The biggest news in the past few weeks is the official announcement coming from ArenaNet on the first Guild Wars novel: Ghosts of Ascalon.  The book is set for release this summer, and it will detail the story behind the peace agreement between the charr and the humans set one year before the events of Guild Wars 2.  The most fun way I’ve heard the book described was at PAX 2009 where they described it as ‘like Canterbury Tales with explosions.’  It’s described this way because not only will the main characters be dealing with the physical ghosts of Ascalon to retrieve the Khan-ur macguffin, but they will have to deal mentally with some of the ghosts of their pasts.  It will only be available at the outset as a paperback, but Regina has said that if the books turn out to be popular a possible hardback reprint is a possibility. Check out the very thorough FAQ for the book on the Guild Wars website.

There were also two Guild Wars 2 interviews: one at IncGamers on a variety of questions from the community, and the other at TenTonHammer on Guild Wars 2 lore.  The latter is a good interview with some new questions and questions that attempt to clarify those already asked.  There are tidbits on possibly encountering the other Elder Dragons in expansions, faction-like orders that try to bridge racial gaps to combat the dragons, underwater asura labs, and hints at the importance of the snakelike Forgotten race.  It’s worth the read.

The IncGamers interview has a bit more on mechanics. We get a hint at racial skills, such as the “Prayer to Kormyr” that can remove conditions, but not as well as the profession skills that can remove conditions.  There will be “hot-button” PvP, which seems similar to the grab and go style of Random Arenas or Alliance Battles. Weapons will be restricted by profession, and the ability to chat with your guild via the internet when not in game.  There are also some good lore questions on the norn and charr.  The rate at which ArenaNet is dropping hints on gameplay is agonizing, but hopefully as things coalesce on their side we will get some more concrete information.

–Ravious
of course these things are contrivances

My first MMO, A Tale in the Desert, doesn’t count because my one character could belong to as many guilds as I desired, which to me makes more sense than anything else.  Yet, it was a smaller community to begin with.  I’ll skip World of Warcraft where I mostly soloed and PUG’d anyway even if I did belong to the guild.  (I still feel guilty for taking a gold, way back in the day, to buy a guild tabard I never wore.) Then I played Guild Wars.

In Guild Wars, players get one guild per account.  Any new character that is created is automatically joined to the same guild, which is very handy when creating PvP characters on the fly.  Now, according to a new interview, Guild Wars 2 is going to be more flexible.  According to ArenaNet, it will still be easy to have all characters in one guild, but now players can put different characters [from the same account] in to different guilds.

I definitely see the benefits of this.  My current guild in Guild Wars only has some very casual PvP every week or so, and a player wanting to get in to high-end GvG battles might have to decide between the friendship of my guild and the extreme focus of a GvG guild.  Yet for all the flexibility it seems ArenaNet still rewards players for concentrating on one guild by having things like a guild calendar, guild achievements, and even access to the guild chat channel when not logged in to the game.

Most MMOs allow for different characters on different accounts to join different guilds, but there are other mechanics added to let players network while still being a single-guild-kind-of-guy.  Alliances are a good way to allow for various guild focal points.  Joinable chat channels are a good way to emulate this.  It can be argued that A Tale in the Desert’s guild system might as well be joinable chat channels.  The palpable permanence of the guild (with guild property) versus the vague purpose of the chat channels is evidence of nonequivalence.  I just learned Alganon goes a step further and has exclusive chat channels roughly based on the Bartlett gamer types.  Like guilds, a character can only join one.

I always wondered about the whispered defectors in my MMO guilds on games allowing multiple guilds per account.  I would see what I believed to be the same person, only this time with two R’s in their name and a different guild tag.  Could it be that officer in my guild cheating on us?  Maybe it was just he and his wife’s personal guild.  Maybe he was vetting another guild? I often don’t understand my paranoia.

After all, I never cared whether people in my Guild Wars guild had an unfaithful account.  I guess the warm blanket of knowing that one guild per account was enough to comfort me.  Why should it be any different with different characters?

Anyway, I am happy for the change in Guild Wars 2.  I think that the majority of players will stick to one guild, especially if guild achievements provide more benefits.  It took me a long time to find the perfect Guild Wars guild, and I have absolutely no plans to leave it. For others that have not found the perfect home or need to split their time between a guild of friends and a guild of PvP soldiers, I think the new functionality will be a welcome addition.

–Ravious
but cupid got me in a chokehold

The first time I saw ArenaNet do this was when Regina responded to a thread on audio, of all things.  It seems that many sounds in Guild Wars 2 will be created procedurally.  For instance each footstep is made of only three sounds, but when ran through a procedural generator it will sound like different footsteps each time. This system will apply to armor clinks and other things (hopefully combat hits as well). 

Another post, where Martin rode in to save the thread on expansion-like races and classes, came from the Lead Designer of Guild Wars 2, Eric Flannum.  The post mostly dealt with the amount of decisions required to make when evaluating whether or not to add a new race of profession.  The Guild Wars 2 information that was embedded was that race will control the look, feel, and story of the character (with a small impact on combat), while the profession impacts the character’s mechanical performance to a much higher degree.

