Guild Wars 2

[Hurlshort]

Started out a couple characters, the Norn *couldn't just call them Nord?) seem pretty cool, might be my race of choice. I am tired so I didn't get deep in the game, but it is fantastic looking for sure.

[zero_or_more]

Started out a couple characters, the Norn *couldn't just call them Nord?) seem pretty cool, might be my race of choice. I am tired so I didn't get deep in the game, but it is fantastic looking for sure.

You mean 'generic' looking for sure?

 

I transfered to Eternal Grove, so I might meet up with Oner after all!

Also finished the personal story - human noble - available in the beta, and it's as unspectacular as expected. But the game is undeniably fun still! (Frame rates still suck though...)

[Oner]

Started out a couple characters, the Norn *couldn't just call them Nord?) seem pretty cool, might be my race of choice. I am tired so I didn't get deep in the game, but it is fantastic looking for sure.

You mean 'generic' looking for sure?

 

I transfered to Eternal Grove, so I might meet up with Oner after all!

Also finished the personal story - human noble - available in the beta, and it's as unspectacular as expected. But the game is undeniably fun still! (Frame rates still suck though...)

Nonono, he meant bland.

 

Anyway, I liked the human noble stuff. The quests were fun, and I'm happy that you actually get a quest chain for your background, not just a single quest.

On another note, the Necro dagger-dagger is kinda weak. Having to go barely-not-melee with a squishy wizard is tough, tho lifesteal Necros should be built more tanky I think.

[Setzer]

Started out a couple characters, the Norn *couldn't just call them Nord?) seem pretty cool, might be my race of choice. I am tired so I didn't get deep in the game, but it is fantastic looking for sure.

You mean 'generic' looking for sure?

 

I transfered to Eternal Grove, so I might meet up with Oner after all!

Also finished the personal story - human noble - available in the beta, and it's as unspectacular as expected. But the game is undeniably fun still! (Frame rates still suck though...)

 

I don't think they're finished optimizing the game yet so the frames will improve. I only noticed a dip in frames when I was in a big city lke Divinity's Reach or doing WvW.

[Setzer]

I also thought I read something in early development(couple of years ago) that there was going to be player housing. I don't see this in the game and haven't been able to find anything on it. Did they do away with this idea?

[Oner]

I also thought I read something in early development(couple of years ago) that there was going to be player housing. I don't see this in the game and haven't been able to find anything on it. Did they do away with this idea?

I think you're confusing home instances with this? Though I remembered something along these lines too a few months back, but now it's "just" different NPCs spawning depending on your choices.

 

*sigh* I want a house. With an armor stand for every collectable set. :<

[Hurlshort]

Alright, I admit I was wrong! The game looks much better live than it came across in the videos. Divinity's Reach is a very well done capital city.

 

I've had no dip in framerate, it runs very well, but I joined a low pop server. So far the two classes I really like are engineer and ranger, I think one of them will end up being my main class when the game launches. There is a lot going on in this game too, it's taking me awhile to learn all the stuff.

 

So what's the deal with the marketplace where you spend gems? They gave us a bunch for free, but is this going to be for microtransactions?

[Oner]

So what's the deal with the marketplace where you spend gems? They gave us a bunch for free, but is this going to be for microtransactions?

Yep. It works similar to EVE Online. Buy gems for real money, then either spend them on small boosts, minis or costumes, or sell them ingame for ingame money.

 

Behold my Necrogangster.

Edited June 9, 2012 by Oner

[Setzer]

I also thought I read something in early development(couple of years ago) that there was going to be player housing. I don't see this in the game and haven't been able to find anything on it. Did they do away with this idea?

I think you're confusing home instances with this? Though I remembered something along these lines too a few months back, but now it's "just" different NPCs spawning depending on your choices.

 

*sigh* I want a house. With an armor stand for every collectable set. :<

 

Nah not confusing it with the 'home instances'. They specifically said players would have their own houses that you could decorate and stuff. Maybe they scrapped the idea or it will be added after release.

