Guild Wars 2 - Top 10 Reasons to be Interested

[timeadept]

I would just like to thank this thread for re-kindling that furious spark within me that wants Guild Wars 2 to be out already. I started following the game way back when it was announced (which was at the same time as Eye of the North came out) and it's been dragging on ever since. I don't play MMO's, but Guild Wars was good enough to steal some hours of my time, and I actually really intend to get into GW2.
Joined a starting Guild as soon as they started forming, but that pretty much fell apart when people realised just how long they would have to wait ;p

I know, right? These guys need to learn to announce games much closer to the release date! Announce it a few months before it's due and release all this media, like classes and new systems at even intervals. Use that to build momentum and use that momentum to carry your game to a great release! Then again, i don't know much about marketing, but i will hear about a game and think "i really want to play that" and then forget about it.

 

[EmperorSubcutaneous]

Aside from the combat system, events, no monthly fees and familiarity with Guild Wars 1 (im a fan) the main reason im interested is that it has all the systems in place to appeal to my explorer side. Since you will not be needing to follow a quest line to progress, you are free to roam and see what the world has to offer to you, and when i see those graphics and events and all the attention to detail, boy do i want to.

I can't wait to explore all the cities, the human city is just enormous and beautiful: snip

The art style is amazing indeed, but good heavens, enormous indeed. Too enormous, if you ask me. It just doesn't feel like a buzzling town to me. So much wasted, empty space and surfaces. Too much there just for the looks.

That's because this is just footage meant to show off the city. The NPCs aren't in place yet.

The towns will actually be filled with NPCs doing stuff, like carrying wood to fires, not just standing there. You can see a bit of it in this video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of3P9WouogU] (though keep in mind that this is an outpost of sorts, not a city). On top of that, you'll be able to overhear the townsfolk chatting in the background. Here's [http://www.arena.net/blog/against-the-wall-humanity-in-guild-wars-2] a blog post containing some of the clips you'll hear.

 

[ThreeKneeNick]

I really hope it can deliver when it comes to exploration. GW broke three of the fundamental commandments to making a game fun to explore (and one not so important[and yes, i pulled these out of my ass but that doesn't make them any less valid]).

1. NEVER place invisible walls in any place that players would be able to get to easily.

2. Do Not place half assed barriers to stop a player from going into an area that they were never intended to, ESPECIALLY if the player does not have to go out of their way to find them.

3.Let the players interact with the environment. (no, not using tree branches as weapons, but that helps[especially if you just destroyed the tree]. What i mean is that if you show the player a cool rock formation off in the distance, you can be sure as hell that the player wants to go there and climb on it, let them do it.)

4. Make the game world continuous. (basically no instanced areas, but it looks like GW2 is taking a big step in this area)

I get most of that, i had the same thoughts when i started playing. Oh how ArenaNet teased me. When I started playing Factions, off the coast of Shing Jea Island i spotted a small island with a freaking stone dragon coiled around it, and flipped when i realized i cant come closer to look at it. But later i came to appreciate that they used the lack of the Z axis to cleverly end their zones with gorgeous scenery that is just out of reach, instead of how many other games did it, with unimaginative steep mountain ranges you can't climb.

ArenaNet designers did however express regret over how they handled this in an interview in one of this years conventions, so, hopefully, no more teasing and more actual stuff to look at.

 

[Master10K]

Looks pretty sweet, but to be honest, I'm way too hyped for Tera Online to care about this.

That's understandable, but the good thing is that you'll be able to play both. So enjoy Tera in all it's action orientated glory and once you're bored of it, you can always purchase GW2, since there is no monthly fee.

 

[EmperorSubcutaneous]

suddenly...

Interest!

No really this made me realize i never gave gw2 any chance to prove it can beat the old republic and that a few of my main concerns about it are completely wrong. Now if only it had the story-thing like tor and wasn't yet another medieval-ish setting.

They are kind of doing the same story thing SWTOR is doing, just not to the same extent. Read up on the personal story [http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Personal_story] aspect of the game.

Basically, you make a couple personality-related choices at character creation that start things off, and then you'll be progressing through your character's story in the form of missions throughout the rest of the game. Your personality will change depending on how you respond in certain situations, and the way NPCs respond to you will change based on that. (Example: you'll be able to choose to end a conversation by punching an NPC in the face, if your character is getting ferocious enough, and merchants might hide behind their stalls when they see you coming, as a result.)

