Guild Wars 2 Preview
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(We wanted to do away with a lot of the stringent class roles that MMOGs often impose upon players,) says Flannum. (It's not the best experience in the world to have to play with someone based solely on what profession they are. We'd rather that gamers be able to play with their friends and that their friends have the leeway to make the kind of character that they feel is interesting. So, we don't want you to have to play with that monk you don't really like all that much because he's the only person that plays healer. And we don't want you to have to sit around for a half hour looking for a healer. So we tackled that by making our professions very versatile and allowing them to switch roles in combat. What that means is you go into a fight, you look at the situation and then your character can be versatile enough that you can react to whatever you've got in front of you. We try to make our combat not only dynamic in the sense of encouraging movement and making it very visually distinct, but also by making it dynamic in the sort of choices that players make.)
Every class can tank, every class can attack at range, every class can heal themselves, and resurrect others too. The second half of your skill bar is devoted almost entirely to powerful defensive abilities determined by your character's race shields, buffs and cure-alls while the aggressive former half is defined by the weapon you currently have equipped. It's a system designed to exploit a preference of two weapon sets, which can be flipped between at a moment's notice, radically altering your character's abilities.
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(When the map first loads, the centaurs have a base camp quite a way into the map,) says Flannum. (They start conquering territory, and if no players come along, the centaurs are just going to win and start advancing across the map. These invasions are persistent: any place that gets taken over by centaurs is going to stay that way until some players come along and try to fix it. There can be a lot of back and forth: the centaurs might hold the human garrison or they might be pushed all the way back to their camp. Players might be in the centaur camp, trying to keep them from coming back. The idea is that players get into this big world that can have all of these different states they never quite know what's around the next bend.)
There's one other vector by which ArenaNet hopes to build cooperation among players something tech director Ellis refers to as (the extended experience). Essentially, this means ensuring players always have a connection to the game and their fellow players, even when they're not at a computer, building in support for the game's social systems on iPhone and other portable devices. But ArenaNet's plans go beyond chat apps, hoping to allow players direct influence on the world.
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We ask if ArenaNet has considered giving remote players some sort of spectral ability by which they could still engage in combat, or buff their guildmates. (Er, possibly,) offers Ellis. (We have ideas about how to have a mobile player become part of a party there are a lot of options there. We could consider trying commander-level type things, where you have a view of the world that the players themselves can't see.)
Aware that Guild Wars clans looking to make the leap to the sequel may do so gradually, there's also some continuity with the previous game, with chat enabled between the two titles. Guild Wars veterans will inherit titles, weaponry and attire based on their achievements (as commemorated in the Hall Of Monuments available to players of the Eye Of The North expansion). Ongoing additions to Guild Wars 1, meanwhile, will continue to lay the foundations for the sequel's storyline.
