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[GW2] The Jotun, That Which Was Lost

There’s a nice new lore article detailing one of the non-player character (NPC) races that appeared in the Guild Wars expansion, The Eye of the North. The jotun are a giant-race, cousins to the ogres. It appears that the giant-races prefer mountains, the ogres getting the Blazeridge Mountains east of Ascalon, while the jotun once held court all throughout the Shiverpeaks. While the story of the ogres is still unknown, the jotun fell in power because of interracial conflict.

Behind the scenes, ArenaNet’s loresmith Ree Soesbee writes that the jotun lore was expanded to show something great that was taken because the jotun race cannibalized itself. They were legendary and possessed the magic and the ability to create huge monuments, possibly before the time of the gods and Bloodstones that brought magic to the races. This leads one to wonder whether the jotun had a hand in the Eye of the North superstructure. Regardless, all that’s left is a mongrel scrap of a race among massive stone monuments without meaning. Continue reading [GW2] The Jotun, That Which Was Lost

[GW] 100%

The first few titles I saw had just a couple of tiers: survivor, drunkard, party animal (I started during a festival, so I had booze and candy before I had a secondary profession). Then I met “Cartographer.” That is normal, an achievement for exploring the whole map. It starts at 60% and tiers up, makes sense.

I did not notice until this weekend that it goes all the way to 100%. This explains much that I have seen in the wiki. Zone descriptions talk about how the docks count as 0.1% of the map, or you can get an extra pixel by “scraping” the walls of a zone, or that 101% is possible. When I was thinking that you were done at 80% or 90%, that seemed super-Completist. Now I’m worried that I need to step foot on almost every square centimeter of the world if I want to add that to the Hall of Monuments.

I am saving that one for once I start trying hard mode vanquishing anyway. I just feel for folks who were stuck at 99.8% and spent weeks scouring maps for the dozen pixels that needed to be stepped on because they had an invisibly brief lag spike one day while pushing against a rock.

: Zubon

[GW2] Year of the Dragon

To rock in the Chinese New Year, ArenaNet has announced that Guild Wars 2 will be released this year. There was much dancing and celebration in the streets. Even though most revelers were celebrating the announcement, they didn’t mind the company of the other Chinese New Year party-goers.

In the blog post, Mike O’Brien then goes on to discuss ArenaNet’s plans for the ongoing beta:

We recently finished our first closed beta test, and we’re now ready to hold progressively larger events. In February we’ll invite select press to participate in beta testing, and in March and April we’ll aggressively ramp up the size of our beta test events so that many of you will have a chance to participate. And of course, this all leads to the release of Guild Wars 2 later this year.

Don’t worry, faithful readers. My firstborn is already shipped well on her way to the ArenaNet studios.

There are a couple of interesting points, though. Press are usually involved in MMO betas at some point, but usually this is one of the last phases of beta. What does ArenaNet intend with having awesome, dedicated bloggers and some real journalists in the beta? Normally, I would assume they would be under a non-disclosure agreement, but it would be really cool if ArenaNet kind of said “we’re so amazing, just come play and tell the world.” It could also be that ArenaNet wants possible “reviewers” to have more time to play so the Metacritic crushing reviews happen all the fast upon release.

Which of course leads to the question, when is release? Certainly nothing would be more epic than it launching on the Guild Wars 7th Anniversary. Yet, many times in the past it seems a good idea for MMOs to shut down beta and give the company a couple weeks to add that last bit of polish. This would lead the launch on the edge of summer, during exam time for students, near vacations, etc. Most MMOs will not launch during summer. Then there is this bit of Nostradamus-ish evidence of ArenaNet soccer jerseys possibly signifying June 28, 2012. My personal best guess is September with a wild card bet of April.

–Ravious

[GW] Crafting Storage

One Guild Wars design decision that beats the competition is the crafting storage tab. Crafting materials stack up to 250, and one tab of your storage holds one stack of each. All storage in Guild Wars is shared, so all your (post-Searing) characters have access. You could duplicate the effect by giving players two more storage tabs, since this is effectively 36 slots, but this comes pre-organized and of course for the specific purpose of crafting. (NCSoft could also remove the cap of 250, which seems arbitrary, low for common materials and very high for rare.) Aligning with other design decisions, Guild Wars does not have tiers of crafting materials as you level up, although having a crafting tab would be even more useful there (potentially messier in the UI).