Another cool thing they're doing here is adding a "home instance." This is your personal instanced area of your hometown. Where other MMOs might give you your own instanced house, the home instance includes a house, several streets, shops, and some other buildings. And the coolest thing of all is it will change depending on choices you've made in your personal story. Merchants you save will end up setting up shop there, and people might even build monuments to you when you get really far along in your story.

As for the setting, it's more Renaissance than medieval. Industrialization has progressed pretty far, especially in the case of the charr [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi5KDcrO4Mk] and the asura (who haven't been shown much yet, but their city has a heavy fantasy-cyberpunk feel to it, seen in this concept art [http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Zojja_01_concept_art.jpg]).

 

[Cowabungaa]

That's because this is just footage meant to show off the city. The NPCs aren't in place yet.

The towns will actually be filled with NPCs doing stuff, like carrying wood to fires, not just standing there. You can see a bit of it in this video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of3P9WouogU] (though keep in mind that this is an outpost of sorts, not a city). On top of that, you'll be able to overhear the townsfolk chatting in the background. Here's [http://www.arena.net/blog/against-the-wall-humanity-in-guild-wars-2] a blog post containing some of the clips you'll hear.

Actually, I was more talking about the vertical space than horizontal one. Big squares and plateau's are one thing, but it's all so needlessly tall. To take the everlasting WoW example again, if there was a two story building you could enter, it actually had two stories on the inside. It all felt...proportional. That big city in that vid felt like one big space-time clusterfuck to me.

 

[EmperorSubcutaneous]

That's because this is just footage meant to show off the city. The NPCs aren't in place yet.

The towns will actually be filled with NPCs doing stuff, like carrying wood to fires, not just standing there. You can see a bit of it in this video [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of3P9WouogU] (though keep in mind that this is an outpost of sorts, not a city). On top of that, you'll be able to overhear the townsfolk chatting in the background. Here's [http://www.arena.net/blog/against-the-wall-humanity-in-guild-wars-2] a blog post containing some of the clips you'll hear.

Actually, I was more talking about the vertical space than horizontal one. Big squares and plateau's are one thing, but it's all so needlessly tall. To take the everlasting WoW example again, if there was a two story building you could enter, it actually had two stories on the inside. It all felt...proportional. That big city in that vid felt like one big space-time clusterfuck to me.

We don't know yet if we'll be able to climb multiple stories in buildings, but considering how much they want us to explore, it would be a mistake to automatically assume that we wouldn't be able to.

Exploration is actually key to this game. They're going to be hiding triggers for dynamic events all over the world. There might be some hidden cave that no one discovers for months after release, but if you find it you might discover something in it that will trigger some massive event. They will also be stealthily adding more of this kind of thing over time, so there will always be new things to discover.

 

[jpoon]

It looks excellent at this point. Not sure if my old 2005 computer will be up to snuff for running it though, might have to pass but I'm pretty tempted to give it a shot.

 

[Master10K]

I've been watching GW2 but this guy managed to come up with some new stuff that i can't believe i missed. /drools over content scaling...

Spoiler: rant about content scaling

Games like WoW and Borderlands DRIVE ME UP THE WALL when it comes to content scaling! WoW has that completely arbitrary weapon skill and defense skill (that scales with your level) where you simply cannot hit an opponent 5 levels higher than you are often enough to kill it (if your class has no healing skill). If you have a healing skill, and bonus points for tanking abilities you can probably handle up to 7 or 8 levels, and my hunter with his pet (dps/(pet)heals + tank all in one class) has managed 9 or 10. But all this is one on one, if you manage to pull something else then you're screwed, you need to use every single ability you have if you want to manage this. Then the fights last a good 5 mim and when you finally win you're rewarded with some scraps of cloth as loot and maybe 1.5X the exp of killing a mob at your level.

It makes leveling a complete grind because they place arbitrary hard level caps on the mobs you can kill. Theres no way to challenge your self while playing if you're above average in skill.

Borderlands has a similar system in place. Your gun magically does more or less damage depending on the difference between you and your opponents level. I will literally be in the middle of a fire fight, having a moderately difficult time, level up, and suddenly everything will just start dieing like their bones turned into toilet paper! Yes, the difference between levels is that sever. You can only hope to kill an enemy 3 levels higher than you at best, more than that and your gun simply doesn't do enough damage. Then borderlands has the problem of having far to many optional quests. If you try to do even half the quests in the game, you'll end up consistently over leveled for your area. Sure you could skip the quests, but i actually enjoyed a good number of them and even when only picking the ones i liked, i was still at a consistently higher level than the guys i was killing. Also, if you don't accept the quests, then clap-trap never shuts up about them, but if you accept them then they never leave your quest log until you finish them. So you end up having your quest log filled with 50 grey(trivial difficulty due to level differences)quests and having to scroll past all of them each time you need to look up a new one or track a different quest.

