Category: Guild Wars 2

The March update dropped last night in Guild Wars 2. There is so much to talk about. There are PvE instances along with a nice chunk of PvE content. WvW feels very different, for the better. There is new guild content. And of course a few gem store offerings. These monthly updates are addictive, and they are honestly overwhelming. It’s hard to know where to begin; so I am going to step out of the game and talk about the business model.

Each month ArenaNet puts out an update that seems to reverberate throughout the PC gaming sphere. They have to. With ArenaNet’s studio size, they have to make the game work for them. They cannot sit back and pad a few months with parking-lot subscriptions. These significant monthly updates condition players to continually check back even if Guild Wars 2 is not their priority. If the Game Director, Colin Johanson, believes that the March update is going to set the bar for the monthly updates, 2013 is going to be pretty exciting for Guild Wars 2. Continue reading [GW2] Razing Ahead

The way I play Guild Wars 2 may not be the way everyone else does, but I always manage to entertain myself.

Over the weekend, in between doing some storyline quests with my son, we decided to start jumping off the bridges in Rata Sum and see how far down we could get. Frequently we would land at the very bottom (splat) and laugh. Soon after that we decided to try jumping off the outside of Rata Sum and see how far down we could slide before some abrupt edge would stop us dead. Eventually we slid right up to and over the edge, watching our bodies fall (and die in mid-air) all the way down into a lake – waiting for a revive that isn’t coming. This gave us an idea. My son ran back to his bank and grabbed his revive orb and jumped off again. He self-revived and then revived me and we set out to explore this area we have never seen before.

We were actually underneath Rata Sum. We could swim under the giant cube shaped city. We found a few interesting things, like Zojja’s lab even though they ignored us and the portals didn’t work. I saw an interesting looking structure and decided to go look at it but before I got there I was teleported into a prison cell deep inside Rata Sum. This was hilarious to me. I ported out because I wanted to find the prison from the outside of the cell as I had never noticed it before. By the time I found it, my son had also been teleported into the jail cell.

[If you haven’t been to the jail in Rata Sum, seek it out. The prisoners and their descriptions are worth the trip.]

This adventure is something we will not soon forget. It was so much fun we couldn’t stop laughing. I half expected a developer to pop into the cell and yell at me because I assumed we must have gone somewhere we shouldn’t have.

After this happened I spent some time searching the internet and it appears to be a pretty well known place, but for a while there it felt like we were the first people ever to find this unexplored area and it was wonderful.

Have you ever wandered into an interesting location in a game only to realize afterwards you should not have been there? Or just found something strange or unusual that you might not normally find during typical game play?

– Ethic

Massively has a nice article on a QA session with two ArenaNet designers at PAX East. Bhagpuss already gives a pretty good breakdown along with his thoughts. I don’t agree with everything Bhagpuss says, but I feel he is right on the mark in saying that ArenaNet develops for geological time. They expect their game to be lively in the years to come, and each advancement is built with that in mind.

One issue I want to tease out of the Massively’s article is the issue of town clothes. The article states that the “cosmetic function of town clothing will be expanded”. However, ArenaNet feels that keeping town clothes to out-of-combat situations only is best for avoiding any immersion breaking. This answer seems too simple. It seems to miss so much of the forest for a single tree. Continue reading [GW2] Fashion Forward Combat

Bhagpuss believes Guild Wars 2 is pretty lively from all the open world activities. I agree. I’ve been seeing more and more people running around the open world. There’s another stick-of-measurement to watch. Oh sure, we can all be beguiled by the entrancing smile of Colin as he says numbers are still rising post-launch…. Sigh. Oh. Right. Carry on then. There is also a lot to be said about community tools as an activity meter.

Community tools feel necessary in MMOs, and lively MMOs seem to have lively communities. The movements in the hive eventually produce tools you never knew you couldn’t live without. Guild Wars 2 is still missing a lot of MMO features usually taken for granted, and yet out of the chaos of an MMO community comes spontaneous triumphs. In the words of somebody “you can’t stop progress”. Continue reading [GW2] In Spite of Community Pressures

Hitherby, Spoilers!

The obvious route is never the one that ArenaNet seems to take in their storytelling. This can be both confusing and exciting. Much to the frustration of many lore delvers, whole threads are kept dangling while others are simply snipped, seemingly prematurely. Either way, some will likely never have their complete story told. Yet, ArenaNet keeps pressing forward.

In the current living story arc, Flame and Frost, the dredge are buddies with the Flame Legion. Who saw that coming? A xenophobic ex-slave race teamed up with an abrasive, slave-loving faction. Perhaps dredge found new owners, but that seems unlikely for an “alliance”. Either way, if someone had asked me in December what was the next story to be told it is unlikely I would have thought of either party, much less a combination of the two in a “Molten Alliance”.

Continue reading [GW2] Lore Thoughts on the Living Story

Ruminations aside, I did take part in a few Tier 1 Guild Bounty guild missions last weekend. My guild is actually composed of 5 rooms, which are actual Guild Wars 2 guilds. So we were working on making sure that every guild was able to complete a Guild Bounty.

At Tier 1, a Guild Bounty requires that two champions be found and beaten in 15 minutes. Once activated, the guild is given hints as to the locations of the champions they are supposed to find. There are 15 champions total, so it is helpful to be ready with a guide. It is not just that they are in some zone, but they could be anywhere in nearly the entire zone. With our 50+ people (many not being fully responsive) on the Guild Bounties, it took us about 1-2 minutes to find the champion. This was kind of the herd-zerg attack. A group of 10 will likely have to discuss zone search strategy before the hunt, or simply have 10 champions marked before the start of it. Continue reading [GW2] Bounty Hunter Hour

ArenaNet has called guilds in to question. Not all guilds. The very active, very big guilds are having no issues plowing right ahead to unlocking all the mission types at the pace of a few months (or less!). It’s the small guilds that are having problems. It’s the small guilds that feel threatened. It’s the small guilds that are now forced to reflect on whether their community actually reflects ArenaNet’s mechanical definition of a guild.

So what is a guild? Well I would say Guild Wars 2 has two definitions. The first is the objective definition, where players can open the “G”uild menu and click “Create Guild”. Voila, a new guild is born. Yet this is the lowest common denominator of a guild. The subjective definition is whether the guild contains activity to generate Influence, the guild resource, to reasonably progress along ArenaNet’s guild progression track. Continue reading [GW2] Guild Score