details beyond that is something we will go into more in the future, when we get closer to reviling more information about PvP and getting closer to the release of the game. It's something we talk a ton about right now.

Q: I'm not entirely sure but I don't think we've seen any examples of environment affecting characters performance. Will there be any effects similar to the movement slowing tar that we remember from Ascalon in GW1 or maybe there will be some effects bound to specific areas that, let's say, make our arrows fly faster or something similar to the effects that the Ranger spirits gave players in GW1?

A: Yeah, there will be environment effects like that in GW2 depending on what area you are in the world. One of the nice things about having a DE system is that we can actually dynamically create those environments as a result of DE and then have them go away again as a result of other DE. So we can actually have the world change and things will occur in the world as a result of the events. We centennially plan to do some of that in PvP as well , Our first competitive PvP match that we revealed actually has some very special environment stuff in it. It's all destroyable environments. So there is the trebuchet you can use in a PvP match and you can actually destroy peace's of the map and create new paths for your team to use to get the capture points, to make it easier to fight the enemies . (...)

Q: The companies that are into e-sport right now are putting huge amounts of money into this competitive scene. Are you going to do something similar like tournaments with millions of dollars in prize pools, something like that? Can we expect that from Arenanet?

A: We actually have a history with GW1 of supporting major tournaments for our games. GW1 had major championships hosted in Europe and in Korea. We've had major tournaments that played worldwide.With GW2 we plan to expand on and build on that. Not only will there be automated, hosted tournaments in the game running all day-long, that are as small as four teams and as large as massive numbers of teams that you can sign up for, jump in and play. We'll also be hosting larger tournaments than that based on the demand of our fans. Our hope is that our game will become popular or more popular than the titles that are there already, we would certainly take advantage of that and try to make giant tournaments if that is what our fans are waiting for, absolutely.

Q: As we all know, the MMO market is pretty much monopolized by one title. There's this one big title then there's the huge gap. You're planing on selling the game with just one price, no monthly fee. How are you going to compete, how are you going to develop in the future if it's only one pay and play kind of idea of selling . How are you going to do it without a monthly fee?

A: That's a great question. You know, the answer is, GW1 had no monthly fee and it worked extremely well for us, for the company. The game was very popular, it sold extremely well, 7 million copies worldwide and it worked extremely well for us as a business model.
It allows us to attract players who otherwise would not get into MMOs, it allows us to keep players that would stop playing at the point when the monthly fee would drive them away. We can build a larger player base, a stronger player base as a result of the decisions we have made. It was a great decision four our company and it worked very well for us.
And our hope is that GW2 is going to be a massive hit. If that happens we're just going to continue to grow and we're going to create more content for people to purchase. We're going to follow the same basic business model that we had in GW1 since it worked very well.
And it makes our fans happy. Our fans can say : "Hey, I love the game you've made. If you guys put out extra content, an expansion I'm going to choose to buy it because the quality is good, I love the game you make." And if they don't think the game is that good then they won't do that but it puts the (pressure? ) on us - to make great things, to make great content and to continue to support the game and make it worthwhile for the players. And as a result we end up having an extremely strong relationship with our customer. We don't want to change that, we love our business model. It's competitive and it works for us.

Source: http://www.guildwars2guru.com/forum/gw2 ... ml?t=22279

 

[SuicideBunny]

i really don't like the high level cap and huge differences between levels.

 

[Excidium]

Cool stuff, thanks Angthoron.

 

[Angthoron]

i really don't like the high level cap and huge differences between levels.

I think they were going to implement downscaling, so you could become "weaker" if you went to a lower-level instance or event. Not sure how that'll work, but them's the words. Might not be an issue. Dunno why make so many levels though, kinda reminds me that "interview with Bethesda", and the "Level 100 would be ultimate" line.

 

[Angthoron]

Some hot PvP action on a Thief, by Total Biscuit. He actually doesn't fuck up too much this time, and I gotta say, thief looks really neat to play.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJC28DUQcZs


Also Pt.2 of that Sylvari thing Biscuit was doing, as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83_Ei14H6Ag

 

[Excidium]

Thanks!

Man, all necros on pvp videos are fucking terrible.

 

[SuicideBunny]

hm, norn thieves look every bit as retarded as i imagined they would...
think i'll go with sylvari thief and asura engi.

really liking the new sylvari style.

 

[Excidium]

hm, norn thieves look every bit as retarded as i imagined they would...

Indeed.

Those tiny pistols...

 

[Angthoron]

Necro seems to be one of the "hard to master" classes. Interesting how TB totally sucks it in the first Sylvari Necro video but then discovers axe+want combo and shit starts to roll.

 

[Mangoose]

Graphics whore time: I wish MMO npcs moved a little instead of just standing there in combat. I feel like they could easily do some strafing/circle-strafing, if even a minor step now and then, and that would make the overall animation more "life-like."

In TB's PVE video, it's pretty nice that doing something you think is beneficial but not a specified quest objective can help you advance the quest. There's one part where he is told to clear an area of some spiders, filling a meter, but reviving the allied NPCs that are lying on the ground actually increases that meter. And then afterwards, he has to kill the undead in a town, but he can also revive the guards in the town to help him do so.

 

[SerratedBiz]

Other than the usual concerns posted already, and the fact that it gave me this creepy WoW vibe at first, I have to admit that PvP video made me fairly wet.

I'm glad that skills seem to be limited to the traditional 8 (though, from earlier information, it seems some of those 8 cycle to an alternative when you change your weapon?) and that healing is part of every PC's skillset now. Maybe it'll finally break the stupid tradition of every MMO of having a dedicated healer class.

Though HP and damage seem bloated out of necessity for making it a level 80 character, it seemed nicely paced. Spiking should still be a strong possibility so I'll be expecting the defensive skills to be failrly powerful / easy to use, considering the no-dedicated-healer point.

But yeah, I'm hot for this game.

 

[Mangoose]

Also of note about the leveling is that the rate will be fairly flat and constant, instead of getting significantly harder to level at the end.

 

[Excidium]

There are actually 10 skill slots. The first 5 are determined by the weapons you are wielding, and also some character abilities and enviromental objects. The elementalist for instance, has different weapon skills for each one of the four elements. The last 5 are skills you can change individually when out of combat, with 6 being the slot for healing skill and 10 the slot for the elite skill.

I'm p. concerned with the shit they have been testing, the skills being learned with weapon use and not costing any energy, both of which sound like terrible ideas.

 

[SerratedBiz]

The tard is strong within me. I basically failed to count the skill slots and assumed there were eight of them, and somehow managed to overlook the fact that you only had a health orb and not an energy one.

What's this no energy nonsense? Management of it was a huge part of mastering GW / playing with its professions.