So a broken difficulty curve combined with a poorly designed quest system ended up being a constant thorn in my side while playing one of my otherwise favorite games.

I am very much looking forward to GW2 and really hope that it exceed my expectations (i placed them a bit low because i didn't find combat very entertaining in GW)

Yeah, I find it annoying how easy it is in MMOs to just out-level the content you have to do and the content you want to do can be impossible for your level. Which is why I like what they are doing with both content scaling & player scaling.

Content scaling as in allowing players to go and do content that is a couple levels above them and have it be challenging, not impossible. This is attributed to the combat being skill based, not RnG based. So if you hit a mob and it connects, it will do damage; not give some "dodged" or "missed" message. The devs even gave an example of a time when a couple of them were play testing content 8 levels above them. Also when you're doing dynamic events with 5 players and 5 more join in, the content will scale up to accommodate for those players and scale down when players stop participating. Player scaling is implemented via the side-kick system [http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Side_kick], which I'll just let you read about.

Also about your issue with GW1 and invisible walls and such. Arenanet understand this themselves and these two quotes from this blog [http://www.arena.net/blog/an-introduction-to-the-environment-art-of-guild-wars-2#more-5073] will satisfy you:

"Game worlds aren?t movie sets. Though the sprawling world of Guild Wars 2 has no physicality, it?s a persistent place that will be experienced again and again, from multiple vantage points. In the original Guild Wars, a map artist could ?cheat? in places they knew a player could never reach, using unbacked facades or hollow props, but there are few parts of this new game world that are inaccessible. Players are going to swim to the bottom of that flooded cavern or jump the counter of that pub to sneak into the back room. So, no cheating this time."

Player exploration of Guild Wars 2 will be encouraged and rewarded, just as it was in the original Guild Wars. It?s up to the environment team to fill our game with memorable locations worthy of that exploration. A series of broken stone columns turns out to be a jumping puzzle to reach a hidden cave mouth overgrown with vines. The caved-in floor of a ruined fort drops you down several stories into a flooded subbasement haunted by the cursed ghosts of pirates. A hatch in the basement of a farmhouse conceals a tunnel to the cavern hideout of a bandit gang."

 

[Cowabungaa]

We don't know yet if we'll be able to climb multiple stories in buildings, but considering how much they want us to explore, it would be a mistake to automatically assume that we wouldn't be able to.

Exploration is actually key to this game. They're going to be hiding triggers for dynamic events all over the world. There might be some hidden cave that no one discovers for months after release, but if you find it you might discover something in it that will trigger some massive event. They will also be stealthily adding more of this kind of thing over time, so there will always be new things to discover.

I wasn't saying there wasn't going to be exploration, I was just trying to say that it felt very disproportional. A human house in WoW felt like the right size for a human player. When it had two stories, it actually had two stories and was proportioned just right. And it was like that with pretty much everything.

I didn't get that feeling in that video about GW2's human city. Scale and overal size just felt incredibly out of proportion, very wrong. Given, it was just a video, and I still want to check it out myself, but it doesn't bode well.

 

[2xDouble]

*snip*

Which is it, are the zones too big or not big enough? Haha, ironically both.

Have a look at some of these videos [http://www.gametrailers.com/game/guild-wars-2/11916], particularly GC '10 Human Walkthrough 5-9, and Charr Preview, if you're concerned that there is too much "empty space". (looks like a "bustling town" to me *trollface*. heh.). That footage is a year old, and has been continually added to and updated since.

Consider that what they called a "small area" takes "about 15 minutes to run across, avoiding fighting" (quoted in the guru thread linked earlier). A single zone can contain that entire river, spring to mouth, mountaintop to beachhead to ocean floor... and two other complete rivers. Every single one of these areas is loaded with events and activities, only one of which is "kill random monsters". And about flying... well, Yahtzee said it best [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/2757-DC-Universe-Online].

I get that you prefer a seamless world, and that really is the ideal. But is that really better? The game has to load the new zone either way, and it's going to take time to do it. Would you rather have something to read for a few seconds or would you rather walk down a hallway that's about 15 seconds longer than it should be (or have a door that takes about 15-30 seconds too long to open, a la Metroid and KotOR)? Personally, I prefer the game not lie to me about loading, because lying about loading makes loading take longer.

Eh, whatever. Buy the game, try a demo... play Guild Wars 2 or don't. But if you pass on this game entirely, I assure you, you'll be missing out on something awesome.

