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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?
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.
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.
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.
I'm sorry, but WHAT?
The amount of times I've fought a dragon, or Ragnaros, in WoW and been hitting some piece of space between a circle drawn on the gound and the polygons of the creature I'm fighting are too numerous to count. How often have you heard "The boss has a huge hitbox" in WoW?
Have a look at This Youtube video I made and you can see the 2 most annoying things I ever faced in the game. 1) My character being INSIDE the boss and 2) My character hitting the boss from a distance greater than the length of my weapons.
WoW doesn't have shadowboxing? Don't make me laugh.
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.
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.
Does GW2 have 100% spoken dialogs?
No. The usual NPC chatter is mostly text-only, but all the story-mode chatter on the other hand is fully voiced. Ergo, you probably wouldn't be entirely satisfied, if you really are as picky about it as you claim. I hope this answers your question to your satisfaction.
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.
GW2's story telling is far better, with choices during your story quest that actually change the quest in a meaningful way (so 2 people of the same class/race who made the same choices during character creation, can still end up with a different main quest).
As for the dialogue? GW2 has about the same percentage of REAL spoken dialog as SWTOR did. SWTOR just "cheated", and reused a ton of lines, and used alien dialog for the rest. That ended up being pretty annoying after the 15th time in a row you hear "The jedi way is to serve!" and "Dying wasn't in my agenda for today!" (the further in the game you got, the worse it got). In GW2 that stuff is text based. Still, the majority of the story driven content is spoken dialog, in about the same ratio.
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.
Yep, it's much better in the real world, where you can only swing a sword or shoot a gun if it will hit a target.
The fact that your char will still do the attack (but if nothing is in range do no damage) even with out of range target or no targets.... That's actually lovely. And helps making the game harder, in fact. When you got 15 second cooldown on your only slow spell, and miss with it because you were too far away just then.. And mobs can kill you in 5-10 seconds...
Also, it lets you do and react to things without targeting first. That can buy you some valuable time :) Like a warrior ability that takes 0.5 seconds to "get going", but rape everything in front of you.. When the mob comes running, start it just before he's in range. Then he'll arrive just in time to feel the pain :D
And to the weapons.. Most weapons have a specific goal. For warrior..
2handers:
Greatsword = Mobility, multiple targets
Hammer = Control, single target
Rifle = Single target ranged
Longbow = AOE ranged
1handers:
Sword = Bleed, counter/interrupt
Mace = Stun, counter/interrupt
Shield = Block, stun
Warhorn = Buffs/Debuffs
Axe = AOE, vulnerability
Which one of these is the One True Weapon? Depends a lot on what you're going to do, and your personal play style, if you ask me.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."