Hunter's Insight – A Guild Wars 2 Blog

Beta Sign Up

Yesterday Arenanet let it be known they had a surprise in store for today. Just now they let us know what that was.

The #GuildWars2 beta sign-up page is live! It will be open for 48 hours, so sign-up for a chance to get in! cot.ag/A7jwF7 ~RB

— Guild Wars 2 (@GuildWars2) February 22, 2012

Of course this immediately led to said page being crippled.

Hey all: we’re aware of the issues that some people are having getting to the page. We’re on it! ~RB

— Guild Wars 2 (@GuildWars2) February 22, 2012

And it seems like not everyone will get a chance to play.

You have 48 hrs to sign up. Signing up immediately doesn’t increase your chances. Testers are chosen based on development needs. ~RB

— Guild Wars 2 (@GuildWars2) February 22, 2012

A beta sign up is yet another sign that Guild Wars 2 is nearing release.

Good luck everyone.

Jumping Puzzle

I waited all day yesterday waiting to see a video posted of a jumping puzzle. Not until I walked away from the computer did anyone post anything.

This video from curse was posted showcasing a puzzle in the Diessa Plateau, a low level charr zone. Since the charr invaded Ascalon the area is filled with Ascalonian ghosts, and the puzzle itself takes place on the ruins of the Great Northern Wall. Which by the way is genius.

It’s hard to tell just how difficult it is, the person doing the puzzle seems to have done it before and knows precisely what to do. Some of the jumps look like they need to be carefully timed. One jump in particular seems so close that another person doing the puzzle at the same time makes the jump, but due to lag looks at first as though they haven’t made it.

There are a couple of interesting points about the mobs as well. They’re placed throughout the puzzle. Normally in other games like Rift, Runes of Magic, or SWTOR there are few mobs nearby a puzzle. At least in my experience. Jumping puzzles in Guild Wars 2 seem to involve more than simple pathfinding.

The rewards for the puzzle or pretty straightforward. The end of the puzzle has a boss who I assume has a good chance at dropping some loot. There is also a skill point which I assume is worthwhile. It’s difficult to tell just how many skillpoints are available or generally how easy they are to get.

Overall it looked like fun, but overall I suspect the person running the puzzle made it look easier than it is.

EDIT: So just after posting this DutchSunshine was kind enough to tweet me another video. It doesn’t show the entire puzzle but appears to show enough.

In this case the puzzle appears to be located in the charr starter zone Plains of Ashford. It has an underwater entrance and several wooden beams and stone steps to jump to and from. It’s all inside a cavern that is darkly lit, a very cool atmosphere.

What is particularly interesting here is that the video doesn’t show any mobs at all but it does show traps. A hallway with red circles that have a precise timing forcing you to be very careful moving along it.

But that isn’t the only trap. There also appears to be either a triggered shakey cam effect (probably set off at certain difficult points) or a random shakey cam effect or maybe a timed one. In any case for those not expecting it that could certainly screw up a jump.

Another Arenanet Update

Aegis in action, it blocks the next attack.

Arenanet announced Guild Wars 2 about 2 or 3 years earlier than most studios would have.  The fans were expecting news about upcoming expansions and essentially Arenanet had to explain themselves.

That means for the past 2 years we’ve benefited from constant updates but suffered through constant nerd rage calling for a release date.

Thus once again we are updated.

For instance several months ago they mentioned they were removing energy as a mechanic, to be replaced with some other long term resource.  That resource appears to be armour degradation after being defeated in game.  It’s a clever system that only punishes you after being fully defeated, and even then doesn’t seem to become a problem until you’ve been defeated multiple times.

If a player is defeated while all of their armor is damaged, then a random piece of armor will break. When armor breaks, it ceases to provide any benefit to the player and must be repaired by visiting an armor-repair NPC in town.

I’ve played games with durability mechanics before and have noticed one consistent problem.  I shouldn’t have to stop what I’m doing to run somewhere and fix my gear.  It breaks up my gameplay.  It’s inconvenient.  I’m not playing a game to do chores with NPCs.

That said I don’t have a big problem with it.  If they feel like they need a gold sink, fine I guess.  A good death penalty can be a fine motivator.

Following that update, and no disrespect to the compass information, but the next update are these meta events.  We know events chain from one to another, but meta events are that idea made larger, extending across the zone.

A meta-event can cover a much larger region than a standard event might; you could as much as a quarter of the map thrown into turmoil by a meta-event!

The zones of Guild Wars 2 are kind of large in my estimation.  That seems impressive.

I really want to see one of the jumping puzzles.  Anet, make a trailer.

Whether you are fighting off bandits or using the broken remnants of the Great Northern Wall to climb to a hidden chest, we think you’ll find these areas to be both fun and formidable.

