Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.
.I will now get the highest score of any MMO pundit making predictions. Ready? “It will not go live in 2012.” Whatever we’re talking about, I’m predicting that it will slip into 2013, or later, or just never ship. The game, the expansion, whatever: not in 2012. I’m going to lose a few points, since something will ship in 2012, but I don’t see how anyone can beat my accuracy rate here.
: Zubon
One profession in Guild Wars 2 is the direct descendant of its ancestor in the original Guild Wars. The warrior now has significant ranged weapon mastery. The elementalist became one of the most versatile on-the-fly professions. The ranger got blended with Pokemon, and the necromancer decided to turn into a plague-bearing cockroach with friends that don’t decay as fast. Nope, it’s the freshly officialized mesmer.
Oh, you say, the mesmer lost hexes and interrupts. They make copies of themselves, for Kormir’s sake. It is the most different, you say! Yet, I would say the mesmer didn’t change. It was the battleground that changed. Continue reading [GW2] Mesmer Metagame
“Iteration” is a word emphasized by ArenaNet. It seems something greater than mere polish, and I asked ArenaNet if they could entertain a few questions about their design and development practice. What does it really mean to iterate? Guild Wars 2 Lead Designer Eric Flannum graciously took some time to talk about the term and what it means to the studio and Guild Wars 2.
Q: ArenaNet touts “iteration” a lot in interviews and official blog posts. Is it not the industry norm to iterate during MMO development? Are other games’ leads more bullheaded and less willing to deviate from the plan? What makes ArenaNet’s iteration of Guild Wars 2 special? Continue reading [GW2] Interview with ArenaNet’s Eric Flannum
ArenaNet’s Chuck Jackman (pronounced as Scottish as possible) shows off the new dialogue cut scenes in Guild Wars 2 in one of the latest blog posts. Unequivocally, he started the doom of ArenaNet and Guild Wars 2 by having to summon eldritch gods to get the job done. It is possible that everybody will be insane/dead before a beta starts. Still, which do you think is scarier, Cthulhu or an art director that has probably already bested a few of those gods? Anyway, amongst the cries of the damned, Jackman writes:
We also use a layered and additive approach on the face. This allows us to animate a mood or emotion-based “face idle†and layer on the lip-synch animation as well. We can then drop additive facial gestures at the appropriate time in the dialogue. For example, we can have a character looking timid or frightened while they talk. Then maybe something happens to scare them and we can drop an additive flinch animation onto the character’s face, body, or both independently at just the right moment so that they react to what is happening to them in the scene.
I have to say that this sounds really cool, especially after watching some deadpan facial expressions on the heralded Skyrim. An official video of one of these new dialogue scenes gives the full impression. I find two teachings colliding from my untrained pundit’s eye: microexpressions and constant movement. Let’s explore both! Continue reading [GW2] Valley of Movement and Microexpressions
Lots of neat tidbits in the latest ArenaNet blog post including UI changes, character customization stuff, and skill quests. Okay, so that’s not what they’re called. “Skill challenges” is the official title, but this new system for getting the non-weapon skills unlocked has me squirming a little. Flannum writes:
Skill points can be acquired by undertaking what we call a skill challenge. There are 200 skill challenges in the game, and they range from defeating tough opponents, to answering riddles, to drinking a particularly potent drink.
He goes on to say that this is an evolution of one of their earlier profession specific “challenges” because this new iteration allows for players to group up to do a skill challenge together, regardless of profession makeup. Sounds pretty good, until I looked at the picture. That’s a lot of things to unlock. Continue reading [GW2] Questing for Skills
It’s pretty apparent that even after the profession is officially disclosed, ArenaNet is not happy to let their professions stagnate in pre-beta testing. Profession and skill herder, Jon Peters, wrote a really nice Friday blog post on the official ArenaNet blog about some of the things that have been iterated upon for Guild Wars 2.