 

[yanipheonu]

It looks so interesting, definitely have been keeping my eye out for it.

 

[scw55]

I was going to play Guild Wars 2 anyway but this video has made me even more excited (even though I already knew all the points).

I'm going to have great fun playing it along side The Old Republic.

 

[Cowabungaa]

[le snip

I already explained the thing about the city to someone else. It just felt rather out or proportion and oddly sized. As example I used a human house in WoW. It actually felt like it was made for an ingame human. That city in that GW2 just felt really massive, uselessly massive.

It's nice to hear that the zones will be big, but if all those zones don't flow into each other and form one big world, or at least form the illusion that there is one, I don't really care that much about the size of one zone.

As for the loading, yes I think that's better. Continuity to me is important for immmersion. As you did as well, I'll let Yathzee do the talking as well [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/7198-Extra-Punctuation-Connectivity]. Yes, I definitely prefered the Metroid way of opening doors as loading times. It kept the game feeling big and connected. The world did not fade away, the action was still there. You were in the world, in the game, not disconnected from it all.

Never really noticed that made loading longer anyway, sometimes a door would take a few seconds, but usually it opened instantly. It at least gave you the ability to come up with a reason why it happened; the door jammed, the electrical systems are old and fraying, you name it. You can't do that with a loading bar that has 0 to do with the ingame world.

As for flying, yeah WoW handled that well. You can't imagine how much I giggled when Blizzard let me fly above Stormwind, something I wanted to do for ages. Gods that looked glorious... If they had it from the start, yeah that would've been a shame.

But yes, I'll be playing a demo. I hope they can somehow work around it and create the illusion of a big world. The overal art style sure deserves having one.

 

[Aethren]

Ugh, between this and Skyrim both coming out later this year, I'm gonna have next year pretty much entirely booked.

 

[timeadept]

I've been watching GW2 but this guy managed to come up with some new stuff that i can't believe i missed. /drools over content scaling...

Spoiler: rant about content scaling

Games like WoW and Borderlands DRIVE ME UP THE WALL when it comes to content scaling! WoW has that completely arbitrary weapon skill and defense skill (that scales with your level) where you simply cannot hit an opponent 5 levels higher than you are often enough to kill it (if your class has no healing skill). If you have a healing skill, and bonus points for tanking abilities you can probably handle up to 7 or 8 levels, and my hunter with his pet (dps/(pet)heals + tank all in one class) has managed 9 or 10. But all this is one on one, if you manage to pull something else then you're screwed, you need to use every single ability you have if you want to manage this. Then the fights last a good 5 mim and when you finally win you're rewarded with some scraps of cloth as loot and maybe 1.5X the exp of killing a mob at your level.

It makes leveling a complete grind because they place arbitrary hard level caps on the mobs you can kill. Theres no way to challenge your self while playing if you're above average in skill.

Borderlands has a similar system in place. Your gun magically does more or less damage depending on the difference between you and your opponents level. I will literally be in the middle of a fire fight, having a moderately difficult time, level up, and suddenly everything will just start dieing like their bones turned into toilet paper! Yes, the difference between levels is that sever. You can only hope to kill an enemy 3 levels higher than you at best, more than that and your gun simply doesn't do enough damage. Then borderlands has the problem of having far to many optional quests. If you try to do even half the quests in the game, you'll end up consistently over leveled for your area. Sure you could skip the quests, but i actually enjoyed a good number of them and even when only picking the ones i liked, i was still at a consistently higher level than the guys i was killing. Also, if you don't accept the quests, then clap-trap never shuts up about them, but if you accept them then they never leave your quest log until you finish them. So you end up having your quest log filled with 50 grey(trivial difficulty due to level differences)quests and having to scroll past all of them each time you need to look up a new one or track a different quest.

So a broken difficulty curve combined with a poorly designed quest system ended up being a constant thorn in my side while playing one of my otherwise favorite games.

I am very much looking forward to GW2 and really hope that it exceed my expectations (i placed them a bit low because i didn't find combat very entertaining in GW)

Yeah, I find it annoying how easy it is in MMOs to just out-level the content you have to do and the content you want to do can be impossible for your level. Which is why I like what they are doing with both content scaling & player scaling.

Content scaling as in allowing players to go and do content that is a couple levels above them and have it be challenging, not impossible. This is attributed to the combat being skill based, not RnG based. So if you hit a mob and it connects, it will do damage; not give some "dodged" or "missed" message. The devs even gave an example of a time when a couple of them were play testing content 8 levels above them. Also when you're doing dynamic events with 5 players and 5 more join in, the content will scale up to accommodate for those players and scale down when players stop participating. Player scaling is implemented via the side-kick system [http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Side_kick], which I'll just let you read about.