The Great Northern Wall as a jumping puzzle.  Genius.

I’ve yet to see any videos of anyone tackling a jumping puzzle but if you’ve seen one, let me know in the comments.  Oh and one link per comment or my spam filter will catch you.

Other than those updates there was also a ton of information on changes to boons and conditions.  But to be honest I’m not the type to take great note of these kinds of details.  When I’m in a game and I’ve got conditions on me, I don’t start doing the math of how much damage is being done.  I just go into instinct mode to determine the threat.  My experience goes something like “Badness!  Get rid of the badness!  Make goodness!  Heal!”

That said I think this is cool.

For instance, since vigor and weakness manipulate endurance, the endurance bar UI should reflect this. And because poison affects heals, your healing skill should look different when you are poisoned.

So thanks for updating us Arenanet, we know you don’t have to.  But you did anyway.

All The Cool Kids Like Guild Wars 2

With the NDA drop after this weekend’s press beta of Guild Wars 2 there is much to discuss. Information is still pouring in so for the moment I’m just going to go over some of the more interesting points in bullet point form sans much commentary.

• Guilds gain influence and spend it on upgrades.  Upgrades are split into 4 different categories, politics, art of war, architecture, and economy.  Politics focuses on things like increased influence gain.  Art of War includes things like discounted WvW siege weapons and other PvP upgrades.  Economy seems to affect crafting and loot percentages.  Architecture affects the guild bank and other integral guild functions.
• Guild armour and guild weapons that display guild emblems.  Plus the aforementioned guild bank.
• Guild UI that allows you to select which guild to represent, leave, or accept an invitation to.
• OMG JUMPING PUZZLES.  Okay, yes, I’m a freak for jumping puzzles.
• There is something called magic find.  It appears to be a buff that increases drop percentages or rarity of drops.
• Rewards for WvW seem to reflect the score your server has accumulated.  In this video you can see the green team has a score of 170k.  Below that you can see this somehow correlates to a small percentage gain for various categories.  The Artisan, gatherer, and scavenger categories have fairly obvious outcomes (crafting, gathering and either salvaging or magic find) though some are less obvious.
• One piece of armour is damaged when defeated (after failing to rally from a downed state) and after all armour is damaged they will break forcing you to repair.  Not a durability system where you have to repair no matter what.
• Instead of a queue to join a server,  you are sent to an overflow shard.  Another instance I’m guessing.
• Currently there appears to be 5 character slots, but lets keep in mind it is still early days.
• There is all kinds of new info on traits, character customization, skills, and what has changed.  I don’t get into those sorts of details, but if you seek it out you can find it.
• This IGN video appears to be the best video so far showcasing WvW.  Lots of detail to be discerned from watching the UI.
• Gates to keeps in WvW take a lot of damage before comign down.  A lot.

• GuildMag has an aggregation of articles.

Okay that’s enough for now.  Obviously I’ll have more to add later, and commentary on things to come over the next week.

World map showing the 3 borderlands and the central bottom battlegrounds.

World Versus World

This image is entitled Stonemist Castle, center keep. Refer to below image as well.

With the upcoming press beta embargo to release on Monday flooding the internet with Guild Wars 2 news I didn’t have much expectation of anything new until then. But I guess we know one thing that is going to be talked about a lot. Arenanet just released a blog post on World Versus World, their 3 faction PvP scenario inspired by Dark Age of Camelot or Guild Wars’ own Alliance Battles.

We’ve known a lot about them for a while but this blog post goes into detail.

We’ve known that there would be some measure of Real Time Strategy involved. This appears to take the form of building siege equipment, repairing keeps, and upgrading fortifications with a resource called supply that regenerates over time.

It sounds as though if you want to be competitive in World Versus World you’re going to want to stay well supplied.

I hope the upgrades are more than simply giving NPCs or fortifications more armour or health. Surely there must be a variety of upgrades.

There was also mention some time ago of siege engines and the blog post talks about those as well. Catapults, ballistae, trebuchets, arrow carts, and to everyones great delight, asuran siege golems. Siege weapons have their own strengths and weaknesses which should make it interesting to find out which are most useful and which are generally regarded as non-optimal. Aside from the golems what I was really intrigued by were the defenses. Boiling oil, cannons and mortars? I would love to pour boiling oil on some people, and that is in real life.

I do have questions about recruiting NPCs though. How effective are they? How many can you recruit at once? Can they be used to attack gates like siege weapons?

If we compare the epic seeming size of Stoneist above, to the Castle Bailey here, we get some good comparative size.

