Category: Guild Wars 2

Amazingly enough, ArenaNet dropped one of the most sought after Guild Wars 2 bits on a Friday. The Hall of Monuments Reward Calculator is now available for Guild Wars players to peruse the goals and rewards. Simply head to the Calculator and put your character’s name in, and the Calculator will do the rest.

There are 50 available points, and each accomplishment will give various amounts of points. For example, putting any statue in to the Monument of Honor gives 2 points, 5 statues gives 3 points, but then 10, 15, 20, etc. statues only nets 1 point each tier. Therefore, the point curve is weighted towards easy to get started, but hard to complete.

Continue reading Hall of Monumental Rewards Calculator

Last night the ArenaNet blog updated with a post by John Hargrove, Guild Wars 2 game designer, presenting an overview of some of the reward and upgrade schemes in Guild Wars 2. There are five main design points followed by a look into how they incorporated that point. These are some pretty cool concepts incorporated in to the game. For example, a player’s loot roll is personalized. If there is a dungeon boss chest, the player gets her own roll on the loot table to find out what that she earned.

This one concept is resounding, and can be a dual-edged sword. The loot distribution at the end of a dungeon was almost a kind of bittersweet celebration. It was exciting to see what we as a group had won, but then often times others would get some of the loot I wanted. Instead they use a system similar to Dungeons and Dragons Online where the group after-event is gone in place of a personal moment with the chest. Hopefully they can find some way of taking back a little of that group reward by perhaps allowing a person to donate an item in-chest (before it gets bound) to another player.

The blog post then leans heavily in to the most iconic rewards in the MMO genre, gear. With gear players become walking trophy cases of accomplishment, and coming off of the excellent dye post, we know ArenaNet wants players to look exactly how they want to. However, this luxury is not without cost anymore.

Continue reading Of Sticks, Carrots, and Wallets (Guild Wars 2)

The November issue of the UK PC Gamer came with a handful of pages on Guild Wars 2. One of the posters at Guru went above and beyond in tracking down a copy of the newly released magazine to disseminate any exclusive info to the masses. Big thanks to Lyssa for taking that time, and then taking the time to do a “live”-posting of info as he read. I would expect a couple official dungeon articles from ArenaNet in October, but in the meantime, let’s look at this new information.

Dungeons are instanced content nodes in Guild Wars 2 that tie heavily in to a player’s personal story and then branch out into repeatable content. It seems that to attune to the dungeon, the player has to get to that point in their personal story. The dungeon’s first phase overlaps with the personal story, and the player is joined by a NPC’s (and any supporting players) to finish this phase. Once the personal story phase is completed, the dungeon opens up into an explorable mode with follow-up adventures that are designed to be repeatable. It is unclear now, but I would expect the explorable areas to mostly be group oriented and not part of the personal story.

Continue reading Peek at Guild Wars 2 Dungeons

The puns abound in the latest ArenaNet blog post. I love Kristen Perry’s enthusiasm though. I just can’t help but smile and be excited as well, even if the information is small or tangential. In blog post we get a pretty thorough review of the dye system along with a lot of new and confirmed information.

The biggest advancement, in my mind, is that dyes will no longer be physical items that are crafted or dropped by mobs and then sold on the auction block. Instead, each account gets an unlockable palette of colors. Automatically from the start of the game, when centaurs are attacking and you are supposed to be saving villagers and killing big earth elementals, you can stand there for ten minutes playing around with your unlocked starter area colors. There is a great video from GuildMag of some player “wasting” gamescom demo time doing just that (more colors, etc. were unlocked for demo purposes).

Continue reading Guild Wars 2 Dye-atribe

This morning ArenaNet dropped a nice article expanding on the mobile app for Guild Wars 2.  In conjunction with a brief interview at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, we finally get some screenshots of this app-in-production.  News of the app has been known since the Curse announcement over PAX Prime, and there are some other really good interviews about the feature.  I think some of the apps are going to be pretty cool, but I am dubious as to how much of the Guild Wars 2 experience they will carry to the small screen. (ArenaNet says that there will be similar functionality for web users, instead of app users.)

Continue reading Guild Wars 2 Apps

A commenter on an another post implied a revisitation to the four Bartle splats for a [MMO] gamer.  I thought about it, but it is hard to revisit a subject that has been hammered, beaten, and possibly mishappen through the MMO blogosphere and forums.  Instead, let’s also revisit the four non-human races in Guild Wars 2 in view of the Bartle splats.  Much more fun that way!

Continue reading Bartle-ized Guild Wars 2 Races

Isn’t it fun when you mention a problem and the solution is already in the works? Last week, that was my mention of manuals and digital distribution, where the manuals are there, just not immediately obvious when you don’t care enough to look very hard. This week, it is my next bit from The Design of Everyday Things, preempted by Guild Wars 2.

One of the difficulties in making intuitive interfaces is that some things require complexity. It is not always possible to make something powerful, flexible, and simple. If you need 200 options, you have problems whether you have 200 buttons or 10 buttons with a combination of toggles or whatever. There is no simple way to present 200 options.

One solution is to hide some options. That is why most “options” menus have an “advanced options” menu, although that is rarely of help to me because the option I want to change is usually somewhere under “advanced” (as are many cool toys that you never knew you wanted). One non-computer example cited did that with a flip panel — less common options were hidden under a plate so you did not see all the buttons at once. Yes, putting a fig leaf over half the buttons can potentially improve how intuitive the interface is.

But what would be even better would be if the options auto-updated according to your needs. My phone at work does this, and I tend to demand more of my games than my phone. This needs to happen in a structured fashion, so that you are not chasing commands or having buttons change on you in the time it takes for you to push them, but we already have some good examples, dating back to adventure games that automatically do the right thing when you click or use something. (This can be done badly, if the multi-use button does things unexpectedly.)

But as I suggested in the opening, Guild Wars 2 is already doing this. Change weapons, and your power bar updates. Go into Death Shroud, and your power bar updates. Summon a pet, and your power bar updates. I was so used to needing several power bars for all my abilities that it never struck me to want my 0 key to update from “summon bear” to “command bear to attack.” Is it potentially easy mode if, when you are set on fire, a big button pops up offering to let you use that water you picked up? Maybe, but you would think that would be an immediately available option for your character, because in real life you do not need to rewire your brain to lunge for water. Do I have any evidence that Guild Wars 2 is going to do this well? No, but I endorse the idea, even if it takes a few iterations to make it work as intended.

: Zubon

I saw them days, possibly a week or more, before I knew what they were.  From the Guild Wars 2 gamescom videos almost every one showed the player hitting the map.  The world would zoom out and re-orient from the character in a somewhat artistic way, and I saw heart outlines on the map.

I actually allowed the puzzle of their presence a few cycles of the old brain when an NPC was circling the hearts and at the same time telling me there were farmers about each heart that needed help.  Event hubs! I first thought.  Wait, hearts as the icon for event hubs don’t make sense was the second thought.  Then because I didn’t like the look of hearts on the nice map, I conveniently forgot about them while I was inundated with plenty of other Guild Wars 2 information.

Continue reading Guild Wars 2 – Completionist Hearts