Also about your issue with GW1 and invisible walls and such. Arenanet understand this themselves and these two quotes from this blog [http://www.arena.net/blog/an-introduction-to-the-environment-art-of-guild-wars-2#more-5073] will satisfy you:

"Game worlds aren?t movie sets. Though the sprawling world of Guild Wars 2 has no physicality, it?s a persistent place that will be experienced again and again, from multiple vantage points. In the original Guild Wars, a map artist could ?cheat? in places they knew a player could never reach, using unbacked facades or hollow props, but there are few parts of this new game world that are inaccessible. Players are going to swim to the bottom of that flooded cavern or jump the counter of that pub to sneak into the back room. So, no cheating this time."

Player exploration of Guild Wars 2 will be encouraged and rewarded, just as it was in the original Guild Wars. It?s up to the environment team to fill our game with memorable locations worthy of that exploration. A series of broken stone columns turns out to be a jumping puzzle to reach a hidden cave mouth overgrown with vines. The caved-in floor of a ruined fort drops you down several stories into a flooded subbasement haunted by the cursed ghosts of pirates. A hatch in the basement of a farmhouse conceals a tunnel to the cavern hideout of a bandit gang."

No, you see, my complaint about level scaling is that these two games add an additional stat that dominates all others in determining what foes you can beat. Weapon skills allow you to hit targets with similar defense skills. If the two stats are two different, then no amount of strategy or planning can over come this. In WoW, i'll fight a mob at my level, easy. Hell i'll take on 3 of them at once on my Rouge(single target DPS with no self heal) just to make things interesting. But again, my class is single target DPS, so i decide i'm going to attack these stronger monsters that are a few levels higher than me. I could beat them if not for the weapon skill levels and such. The monsters aren't really that tough, I just can't hit them. And so the end result is that I cannot challenge myself because the difficulty curve increases from easy to impossible stupid fast with nothing in-between (tanking and healing abilities help to smooth this though). End result is that if i want to progress, i have to boredly grind like no man has ground before. Except it's an MMO so many other people have probably gotten bored doing it too.

As for their environment team, I really hope that they can deliver. I REALLY hope that i'm not setting myself up for a big disappointment. ArenaNet is promising so many things that i want to see, but this is a lot of new stuff, that hasn't been done right before, if at all. I WANT this game to be all they've promised and more, but i have no idea if they can pull it off.

 

[BlackEagle95]

I have no money and a shitty computer! Why did I watch this!

 

[EmperorSubcutaneous]

As for their environment team, I really hope that they can deliver. I REALLY hope that i'm not setting myself up for a big disappointment. ArenaNet is promising so many things that i want to see, but this is a lot of new stuff, that hasn't been done right before, if at all. I WANT this game to be all they've promised and more, but i have no idea if they can pull it off.

This is where I trust them. They've said repeatedly that they want to make a game that they want to play. They've reassessed and reworked the same parts of the game numerous times, trying to make it all as perfect as possible. They are all clearly gamers themselves, which you can tell by listening to the kinds of things they say about the game and the genre itself.

And the best part of all is that NCsoft is giving them the freedom to do it. ArenaNet has made it clear that this is going to be the best game they can possibly make, and they will spend as much time as necessary on making it so. They're not on a deadline, which is the biggest thing that has killed so many MMOs before, and their main goal isn't "keep subscribers playing for as long as possible so we can milk $15 out of them every month," it's "make a game that's so good, people will really want to buy it." Because once you've bought the game, they have all the money they ask from you.

Also, they're not rookies when it comes to designing games; they've got some really talented people working for them, and a number of industry veterans. On top of that, they often tell us about what an awesome place the ArenaNet office is to work in. It's clear that they're passionate about this game, which is great to see. It's really obvious when passion is lacking in a game, and that is not the case here.

When they tell us to set our expectations high, I feel we can believe them. The amount of confidence they have in their own game, and especially the fact that demo players are backing it up with their own reactions, make me confident that they know what they're doing.

 

[Alexridiculous]

Glad you guys liked it!

As for comparisons to GW1, I don't think it's fair to assume that GW2 won't be a "real MMO" just because GW1 wasn't. Developers are gamers too, and ANet knows what they're doing.

 

[Alexridiculous]

And the best part of all is that NCsoft is giving them the freedom to do it.

This! Publishers who don't have the devs on a leash is never a bad thing.