Guild Wars 2

[Joiry_]

I know this is out of the SW/scifi realm, and SWTOR seems to be trucking along, but thought to check if anyone has an interest in GW2. Prepurchase started a few days ago (that's right, not to be outdone, they're offering to let you pay now even tho there's no official release date, tho its likely in a few months).

Anyway, even tho the devs ended making the game more mainstream than I'd have hoped, it does have some nice features:

Dynamic Events: These replace quests. They're not truly "dynamic", more like branching scripts. Basically every area of a zone has a continuous series of events going on. Say centaurs are raiding an outpost. The centaurs might actually take it over if the players in the area don't help out. This will be one branch, possibly putting other settlements at risk for attack. Or the players may drive the centaurs back, which opens up the possibility to attack a centaur camp. That's just a simple example, most I've read about have several layers of how they play out.

World vs World vs World PvP: Open world pvp takes place in a special 4 part zone, that involves 3 servers fighting each other for a 2 week period. Basically, you're automatically allied with everyone on your server, and you fight 2 other servers in the open PvP zone. Three subzones are the "home" zones for each server, and a central area between them is the 4th subzone. All areas have objectives, from massive castles to smaller forts, mines, etc. Controlling them contributes to a servers score, and at the end of 2 weeks, winners are declared, rewards passed out, etc. Then you're semi-randomly matched against 2 other servers (they'll use an ELO like ranking system so the better servers play against each other more often).

There's also structured, match style pvp, these are with 5 man teams, from basic deathmatch to more complex 8 way battles involving objectives.

"Active combat" - this is one of the areas I'm less inclined to believe all the hype from the devs. There are some things which set the combat definitely apart - like no healer classes. Oddly a bit like SWG, every player has a dedicated healing skill slot (you have 10 skills at a time, 5 determined by your weapons & class, 3 utility skills, 1 heal, 1 elite). The latter 5 skills you have some selection (ie there are several heals per class you can slot, 20+ utility skills per class, several elites). Instead of being a tank-healer-dps trinity game, the devs are making it a damage-control-support trinity, where supposedly any of the 8 classes can perform any of the roles. Not sure how well that will play out, certain classes, like the Guardian *cough*paladin*cough* and elementalists, when attuned to water, will have the best heal-other capabilities.

And the usual trough of other standard MMO features. Crafting looks decent, but nothing really new. Its a beautiful game, and ArenaNet is very good on the technical side - they can make things look good even on lesser machines. They're good programmers too, their build system in GW1 was superfast, during betas new builds would become available hourly - and they're patching is great. Basically log out, the client updates itself, log back in usually less than a minute later. And one of the first games to have on-the-fly updating of data/content.

[Joiry_]

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2850B50D9F15139F

See how sneaky smuggler like I am, by using a relatively vague subject line to draw you into this post, without ever technically lying about anything ;)

Anyway, these just show off how the combat skills work in GW2, they are linked to the weapon you use. So a warrior has a certain set of 5 skills with a rifle, whereas an engineer has a different set of 5.

[Joiry_]

Third time's the charm, right? Don't worry, I won't spam much. Just, if you happen to have had your fill of SWTOR, or burned out on Diablo 3 (or burned by http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I43GUnZN_s4 ), GW2 release has been set 2 months from now.

http://www.arena.net/blog/announcing-the-guild-wars-2-launch-date

Honestly tho, the release trailer is kinda sucky. Their earlier official trailers were much better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-CB0hheQRg

[Ehne]

Got to the slightly burned out on Diablo III part, but being down here in Texas without a wife to tell me "Do not do it" I picked up an old obsession from 10 years ago... Started playing Magic the Gathering again... Not good for the bank account...

[Joiry_]

Magic is like the original micro-transaction game...

Anyway, GW2 launches Aug 28 (Aug 25th for prepurchase headstart).

Here's a gallery of dungeon armors:

http://dulfy.net/2012/07/21/gw2-armor-previews/

How you get these might seem familiar - basically after doing the dungeon in "story mode" - ie your personal storyline - the dungeon is open to you for general exploration. There are several "wings" to each dungeon, and completing these earns tokens, and you can use the tokens to buy the corresponding armor and weapon pieces for these dungeons (there is apparently also a small chance the pieces drop from mobs in the dungeon themselves).

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your tastes), a lot of Anet artists like spikes and skulls and stuff, so the higher level armors are all very much in that vein. There's no appearance tab system, but you can use transmutation stones to merge one armor's appearance with another's stats. Unfortunately that's part of the business model, as t-stones are cash shop items, tho supposedly you can get some in game. Players can also sell the cash-shop currently, "gems" to players, so in theory you could farm the gold to buy the gems to buy stuff in the cash shop...

Listen (er, read) that, I'm awesome at selling a game!

[Joiry_]

Well, one more post on this, not that it seems many people are checking the forums anymore.

official vid on the World vs World vs World PvP combat:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnOhMeYxhRM

I don't really like how the devs insert themselves into these vids. They're kinda douches, unfortunately its been a trend of late. Anyway, still some decent footage of the battles to be found. I believe the current limit is something like 100v100v100 per map, but they may optimize it to go higher.

[Ehne]

I check it every few days. Just don't have the time for another mmo. and since I broke my mouse hand I have been put on the gaming DL for a bit...