We get a little Hall of Monuments information where Regina related to us via the devs that “declaring your ancestor” will mean linking a single Guild Wars 1 game account to the Guild Wars 2 game account.  The Guild Wars 2 characters can then access an instanced version of the Hall of Monuments to claim the rewards. This can be done by every Guild Wars 2 character on the Guild Wars 2 account as many times as the player wants.  The rewards cannot be traded or sold.

Finally, there is a small tidbit on the open parts of the world.  With the event system having no traditional (!) quests, a lot of players were wondering whether combat would only occur in the open world via events.  In other words, did you have to track down hotspots in order to kill things?  The answer, as it turns out, is no.  Eric Flannum wrote that they deliberately made traditional mob hunting areas to go farm some gold, XP, and secret other things.

Also, one of the ArenaNet community managers is clearly the wrongdoer to poor defenseless creatures.  The evil man taunts us too by relating that for ArenaNet, Fridays may or may not be the best days.

–Ravious
all I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead

Yes, we have a lot of ideas on our minds, probably more than we will be able to implement. We love the game and always try to come up with new things we hope players will enjoy. Who knows, maybe players will bear witness to some of the cataclysmic events that transform Tyria prior to Guild Wars 2?

ArenaNet keeps mildly hinting at using Guild Wars as a platform to introduce some Guild Wars 2 lore, but that is an overly candid response to an easily shunted question.  We know that skill balance is a top priority, but we haven’t heard anything about upcoming features or content. Hopefully after the dust from the skill balances clears, the Live Team can preview what else they are working on.

The second is that the popular Guild Wars fansite Guild Wars Guru was hacked, and the hacker was able to obtain some personal information.  Read about it here, but the bottom line is to change your passwords to Guild Wars Guru and Guild Wars 2 Guru (and Auction Site).  I would also watch any other sites / games where you combo your email, username, and/or current Guru password.

The third is I have to say with one of my last controversial posts on Guild Wars, I had the weirdest pingback ever.  We are breaking grounds with the MMO genre people! (And go River Rats!)

–Ravious
remember two things

Guild Wars came very close to shirking the entire thing.  Agro does not really exist like it does in World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online.  Each battle with PvE mobs is reminiscent of a PvP battle.  Players have 8 bodies against the team of enemies to kill.  Because PvE can feel so much like PvP (especially in comparison to the stark contrast of PvE/PvP in World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online), ArenaNet moved away from the holy trinity to a more enlightened trinity: the three lines.

The three lines role system is a simple concept.  The front line is most reminiscent of the holy trinity’s tanks.  The front line tries to harrass, damage, and cripple the enemy as much as possible.  They try to lower the efficiency of the enemy group by forcing kiting and generally distracting the focus of the group.  They are generally more durable than the other lines, but they have no way of forcing mobs on to them in the heat of battle because there is no vanilla agro in Guild Wars.  The main difference is where the holy trinity’s tanks try to focus the enemy on to them, the enlightened trinity tries to disrupt the enemy.

The mid-line are most reminiscent of the holy trinity’s DPS.  This is not wholly accurate because the front line can deal plenty of damage.  The mid-line is a versatile anomaly.  The mid-line can DPS, disrupt, and harass just like the front-line, but the main difference between the front line and the mid-line is the tradeoff of power and versatility for survivability.  The mid-line are usually casters or ranged attackers that can target a wider area without needing to chase down their quarry in to melee range.  The specific roles are most diverse in the mid-line.

Now before I get to the backline, I have to interrupt the flow with the problem, as I see it.  For the most part with the front line and mid-line, ArenaNet stayed away from the tank-healer-DPS combo.  Battles were more dynamic in both PvP and PvE where weak spots had to be located.  The problem (again in my limited world-view opinion) is that the game was built for PvP.  The developers, when creating Prophecies, fully expected the nice little storybook campaign they created to lead the majority of players to PvP.  Still, they did have some PvE, which had to be balanced between difficulty and fun.  Every PvE encounter could not emulate a full blown PvP match, and even worse was that in PvP intelligent opponents had some modicum of survival instilled in their lizard brains.  In PvE the mobs basically commit kamikaze like a rabid animal.  In PvP, if 3 of your 8 teammembers are dead when you win, you still win.  In PvE if 3 of your 8 teammembers are dead after the battle, you were on your way to losing because of death penalty.

Enter the monk profession.  Monks repaired the balance in PvE because they could offset the damage caused by reckless, kamikaze PvE mobs, and they then destroyed the enlightened trinity.  The backline were healers, and healers were the backline.  Sure, the healers felt more proactive than the healers in other MMOs, but just like in the holy trinity in Guild Wars healers were required in PvE.  The elegant versatility of the front line and mid-line makeup was overshadowed by the pressing need, always, for a monk or two.  This one profession completely shaped the gameplay throughout all of Guild Wars 1.  Cries of “looking for one monk, then ready to go” were very common in the days of Guild Wars Prophecies, and rarely, if ever, did a group need another specific profession.

