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Guild Wars 2 Release Date Announced
New submitter Woldry writes "After five years in development, Guild Wars 2 has been given a launch date: August 28, 2012. ArenaNet's aim is to provide 'a living, breathing online world that challenges convention, that's designed for fun instead of grind.' There's a beta weekend planned for July 20-22 for those who have pre-purchased the game (and for those who have gotten legitimate beta keys in advance)."
Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a good write-up of some hands-on time during one of the earlier beta weekends, saying, 'Time after time, Guild Wars 2 impressed me with just how carefully no, how smartly everything has been thought out. Those things that annoy us in other games are simply banished here.'
Unlike WoW, when this game sucks my boyfriend in, I'll actually be there playing with him. :D
I have the hiccups.
"Those things that annoy us in other games are simply banished here."
There are no other people?
What do you want to bet the long awaited release date for WoW: Mists Of Pandaria is announced in the next week? Wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being pretty close to the GW2 date.
I started seeing excitement about this late 2011, as Guild Wars 2 started to do its road show, demoing it at various conferences. There was a lot of hype behind GW2, but when they did their first Beta Weekend Event, it really blew me away.
ArenaNet was smart and didn't show the game off to people (in beta form) until they felt it was really ready to show to the public. Their beta wasn't a place to test it while it was still alpha quality. Their beta events were there for people to experience the game, stress the servers, and test some of the more detailed mechanics that needed work.
Even in the beta events, it's a well polished game with very few rough edges. All the classes feel unique, and have a lot of different play styles available to them (depending on how you equip/spec your character). It's really hard to describe a large MMO in just a few words (as there is so much content), but it is really worth giving it a try if you like MMOs.
The biggest selling point that I've been using with friends is how they split up PvP. In the PvE (player vs environment/enemies), there is no fighting other players (pvp, player vs player). When I run around the PvE world, it is really one of the first games where I will help out random people. They did a great job to guide you into helping others. It really helps build a feeling of community within the PvE adventure.
For PvP, it's all in an instanced area. So you never fight against people in the PvE world. They have 2 PvP modes. One is a battleground style PvP (much like they have in World of Warcraft with battlegrounds). These are quite fun. But then they have a persistant PvP zone (a massive zone at that), where 3 servers fight against each other for control of the areas. For people that played DAoC (dark age of Camelot), it feels much like the RvR in that.
The story and lore of the universe is quite fun (I started reading up on GW1 lore, it's a pretty decent fantasy story). But it doesn't get too much in the way for people that don't want to take part in it.
Its not what it is, its something else.
Perhaps my biggest annoyance with the game so far is combat. In so much as your attacks will execute, animations and all, even when your not in range of your target. This leads to it looking like shadow boxing.
Shadow boxing is that old nemesis of immersion, it is when your and your opponents moves do not synch up. When neither seems to respond to the other. WOW for all its faults does not suffer this.
Another combat issue is their world and event bosses then to be zerg fests. Its fun once or twice but after awhile your buried under rendered effects without any real organization. I am sure groups will eventually organize for these but with the come one come all its not bound to be anything but the zerg fest.
The abilities system where each weapon provides different abilities will lose its luster once the players settle on whats best and there is always a whats best is such flexible games.
So a very pretty world with a great new take on cut scenes art and distance drawing. The voice acted dialog is very stiff and cheesy for the most part, again the actors don't seem to be talking to each other - they instead are talking to a fixed point in the distance. Gee, just like combat.
I haven't found an open world with this ease of traveling that looked fun to just explore since Asheron's Call.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
You should try it before judging.
From a game design stand-point, a mana system is fundamentally a way to prevent players from activating too many skills too quickly...which is the same thing that cooldown timers do. However, cooldown timers don't force players to channel funds into a gold sink like mana potions, or waste inventory slots to carry them. Having played many games with mana pools, I find the cooldown system in GW2 to be vastly superior.
Obviously, those players that really enjoy buying, carrying and quaffing mana potions may disagree.
I stopped reading after he mentioned that there was no concept of a Mana pool for spells, just cooldown timers. I was actually looking forward to this game, but not any more.
Why? I played casters in most MMO's since the original Everquest, and the mana pool was simply another form of cooldown timer. You needed to manage your casting rate, your regen rate, your meditation (when it was a factor), etc. against the size of your mana pool. The only thing that a mana pool actually allows that this wouldn't is the quick burn and I'd be surprised if they didn't put some kind of special ability or skill that would allow that, too.
If you want read good primer on Guild Wars 2, I would recommend checking this page: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1058358-Guild-Wars-2-Mass-info-for-the-uninitiated-READ-ME!
A 4-year-old gaming rig should be able to handle it, but maybe not on the highest graphical settings. It plays pretty well on my 5-year-old laptop with the graphics set on low to medium.
