Category: Guild Wars 2

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[GW2] Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Zwei!

One nice bit of news is that the second Guild Wars 2 pre-purchase access beta weekend was announced in the midnight hours by Chris “Snowcrash” Whiteside on the ArenaNet blog. The most important bit of information of course is that the beta weekend runs from June 8th to June 10th, which gives gamers a good week or so to stock up on foodstuffs and earn points with the significant others. The next bit hints at further blog posts coming down the line:

We have listened intently to all of your feedback from our first Beta Weekend Event, and we’ve made great strides toward resolving many of the issues you’ve helped us identify. These include party movement into overflow servers, chat functionality, key bindings, server stability, performance, and many more that we will detail in the near future.

Since we already know that the asura and sylvari will not be playable, it is likely that the same content will be available to play. This is compounded by the blog’s mention that with no character wipe players will be able to access the explorable parts of the Ascalonian Catacombs dungeon (level 35). This is a bold position because instead of limelighting new content to shift community focus, ArenaNet is believably going to keep the same content in a more focused light.   The “great strides” are made all the more critical. That’s bold, ArenaNet.

I have a plan to play the lackey. I plan on playing a “support” elementalist that is big on daggers and the water and earth attunements who will basically run towards players instead of events. Elementalist is one of my last choices for live, and I want to kind of go crazy next beta weekend. What do you plan on doing this time around?

–Ravious

Non-Sequitors

A few news briefs that don’t really fit together in any coherent way:

 

  • My initial impressions of the Guild Wars 2 beta were wrong.   Go read the Facebook update from yesterday where ANet talks about how hard they are working on the client after the feedback from the BWE1 and Stress Test.   They aren’t even releasing a new BWE ‘until its ready.’  I can’t even begin to describe how happy this makes me.   Make it right, make it the best it can be, and I will help test when you want me to.

 

  • Today is patch day for the 17th Expansion to Eve Online titled Inferno.   My love for this game is no secret, and the pace at which CCP delivers content upgrades is simply amazing, and clearly leaps and bounds beyond what anyone else is doing in the MMO space…   add to that fact that the true game expansions are free, makes me scratch my head a bit, and really feel blessed to have found this game when I did, instead of letting one of the most impressive, and unique gaming experiences pass me by without ever giving it the proper due.

 

  • In a sad, but largely unsurprising turn of events, 38 Studios has started the process of downsizing their development staff.   For everyone out there commenting on the politics of this or that issue and forgetting that real people’s livelihoods are at stake, please take a moment to put yourselves in the shoes of the developer who was living their dream making games, and is now out of work.  This is a very difficult situation, and while you can hate on Curt Schilling if you want, try to temper your gloating by realizing that good people from our gaming  community are going through a hard time right now.

~Cyndre

 

Hearts and Bears

For those of you who missed those heady days, the launch of Warhammer Online was one of the best times in MMO blogging. Props to whoever at Mythic’s community team pushed it, the blogger community came together and decided we were all going to try this game as a group. This became the prototype NBI, and several of those bloggers are still around. And then the game launched, we all got to experience it, and we turned on it like an angry creature that turns on things.

One item I used for years as an example of failed developer promises what Paul Barnett’s “bears bears bears” video. For those of you who can’t click on videos right now, the idea was to never again have a “kill ten rats” quest pop up after you had just slaughtered dozens of rats, because the dude should notice the rat corpses. Warhammer Online then launched with a severely limited implementation of this, along with all the usual quest stupidity of being sent to kill someone you just killed on the previous quest stage. As I phrased it, “developers explicitly identif[ied] a problem, identif[ied] a solution, [and] then implement[ed] the problem exactly as described.” Oh, how I carried that grudge.

Four years later, Guild Wars 2 is moving towards launch. And what has it quietly implemented? The answer to “bears bears bears”! Through hearts, when you slaughter a path to what would normally be a quest-giver, s/he recognizes and appreciates the things you did along the way. Granted, sometimes it is silly that you know what fills the heart before you meet the heart-person (“I’ll just check this shrubbery for stray moas, in case anyone nearby lost one…”), but if the dude hates bears, and you just killed a bunch of bears, he recognizes that you killed a bunch of bears.

After four years, the circle is complete. Everyone who wanted WAR to be DAoC2 can now look forward to three-sided RvR with territorial control and a development team that has implemented the design described under “bears bears bears.”

: Zubon

Shopping By Customers

I recently read An Economist Gets Lunch by Tyler Cowen. Much of the book is advice on finding quality ethnic food (and barbecue) at reasonable prices, whether in the US or in their home countries. Don’t eat in the tourist district, do eat where there are several restaurants of the same type in the neighborhood (until I visited DC, it never occurred to me that you could have a half-dozen Ethiopian restaurants on one block). Being an economist, his insights focus on where the restaurants have the right incentives and efficiencies. A place with great atmosphere is selling that, rather than the food; the tourist district does not worry about repeat customers; American shipping systems are great but really fresh seafood and produce is only available close to the source.

Yes, this is one of those extended metaphor posts that takes an example from another setting and applies it to gaming.

