Daniel Dociu, concept art god, had a presentation at the recent GDC. Instead of doing bullet point powerpoint slides, he decided to blast a few retinas with some old and new concept art going by at warp speed for the Guild Wars series (including Guild Wars 2 concept art). ArenaNet worked hard to push out a high-quality version of the video so people would be able to stop watching the cam versions. Enjoy!
Category: Guild Wars
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.Famou$ Credit
I can’t stop raving about Wizardblox. Other MMOs need this pronto. It gets even better when my wife plays Wizardblox and all of the sudden I see a gift pop up on my Wizard101 screen telling me she just sent me 100 gold or so. It’s a funny hypocrisy, but I hate getting crap in game – like for Lord of the Rings Online festival gifts where I get some crappy food I will never use. Yet, when I can accrue some crap and some other niceties out of game… it feels nice. It feels rewarding.
Anyway, one thing I received through Wizardblox was a transformation potion that changed me into a Krokotopian mummy for an hour (I love how they run with their little Krok legs). I landed in the commons area of Wizard City, and my screen blew up with friend requests. I couldn’t hide in the mass of players when I was standing twice as high as them. I had to quickly run out of the zone with the annoying friend request in the middle of my screen. Continue reading Famou$ Credit
Guild Wars 2 Stuff (2/26)
Before I begin with Guild Wars 2 news, be sure to check out the huge skill balancing update to Guild Wars 1. A lot of people worked very hard on balancing extremely popular (and therefore touchy) farming skills, buffing entire lines of skills, and working on the balance across the PvP formats a bit more. Then Linsey Murdock of the Guild Wars Live Team hints on Facebook that the next big patch will be a content patch, and she will have to kill people off. My guess is she might be planning to push forward with the timeline in Guild Wars. Now, on to the future.
The Explorer’s Conundrum
A big reason I fear I will never play Mass Effect 2, or similar games, is that the story is personalized. I don’t like leaving paths unexplored. What if I killed the Texas-talking lizard? What if I ignored their water supply? I hate those “what ifs.” It leaves me the feeling that I did not get the best story as if I skipped a few chapters and then tore out a few pages. The last thing I want to do with my precious time is replay the entire game just to read a few different chapters.
As a quick aside, this is largely why I don’t alt. My main has a rich history and story that would take any alt months and months of dedicated play (and player wrangling) to match. Playing an alt, in my opinion, is even worse than replaying a game like Mass Effect 2 because most often the alt experience will be a shadow of the main read. I’ll leave that thought now for another time. Continue reading The Explorer’s Conundrum
Thousand-Year Achievements
This last weekend during the Canthan New Year for Guild Wars I made it to multiple celestial summonings (where I got goody bags for our district feeding the beast things like half-digested boot consomme) and completed the festival quests on multiple characters (netting more goodies). I tore apart countless fortunes in the hopes that one would contain the elusive – elusive to the tune of 0.3% chance – celestial tiger mini. I would’ve been out of luck if not for a sultan of a man in my alliance who had some extra.
Still it was a productive weekend in terms of gaining wealth. I received boxes and boxes of fireworks and some shiny new celestial summoning stones. Between this festival and last week’s Wintersday redux, I advanced some titles by possibly up to 10%. These titles are paramount achievements filled in the vein of the purest grind. That is, unless one takes in to account festivals. Continue reading Thousand-Year Achievements
Happy State of Grind
Last weekend I dug away at a repeatable quest for Guild Wars Wintersday Redux, which ends this weekend with a finale for those having hat problems during Wintersday 2009. The quest is a fun one called Snowball Dominance, where the denizens of the Eye of the North go outside for a massive snowball fight. Players can bring one other person along. The quest can be a bit challenging for casual players that stroll in to the chaos, but with a few “exploits,” like waiting for the scrum to finish by standing outside of agro range on the left side then mopping up the remaining mobs, it becomes manageable.
Of course for farmers there is a different tactic. Take a necromancer Hero, and run it into the middle of the enemy group before they turn red. Pop Holiday Blues (AoE well degen), Snow Fort (temporary invincibility), and Snowcone (heal) to ball up the mobs. The mobs waste their good skills on the sacrifice, and players and the AI allies can easily take out the clumped up enemies. The rewards are very good for something that can be run in under 2 minutes. Continue reading Happy State of Grind
A Lesser Evil
Answer this question right now, which is worse – gold farmers or cheaters? They might belong to the same coin of the disease that hurts our favorite MMOs, but they attack it from wholly different sides. The answer, for me, is not self-evident. Sure, if I were the Ultra Decision Maker with infinite resources I would press my magic button and both problems would be dealt with by my happy MIT graduate programmers. But, developers don’t live in that world. They live in a world where the target is always moving, always trying to outsmart, and there is never enough time to line up the scope for a perfect kill. So which is worse when you have the development time for one bullet?
Three Guild Wars Things
Mondes Persistants was able to interview the Guild Wars Live Team, and there are some pretty interesting answers (HT: Fril Estelin @ Guild Wars Guru) . The most interesting answer to a pretty common question regarding future content additions / events was:
Yes, we have a lot of ideas on our minds, probably more than we will be able to implement. We love the game and always try to come up with new things we hope players will enjoy. Who knows, maybe players will bear witness to some of the cataclysmic events that transform Tyria prior to Guild Wars 2?
ArenaNet keeps mildly hinting at using Guild Wars as a platform to introduce some Guild Wars 2 lore, but that is an overly candid response to an easily shunted question. We know that skill balance is a top priority, but we haven’t heard anything about upcoming features or content. Hopefully after the dust from the skill balances clears, the Live Team can preview what else they are working on.
The second is that the popular Guild Wars fansite Guild Wars Guru was hacked, and the hacker was able to obtain some personal information. Read about it here, but the bottom line is to change your passwords to Guild Wars Guru and Guild Wars 2 Guru (and Auction Site). I would also watch any other sites / games where you combo your email, username, and/or current Guru password.
The third is I have to say with one of my last controversial posts on Guild Wars, I had the weirdest pingback ever. We are breaking grounds with the MMO genre people! (And go River Rats!)
–Ravious
remember two things
Guild Wars Holy Trinity
The holy trinity is well known. The DPS fight the mobs with damage. The Healer fights the damage from the mobs. And, the Tank fights the agro from the DPS and Healer. In World of Warcraft the formula is pretty well set for easy gameplay. Lord of the Rings gets a bit hazier with their use of hybrid classes, range tanking, and tank swapping, but for the most part it follows the doctrine of the holy trinity.
Guild Wars came very close to shirking the entire thing. Agro does not really exist like it does in World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online. Each battle with PvE mobs is reminiscent of a PvP battle. Players have 8 bodies against the team of enemies to kill. Because PvE can feel so much like PvP (especially in comparison to the stark contrast of PvE/PvP in World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online), ArenaNet moved away from the holy trinity to a more enlightened trinity: the three lines.
Re-Emergence
Yesterday afternoon I was in a pretty bad mood. I had destroyed a part of my main character in Lord of the Rings Online. It wasn’t until later that evening when I could apply a salve to my character’s gaping wound that I felt better. It wasn’t my fault, but the change needed to happen. I had to switch crafting professions.Â