This morning wrapped up ArenaNet’s live demo presentation of Guild Wars 2 at Gamescom 2010. I did not go crazy bonkers following every possible link and morsel of text, but I did watch several of the live stream presentations. Thanks to @Longasc for providing a play-by-play English translation.
I love the character animations so far! I love the more active combat skills. I love the skill effects. I especially love that finally we see skill effects look pretty much the way they did in the CGI trailers – that must be an industry-first. The world looks glorious and very fitting with ArenaNet’s art style for the Guild Wars setting. They wanted to bring their concept art to life and it looks like they are well on their way to accomplishing it.
The combat mechanics look solid and the concept of a “downed” player should serve to provide a more “heroic” (for lack of a better term) feel to battles. Borderlands and a few other recent games (mostly shooters) have similar mechanics where when you run out of health you fall to the ground either unable to move or can crawl slowly but can still do a little bit of damage to contribute to the fight until you bleed out. Any player can revive any downed player they meet in the world; no grouping required and it’s not the same as resurrecting a corpse so we don’t need to equip a special skill to revive.
Another great feature is GW2 is doing away with the concept of “tagging” or “owning” mobs. This mechanic exists because of “kill stealing” in EverQuest where other players could do more DPS than you and get the mob’s aggro and full XP for the kill, creating a hostile environment among players. Developers came up with “tagging” mobs so people outside your group could not steal them. The downside is that tagging also has begat a somewhat hostile, or at least anti-social, environment where players get downright angry if you help them fight despite the fact that you don’t diminish their XP at all. GW2’s mobs are public in that anyone can join in the fight, can help each other out, but everyone gets full XP rather than the shared XP that most modern MMO’s use which is actually a disincentive to group while leveling.
I have always liked Guild Wars’ UI because it’s so minimalistic compared to traditional MMO’s where you end up with a screen full of hotbars and other UI elements. Guild Wars 2 added a “quest tracker” UI frame in the top right, though it seems like it will only work for whichever quest you set as primary rather than adding five or ten quests and taking up a good portion of screen real estate.
For a negative, I loathe the Diablo-esque “big red health ball” in the center of the screen. I’ve heard it is merely a placeholder but I cannot even fathom how the artists at ArenaNet thought that was a good idea. I’m all for innovating with the UI to keep you playing the game rather than playing the UI but that big red ball is so out of place it sticks out like a sore thumb. When your health goes down your screen gets “bloody” as seen in a number of shooters which gives you a big clue that you’re in trouble without forcing you to stare at your unit frame.
Also, progress bars have made an unfortunate return in Guild Wars 2. They may be “gashy-slashy stylized” like the rest of the UI but they’re still progress bars which frequent readers should know I dislike. Guild Wars had precious few progress bars, most skills with lengthier inductions had a full animation which built up to the skill’s release – a noted improvement over the traditional MMO that just cycles a brief animation loop while the progress bar ticks. From what we’ve seen in the demo Guild Wars 2 also has “build up” animations, making the progress bar redundant and in the way.
Finally, I was horrified to have my fears confirmed in the demo featuring the Charr Necromancer who opened his inventory and moused over all his gear. Sure enough, gear now has stats just like every other DikuMMO. That means Guild Wars 2 will be a game where yet again gear – and by association, level – matters. More gear treadmills. Entire areas of the game rendered obsolete by levels, just like we see in every other DikuMMO. In the previous post I wrote about levels in Guild Wars 2 and my fear that the broken Diku Monster would infect Guild Wars 2, a couple readers correctly commented that ArenaNet had not yet detailed what exactly a “level” means in Guild Wars 2 and perhaps the game would not use Diku-levels. However, ArenaNet’s developers appear to have confirmed the Diku-influenced levels in their own blog the past few days at Gamescom.
I was one of the designers responsible for events and spawns in The Brand, the mid-level charr section that players will experience at Gamescom.
A demo player named Dutch Sunshine made a run from the newbie area at level two with a group of higher level ArenaNet staff and survived all the way into the level 15 area.
Toby played in The Brand, the mid-level charr area where demo players take on The Shatterer, a very big, very hostile dragon:
That pretty much says it all. There are low-level starter areas progressing to specific areas for specific level brackets, which obsoletes all previous content, unlike Guild Wars 1.
I cannot find the words to express my disappointment but perhaps it’s for the betterment of their business model which relies on box sales and transactions rather than a subscription. The traditional Diku model, utterly broken as it may be for the massively multiplayer genre that has unfortunately adopted it, is what the majority of MMO players are familiar with. It’s easy to understand and easy (by comparison) to design and balance. They need box sales, and the simple Diku system sells.
I just finished reading a forum thread from players who played the demo at Gamescom and one perhaps said it best that we should not think of Guild Wars 2 as a true successor to Guild Wars, we should just think of it as an MMO.
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Hai!
“Another great feature is GW2 is doing away with the concept of “tagging” or “owning” mobs”
Guild Wars was totally instanced. You had the zone to yourself or your party aside from city zones. Doesn’t that mean they did away with tagging (since the only people in your zone are you and your group mates) a long time ago?
They’re still doing instancing like that, aren’t they?
@smakendahed: There will be instancing, especially for the story bits just like GW, but the world itself is wide open and public.
The ‘tagging mobs’ thing always bugged me. I think they way they’re leaning sounds good, but some people will fault them for it because it allows “power leveling” (ie your level 90 friend takes you out and kills mobs to within few hitpoints and then you get to finish them off and get full experience). Frankly, I see nothing wrong with this… in fact one could argue it helps build social bonds between players. But some people take issue with it.
I love the idea that I’ll be able to randomly help someone out without having them go off on me. I might actually start interacting with other players again!
