I can't wait for this game to come out. No release date yet. But beta should be soon. Can't wait to play! I can see this game being the game of the year when it comes out,
Guild Wars 2 takes place in the high fantasy world of Tyria, 250 years after the players' defeat of the Great Destroyer in the Eye of the North expansion. Five so-called Elder Dragons sleeping beneath the continent have awoken in the time since Guild Wars, causing widespread destruction to Tyria and corrupting its inhabitants. The once dominant humans of Tyria are in decline, supplanted from most of their land by natural disasters and war with the charr, who have finally reclaimed the last vestiges of their ancestral homeland of Ascalon from the humans. To the north, the norn, a proud race of nordic hunters, have been forced south by the rise of Jormag, and in the west, the technologically advanced asura have been forced to establish permanent homes above-ground after the minions of the first dragon to awaken, Primordus, took control of the Depths of Tyria. Near the forests where the asura make their home are the sylvari, a new race who have appeared in Tyria in the last 25 years, unaffected by the difficulties that plague the other races but with some as-of-yet unexplained connection to the Elder Dragons.
To the south, the continent of Cantha has been cut off by an isolationist and xenophobic political climate, which is reinforced by Zhaitan's undead navy. Elona, too, has been cut off; the only hint of its continued prosperity being the ongoing battle between Palawa Joko's Mordant Crescent and Kralkatorrik in the Crystal Desert, as well as occasional reports from Order of Whispers spies. The Battle Isles have been wiped off the map entirely by the tidal wave caused by the re-emergence of the fallen kingdom of Orr, which came with the awakening of Zhaitan.
The advancement of time from Guild Wars is reflected in the changes in culture, including armor and clothing, as well as in the advancement of in-game technology and a unified common language.
Guild Wars 2 is a spectacular game. Definitely changes up things in all the right places. I've been doing my best to keep people in the GW2 group apprised of new info. Speaking of... I come bearing good news!
ArenaNet has confirmed we will be seeing the 8th profession this year, and that everything is on track for closed Beta testing to begin this year. Considering ArenaNet has a fairly long holiday break, I expect we'll see a lot of new information over the next 8 or 9 weeks, give or take. Closed beta results will determine open Beta, and open Beta results determine release date, etc., etc..
If anyone has any specific questions about Guild Wars 2, I'll do my best to answer them. I have done extensive research regarding the game, and have a little bit of "insider info" regarding the game. (Nothing NDA-breaking, it's simply what ArenaNet has told the community in conversation... such as my previous post.) I'm happy to pass on what I know. (Questions regarding release dates will be ignored as cruelly and sadistically as possible. heh.)
BUT Before tossing around random questions like "Can I jump?" (you can, by the way), please visit the Official FAQ. I'd rather not waste everybody's time answering the same five questions over and over.
I've found that many of the people who have been actively playing Guild Wars between the announcement of Guild Wars 2 and now (the announcement was long ago; people who didn't follow ArenaNet didn't really find out until videos started coming out, though) are already done being excited... Obviously this isn't the case for everyone. As such I can see many potential places for this game to fail (but I won't name them yet, since I don't want to bash a game that hasn't been released yet). But I like their idea... although going away from the instanced worlds of the original Guild Wars will be a bit of a change for people like me.
By all means, voice any valid concerns. I guarantee the GW2 community is harder on the game than anyone, and if you think of something we haven't, I'll pass it along for you. (ArenaNet's cool like that.) I said I'd answer any questions I can, and "Will GW2 suck?" (No) is one of them.
All I ask is that criticism remain as genuine as possible. None of this "gild warz suks, [insert other game here] rulz" garbage, if you please.
Who is this "we"? What is the "Guild Wars 2" community? I mean... the game hasn't come out yet... how is there already a community for it? (I also forgot to mention in my first post that I'm one of those people who still play Guild Wars regularly.) Well, from the original Guild Wars, loot and experience were shared among the party. This didn't matter that much, thanks to instances, though. The problem in Guild Wars 2 is that experience and loot are DUPLICATED for everyone who participated in killing a monster. Now, this obviously isn't a problem with events and such, which scale in difficulty, but when just fighting singular monsters (monsters not part of events), there's absolutely no purpose in soloing now. People who want a single player experience will have to stick to dynamic events. And that brings me to my second concern. Dynamic events repeat, I know that. But eventually, people will run out of them to do. Developers give new dynamic events through updates and all... but won't that just turn the game into World of Warcraft's instancing system, where hardcore players finish new content quickly, and then sit around doing nothing until more new content is pumped out? There's a whole slew of quests in the original Guild Wars, and that makes it incredibly playable. But the thing is that dynamic events are a lot harder to code than simple quests, and thus will take a longer time. Even at its height, the amount of content in each campaign left many people playing the original Guild Wars simply wait for an expansion (especially after Factions, which had less missions and less quests than Prophecies and later Nightfall). And with the expansion system, the developers also have to devote time to making expansions rather than new dynamic events. That'll make it even slower. For those of you who don't know, ArenaNet's team is not that big like Blizzard's World of Warcraft's team... so small size will also extend periods between content updates.