[Setzer]

Alright, I admit I was wrong! The game looks much better live than it came across in the videos. Divinity's Reach is a very well done capital city.

 

I've had no dip in framerate, it runs very well, but I joined a low pop server. So far the two classes I really like are engineer and ranger, I think one of them will end up being my main class when the game launches. There is a lot going on in this game too, it's taking me awhile to learn all the stuff.

 

So what's the deal with the marketplace where you spend gems? They gave us a bunch for free, but is this going to be for microtransactions?

 

If you get a chance you should check out WvW. It can be accessed from pretty much anywhere and it bumps you up to lvl 80.

[Setzer]

Couple of screens I took from last night....

 

 

[Oner]

Couple of screens I took from last night....

Looks like a sidescroller.

[Hurlshort]

Ok, had a good weekend playing, got a human engineer up to level 10 and a few other characters up to 4 and 5. There are a fair amount of things done differently than other MMO's, so the learning curve was decent. Here are my pros and cons:

 

+ Loved the exploration, which is rewarded nicely.

+ Easy to get into area quests and events, very similar to Rift.

+ Crafting allows for some nice experimenting and has some logic to it.

+ Individual stories are a nice touch

 

 

- Auction House (Trading Post) seems a bit crazy...you can basically buy everything you need for crafting? It was a bit hard to understand.

- Not sure how I feel about the real money marketplace, seemed to be giving a significant edge to players.

- Combat for melee characters was tough for me to follow, there was a lot going on and I couldn't really see what I was doing in the crowds. I'm sure time and practice would help that, but it made me more comfortable with ranged classes.

 

I haven't even seen the PvP or WvWvW stuff, so I will try to check them out in a future beta.

[Setzer]

- Auction House (Trading Post) seems a bit crazy...you can basically buy everything you need for crafting? It was a bit hard to understand.

- Not sure how I feel about the real money marketplace, seemed to be giving a significant edge to players.

- Combat for melee characters was tough for me to follow, there was a lot going on and I couldn't really see what I was doing in the crowds. I'm sure time and practice would help that, but it made me more comfortable with ranged classes.

 

I haven't even seen the PvP or WvWvW stuff, so I will try to check them out in a future beta.

 

I agree with you on the Auction House or Trading Post, it was bit hard to understand. I believe you can buy your mats for crafting -- its kinda how it worked in the first Guild Wars, they had these material trader NPC's that you could buy mats off of.

 

As far as the real money item shop goes, ArenaNet has to make money somehow since the game won't have a monthly subscription fee. So, I support the item shop and will probably spend $10-15 p/mo. to buy currency for it just to help support Anet. Most of the items I saw were either consumable buffs for XP, etc., pets and cosmetic outfits.

 

World vs. World was probably the highlight of my weekend. I spent hours just doing that on my Ranger and had a blast. I went from level 5 to 14 just doing that. I'm going to have to upgrade my pc before this launches. I had huge dips in FPS in some of the bigger battles and since most my time will be spent in WvW I gotta make sure my PC is good enough to handle it.

Edited June 11, 2012 by Setzer

[Oner]

- Auction House (Trading Post) seems a bit crazy...you can basically buy everything you need for crafting? It was a bit hard to understand.

- Not sure how I feel about the real money marketplace, seemed to be giving a significant edge to players.

- Combat for melee characters was tough for me to follow, there was a lot going on and I couldn't really see what I was doing in the crowds. I'm sure time and practice would help that, but it made me more comfortable with ranged classes.

 

I haven't even seen the PvP or WvWvW stuff, so I will try to check them out in a future beta.

AH: What players sell, you can buy. (Which reminds me, I forgott to file a bug report when I couldn't search for Lemons.) You can buy a crapton of common mats, because they're common and there's a crapton of people selling them.

I don't see where minis give players a significant edge over anything.

Yeah, melee can be chaotic, and it's easy to die.

