MMO madness: Guild Wars 2 to release on August 28

Yes! Finally, something worth playing.

Looking good.

I guess they’re trying to get in before the rush hour. I hope they finish it!

Original Guild Wars is the only MMO that hasn’t annoyed me. I haven’t enjoyed a single MMO game and found all of them to be bad or boring but GW is something else. GW2 could be even better.

Really looking forward to this one.

It means the game is not yet done and they time clean things Up.

Might check this out when some months have passed since launch since there is no sub fee. It looks a bit interesting.

So all those posters and teasers were right? So just 2 beta weekends played and I still need to get to grips with the mechanics and that fucking shit Auction House.

guild wars and mass effect are favorite games of all time.

Yes! \o/

Sadly I only got to play the first beta weekend and I totally forgot about the other chances such as the recent stress test, so I have no idea if they improved it from the first beta test. It’s my opinion of course that is needs improving.

Quite a few people seem to really like it so hopefully it won’t turn out a waste of money.

It’s the only MMORPG that’s continued to hold my interest.

What makes it nice is that it really does feel like a break from the regular tripe in every regard.

I’ll give you a run down.

Setting

Most fantasy MMORPGs:

I’m either a human in an incredibly twee and po-faced land of castles and magicks, or if I’m a beast race then I’m going to be some idiotic tribal that’s afraid of technology. It’s going to be Tolkien 101 and nothing more, no growth or potential.

Guild Wars 2:

I’m playing a bloody post-indutrial Roman catbeast, one who’s intellectual, professional, and clever. Ultimately a beast of order and one of the most intelligent species of that world.

Combat

Most fantasy MMORPGs:

I’m going to be standing in one spot pressing 1-2-4-3-4-1-3-4-1-3 and hoping that other people heal me. I don’t move at all because all incoming missiles are just homing missiles anyway and everything is decided by the game’s code.

This can be anything from flashy combo-smashing to WoW’s just sitting there. But in many games I’ve played I don’t really feel like I have much input on what’s going on. It may make it completely obvious or it may woo me with pretty graphics, but I can still see that all projectiles are homing missiles, and the holy trinity is still obvious. You still need this bloody exact combination of people that just makes it seem so dead and without any amount of dynamism to speak of.

Guild Wars 2:

I have to take a very proactive approach to keeping myself alive. I can’t rely on other people healing me and I have to do that myself. Heals are either only for myself or ground targeted/area of effect things so I have to watch where I am.

Most attacks hit an area of effect or are missiles, if I move quickly and use the dodge feature a lot, I can avoid most damage. I have many contextual abilities that have a lot to do with what’s going on, such as using a flashbang if a group are closing in on me so I can blind them and back away to give myself some clearance.

There’s no tanking, so you can’t expect someone to pull stuff off you, you have to use control abilities to ensure that you have some room to back away and lick your wounds before running back in again.

And then you have the cross-profession combos, where if I create a firewall with my flamethrower, any projectiles that go through that firewall will be set on fire. Such as a ranger’s arrows and so on.

Gameplay

This is the big one.

Most fantasy MMORPGs:

I head to people with !s above their heads, then I head out into the world and just grind shit until I’ve filled my shopping list. So that’s 10 pigs hooves, one lever pulled, 13 goats killed, and… back to the people with ?s over their heads I go. Repeat until sick of it and game is uninstalled.

And there’s just nothing more to it than that, you don’t really feel involved because they do nothing to disguise the fact that you’re just picking up a shopping list, going out to kill shit and gather shit, and then coming back.

Guild Wars 2:

What makes GW2 stand out immediately is that it’s a pseudo-sandbox. Instead of going to a ! person, being told to kill some critters who’re terrorising the local populace, then going to kill these well behaved critters who’re just standing around doing nothing, and returning… you actually see things happening.

You’re out in the open world and you’ll actually see people being attacked, you’ll jump in to save them, because that’s what heroes do, and you’ll find out that it’s part of some content and you actually get rewarded for helping out.