Many people have played Guild Wars. A few months after the release of Eye of the North, about the time when another expansion was due, many people stopped playing. With so many new limiting factors, Guild Wars 2 looks to be more like World of Warcraft's system of "wait around for new content". Because the simple fact is that dynamic events aren't as dynamic as the developers make them sound... they repeat, and they don't change every time they're repeated. They simply have a chain related to them, and the outcome of the chain as a whole (before resetting) is decided by the players.
Who is this "we"? What is the "Guild Wars 2" community? I mean... the game hasn't come out yet... how is there already a community for it? (I also forgot to mention in my first post that I'm one of those people who still play Guild Wars regularly.)
GuildWars2Guru.com. It's basically an extension of the GW1 community, but attracting new players and fans as well. ArenaNet frequents those boards, reads our suggestions, and sometimes responds with helpful (and sometimes unhelpful, thank you very much Martin and Eric... heh) information.
Well, from the original Guild Wars, loot and experience were shared among the party. This didn't matter that much, thanks to instances, though. The problem in Guild Wars 2 is that experience and loot are DUPLICATED for everyone who participated in killing a monster. Now, this obviously isn't a problem with events and such, which scale in difficulty, but when just fighting singular monsters (monsters not part of events), there's absolutely no purpose in soloing now. People who want a single player experience will have to stick to dynamic events.
Not exactly. The loot is "phased", similar to Treasure Chests in Guild Wars 1. Instead of enemies dropping a single piece of loot that everyone can see you get and get angry/jealous at you for, they get their loot roll and you get yours. To quote their blog: "Everyone gets a swing at the proverbial pinata".
The Experience system actually favors solo players. Look at it this way, in Guild Wars 1 and most other MMOs, the way to get the most experience was to play solo because you were effectively penalized for joining a group. In Guild Wars 2, you never have to join a group, and couldn't care less if someone wanders in and helps you kill something, because you still get full XP (and an independent loot roll) for it.
And that brings me to my second concern. Dynamic events repeat, I know that. But eventually, people will run out of them to do. Developers give new dynamic events through updates and all... but won't that just turn the game into World of Warcraft's instancing system, where hardcore players finish new content quickly, and then sit around doing nothing until more new content is pumped out?
Maybe. But unlike World of Warcraft, you cannot "outlevel" content in Guild Wars 2. Thanks to the content scaling and sidekicking systems, you will have your overall power reduced when you go back to earlier areas, which means there's nothing stopping you from playing an earlier dungeon to get the pretty shinies, or looking through other races' starter areas, etc.. You'll still find challenge there instead of one-shotting everything, ruining everyone's experience, including yours.
Secondly, Dynamic Events are exactly that, dynamic. Not just in their execution (upscaling for more players, etc.), but in their content. In fact, some Events can crossover and interfere with each other. Some examples mentioned at San Diego ComicCon were: A blizzard might roll through an entire Zone (which, incidentally, are enormous in comparison to other game maps), kicking off new Events within Events already in progress; or a certain Charr area has Events to build fortifications and Events to defend against waves of Ghosts, if you complete the fortifications (artillery, etc.), they are there and ready for you to use against the Ghosts, and if you don't they aren't. Coupled with the fact that Events aren't on timers (they kick off due to player action, inaction, or sometimes at random), and once one does resolve it will not repeat again for potentially hours, not to mention the fluid dynamics of player movements, it is extremely unlikely you'll ever see the same map twice, even if you've already played through that area before.
There's a whole slew of quests in the original Guild Wars, and that makes it incredibly playable. But the thing is that dynamic events are a lot harder to code than simple quests, and thus will take a longer time. Even at its height, the amount of content in each campaign left many people playing the original Guild Wars simply wait for an expansion (especially after Factions, which had less missions and less quests than Prophecies and later Nightfall). And with the expansion system, the developers also have to devote time to making expansions rather than new dynamic events. That'll make it even slower. For those of you who don't know, ArenaNet's team is not that big like Blizzard's World of Warcraft's team... so small size will also extend periods between content updates.
