Guild Wars 2 Catch All

The second video is a 2 part of the newb human ranger experience... There are a few others Im going through on other classes.

edit: man the combat on this looks really good!

MrDeVil909 wrote:

Yeah, I know the video is out, but they have 45 stations with playable demos at gamescom. The demo has two parts, a low level human and a level 47 Char for attendees to try out.

I'm just finding the lack of coverage interesting, unless it's not being played yet.

I wouldn't worry about it just yet. Ign's got their preview up and no one else has said a word except for 1up's high quality vids. It wouldn't shock me if Ign got early access while everyone else is embargoes or some such thing. Or everyone else just hasn't had their private demos yet.

If there aren't any new articles in the coming weeks, though ...

I'm actually not even going to look at the videos. Unless there's huge bad news before release it's a day one buy, so I want to go in fairly fresh, I'm just a bit curious regarding some hands on impressions.

MrDeVil909 wrote:

I'm actually not even going to look at the videos. Unless there's huge bad news before release it's a day one buy, so I want to go in fairly fresh, I'm just a bit curious regarding some hands on impressions.

Same here, it's still way too early to start getting hyped for this game.

Nine part video walkthrough at GameTrailers (about 5 min a piece). Sadly only standard def, but ...

I slightly dislike the art style of the game - it's more cartoony while the first one had a more realistic approach. All the character faces were also a lot prettier in the first one

There was nothing realistic about the original games art style. People aren't shaped like that and most of the architecture was just crazy. It was pretty hyper real. I'm really excited for GW2 though. Guild Wars was one of the few online RPGs that actually had some skill to winning fights. Being able to dodge spells and arrows in a WoW like MMO will blow a lot of people's minds.

[i]It wasn't realistic but it had a more realistic feel, especially the environment. Not by much, but this looks like a high-poly/detail WoW cartoony.
Maybe realistic is the wrong word. Perhaps more "serious/mature" would fit better.

I sort of get what you're driving at, but the change is quite minor in my view. If they're making an entirely new game years after the original, and set after drastic events in the world, I think it fits that it looks a little different. It's still identifiable as Guild Wars, but made to modern standards.

Liquid, I think you're misinterpreting the Gamescon videos. They look stylized and low-poly because they're lo-res camera recordings of a monitor. You're not seeing anything remotely like the actual resolution and style of the game. Look at the official in-game videos for a better picture of the game (literally as well as figuratively). It's still stylized compared to your average brown-'n'-gritty UT3-engine shooter, but it's more detailed and realistic than GW1, and way more than WOW.

Here is a link of pretty much everything that has come out of Gamescom.
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/forum/this-gamescom-compilation-information-streaming-t6651.html

They've changed many mechanics from the first game, an important one being energy and how your pool is drained by using any skill or even rolling to dodge attacks I think. You now have access to potions to sustain you in fights.

Energy in Guild Wars 2 is a long term resource. It lasts over multiple fights. Every skill uses energy. It is a way for players to gauge how difficult a fight was and how cautious to play. This makes encounters a lot more diverse and in our more solo friendly environment, it allows players to push into higher level and more difficult areas and get into more challenging fights without killing them outright.
Guild Wars 1 did not have a long term resource. Energy regenerated immediately outside of combat. This created a number of problems for us. The greatest of which was there was no good way to balance encounters. Encounters were very binary – you either won or lost and there was nothing available to tip the scales of the fight in your favor. The only way you could tell if a fight was difficult was if players died. Most of the time this was either because they made a series of mistakes that they couldn’t recover from once they realized it.
A long term resource allows players to learn from their mistakes, makes the game more approachable, and together these things make the game more fun. You don’t just win or lose – you have time to react and time to recover from errors instead of being punished by death for not playing perfectly.

Energy regenerates slowly on its own, however, all players have a potion button attached to their energy bar. Drinking a potion returns energy and puts this button into recharge. Out of combat, this recharge is short. During combat, the potions recharge slower, allowing us to reward skilled play and balance difficult encounters against a finite resource pool, so that challenging bosses can’t simply be defeated by bringing more defensive and healing skills. Energy potions are the only kind of consumable that is usable in combat.

Since I know it is the first follow up question, we aren’t talking about PvP yet, but there will be interesting energy dynamics in PvP, but we will not force players to buy and pound potions to be competitive. Potions are not very expensive, they refill a significant portion of your energy pool and they will also drop off of mobs.

Also the second question, what about energy management and energy denial skills? Energy as a long term resource does mean that energy management is no longer a direct mechanic in the game. However, we recognize the strategy implications of this decision and there are other mechanics in the game that replace these elements and play style in a way that makes sense for the new game we are making.

Hopefully this addresses some of people’s concerns with potions in the game. Remember, Guild Wars 1 and Guild Wars 2 share a lot of philosophical similarities. but this is a new game and…instead of trying to explain it I’ll just quote one of you since I think this was as well as I could have said it…

The new skills, attributes and traits and the way skills are obtained still need more fleshing out.

Im thinking this game is still over a year away from being released, I should stop getting myself so hyped up.

Here's a tiny bit of what I was waiting for.

Ten Ton Hammer has a nice long necromancer gameplay demo and an extended overall gameplay demo.

I wonder how much of the game is beta standard yet, for eventual wider public consumption. GC/PAX are the first times the public have their hands on it, so I wonder what they're learning at the same time, before they ever throw in factors such as the internet, or accounts.