 

 

Tried WvWvW, was kinda fun at the start, but when I started seeing the "LoL pattern", only applied to a few hundred people, I lost my will quickly. That and constantly having to run from the spawn point was boring, The domination-like mode went similarly. Five enemies everywhere I turned, allies only happened rarely.

[Hurlshort]

As I said, I'm just not sure how I feel about the real money market yet, I don't begrudge ArenaNet trying to make some money.

 

One other negative was the leveling pace, or rather how it lined up with the individual storyline. There were quite a few times where I was supposed to rush off to to meet someone or save somebody, but when I reached the personal instance, I was a level or two behind the recommended. So I would turn around, go do some area quests, and then come back. It wasn't a huge issue, but i disrupted the flow. I get that it is difficult to balance, TOR pretty much made everything too easy so that players almost never need to leave the class storyline, which might not be much better.

 

Overall I really enjoyed it though and look forward to release. It seems pretty polished, I wonder when they will set a release date?

[Oner]

They want to release it this year (being the Year of the Dragon), but apart from that, who knows.

[Setzer]

Yeah, the 6/26 release date Gamestop shows isn't happening. LOL

 

I hope Anet releases the game when its finished and not any sooner. A big problem with MMO's today is they're released unfinished and with lots of bugs. Sure an MMO is never finished but content thats suppose to make launch gets cuts because devs didn't have the time to finish it and then its later added in a content patch. I think first impressions is an important factor in the success of an MMO. If people love what they play they'll stick around but if your game is plagued with bugs and unfulfilled promises then it will either fail or not live up to expectations. Old Republic is a fun game but was riddled with bugs at launch and highres textures were removed because of problems which pissed off alot of players. I'm sure a year from now TOR will be a much better MMO than it is now but how many people will still be playing? Same can be said for other games like Age of Conan, Warhammer, Final Fantasy XIV, etc.. I've heard lots of great things about FFXIV 2.0 and how its a drastic overhaul of the game and it will be so much better. How many people are still left that actually care? How many people will come back after SE took people's money for a game that was technically still in Alpha? The success of an MMO hinders on it's launch and hopefully Anet gets it right.

[Setzer]

Tried WvWvW, was kinda fun at the start, but when I started seeing the "LoL pattern", only applied to a few hundred people, I lost my will quickly. That and constantly having to run from the spawn point was boring, The domination-like mode went similarly. Five enemies everywhere I turned, allies only happened rarely.

 

Yeah, open world pvp isn't for everyone especially for those coming from playing only structured pvp. My first pvp experience was doing RvR in Dark Age of Camelot and that's exactly what WvW is and thats the only kind of pvp I really enjoy. Sure 1v1, 3v3, 5v5 or 10v10 is fun but it doesn't deliver anywhere near the excitement of hundreds of players from three different worlds fighting for control over something, at least for me anyways.

[zero_or_more]

Right so once again I'm late posting my experience here, which is exactly that, my experience.

 

So I continued a level 19 ranger from the previous beta, playing as a greatsword melee with a longbow alternative. (PvE only.) I rarely had any problems with knowing what I'm doing in melee, though figuring out the skills and their practical use takes some time. When starting out, the healing spells felt weaker then previously and pets seemed to die on me a bit too much, however spending 3 trait points on the healing+pet health trait gradually solved this, and from there the class felt pretty balanced (in PvE) just like in beta 1.

 

There were times when certain skills filled the screen, especially elementalist and necromancer spells and it was indeed hard to navigate or dodge properly, but it wasn't confusing just 'as a melee', it was confusing overall with my bow too... aside from that I felt the difficulty was fine, but I had 'undeserved' deaths, which came mostly from overpowered events and out-of-nowhere respawning enemies. This last thing was pretty annoying at places.

 

I also reached level 30 late in the beta, but still managed to try one elite skill and from their description and that one skill I got they do seem to be just that much better - but luckily no 'I WIN' skills.