I don’t have the dislike of “diku” that you do, so all in all your post has me more excited about GW2 than I was before I read it. In fact I’ve been skipping all the coverage because I figured it’d be GW all over again (though I’m giving GW another try…you and some other people who’s opinions I respect like it so much I figure I’m just missing something).
@pasmith: Diku bothers me — specifically the Diku / D&D implementation of “levels” — because it is counteractive to the whole point of having games that are “massively multiplayer,” or perhaps more to the point, “massively multiplayer with a living, breathing virtual world” as opposed to mere games, which is the current trend over the past 5+ years. “Levels” in and of themselves are not a bad thing, but the specific type of level can be in certain contexts.
Diku/D&D levels directly inhibit everyone being able to play together and it all comes together only at level cap because finally everyone is once more on an even playing field, gear, etc. notwithstanding. For a virtual world it’s horrible because once you out-level a zone it is immediately obsolete for that character and there is never a reason to visit again.
Shoot me a message if you want some help or anything in GW. I had Oakstout on my kinship’s ventrilo server last week and showed him a few things and gave him a brief history on the game to explain why there is no jumping, etc. He said that helped and the fact I didn’t rush him along was much appreciated. If people don’t like the game, they don’t like the game, but it’s easier to accept if they like or don’t like the game based on its own merits rather than pre-conceived expectations carried over from other games.
although they haven’t given a lot of details on it, they’ve said that high level players will scale down to low level areas when helping out friends. whether that means they’ll scale down when they come to those areas alone is unknown, and beyond mana and health I’m not sure if anything else scales down.
They’ve also said that low level characters will scale up when they want to play with high level friends.
So i’m not sure entire areas are rendered completely obsolete, its a little early to judge.
I might also point out gw had some low level areas made obsolete by high levels, particularly in prophecies, but not insignificantly sized areas in cantha or elona.
We need a forum or something…
Here’s my take on Levels. The one thing I really enjoy about MMOs and RPGs is starting as a weakling and growing more powerful over time. Without some kind of level/gating mechanism, you’re taking that away from me. If I ever get around to getting a GW character to 20 I’ll almost certainly quit (or roll a new character) since that’s the part I like: growing a character. I’ve never stuck around at ‘level cap’ in any game. Even single player games, once I hit a level cap I lose interest.
Levels to me feel like the game embodiment of The Heroic Journey. Getting stronger and stronger to face more and more dangerous foes is what’s fun for me.
So that’s why I like levels, or more accurately, progression. Yeah, you can re-skin them and make them skills rather than levels, but still the more skilled aren’t going to go hang around where the less skilled can get by.
To me (and this is clearly very much a matter of opinion) the most off-putting thing about GW is that it feels very, very much like a game and not even remotely like a virtual world. That is mostly about the city/lobbies and totally instanced play areas rather than the level issue.
I can see how, at cap, Guild Wars would feel almost like playing Magic: The Gathering or something. You “collect” skills and then build a “deck” of 8 of them to take into battle. I can understand the appeal of that. It isn’t something that really interests me, in practice, but I can understand the appeal of it.
The irony is, like you, I really do want more virtual-world-ish products. I just don’t see that in GW. Oddly the most VW-feeling land-based (take that away and I’d say EVE) game I’m aware of right now is EQ2, just because it has had so many expansions and there are so many tracks to follow, and you can self-mentor to keep all areas challenging. It isn’t a sandbox, but there are so many ‘paths’ that it almost feels like a sandbox at times.
I do think that’s a brilliant extension of the sidekick/mentor system (if you’re going to be stuck with levels)…allowing you to just ‘de-level’ yourself at will so you can pal around with anyone lower level than you and still have a good time.
I get that you want people to see Guild Wars for what it is rather than what people expect it to be, but I’m not sure how possible that really is. It’s an interesting topic; how do we approach a new game without bias? It’s a timely topic to, given the reception that this new D&D game from Cryptic is getting.
@pasmith: The catch with Guild Wars is the moment you ding 20, all that tells us veterans is that now you have collected enough skills to at least be useful in a group with us and you have acquired max armor. It’s rather like getting your black belt — you may have had to start with white belt and “level” yourself up to black, but once you’re there, you’re really just beginning. In Guild Wars a new level 20 is just barely on their way to developing or growing their character. You still have tons of skills to collect, tons of content to play through, and also you *never* stop dinging. Ever. The only difference is that the 20 over your head stays the same. GW is a skills-based game so every time you level you gain another skill point, giving you room to either acquire a new skill or collect your skill points then spend them as currency on a few of the “real” end-game consumables in Eye of the North. Your comparison to Magic: the Gathering is a valid one, and one I have been using for the past 5 years to try to explain how the skills system works in GW versus how they work in every other (read: Diku
) MMO.
Also I’m not claiming GW is my ideal “virtual world,” far from it. However, I do personally find the world more cohesive and continuous than EQ2 which makes extremely dramatic shifts from zone to zone without the previous zone giving any sort of indication of what is coming next.
Again, I’m not saying “levels” as a mechanic are a bad thing at all; indeed, they are a necessity. Same applies with EVE or Darkfall where people say “skill points are levels in disguise” which is true because those skill points are a leveling mechanic. It’s the particular version of D&D/Diku (same thing for the most part) that is counter-productive in a massively multiplayer environment because you can only group with people within a few levels of yourself if everyone is to get the most benefit from it. The “mentoring/sidekick” is nice for friends to play together but I see it as an admission that there is something broken with D&D/Diku levels and rather than fix the problem (which would require an entire re-design) mentoring is a quick bandaid. It works in the short term but it is also a lose-lose compromise in terms of XP/development/growth/etc.