As I said before, ArenaNet is planning on adding new content and "hidden" Events starting Day 1. They are able to accomplish this because ArenaNet is now large enough to split into multiple content teams. The Live team (similar to, but of different makeup than the GW1 Live Team, currently responsible for such content as the recent Winds of Change update) will be able to focus primarily on creating new, free, "small" content (such as individual packets and chains of Events), while the Expansion teams are able to focus on the grander Expansion content, such as Eye of the North was.
Normally, that might lead one to believe the content will be disjointed, having many different cooks in the kitchen and whatnot, but ArenaNet's core philosophy of "everyone working together" applies to their development teams too. They can literally form groups on the fly and hold meetings on a whim. In fact, in their new office building, they can literally unplug their walls and desks and move them to suit their current purpose. The individual crews themselves are made up of people from different departments, depending on what content they are working on at the time. They all have their specialties and focuses, but they really are one big development team... and that's awesome.
Many people have played Guild Wars. A few months after the release of Eye of the North, about the time when another expansion was due, many people stopped playing. With so many new limiting factors, Guild Wars 2 looks to be more like World of Warcraft's system of "wait around for new content". Because the simple fact is that dynamic events aren't as dynamic as the developers make them sound... they repeat, and they don't change every time they're repeated. They simply have a chain related to them, and the outcome of the chain as a whole (before resetting) is decided by the players.
That's the thing though, they're not going to tell us when they're adding the smaller content. They're just going to add it in and wait for players to discover it (like they did for Hearts of the North). Say, for example, you're wandering through the Human area farms (where the "bunnies eating the watermelons" and "bandits burning the crops" events normally happen), and suddenly you notice a rogue bull attacking or something, something that's "not supposed to happen". That's the experience they want players to have. Unlike GW1, knowing the new Event exists and where (such as looking it up on the Wiki) doesn't change the surprise factor of seeing something new and different in the game for yourself.
As I said previously, the content does change. More importantly, the chains branch and spawn new chains. In fact, Events can have multiple results, far beyond simply "you can't use this town anymore". Take the Pirate Raid demo scenario shown off last year: at some point during the boss fight, the pirates would kidnap a family, or if you get there in time, just a little girl. You can hear the kidnapping take place. if you choose to intervene, you can chase down the pirates (whom you can see escape out the back), or you can focus on the task at hand, which moves that chain along it own "track" toward a Pirate Base, which is in another direction entirely, and chase after the kidnappers another time.
I should also point out that it's extremely difficult to "do everything" in Guild Wars 2. There are activities to do in between Events. Content will change depending on in-game time of day, weather patterns (such as the aforementioned blizzard), and other Events in progress. Even playing through the same Event, sometimes you'll be alone, sometimes you'll have 100 players in the area. Both of those scenarios feel and play differently... and that's just the overworld experience. As British game commentator Totalbiscuit put it :
You can do whatever you so desire here. If you want to fix it simply by picking up junk, you can. If you want to fix it by killing rats, you can. If you want to fix it by picking up gears and defending the actual area, you can do that too.
This doesn't answer many of my concerns.... First the looting... from what I understand, despite different loot for everyone, people still have the same amount of loot gained... there's no decreased chance of looting if you're in a group. Nor is there EXP deduction. And in Guild Wars 1 and other MMOs, you were DEFINITELY NOT penalized for joining a group. Sure, you got less EXP and loot, but you killed WAY faster. Soloing means you only have yourself, while grouping, you have yourself, others, and, as a bonus, synergy which may make skills work better together. It'd be unfair to say that you got penalized for joining a group. In fact, it's usually better. But soloing was not far behind. In Guild Wars 2, you not only get yourself, others, and synergy, you also get full EXP from killing stuff. That means you kill things faster, and get the same EXP you'd get while soloing... which means theoretically two people killing together would receive EXP twice as fast as a single person killing. While this does get rid of the anger of kill stealing and all, your response does not in any way make me feel more comfortable of making soloing much slower than grouping.
In terms of content, in World of Warcraft, let's say you're 85. You're max level. You can do all 85 content, which is a lot. You don't really "outlevel" content in that game either, because there's still content at max level. But after you do that you just... wait. While conflicting dynamic events and hidden updates and all do make more content... more than I expected, you forget that Blizzard also said it's hard to "do everything" in World of Warcraft. Yet every time a content update is released, people get them done in a few days (unless you count dailies, which are limited per day... Blizzard's way of buying more time). And while events do branch and such, you need to look at it from a programmer's perspective (I'm a bit of a programmer myself): it still needs to be coded. Sure, something different might happen a few times. But it won't be long before you experience all of that. And then more needs to be added. If it's not added fast enough, people have nothing to do.
