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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.
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!
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.