Moving on to these Orbs of Power. It’s clearly Capture The Flag. That is not a bad thing. These maps are said to be as big as Guild Wars 2 can have. That must be pretty big. Demo videos have players wandering the full 20 minutes from one end of the map to the other and still not really seeing everything. Can you imagine playing CTF on that scale or even WvW on that scale?

You take all this, you throw it in a pot where you can join WvW at level 1, gain experience and gear all the way to level 80, and you’ve got yourself a self-contained game most people could play for an eternity before they got bored.

Now this is something guilds can get into, maybe some people want raids but I don’t doubt many will be pacified with this content. I just wish we had more details on just how guilds take keeps or what these benefits are exactly.

Can’t wait to see WvW in action (or dub vee dubs to those in the know) and I can’t wait to see what else is going to drop from this press beta.

Roses

Marketing and advertising firms do something that irritates me to no end. They rebrand something that already had a name and image. They make a product seem new and fresh to appeal to a younger audience, or classy and expensive to appeal to an older one.

Old Spice used to be a deodorant for old people, and now with their bizarre marketing campaigns, it has definitely begun to appeal to a younger male demographic.

Which brings us to the MMO market where the industry is flooded with games that have many of the same features. How do you differentiate Game 1 which has quests and combat with Game 2 which has quests and combat.

Well if you’re Arenanet you might do a few things. You might innovate a moderate number of features that represent an evolution in the MMO industry, you might emphasize good story-telling and lore, you might integrate concept art to an insane degree, or in some cases you might just rename things to sound different.

Now obviously I’m oversimplifying making and marketing a video game in the extreme, but I do think it’s important to be realistic about a few things. Arenanet is making a game I am truly excited about with excellent graphics, designs, writing, and gameplay that I can’t wait to try, but there is certainly some rebranding going on.

Guild Wars 2 will have an auction house, but it’s not called an auction house. It’s called a Marketplace. So why the new name? Arenanet has included features in their auction house that other games don’t have. To emphasize that change they’ve renamed the very familiar notion of the auction house. In the Marketplace you can put up bids to buy things that no one has put up for auction. You can access the auction house from the web or perhaps from your iPhone. It’s global across all servers. It’s not an auction house! It’s a marketplace!

Semantics. It is an auction house.

I don’t really begrudge them the right to describe the game in any way they see fit, but at some point I just feel like it needs to be said. Let’s call a spade a spade.

Professions should probably be referred to as classes. There is no real reason to refer to them as anything but classes aside from the need that corporations feel to make their products seem unique and superior. “These aren’t those boring old ‘classes’ from other games, these are professions y’all! I reckon!” Yes, they’re from Texas.

I don’t consider this to be a completely negative thing for Guild Wars 2 or Arenanet. In fact in some cases I see clearly what they’re doing and support it.

Dynamic Events in Guild Wars 2 would be sullied if too closely associated with the Public Quests of Warhammer. There they were widely considered a failure and many people left Warhammer with a bad taste in their mouth. On top of that Dynamic Events seem much more complex, intricate, scalable, diverse and make up the vast bulk of content in Guild Wars 2, not some sideshow piece of content that didn’t fit with the rest of the game. Arenanet seems all too justified in distancing itself and distinguishing itself from Public Quests. I can even forgive them the use of a marketing buzzword like dynamic. I’m just glad they didn’t call them Proactive Paradigms.

But then there are some grey areas. I can’t make up my mind if Cross Profession Combos really deserve their own moniker. Didn’t we used to call these buffs? Admittedly there is a major change in gameplay here because in Guild Wars 2 you can’t target fellow allies with skills. Arenanet wants you looking at what you’re doing, not the group UI, so skills became ground targeted, and therefore you’re moving around a lot to adjust and move to buffs. Different enough that I guess I can just give them this one.

Anyway none of this really takes away from my excitement for Guild Wars 2. They can rebrand mini-games as ‘activities’, rogues as thieves, or crafting professions as ‘disciplines’ all they want. If that helps them sell the game that’s great. I just wish they had a little more confidence in the gaming community to understand what is different about Guild Wars 2 without rebranding everything. Or that I wasn’t about to suffer through endless local chat confusion about what the MP is or why they don’t just call it an AH.

The Shape Of What’s To Come

Guild Wars 2 is slowly creeping towards release, but there are still a few things we haven’t seen and don’t know about. I guess I’m just wondering what we’ll see next, or what will come out of the upcoming beta events.

We’ve seen the Battle for Khylo PvP map but surely sometime soon we’ll see other maps. The only questions are how will they vary Conquest, and if there will be modes of PvP different from Conquest. Guild Wars had a lot of PvP maps that were quite similar except they had been reskinned to look radically different. I believe Arenanet themselves have said that there were too many PvP types in Guild Wars, making it difficult to balance for all. So I’m sure there will be more modes than just Conquest, but not many more.