Splitting “crafting storage,” Guild Wars crafting is not exactly rigorous. The crafters are basically collector NPCs with shared materials. Storage in Guild Wars is simple, shared, and rather inadequate if you want to keep all those collector drops. The vault is expandable at $10/pane, which feels a bit pricey, although it’s tempting with all these frog and bug bits about. I need to do some muling.

: Zubon

[GW,SW:ToR] Inversion

Many of the design oddities I am citing in Guild Wars arise from its development path. It was not built as an MMO, but it has accumulated MMO elements over time, grafted interestingly but sometimes awkwardly onto its frame.

Everything I read about The Old Republic suggests that oddities arise from its developers. Without having played, my sense of the internet consensus is that this is a wonderful, brilliant, elegantly crafted single player game with excellent polish, story, and voice work. And that it completely lacks anything that attracts and retains MMO players except for having WoW-like gameplay.

Personally, I am quite happy with the notion of a game that has an intended finish rather than an eternal grind, but that has gotten about as far as possible from the old notion of an MMO as a virtual world, and it does not mesh well with a subscription model. But what do I know? I am not the target audience for “WoW with lightsabers,” and those are not my hundreds of millions of dollars invested.

: Zubon

[GW] Start the Mission

Here is a bad design decision that seems easy to band-aid. Guild Wars starts missions in Prophecies and Nightfall with a button under the character list, while in Nightfall and Eye of the North with an NPC dialogue. This is poor, having something be a UI element in one place and part of the world in another. I started in Nightfall, as most seemed to recommend, then played some Eye of the North and just this week visited Factions. Nothing tells you about the “enter mission” button. There is absolutely nothing in-game that tells you how to start the mission unless you notice that a button appeared in the UI.

I have commented on how Guild Wars players and wikipedians assume that you have a sizable resource base. It reaches a new tier when the developers forget that they designed the game as three expand-alones rather than a base Guild Wars with expansion packs (and then one actual expansion pack shared across the three). There is a handy mission to introduce you to the other campaigns, but whoever wrote it must never have thought that you might be starting with Nightfall and not already know how things work in Prophecies and Factions.

The in-game help is already a link to the wiki. Your players should not need to then Google to try to figure out what they need to ask the wiki.

: Zubon

Psychonauts did the same thing by giving you inventory items without telling you that you have an inventory or how to access it.

[GW2] Just Play, Quests as Hearts

There’s a pretty good thread over at MMORPG.com about The Tao of ArenaNet. It’s a nicely done, if a bit wordy, fan-made response to what the heck ArenaNet is doing. They are doing things different. No more quests is a huge one, yet their essence remains. Walk this way.

Since I am still waiting to play Guild Wars 2 (still, ArenaNet, still), I’ve been playing around my with my old flame, Lord of the Rings Online. It’s a good ol’ vanilla MMO with its own twists like World of Warcraft or Rift (possibly the new Star Wars MMO, which I haven’t played enough to include here). Like a good ol’ MMO, it has quest hubs which branch out to get players exploring the sub-zones. It’s a tried and true formula. Fill a sub-zone with enemies and problems, and then get players a reason to get out there. It’s fun, there’s constant activity, and it’s comfortable. Continue reading [GW2] Just Play, Quests as Hearts

[GW] Many Stop Shopping

In Guild Wars, you buy skills once, at that even unlocks them for heroes on the account. Guild Wars has the rather odd design feature that not every skill trainer has the same skills. If you want to get all the skills for your class, you need to tour around to different cities. Not all the cities and outposts have skill trainers. Secondary profession changers might be somewhere else entirely, and you need to have swapped to that profession to buy the skills. Some of the trainers are in explorable zones, so you cannot change your build after picking up the new skills.

Is there anything at all to recommend this design for skill training? I’m down with picking up elite skills from bosses, but aside from having a few early trainers with only a few options, which you could also do by hiding some skills until level X, what benefit is there to having this random spread of skills and trainers across the zones? And campaigns, because not all the basic skills are in all the campaigns.

: Zubon

[GW] Things You Get Used To

You can call the skills whatever you want. The effect is what matters. So why force players to re-learn the same skills by calling it “beast strike” or some such when you can just re-use the normal class skill?

That was presumably the thought process, but what was your reaction the first time you ran into groups of dinosaurs with necromantic powers?

: Zubon

saurian blood cultists on the next Jerry Springer show