Author: Ravious

Yesterday, GuildFans posted the results of their first contest. The contest was a “Design A Skill” contest for Guild Wars 2, where Guild Wars 2 designers Isaiah ‘Izzy’ Cartwright and Jon Peters would be the judges. Cartwright and Peters gave some excellent commentary on why they chose the winning skills. Peters also shed some light on the criteria he used in sifting through all the skill entries, such as simplicity, versatility, and whether it feels like a Guild Wars 2 skill.

I always enjoy hearing from game developers from a design standpoint. The “why” of design decisions can really help players understand the game they are playing. Sadly, I could not get my Spiteful Spirit re-make in as an entry in time, but the winning skills choices are great. I think my favorite is Plasma Shackles, but they are all pretty good.

There is no word on whether any of these will absolutely make it in to the game, but ArenaNet seems to enjoy using fan-driven suggestions to help build the game.

–Ravious

Since I had the unfair advantage of tempering my opinions on the two–part Guild Wars 2 interview for 1.5 weeks while I was on the road, I asked frequent KTR commentator and Guild Wars 2 community celeb, Vulturion (or Vorsakan depending on where you stand), to write a follow-up guest piece. He graciously accepted. Enjoy! –Ravious

It’s been a big week for Guild Wars 2 here at Kill Ten Rats, with two huge servings of information and insight. Hang-up your hang-ups, and enjoy some musings on the role of energy and potions in Guild Wars 2.

Spamalot?

If the energy bar loves offense and hates defense, will we be spamming attacks 24/7?

No, quite the opposite.

Firstly, ArenaNet has not strayed too far from the bold position they began development with – no resources, only cooldown to constrain skill use. In the convention build, the cooldown times we saw on skills were predominantly higher than we are used to in Guild Wars 1 – disturbingly higher in some cases. Consequently even absolute beginners (traditionally one of the most spam-happy demographics) were taking control of level 47 charr and working their whole skillbars for 40 minutes, because (by and large) there simply isn’t the option to spam anything besides the autoattack surrogate in the first skill slot.

Continue reading [GW2] Energy Blast!

[continued from part 1]

I started out the second half of the interview on a mistake, and it was Peters turn to run my fumble to the endzone. I brought up the three different types of skills: weapon, utility, and elite. Actually, Peters said, there is another skill type: healing skills. (Lots of headsmacking then on my end.) Don’t ignore healing skills, warned Peters, heal skills can make builds. He said “there are some very varying heal skills that really change what you are going to do with your character.”

As an example, Peters brought up two of the warrior heal skills shown in the demos. Healing Surge heals the warrior and gives him adrenaline. Healing Signet heals the warrior on use, but also provides extra health regeneration when the signet is not recharging. Healing Surge makes for a very aggressive warrior because he is ramping up adrenaline for the burst skill so much faster than other warriors. Conversely, Peters said that when warriors are using Healing Signet they basically ignore all the little plinks, and they can keep plowing through mobs or players until the warrior gets focus fired upon. The developers are finding that the one player-decided healing skill has a huge impact on style of play. Peters then asked Cartwright to talk about weapon skills.

Continue reading [GW2] Interview on Energy and Skills, Pt. 2

A few weeks ago, I had a coast-to-coast interview with ArenaNet. I sat on the one side, and a room full of people sat somewhere on that proverbial other coast. Two Guild Wars 2 developers, Jon Peters and Isaiah (“Izzy”) Cartwright and two ArenaNet community managers, Regina Buenaobra and Martin Kerstein crowded around a microphone for the interview on two big things. (A big thanks to Regina for setting this up!) Guild Wars 2 energy and skills were two concepts that were completely questioned and redesigned to escape the gravitational pull of the prequel, Guild Wars. These two concepts were also, in my opinion, of the most misunderstood when all the fans had was to imagine what it was like to play Guild Wars 2.

Cartwright took my early kick-off and ran straight for the goalposts, when all I had to say was “so, energy?” In the beginning of Guild Wars 2 development, there were no resources. Or rather, there was just skill recharge. They wanted to start as simple as humanly possible. After some testing, they decided that they did want another resource to balance encounters and give players some sort of encounter-success measure.  This measure was not really found in the original Guild Wars where the encounters were binary; players either won or wiped. Then the designers went crazy with ideas for resources including resources on skills, items as resources, “bars,” and all sorts of things. After a ton of brainstorming and iteration, they landed on the energy bar.

Continue reading [GW2] Interview on Energy and Skills, Pt. 1

I’ve been slowly catching up on news, blogs, and emails since I took a journey half-way across the country for a wedding my whole family would be a part of. (Flower girls nearly stole the show!) I have been watching, though. I did see the When It’s Ready blog post from Guild Wars 2 master Eric Flannum. It made a 500 ton splashes at the various Guild Wars 2 communities because of the information it gives, the information it doesn’t, and the virtual pressing of the mute button for the rest of the year.

Continue reading [GW2] An Answer to Suffering

It’s been an exciting and busy morning over at the ZAM network. They’ve just launched their Guild Wars 2 community, GuildFans. Running the site are long time KTR friends, JR (who writes occasionally at Biff the Understudy) and Inde. They are joined by Kattar and a slew of other community heavyweights as they put the spark of life into the new community site. Be sure to check out an interview with Eric Flannum where he talks about the news downtime (I was close), and also a really fun contest to design a Guild Wars 2 skill (judged by Guild Wars 2 developers) to win a massive Guild Wars 2 wall print! And, definitely be sure to say hello to this All-Star Guild Wars mod team in the forums. News from ArenaNet may be slow, but that doesn’t mean fans don’t have excitement of their own.

–Ravious

Things feel rather slow at the moment for Guild Wars 2 info with a few crumbs.  ArenaNet did a triple-A job building excitement and fervor during the convention season. That, my friends, amounted to months of prep and long hours by ArenaNet staff during the two main conventions, gamescom and PAX. Then, Guild Wars 2 was also shown at the New York Comic Con and most recently at Paris Games Week. Yet, for the community it feels like nothing has been revealed since the Hall of Monuments, and the mob is getting a little restless.

Continue reading [GW2] A State of Consumption