World Versus World is surely to be a big centerpiece for Arenanet. MMO fans speak in reverent tones when Dark Age of Camelots free-for-all PvP is brought up, a modern take by Arenanet could lure a great many people to the game. We’ve heard about Real Time Strategy elements being included in WvW, protecting keeps, taking others, but that’s all well and good until you actually see WvW in action.

The leaked World Versus World map.

The cash shop will likely cause a lot of fury. Whether or not the items therein are fairly priced or outrageous ripoffs fans will be foaming at the mouth with rage at any mention of it. Still it will be interesting to see what Arenanet has in store. I for one am hoping for mounts, but as I’ve said in previous posts, the items are likely to be fairly predictable and along the lines of what Guild Wars and other games already offer. I doubt sincerely that anything game changing on any level will be available for outright purchase.

We still don’t really know that much about guilds. We know you can be in multiple guilds at once, and that’s about it. Martin Kerstein at one point said something to the effect that Guild Wars 2 has one of the most impressive guild systems he’s ever seen, but if just being able to join multiple guilds at once is all we know, then we’ve just seen the tip of the iceberg. Online games are a social beast but I’m not sure what to expect since I’ve always been disappointed with the original Guild Wars’ guild system.

I think that’s about it for major systems. We already know enough about Personal Story, Dynamic Events, Skills and other systems, but what about smaller stuff?

We haven’t seen as wide a selection in armour or weapons as I expect Arenanet is putting together.

We haven’t seen how the Hall of Monuments is going to be integrated into Guild Wars 2.

We haven’t seen as much of the asura or sylvari, so it may be possible to see more of them before release.

Activities were one of the first things we heard about from Arenanet but we’ve yet to see any in action.

We’ve yet to see their supposed replacement resource after energy was removed.

And are they really done iterating? I doubt it. Who knows what they’ll change in the coming months.

That’s a short-list of small things I’m thinking about although I suspect there are dozens of things others would take note of. Guild Wars 2 may be getting closer to launch but I don’t doubt the news will keep flowing until then.

New Heroes

Everybody and their mom is tweeting about this fan-made trailer on youtube. Thought I’d post it because I don’t want to be left out! It’s pretty good.

Arenanet Fattens Up

As Arenanet increases testing and plans beta events, the strain on their community managers must be taking a toll. I can’t imagine how busy they are going to be in the weeks just before launch and the long haul of maintaining a hit game.

Thus the addition of new talent at Arenanet in that regard. Rubi Bayer has left Massively, and indeed GuildCast, for a job at Arenanet. I’m not familiar with Aidan Taylor and Melanie Corolleur, but they appear to have been announced on Facebook a few days ago as the European counterparts to the team.

They’re going to need the help once they start announcing more controversial features. The cash shop is just plain not going to be received well by the community. I don’t know what is in it, I don’t know what the community will react badly to, but I do assume there is going to be rage. Lots and lots of rage.

You need even-tempered souls to deal with gamers. We can act like the most ill-behaved children and often are ill-behaved children. Good luck to Arenanet in regards to that.

It seems clear that Guild Wars 2 will be a big hit, and I had wondered if Regina, Martin, and Stephane would need help. Their opinion seems to be in the affirmative.

More community managers only means good things for the Guild Wars 2 community. Grats to all.

Screenshots From The Mists

There have been a few things coming out of the recent trip by Seven, of Guild Wars Insider, to Arenanet. I didn’t notice much of anything that seemed like big news or small tidbits from his interviews but he did walk away with screenshots.

The first few screenshots were of a yet to be seen PvP map. They show a mountainous setting with two camps opposed across a ravine. The map appears to form a U shape, which is not unlike several Guild Wars maps of note.

The perspective is a little misleading but it's quite a big map.

The Guru thread on the screenshots is as always informative, if filled with crazy speculation. What we can take away from these screenshots is that it is another conquest map, there are 3 capture points, a lot of fog, and an undetermined random mechanic such as the trebuchets in the Battle for Khylo map.

Hopefully this screenshot gives a better idea of scale. It’s from the same map.

Seems pretty big to me.

There are a couple more screenshots of the map over at Guild Wars Insider.

Not to mention two screenshots of armour on display.

Dark and mysterious!

Not a whole lot to draw from here. It appears to have a dark shading, ruins of some sort in the background. I’m guessing we’ll travel to the mists through asura gates.

And finally, just released as I was writing this, about 8 screenshots of various armours on what appears to be mostly the battle for khylo map. There’s a few skills to be seen, some mines, some pets, so go check it out.

Two medium armours it seems?