The simplest guide is to look at the customers. If the restaurant has the right people eating there, the food is probably good. Who are the right people? The ones with interests aligned with yours. Continue reading Shopping By Customers

Languished Thoughts

I am withering away waiting for the next Guild Wars 2 beta event. I have dreams of a dagger-charged necromancer or elementalist that I can’t wait to realize. Yet, the gaming world seems to be darkening as the light of the last Guild Wars 2 beta weekend event is receding. I am trying to shake the feeling as best as I can with Steam sales, and the like. Then I hear what is going on in the news.

Scarlet “MMO”

Except for the aforesaid exception, the MMO genre seems to be bleakening. With a gracious nod to Beau Hindman, I would say that this only seems to be the case for so-called “AAA” titles as F2P titles seem to flood across the land like a scute mob. Continue reading Languished Thoughts

[GW2] I Name Thee Greed

The herd has shifted a little with ArenaNet’s rules for keeping names from the original Guild Wars. Basically log in to Guild Wars soon to get your Guild Wars names on the list. The list holds for the three-day headstart period and the day of the launch. After that miniscule time period, it’s fair game. One-word names are fair game from the start. Afterall, only one player in Guild Wars 2 gets to use the sweet, sweet name “Wizardex”.

It might be the most coveted name for Guild Wars 2 at the moment. Greedy name grubbers. It’s amazing that there is so much greed around names. Continue reading [GW2] I Name Thee Greed

[GW2] The Long Game

There are a lot of head scratchers in the halls of ArenaNet. It’s not that things are wrong per se; just that sometimes they are really going against the grain. For example, their dynamic events are incredibly deep as this video illustrated. Yet it took some small amount of effort to find the hidden depth of the dynamic event.

I admit that it can be hard to stop. Just stop. And enjoy the moment. The transitions  between most events are really quick, but the NPCs do take a small chance to talk. I noticed that I have to stop and pay attention. Fiddling with loot, trading post, or remaining enemies usually means I miss a bit of the story action.

I know that when Guild Wars 2 launches I am going to make sure to set up a chat channel for NPC discussions. Still, I wonder if I will train myself backwards to slow down and get the content hit as it happens. I wonder if I will care, or if it will be go, go, go.

Continue reading [GW2] The Long Game

Sapped

Having played GW1 pretty hardcore for the start of the year, burnout was approaching along with the GW2 BWE. Post-BWE I have basically run out of urge to log in. I’ve seen where we’re heading. It’s right over there. It feels pointless to mill about over here. It’s like cleaning something before you set fire to it. GW1 will still be there, but I have my 30+/50, so the value of Achieving has fallen, and I have Explored almost everything. It’s hard to Socialize when most others seem to be in the same state (or furiously completing their 30 or 50), and who wants to Kill against people with 7 more years of experience? I like the Jade Quarry, but my most effective strategy has become dull.

Cleaning the garage is feeling strongly competitive with MMOs right now.

: Zubon

[GW2] Dynamic Events Edutainment

I’ve seen this video pop up around a few places on the net, and think there can be no better compliment than further promotion. CaraEmm shows off the Guild Wars 2 dynamic events in a really interesting way. He provides multiple perspectives of the action, and he is careful to show how a single event chain is all interconnected. It is great that CaraEmm really showed what it is like to stop and smell the flowers because there are things like this everywhere in the game. I completed this event chain over last beta weekend too, but I was busy snowball fighting outside while the kids were talking. I missed that whole part of the story. Anyway, this video is well worth a watch.

–Ravious

[GW] The Humans Deserve To Lose

or “NPCs I’m glad are dead for GW2”

On a scale of 1 to suicidal, Prince Rurik is one of the worst escort NPCs in the universe. He’s actually not a bad fighter, but he feels free to dive into large groups of enemies, and if he sees you fighting one group while you try to be his bodyguards, he will take a sharp turn to find more. You must protect him in quite a few missions, and his suicide will lead to mission failure despite the way he dies a completely pointless death a mission or two later. Sara Oakheart from LotRO was a great competitor for “worst escort NPC ever,” as she charged quickly ahead and then cowered, also appearing quite often, but her death meant that you failed an optional side quest, not that the main story arc of the game came to a pause.

I think Nolani Academy is my favorite Rurik moment. He lives in a fort so well planned that a charr scout starts inside and you find the back door by following it out. The idea is to clear the front so that Rurik can come out and proceed safely. If you over-leveled normal mode and are going back, there is a convenient “just let them all come” lever to open the front gate. The problem is that, if Rurik sees you approaching, he will open the front gate to greet you, no matter that there are more than a dozen Charr between you and the gate. That is still the “just let them all come” lever, and Rurik will of course try to solo a dozen enemies that are all higher level than him. The image the game wants you to have is the sneaky skirmisher or assassin, taking out the charr in their encampments, but you are really hiding from the idiot prince.

Many guildmates can be drawn into helping others complete Prophecies just for the chance to kill Prince Rurik when he comes back. I don’t know if GW2 has escort NPCs; I hope not. I don’t know if Undead Rurik will be a dungeon or raid boss in GW2; I hope so. I also don’t know if the charr deserve Ascalon, but the humans certainly deserved to lose it.

: Zubon