While I appreciate your answers, they sound as if they come directly from the developers... who, thanks to the laws of propaganda, do not exactly give out realistic responses.
If all you're doing is killing random mobs, then yes, two people will kill a mob faster than one. I think a misconception here is that there will be significant down time between Events, where players have nothing to do but kill random mobs. It is true that Events do not "cycle" as fast as, say, a repeatable quest (where all you have to do is click a button and "poof" it's there for you), but as you can see in the demos (specifically these videos, Totalbiscuit is awesome, isn't he?), there is plenty of stuff to do without killing random mobs at all. And while it is true players can avoid the Events if they so choose, there's no reason to do so, except to get to a new area. Events are the primary content here, and worth WAY more experience and rewards than just faffing about murdering stuff. They happen often enough to keep the area you're in interesting, but also slowly enough to encourage exploration, break up "zergs", and make failure of an Event actually mean something. (Journalist comments, not ArenaNet's, by the way.)
Those are convention demos, so view them with as much skepticism as you like, but ArenaNet have said the only content that was "toned down" was the high-level area, removing the down scaling and starting players several levels higher than the content they were playing, and the only thing that was artificially sped up was the boss fight with the big dragon, to give everyone the opportunity to see it. According to them, with those few exceptions and a lot more polish, what you see there is what you will get in the game.
You absolutely do outlevel content in World of Warcraft. At 85, you can play all of the level 85 content (and that's a lot of content, enough to make "endgame" an entirely different game), but level 10 or 20 content is boring and pointless at 85. You have little reason to ever visit those areas again. In Guild Wars 2, at level 80 (max level), you play the higher-percentage level 80 content, but you can go back and play anywhere in the map, and have it be worth your while to do so.
Regarding programming time: You're right, it does take time to script, program, test, and implement Events, etc., and ArenaNet has been elusive talking about the frequency of updates (mostly because they have the majority of the team focused on completing the main game right now, so there really is nothing to talk about yet). The growth rate of the world is a point of contention around the Guru forums, and unfortunately there can't be a definitive answer right now (the 80/20 rule doesn't really work with no general player data, aka Open Beta). ArenaNet have indicated that updates (such as new hidden Events) will be faster than content updates from GW1 (like the skill balances and GW:Beyond content) , and that they are building the larger Expansion content at the same time. Content updates should be fairly regular, but if I understand correctly, should not be regular enough to be predictable.
Regarding consumption rate: Unlike quests in World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 1, etc., you can't simply click a button and summon the Event. You have to do something to trigger it, such as exploring a cave, or being in the right place at the right time, or completing a previous Event. That significantly slows down the rate at which content is consumed. As I said before, an Event will not be the same every time, which encourages players to return to try out the variants. Scaling tiers alone merit a minimum of 3 playthroughs each (there are more tiers, but you shouldn't need to play them all to get the gist). That doesn't sound like a lot compared to repeatable Missions or Raids, but compare them to other games' primary content: quests. How many times do you complete a quest? once? maybe twice if it's repeatable and you're bored? (unless it happens to have a particularly desirable reward, and then only that one quest). Will players still attempt to blaze through it? of course they will. Will those players end up being bored? maybe. There is other stuff to do, some of which doesn't get "used up" so easily, (like Mini-games, PvP and WvWvW, daily Feats, Dungeons, etc.), and as I said before, there will be fairly regular content updates. We'll have to see if they're regular enough compared to, say, World of Warcraft or Rift.
Hope this helps a little more, and wish I had a more definitive answer for you...
The same as all the other "Groups" here at RT, there is one dedicated to Guild Wars 2. Unfortunately It's been dead for awhile, and I'm working on rejuvenating it.
Oh totally. the G*Star demo looks absolutely gorgeous. Even more amazing knowing this is still not the final polish run! I can only hope to see it when/if I can make it to PAX East next year...
The 8th profession is indeed the Mesmer, confirmed on Twitter by Martin Kerstein after an accidental leak from a Dutch website (who shall remain nameless...)
Youtube was quick to copy the trailer video before ANet removed it, and it is very interesting indeed.
A new update today, for presumably the last blog post of the year. Today they detail some minor tweaks to the Thief, a brief overview of the Achievements system, and some interesting technical information on skill queues and how they represent visually in the game.