MrDeVil909 wrote:

Here's a tiny bit of what I was waiting for.

You were waiting for fluff from the devs?

RPS said they'd have impressions up soon.

The exact sentence on everybody’s lips this year was, I think, “Holy sh*t have you seen Guild Wars 2?”

I think that's all I need to know.

*edit*

There's one thing about the GW lore that I'm finding fascinating. Since Lord of the Rings, and even before in Celtic mythology, humans have always been the 'new' race that is superseding the older races. GW subverts that with humans being the dying race, it's really interesting.

The proper Necromancer page is up.

Looks nice, hope that they've kept this look for the game too. I've always had a problem with the emo-looking necros in the first.

I want to dip back in to say that I've been rewatching the Gametrailers videos pretty much every day this week while I work.

Amazing stuff. So wonderful to see a game live up to the words the developers put out their about it. I haven't been this excited about a game since SWG and WoW were on the horizon.

I'm really looking forward to the game, although I've gone semi-dark. I'm still following the Dev blog and Massively. but not watching any videos.

How is Ghosts of Ascalon, Zonk?

Michael Zenke wrote:

I want to dip back in to say that I've been rewatching the Gametrailers videos pretty much every day this week while I work.

Amazing stuff. So wonderful to see a game live up to the words the developers put out their about it. I haven't been this excited about a game since SWG and WoW were on the horizon. :D

I suggested that having you back on the podcast to talk about the game, little as we've seen, would be a topic I'd welcome. I don't even particularly care for MMOs but I like Guild Wars and everything I've seen about GW2 is just blowing me away. The fact that it's a MMO doesn't even come into play when I think about the game.

I really like the idea of the dynamic world, I wonder if they can pull it off. GG would be interested in it as well I bet.

From how they've described it, it's a reasonably local dynamic world. That's how I read it.

Scratched wrote:

From how they've described it, it's a reasonably local dynamic world. That's how I read it.

Yeah, my impression so far is that there are specific areas where different events rotate through, and each event has multiple stages and outcomes that change the area in some way. Sort of like the public quests in WAR, but a bit more organic and with multiple possible events in an area instead of one repeating event.

There may be more to it than that, but that's my impression from the interviews and gameplay videos.

There are some gameplay videos where dynamic events can be as simple as rabbits eating all the crops at a farm. The player has to go collect them and put them in a pen before all the crops are gone. There was another one where sand worms are popping up out in the fields and as you start to kill them it triggers and invasion of a centaur miniboss.

Another GW2 preview: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010...

and

One district of your race’s capital city is instanced. When you go there, you go there alone, and what you find there relates to your personal story. Your home instance is filled with friends, family and quests relating to the answers you chose in your bio, and this place will actually evolve over time, depending on whether you choose to save the hospital or the orphanage when they’re both found burning, for example, and any people you save out in the public game world might be found later on back at your home.
Sounds like a package that’s full to bursting, no? And I haven’t even talked about the as-yet unrevealed underwater areas, how all the capital cities feature unique minigames with loot rewards (the humans get a shooting gallery), or the presence of an item system that’ll allow your character to carry and use quest-specific items (a bucket of water, say) in a convincing way.

More from RPS: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010...

Russian Guy: I want to ask about PvP. What will it look like in Guild Wars 2? Will be that mixture of Magic The Gathering and Counter-Strike?

JG: We have not revealed the full details of our PvP yet, we’re saving that for later. But what we can tell you now is that we will have two distinct modes of PvP. One will be the competitive PvP you are familiar with, where experience doesn’t matter and it’s purely down to player skill. And there’s the new element of PvP which we call “role versus role”, where one GW2 server will play against another GW2 server in something we call “the Myth”. It will be like a big RTS map with resource points and control points, and three servers will be going at it. Instead of units there will be players.

CL: It’s under development, we just aren’t able to say exactly “this is what it is” right now.

It looks like they're sharding GW2. I can't say it's unexpected given how the game is changing, but I don't think it will have a big negative effect on the game.

German Woman: But is there unique treasure you can find in the world?

CL: Rewards come from events. One of the events, for example, is to bring back old weapons from an armory. And in that situation the armory is selling more powerful weapons than would normally be available, so that’s a reward in itself, it’s not a random drop.

German Guy: So no repeating stuff to earn the right loot?

JG: There will be a form of repeatable content that is set within dungeons, but I don’t think we’ve said what the pure motivation for repeating a dungeon is. We need to talk about that in some detail at a later time.

Sad if they go with shards, but it won't be a surprise I guess. The game is more ambitious than GW1 in basically every way.

Some very bad news in a RPS's latest interview:

German Guy: Can I explore dungeons alone? Or with one friend?

CL: Yes you can. Well, you can go into them all by yourself, whether you can complete them is another thing. Dynamic events in the world will scale up from four people participating, but our dungeons will need to be designed around know we have five people coming in from this direction and they are going to do that, and the order of the creatures. If you go in with a single character you are probably going to have a very difficult time, and that’s because our dungeons are closer to our traditional instanced content where you go in with a limited number of people and encounter the creatures that are there.

Dungeons will have forced grouping? Aaaargh sh*t sh*t sh*t. That's a huge change for the worse from GW1. My interest in GW2 just took a massive nosedive

I'm really looking forward to playing the demo at PAX (and yes my friend over at Anet has confirmed there will be a playable version). Will report back this weekend.