If you activate skills the moment they cooldown, you will fail hard in this game. If anything, the cooldown system in GW2 actually requires more resource management to know when to best activate skills. Of all the RPGs I've played, I think GW2's skill system might be one of the easier ones to begin learning, but one of the hardest to master. In other words, it manages to appeal to both casual and hardcore gamers, which is no small feat.
Also, each class plays distinctly differently. Abilities and play styles are very different between them. The fact each one has a heal skill doesn't alter this. Most heal skills have long cool downs, so you need to really stay alert and use them when you need them the most.
As for the original GW's skill system, GW2's version is significantly different. You can still respec your character in GW2, but there are some costs to do certain kinds of changes.
It also renders fireball-spam a less viable strategy, forcing players to really think strategically about their spell choices and combinations.
Endgame starts at level 1. You are scaled down to whatever content level you are doing so it is always challenging. Unlike other mmo's where people rushing to end level to start playing, gw2 level 1-80 content is not designed as a filler.
They do still need to fine-tune that code though as I sometimes found I was fighting mobs several levels higher than my effective level even though my real level was much higher than the mobs.
They really don't. Most enemies are at or higher than your effective level and it's supposed to be like that. This becomes an issue when you are soloing and can't kill them fast enough before respawning becomes an issue. But if you want to solo, you really need to pick a damage class instead of a support class. That said, what they need to do is prevent enemies from 'crossing' their intended zone.
Downscaled to level 5, I faced a level 7 veteran which is possible, with some difficulty. Retreating to get more ground and give time to recharge skills, I crossed a region boundary, downscaling me to level 3, and the veteran one-shotted me when it caught up. To add insult to injury, the enemy was a pig.
Does GW2 have 100% spoken dialogs?
Ever since I played SWTOR, I no longer care for a story that's presented in text form (like most current MMOs and computer RPGs from the 80s/90s. Between countless hours of Mass Effect 3 (when my wifi didn't wanna play nice) and SWTOR, no matter how good the story is, I just don't care if it isn't 100% spoken dialog (hello, Dragon Age).
If I want to read a great story, I'll grab a book. I own over 20 dead-tree books that I man to start reading eventually (not to mention over 100 e-books), and my eyes can definitely use some time away from the PC screen after a full workday.
So, unless an MMO wants to become the next Korean fetching grindfest (hello, Tera Online) my next MMO will need to have spoken dialog to draw me in. Sorry, SWTOR may have been a lame WoW clone after all is said and done, but it pushed the envelope in MMO storytelling, a new bechmark by which all future MMOs will be measured.
You also have the serious problem of, say, one ele causing constant AoE knockdown (aka knocklock) and another doing constant AoE damage. Without a timer, the first ele can dedicate their mana to just doing AoE knockdowns and counting for casting time. The only fix for this would be to increase casting time to be greater than knockdown time, and then you get 2 or 3 people working together over Vent or TS (or Skype or whatever) doing the exact same thing and just counting out loud and knowing the order. This is ruinous for PvP and breaks PvE. So the enemy player takes and anti-knockdown skill? Well gee, Meteor took 1 skill on the bar, so the rest of the bar can be dedicated to spiking that one player down. And I'm talking about a single tactic - there are hundreds more.
Guild Wars 1 realized that and added a cooldown timer in addition to mana; Guild Wars 2 did away with the mana as superfluous.
Elementalists do not have a weapon swap, due to their attunement mechanic. 4 attunements with 5 skills apiece = 20 skills, compared to standard classes who just have a weapon swap with 5 skills apiece for 10 skills. If eles also had a weapon swap, they'd have 40 weapon skills which would be obviously overpowered.
The difference in GW2 is that there are very few spells that just do pure damage. Most have secondary and sometimes very powerful effects attached to them, which means you will want to use them wisely and not just "as soon as your cooldown timer clears".
For example, one spell may have a blind effect which causes your enemy's next attack to miss. Another may have a knockdown effect. Another might launch you forward while leaving a trail of fire in your wake. Hopefully it's obvious how this forces smart use of skills and not just whack-a-mole whatever's off cooldown.
As a side note, I find mana to be a very bad resource system (large pool, slow/cumbersome to regenerate) and it seems to have stuck around only because it's "traditional". It is essentially unlimited in the short-term, and has a hard limit in the long-term, which means that in the heat of battle, you might as well not have a resource unless you are engaged in very long fights. And if you do run out of mana, it's a very unfun mechanic since there's basically nothing you can do except sit there and reflect on your character's poor life decisions that led to this point.
Energy (small pool, fast-regenerating resource) seems like a much more interesting resource for forcing resource management, as it forces smart, controlled skill usage and heavily prohibits button mashing. However, a purely cooldown based system like GW2 basically creates the same thing.
Almost true. There is a difference between pre-order (Amazon) and pre-purchase (buy.guildwars2.com). If you pre-purchase the game up front (money is paid), you can play in the next Beta Weekend Event. If you pre-order the game from a retailer like Amazon (who doesn't charge you until the game ships), then you will not have access to the BWE.