Guild Wars 2
<div class="IPBDescription">manifisto</div><a href="http://www.arena.net/blog/guild-wars-2-design-manifesto" target="_blank">http://www.arena.net/blog/guild-wars-2-design-manifesto</a>
I think my favorite part is the one where I don't have to use a partying interface to work together with people. Damn hassle just to help people.
I think my favorite part is the one where I don't have to use a partying interface to work together with people. Damn hassle just to help people.
Comments
<center><object width="450" height="356"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/-gEJ-BH2-2g"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/-gEJ-BH2-2g" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="450" height="356"></embed></object></center>
This is going to be so cool.
<a href="http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/combat/" target="_blank">http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/combat/</a>
I translate the promo as: guild wars 1 + hyperbole = 2, but I am not exactly known for my cheerful speakings xD
Thanks for saving me the time to put those words together.
What they say is not impossible, but highly unlikely. You need hundreds if not thousands of people to write events, create models and textures, write the scripts etc. if you want to make this last for more than, lets say 50 hours.
I love that they try to remove the grind, but what they propose is a singleplayer game with a persistent world.
On second thought I wouldn't even mind that so much.
"So if you’re playing an Elementalist, try casting a fire wall, and then see what happens when your friends shoot projectiles through it."
That sounds pretty sweet. I'd love if they actually made that work with tons of skills.
You seem to be near water, use that water as a weapon. You see some big boulders, start hurling them at foes or perhaps make the spikes come from the ground... Not sure if they are area specific though, I think no so much (would be kinda cool for strategy maybe)
I think I also saw something about making a tree or a rock come to life and maybe fight for you (well it looked like that). Or maybe it's just a mission where you have to cure the corrupted tree/rock people. Heck I dunno...
As DiscoZombie, I'm also pretty damn skeptical about this game and their bold statements. But hell, why so serious... Wouldn't it be a lot cooler when they can actually pull of a content rich dynamic persistent environment that actually makes <b>you</b> feel like a hero instead of player124689 doing the same thing as all other numbers, I mean players <img src="http://members.home.nl/m.borgman/ns-forum/smileys/dancing-banana.gif" border="0" class="linked-image" />
Maybe Gabe called them saying: "Hey, you guys want to use our AI director? I take my payments in cookies!"
That. Arenanet could've kept releasing expansion packs, milking the franchise for all it was worth, then left it sour and curdled by the roadside. Instead, they stopped all major development on GW 1 and started over, ostensibly because they had "developed themselves into a corner" with GW 1. They may flop. It's a nasty business, littered with a myriad pitfalls. But they've successfully made it through the obstacle course once, and it'll be interesting to see what happens on their next time through.
A REALLY great move, for more reasons than just the one you stated (though that's arguably the best one). Another one is that it cuts down on the ridiculous UI clutter that tends to plague MMOs.
I think GW made a big mistake with primary/secondary classes though. The idea was to increase versatility even more, and it led to some ridiculously innovative (and more often just plain ridiculous) builds, but the concept was very difficult to wrap your head around, leading many people to take refuge in the simplicity of a single class, which was limited in potential. I don't remember if they've said whether they're doing that in the sequel.
Don't take the whole "no grind" thing too literal. Or take it completely literal. Remember that the word grind basically means "do boring stuff to level up." A lot of what we call "grind" in MMOs is simply called "playing the game" in other games. The problem being that your daily run-of-the-mill combat in MMOs is usually repetitive and devoid of challenge. "Removing the grind" could simply mean that, removing the boredom from the process. You will most definitely still have to kill thousands of mobs, but hopefully it'll actually be fun.
Don't take the bit about "you save town X, town X stays saved" thing too literal either. I'm sure Arenanet knows full well it can't be that simple. You know how WoW occasionally gets a new boss that's beaten by some top guild within the day? The only reason that isn't an utter catastrophe is because everyone else gets to try and beat the boss too. GW2 will have to do the same. Nobody wants to buy the game three months after release and find that the world is saved and there's nothing to do.
Haven't they used instancing for those things in GW1 already? If they don't I'm pretty sure they will now.
For example, you run around in a zone, kill some stuff, while suddenly a massive army of centaurs attacks, you and everybody else in the zones joins up to defend the town and you get flagged for "saving the village" simply because you took part in the fight. If you're in the zone but didn't take part in the fight, you may try again later or the village is gone in you instance.
I'm not exactly sure how they're going to do this but this is what I imagine they might do.
I'd be pretty surprised if they completely stuff it up, they released enough GW1 stuff and have enough info on it to know what made it popular, as well as what people wanted in the new one.
GW1s biggest strength apart from the really good combat system was that it was very much your game, you as the player were in control of it, you didn't have to deal with random people killing you unless you wanted to enter PVP, you didn't have to run around finding places other people hadn't cleared to kill stuff, and you felt more or less like the only players in the world sometimes, but with all the benefits of a fully online economy and whatnot.
It was built around the party, not the server, each party plays through the game by themselves, and you can change your party if you want, but it's very much about the small group of players.
I hate multiplayer games as a rule but I loved guild wars because it's almost singleplayer. If you want to you can spend all your time in rarely visited outposts and just run around and take in the scenery, I did that a lot and it was grand fun, occasionally teaming up with the kurzicks to defend fort aspenwood or something or doing a bit of GvG.
It's exactly the kind of MMO I'd want to play, I'm sure that's more or less what we'll be getting this time with some improvements.
Interesting. I'd be happy to know more about that system. Seems hard to pull of tho.
If I want to play with other players then I can, I get a party in town and go do whatever it is I want to do, otherwise I'm free to be on my own.
I don't really want to have to deal with other players killing all the monsters and taking up space.
I liked the instancing of guild wars, I hope they don't remove it entirely.
They actually specifically mention such things in the third section of the manifesto. They want to do away with the "oh no another player is here to ruin my day" feeling and make it so that interaction is always beneficial. Not the least of which is <i>"When someone kills a monster, not just that player’s party but everyone who was seriously involved in the fight gets 100% of the XP and loot for the kill."</i>
As I mentioned, this seriously reminds me of the L4D AI director. Or at least I hope something similar to that effect...
Which is a sensible extension of the way guild wars handled loot, but it doesn't address the problem of me going to an area and finding two dozen other people roaming around killing everything in it.
Considering the number of people in some of the outposts in guild wars, I'd expect maybe upwards of a hundred people in some of the areas at any given time.
So either you have to spawn huge numbers of monsters which messes with the balance massively, or you simply make bigger instances, with the max number of players in any given instance being about twenty, and not linked to parties or whatnot.
So I would hope they continue with the instancing mechanic, change it sure but don't remove it because it's a very good mechanic with a lot of benefits.
Yeah I find it hard to imagine that will work properly without monsters phasing in and out of existence randomly, but I suppose we'll see.
I guess they wouldn't remove monsters once spawned. This sounds a little like the good old "Diablo's minions grow stronger / weaken", I don't see anything wrong with that.
Don't necessarily worry about his "doubts." :P