A person may run up to you screaming about a shaman who’s befouling a nearby lake with tar golems, and you’ll actually go there and see the shaman retreating, and you’ll see the tar golems attacking and even knocking people out cold (NPCs too). You’ll see the bodies of fishermen around and you’ll see that the lake is turning black. So you’ll fight these tar shamans, but the effects will remain.

Later, there may be an effort to restore the ecology of the lake by cleaning up the tar and setting down traps to capture creatures who’ve become far too abundant since the tar has killed off some of their more usual predators.

You may have a bustling port town that, if it hadn’t been saved, would now be empty and overrun with zombies because evil tentacles from the deep had dragged them down into the deeps and you weren’t able to save them. (So now you have to fight the zombies off so that the town can actually be used by allied forces again.)

Or someone might run up to you and say that the ghosts of a certain area have become a problem, but they have some ghostbusting equipment that they want you to test, and then you’re a freaking GHOSTBUSTER CAT, running around and zapping ghosts, and taking them back to a containment unit. And once you’ve done that, the numbers of ghosts in the area notably drop for a good while.

It all has an effect. You can see stuff happening and respond to it, and by responding to it you do see changes in the world, either little ones on renown events, or much bigger ones on dynamic events. But you do change the world and it’s really impressive stuff. It feels so different than just going through the motions, because you’re out in the world and you’re actually saving people.

And you know that if you hadn’t been there to save them, this little hamlet of NPCs might be dead by now and replaced with hostile whatevers. It feels alive.

The problem with past MMORPGs is that they’ve exposed their themepark nature a little too much and it just feels like a game, it feels like a very basic game. It’s almost like you can see the underlying mechanics, and you feel like you’re just playing with the mechanics and the UI and you have no connection with the world. GW2 does the opposite, it draws you into the world and makes the world important.

You’re not just going through the motions, you’re doing things in a world that reacts to you doing things.

Another example of this is the personal storyline, a lot of which takes place in instanced locations. For example, let’s say that you’re a norn and on a hunt you kill a great beast, right? Well, you now have the hide of that great beast permanently in your home location (your city quarter). You can look at these things and see them as markers of past achievements.

And choices will be reflected in there as well. Even stuff from the open world. For doing a certain dynamic event, you may have a grateful person of that town you saved move into your city quarter, and they’ll sell you unique goods that you can’t get anywhere else.

And when you compare that with going to ! people, going down your shopping list of killing shit, then returning to ? people… it’s amazing. It’s a paradigm shift. It changes how people think about MMORPGs.

@GrimRita

They’re still holding a Beta weekend in July (starting 20th I think), so you’ll have time then providing you’re not busy

Disregard my previous comment. #10 made it clear there is no point playing the game.

@12

Hahah, Awesome!

@12

So, you wanted a purely traditional MMORPG where you have a tank, a healer, a DPS, and where the content is an unending shopping list? With your only measure of worth being a gear treadmill gained over time?

See, yeeeah… Guild Wars 2 is none of that. We must have very different tastes. But I’m glad that I’m warding MMORPG traditionalists away from the game to be honest, because it means less bitching on the forums.

Guild Wars 2 is something completely new. What it’s not is a WoW reboot or some incredibly obnoxious ‘EPICZ GRIMDARKNESS TEEN-HORMONE RAGING MAN-FANTASY YO!’ thing either.

I really like what it is. It’s refreshing.

TL;DR: Maybe you’d prefer something more traditional, or some boring game about zombies.

Well, I personally see Guild Wars 2 about as innovative as SWTOR. Sure they do try some nice things, add their twists to already present Systems, what is cool and everything. Knowing me, I will most likely get the game and try it for some time.

But at the end of a long evening I will be standing there pressing 1-2-3-4, occasionally another button, waiting for the animation of the enemy to trigger so I can roll out of the way, only for big attacks though, else I won’t have stamina when that one hit death comes.

I guess we all will know in October, how well the game did/does.