 

This time I already completed the personal story available in the beta (@ level 20 I think) and spent time running around the Norn and Charr zones (started out as a Human). The overall detail both in visuals and events seemed similar in all places, with enough variety to still feel distinct.

 

Also I dabbled in some crafting, and while leatherworking (medium armor) seemed to level at an acceptable pace - making a full set of armor for myself I leveled enough to near the next 'tier' of stuff - weaponsmithing (for the greatsword) was a grind, in part as there are less components but also I only needed one weapon in contrast with 4-5 armor pieces. This grinding aspect really stood out as I was pleasantly surprised that I hardly-if-ever grinded for character levels in games. (Personal story is not enough though, but a handful of events will effortlessly give you the difference in my experience...)

 

Also you can buy anything at the trading post, but you can craft pretty good stuff for yourself, and NPCs do sell usable weapons and stuff, especially the... uh... favor? merchants. But levels restrict you anyway. I didn't see anything surprising in the gem store when compared to GW1, and from the prices it seemed you could realistically buy slot expansions and similar stuff for in-game gold. Remains to be seen though.

 

My final impression was that this game really is a multiplayer game, those hoping to play it strictly as a singleplayer - while manageable - will hit some walls here and there, especially with crafting and materials or some harder events. However with the help of a few friends these problems seemed to be easily mitigated for now - and surely this beats facebook.

 

Anyway, feel free to ask and see you in the next one!

[zero_or_more]

So there was a stress test yesterday, I'll write a few words but first..!

 

Launch date is Aug. 28th!

 

Also there's a post on the blog about designing the game around it being fun, and while that sounds awfully PR-ish to me, the first word I think about when trying to describe it... is... fun. They brainwashed me and I didn't even notice?!

 

Now about the few hours of test... I just tried a new character, nothing you can't find on the net by now, but surprisingly - even though this was said to be a 'stress' test - I got absolutely no hiccups or disconnects or anything save ONE time when the server didn't want to create a personal story instance for me. Some time later it could.

 

The new thing to me however was when the test ended with an interesting twist, a sort of whole world event. I played in the Charr starting zone and some purple crystals popped up around certain waypoints sort of 'encasing' them. Around these spawned 'corrupted' creatures and some champions and the goal was to defeat these spawns. Now that's all nice and all, but the twist was that if you died while doing this you became corrupted as well and could spawn at these waypoints - while 'survivors' could not. Being corrupted got you a new skin for your race - roughly, something like husks in ME - and a completely new skill bar with lightning and 'crystal' skills. So this effectively turned the event into a kind of whole scale open world PvP thing, which supposedly would have culminated in a second phase that never happened - I guess because of the beta.

 

Although this limited my understanding of the event, from my perspective it felt that maybe we were fighting for the waypoints - all 18 of them all around - and a progress bar showed how much of the world is 'corrupted'. Some waypoints failed to become corrupt so I don't know, maybe this was an insurance to prevent the 'phase' from completing. All in all, some level 80 champions showed up on both 'good' and the 'bad' side - they were practically invincible in a level 1-15 zone - and some time you could see a dragon circling around in the sky, sorry forgot to make screenshots... was quite a scene though.

 

So it was a 'fun' experience, lot of 'dead' people embraced the corruption and tried to hunt down survivors, yet the preset skillbars gave the event a kind of unique, 'part PvE' feel. This is my first MMO so can't tell if similar things have been done before, but it was definitely interesting... at least for me.

[Hurlshort]

That sounds like a neat event. 2 months away from release, cool. It felt polished when I played it in the last beta, so I think it will be a good launch.

[Oner]

http://www.guildwars2hub.com/features/interviews/profession-and-traits-interview-jon-peters

[Oner]

Just a reminder: today starts the 3rd beta event, at noon PDT.

[SadExchange]

Just a reminder: today starts the 3rd beta event, at noon PDT.

 

Very excited to try it out for sure. Just a few hours away. Won't have a huge amount of time to try it out, but want to see how it'll run on the laptop when I'm away from home. Been great to read all of your comments and I'm really looking forward to it.