Now my turn to give some terrible idea.  In my dream MMO, there would be no healer.  Players would have skills that healed themselves and reinforced their class concept like the few heals the non-healer classes have in Guild Wars.  A good example is the Mesmer heal which steals energy from an enemy and converts it to life for the Mesmer.  Even moreso, for a game with a three-line trinity concept I would split the healing between the lines to reinforce the line concept.  Frontline crusaders would have strong heals which only target themselves or allies standing next to them.  Midline casters would have weak spot heals and heal-over-time spells, and the backline would have expensive group heals to control the flow of battle.  I would not have given one class the title of healer.

Guild Wars 2 mechanics information should be coming “soonish,” and they have been very quiet about the professions that would be available.  My hope is that they further reinforce their path to an enlightened, versatile line trinity and completely separate themselves from ye old holy trinity.  Guild Wars 1’s class role system, though, is set.  Barring a complete overhaul little can be done to soften the healing prowess of one class, the monks.  For Guild Wars 2 I have hope that the holy trinity will be properly vanquished and we shall soonish see how much they disagree or agree with me.

–Ravious
how long should we play the martyr

–Ravious
most adaptable to change

EDIT: Oh, and Felicia Day voices Zojja the Asuran. That’s pretty cool. I like their voice actors.

So, of course Mr. Lee was asked at the most recent conference call about NCSoft’s upcoming offerings: Guild Wars 2 and Blade &  Soul.  You could hear his neurons click.  Anybody that’s read Dark Tower should immediately think of Blaine’s thought processes in regards to the asinine riddles the heroes asked the AI.  The answer was “I believe there will be certain public events in the year 2010… at least a closed beta test for those titles. Commercialisation will be expected, at this point, probably some time in the year 2011.”  He later confirmed that both games were “on schedule.”

I did not post it here, at the time, because it was not really blogworthy in my view.  He had to give investors an answer knowing full well that ArenaNet (a company that likes to control its own information) and rabid fans were intently listening after the past conference call debacle.  Since NCSoft is riding on Aion’s success in terms of the bottom line, might as well give a conservative estimate to the invenstors, right?  It’s not like they have to rush to serve up another MMO coming off some mediocre launch.

Anyway, I am still betting on a 2010 release until I hear from ArenaNet (who has been morbidly silent on Mr. Lee’s answer).  I think we will have a much better guesstimate next year when they start releasing information on mechanics and gameplay.  In the meantime, we have this bit of information.  The fans at Guild Wars 2 Guru never cease to amaze me with their constant crusade for information.  Shew, and others, have been scouring ArenaNet artist websites, and Fan Yang’s resume was recently updated with the line “Guild Wars 2 (expected 2010).”  Can’t beat inside information.

–Ravious
and code wants to be wrong

–Ravious
the candy man can

The z-axis is appearing more and more in MMOs as another dimension to be explored.  In most MMOs players can jump, fall, and explore structures with multiple stories from the ground.  Underwater provides a fully three-dimensional exploring space.  Then flying is also becoming more of a mainstream item with World of Warcraft having received player controlled flight with the Burning Crusade expansion, and Aion Online’s entire game being built around the flying mechanic. Flight actually even came up in dev discussions on Lord of the Rings Online because, you know, giant eagles carried Gandalf and the hobbits.  One of the Turbine devs however remarked that many of the maps looked pretty terrible from above, and it was unlikely that the great eagles would stoop to mere steeds in the sky.

Even with the current aerial progression of exploration in MMOs, I like underwater exploration better than flying.  Flying requires ground content below it to be notable.  Then there may or may not also be in-air content as well.  For underwater places, what is underwater is the content.  Sure there can be shipwrecks and mer-giants walking on the sea floor, but it doesn’t feel like the seafloor is really the originating plane.  I might also like it better because swimming is real.  It’s something that I can relate to, whereas flying only occurs on the silver screen and in my imagination.

This leads me to a Guild Wars 2 tidbit I touched upon in an earlier post.  ArenaNet is creating a complete underwater continent.  They don’t want the danger of air to factor in either, and an easily gained consumable will be available for your fish-breathing enjoyment.  Exploration is one of the key goals to this zone (or zones).  It excites me that their focus is on having underwater explorable content rather than it being a small slice of the normal E-pie (as in EASK, or what have you..ummm… pie).  Afterall with that badass dragon in the trailer coming from below, it only makes sense.

Lord of the Rings Online, which is my MMO pony of the moment, has no three-dimensional combat that I can think of.  Either the mob will go into exploit mode or run up the cliff face.  Plus players can only swim on the water.  The three-dimensional architecture and level construction found in the game can be amazing.  The Forges and the Grand Stairs, two Mora instances, are beautifully designed multi-leveled zones.  For the moment, though, the game as far as combat is concerned might as well be compared to the jumpless, “2-d” Guild Wars.  Maybe this will be rectified someday, but I feel we will get mounted combat before 3-d combat in the MMO.  Amazingly enough, I had not really noticed the deficiency until writing this article.  Of course I was quite happy playing years of Guild Wars without a jump button until ArenaNet suggested that maybe it should have been there in the first place.

–Ravious
a half-crustacean band