I'm going to preface this with a simple fact, I am a guild wars fan boy. I have played the game since launch in 2005, had two accounts, played every possession, own every peice of microtransaction and every single campaign. I love the art style, I love the gameplay, I love the story, the lore, everything in Guild wars entices me into it, I am a lover of MMORPGs and for years Guild Wars has been my go to.
So of course WAAAAAY back in 2007(?) when the initial rumblings of Guild Wars 2 began I lept on bored the bandwagon and have not gotten off since. And finally after years of waiting, May 27th of this year.. all of us fanboys and girls were driven into sensory overload with the launch of Arena nets new blog (arena.net/blog) and a stunning Design Manifesto written by head of Arena Net Mike O' Brian. From that point on we'd be given a steady stream of tantilizing tidbits to keep all our mouths watering. Finally, at the end of last month the moment we all had been waiting for arrived.. the first ever gameplay footage of Guild Wars 2.
Unfortunatly it wasn't what alot of people expected and I was there along with them sitting on the Guild Wars 2 Guru forum waiting for any information. Up pops a shaky cam off screen video showing us the first look at this God of Games we'd all been waiting for. And oh my god, the disappointment filmed the forums like the mist rolling over the graveyard at night. Unresponsive AI, a new UI that completally didn't seem GW at all and massive numbers flying all over the screen.. and to top it off, an honest to goodness quest, something we'd been told didn't exist in Guild Wars 2. Our jaws collectively hit the ground.. could this be the end of the excitement.. what was happening.. our world shattered.. and then.. a beckon of light.
It wasn't the demo, it was simply a test run for the showcasing they were going to do running off a developer copy of the game. Phew, collective sigh of relief. And then we started getting the real deal, tons and tons of videos rolling out, off-screen, shaky, but somehow capturing the raw beauty of the game, hundreds upon hundreds of glowing reviews spewed out of Cologne, Germany for the next three days and Guild Wars 2's first official demo was a success.
Move forward a couple of weeks and we arrive at PAX 2010, in Seattle, America. More videos, more shaky cam, a little more english than Germany but still pretty much the same info. But thanks to a few amazing sites and writers (Here's looking at you Rubi from http://www.massively.com/) we were getting a slew of new information with people having more of a chance to rage through the low level human area and charr mid level area.
Some useful links and round ups:
www.arena.net/blog
Rubi's awesome write up.
Guild Wars 2 Guru - PAX thread.
Guild Wars 2 Guru - Gamescom thread.
That's all folks! I'll be writing up my personal opinion on the videos and information flowing out of these demos and will have that up to you in.. a few days. :]
Five years, almost to the day, since the release of the 6.5-million-copies-popular Guild Wars was released, ArenaNet launched a blog to follow the development of Guild Wars 2. The first post, a design manifesto which outlined their vision for the game, seemed to promise to produce something that the MMO world hasn’t really seen before.
ReplyDeleteFive months after that, the gaming community was able to see for ourselves that ArenaNet was fully prepared to deliver on that promise. At this weekend’s Penny Arcade Expo, where I was lucky enough to get my grubby little hands on the game, ArenaNet produced a spectacular beta which seemed to be right in line with everything they were promising.
Over-eager as I was to experience the heart of the game, I skipped over the suggestion to enjoy my first demo experience as a level one human, and instead jumped right into being a mid-level charr elementalist.
The first thing that struck me, before I was even loaded into the map itself, was the art of the game. Daniel Dociu wasn’t wrong when he said that Guild Wars 2 would have a “handcrafted, painterly, or illustrated quality” – everything, down to the skill icons and the character creation screen, was exceedingly beautiful.
Despite being at the disadvantage of never having played with the skill-sets available to me before, it was really natural to jump into the game; I was out in a pitched battle, slinging water-based healing spells and fire-based damage in no time. ArenaNet has put out enough information about the mechanics of the four revealed professions that it was very comfortable to jump into high level and feel reasonably certain that you were ‘doing it right.’
For the sake of demo purposes, the staff had put one of the mid-level world bosses, a crystal dragon known as The Shatterer, on an incredibly short spawn timer, which meant that pretty much every charr demo overlapped with fighting him, which (while I’m sureit was mind-numbingly repetitive for the staff) was a nice touch for gamers. It also helped showcase a lot of the proof for some of their claims about the game. It was fun – and natural – to fight alongside others without forming a group. The skill animations are such that it isn’t hard to figure out what needs doing, and who’s doing what, even if you’ve just stepped into the game. We really don’t need a dedicated healer class (!). Combat felt very visceral – and it was very rewarding when I remembered that dodging existed, and suddenly started side-stepping a lot of damage. Dynamic events can work – and work well.
The dynamic event system is one of the few truly new and ground-breaking systems being used in Guild Wars 2, but it’s far from all that they have going for them.
ReplyDeleteThere's the personal storyline that differs from race to race, profession to profession, and literally even character to character.
There's the beautiful graphics.
There's the new style of combat. It's enticing.
There's the playability and appeal to all sorts of gamers - casuals who just want to be able to log in and do some cool stuff (basically impossible in grind-fest games) without worrying about huge time commitment; hard-core gamers who want to rig the dungeons to be as hard as possible; explorers who just want the experience of doing a new thing, uncovering a new horizon; and many places in-between.
There's the idea of rewarding gamers, rather than being completely impartial to them. As someone who has run the same dungeons for what feels like trillions of times (realistically less than a hundred but more than fifty), the things that dungeon designers are talking about in terms of changing reward styles is really promising.
In all honesty, I kind of expected to not really have fun with the demo. I've seen about 20 demo videos - from poorly-recorded ones by fans to really well-done ones with proper audio feeds, etc. I've seen the Shatterer get defeated time and again; I've heard all the cinematics for the humans, ad naseum.
So I was expecting it to be neat 'Oh, hey, look. It's the demo,' but I wasn't really expecting it to be freaking awesomely fun.
But that's exactly what it turned out to be. And it's not just because I'm a rabid fangirl - although I am - it's because what the team's been talking about about replayability is totally spot-on.
I've been behind ANet's propaganda for this game from day 1. My faith in them has continued to increase with all the recent news releases. But this has totally cemented it.
I'm not trying to sound crazy here, because I know it's "just" a game.
But the point is that it's a game that's being done well - extraordinarily well.
So, news from the PAX front is this: ANet's doing exactly what we've been trusting them to do.
And I'm a rabid fangirl.