First off, the engineer gets… well another skill bar putting the profession as skill master, one full skill ahead the elementalist. An engineer gets 4 toolbelt skills which are based on their slotted heal skill and 3 utility skills. This is 23 more skills for the engineer. What’s really nice is that this also allows the engineer to not have to rely on skill swapping utilities quite as much to adapt prior to combat. For example, an engineer in a single-target DPS fight might not want to pull a flamethrower out, yet it would suck if the engineer is heavily penalized for having the skill-turning utility locked in the slot. The toolbelt skill still gives the engineer some benefit for having the flamethrower slotted even if the flamethrower is not going to be used. Continue reading [GW2] Skill Developments
My go to game right now is The Binding of Isaac. Most games seem to take around 1/2 hour or a little more, but each game is a pure treat. The crux of my delight is that each game will be explored and played differently because the engine procedurally creates the dungeon, bosses, and loot each time. X-ray goggles for example let me pass through the secret doors, which normally need to be found by placing a bomb next to a wall and praying it is the correct wall. Now I have more bombs available for other things. Anybody that has played a roguelike, especiallyNetHack, will be comfortably familiar with this type of exploration.
For me, this is one of the most pure exploration scenarios available in any game. Unlocking a map or reading quest text in an MMO seems to pale by comparison. The developers made the chunk of game to be explored, and others have already explored it. I would go so far as to say that in an MMO the only explorers getting pure-ish exploration are the achievers working on a world first for a raid. Everything else evokes as much exploration as me going to a museum.
I want to be the scientist finding new discoveries. I want to see emergence that the developer could have only dreamed of. For me that is a purer exploration. Continue reading Pure-ish Exploration
After the mega-cons, things have seemed slow from the Guild Wars 2 standpoint. There are a few interviews coming out of the smaller conventions, and a few blog posts showing off environmental concept art or the audio’s team trip to a never-used nuclear reactor have been posted. Perhaps the biggest drop in October was the grawl race’s lore posting. So, it’s been kind of slow on the news front.
I can’t help but feel that the ArenaNet team has shown the demo of their game, and now it’s time to get it done. The only mode of play that’s not been seen in action is World v. World (WvW), which I imagine to be similar in spirit to Dark Age of Camelot or Warhammer Online‘s RvR fronts. Things like WvW, other PvP maps, more dungeons, more events, and of course the elusive eighth profession have all been mentioned as being designed or refined in the Fall interviews. Continue reading [GW2] Nose to the Asura Gybrasion Device
I’ve been mulling this for a little bit. It’s an evolution of The Essential Scatter found in Rift. Is there room in the design for player failure in the event system in Guild Wars 2?
Let’s point a finer point on it. We know that events can fork when there is failure. If centaurs are attacking a fort and there is no player defense, then the system is set up so that the fort will fall. There is also the scenario of an elite event occurring with only one or two active players. Those occurrences are more like branching scenarios than actual failure. What I am talking about is an occasion where the players are simply too ragtag, unskilled, uncooperative, or not lucid enough to beat the event. Is ArenaNet ready to punish them?
Lewis B has some great impressions of the upcoming Stars Wars MMO over at Tap Repeatedly. I wouldn’t call them bad impressions per se; I would call them disappointed impressions. He gives praise where praise is due, mostly the script and voice acting. The art style is enjoyable, and then there’s everything else. For the sake of this post let’s just say it’s basically the gameplay millions have experienced in World of Warcraft, Rift, Lord of the Rings Online et al.
While I particularly trust Lewis B impressions, as subjective as many may be, this is approximately the feedback I have seen on this upcoming game for awhile. There are neat shiny bits apart from BioWare’s trademarked storytelling like the cover system or the use of personal mooks to do all the player’s crafting for sure. Yet it’s still a vanilla ice cream regardless of the sprinkles.
Unlike Rift, which in my opinion clearly tried to push the MMO genre with it’s dynamic events, the hundred-million dollar costing Bioware MMO doesn’t seem to push anything. With all the problems involved in stand-and-deliver combat, the holy trinity, kill stealing, boring quest design, etc. of vanilla MMOs, tacking on a shared single-player branching story feels flat. At least Rift tried to get people playing together in unique ways. Continue reading The Punditry Dark Side