@11 yeah I saw that after I posted.

@15 – Like Bioware Arena are promising a huge shift in game mechanics and then actually turn out the same generic crap that came before it. In SWTOR it was ‘heroic’ combat, GW2 its the grind.

Yes some of the locate events are ok but the actually questing is so tedious. Run into vineyard, grab apples, kill spiders, return(live quest this!) is this the best they can come up with? Collect fucking apples?!!

Sure in other areas its very strong(pvp gear grind all but removed) and server/world pvp where SWTOR just has the same 4 limited bore zones. One more attempt in July and if that auction house hasnt been changed, I am out.

TheWulf says:

“I’m playing a bloody post-indutrial Roman catbeast, one who’s intellectual, professional, and clever. Ultimately a beast of order and one of the most intelligent species of that world.”

GW2 says:

“The charr race was forged in the merciless crucible of war. It is all they know. War defines them, and their quest for dominion drives them ever onward. The weakling and the fool have no place among the charr. Victory is all that matters, and it must be achieved by any means and at any cost.”

Viralshag says:

That sounds like some real ‘EPICZ GRIMDARKNESS TEEN-HORMONE RAGING MAN-FANTASY YO!’

I’m still waiting for the ‘Non-grinding’ gameplay and ‘Innovative’ personal story. At the moment, all I’m seeing is a more scripted MMO, with more grinding than current MMO’s and a very Generic personal story.

To me, this game isn’t living up to what they have promised…

@18 typical out of touch designers really. They promise to change the world and it ends up being the same as everything before it.

As of now, I prefer SWTOR combat mechanics(pvp) as playing my Assassin was alot of fun but as an MMO goes, its just so limited, especially with pvp/end game and I really wish they would move away from gear grind and focus more on skill.

GW2 is the opposite – ok pvp but without the gear grind, which is a huge bonus – but the cut scene story lines arent a patch on SWTOR and I just dont like how combat works right now. Maybe its time, maybe its the class I selected(thief) as I like the Rogue esq hit and run play.

Only time will tell I guess. I was going to check out SWTORs update but what a surprise – 3rd down time in 3 days since yet another fucked up update. Cant these muppets get anything right?

@Grim, I think you and I have similar issues with GW2. I can’t get into the combat, I just found it extremely dull and repetitive – more so than your normal action bar MMO. And with regards to story moments, regardless of what issues TOR does/did have, they did set the bar higher for story in MMOs and GW2 attempt, in a word, is crappy.

I actually don’t have a problem with gear grind – even in TOR. They now offer a basic PvP set you can buy with creds. And tbh even before I never felt like I was getting owned as an un-geared player – and I wouldn’t say I’m that great at PvP. Getting owned as a team by pre-made groups though… something else entirely.

I think you must have some really bad luck with TOR connection, one issue I’ve never had (that I can remember) is not being able to get on or finding the servers down randomly. Maybe it’s just the time I choose to play – which is standard evening 7/8pm onwards – but I always seem to get in to the game, or download patches with no problem.

At the moment I’m loving TOR and I really can’t get enough of it. The only big downers so far from the new patch are related to the group finder and even then, it’s not the actual functionality of it.

It has the problem of giving DPS a long queue time while healers and tanks almost instantly – that’s mostly due to the ratio of DPS vs Heal/tank and no dual specs limits you further. Not a huge problem with the server merge though, as it’s almost like launch with plenty of groups offered in chat.

The other problem is the whole “skip convos”, “go go go” and lack of understanding for people who haven’t run the instances before.

@18, 19 From where I’m sitting, this sort of thing happens with pretty much every new MMO. People go completely apeshit whenever the developers mention something even slightly different.

The only expectation I’ve had for GW2 is a “slightly better copy”. People really aren’t doing themselves any favors by getting so excited about every new MMO promising to be everything to everybody.

If that isn’t obvious by itself, then it stands to reason that it probably won’t be. It was the same with SWTOR.