Guild Wars 2 Previews

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on September 1st, 2011

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I was running around when I got the "New Event Nearby" notice. In the distance, I could make out the huge decaying wings of Tequatl. Yes! Excited at the prospect of participating in a battle royale, I took off as fast as my short little Asura legs could carry me. I arrived in the area, came tearing over a hilltop, and screeched to a halt when I saw the beach swarming with enemies. Scattered here and there were the corpses of NPC allies, and there wasn't a single player character in sight. Whoops. I backed off quickly before they saw me and thought for a moment. It seemed like a good time to test the limits of Guild Wars 2's scaling system, so I started strategizing. The first order of business was to clear Tequatl's Orrian friends, so I snuck around the side looking for some loners to pick off.

In a one-on-one battle, or even two or three on one, it was a decent fight and I emerged victorious. But I learned pretty quickly that Colin was not kidding: These big events are designed for multiple players. I picked off a few enemies and moved forward, but more arrived behind me to take their places and I soon found myself fleeing for my life, forced to admit defeat. I understand this mechanic and it works, even though it's a little disappointing. Who wouldn't love the bragging rights inherent in taking out Tequatl solo? Guild Wars 2 is an MMO, though, and part of the experience is having huge events like this to bring a large number of players together.

That sounds a bit like I'm talking about a raid, which brought to mind one of the things I'm most anticipating about GW2. I needed more people to finish this off. A lot more people. But unlike the situation in a traditional raid, it didn't matter who those people were. I didn't need to put out the call for anything specific. Anyone who wanted to play could have come running with any race, class, weapon, and skill set he fancied and the job would have gotten done. Offering players the chance to participate in something epic on their own terms is a pretty huge deal.

While I didn't get a chance to participate in the PvP challenges that were running at the Guild Wars 2 booth and across the hall in various hardware partners' locations, the PvP battles looked just as harrowing and competitive as they were in the original Guild Wars. Unfortunately, the massive amounts of people and relatively loud din of PAX made it hard to determine exactly what was going on besides people killing each other. I could tell that there were some interesting mechanics going on in each fight, and there's definitely going to be more to worry about than the dude that's swinging a massive sword at your face.

Some other things that I brought away from my play session:

'¢ The limited ability slot bar is a refreshing change from the array of action bars that most MMOs force you to use.
'¢ There's a depth to the game that is teased out slowly to the new player. Each new area exposes you to something new while not force-feeding it down your throat.
'¢ The Asura are a love or love to hate sort of race.
'¢ Moving while you cast is extremely freeing and makes the game feel more action-oriented, even if it's not truly that much more intense than a (standard) MMO.
'¢ The ArenaNet team makes excellent massive monsters. They just look fantastic.
'¢ People looking for new stories will definitely find them here.
'¢ The PvP looks like it will be up-to-snuff for the current Guild Wars crowd.
'¢ Having abilities change with your weapons is fun.

While Guild Wars 2 does, in fact, have a single-player story campaign, the entire world changes based on the actions of the population. What happens in the world today may drastically change future events. Noticing that mission structures in other massively multiplayer online games would often have people competing against each other in order to complete the same objective, the developers decided missions should instead be cooperative and that everyone who is involved in any particular situation should be working with others to complete the task.

Mission difficulty will vary depending on the number of players involved. The term "dynamic" was used frequently to describe many functions within the game. On top of that, everyone who takes part in a particular mission or dungeon will earn participation points, regardless of what their function was. Be they healers, archers, or tank characters, every player will earn rewards for his or her efforts.

Regarding those rewards, gone are the loot drops that would often leave players with items that are useless to their characters. In their place, players will be rewarded with tokens that can then be redeemed for the items they want. Just like money, players can spend those tokens all at once or save them up and get the item that will really help their characters out.

Not only will ArenaNet be making up their own servers for the quick and dirty PVP matches, much like the shooter genre's setup, but Eric and Colin said they are considering a plan for players to be able to "create" their own servers or games with specific rule-sets as well.

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