Guild Wars 2 Preview and Interview Round-up

Quite a bit of new coverage for ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2 has surfaced over the past several days, so I thought I’d pack it all into one newsbit.

Ten Ton Hammer starts us off with a a preview from GamesCom and a two-part preview (here and here) from PAX:

I found myself in a slightly more peaceful version of the village area, but Shaemoor had no lack of adventuring tasks to accomplish. I brought up the map, and Jon noted several small, dark hearts with gilded edges around the area. ArenaNet is tentatively calling this a (scout system), and it’s a nice alternative to the typical quest hub you’d find in most MMOs in that you’re working to improve an area through a variety of different tasks and events. As you perform these tasks, the heart fills up slightly, but events start to pop up that give you greater amounts of favor with the scout. And when the heart is filled (a heart of gold?) you’re rewarded handsomely with items and experience for your efforts.

For example, I ventured across the bridge toward one scout hub where a farmer needed help with a few random chores. I fed the cows, picked up a water bucket and watered some crops; tasks which gave me a little favor with the farmer. But as more players entered the area and chores were harder to come by, the game began to trigger events. First, a wave of bandits began to set fire to hay bales. Since I had a water bucket in hand, I extinguished the flames, then dropped the bucket to fight the bandits since we were tasked with dispatching x number of bandits before y number of bales burned.

They follow it up with an interview with GW2 designer Isaiah Cartwright at PAX:

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you think you’ll keep some of the exploration aspects to the process though? I know for some players it was a lot of fun in GW1 figuring out which boss mobs you could track down for a specific elite for your profession.

Izzy: Another big system with skills is Traits, and traits have taken on that aspect. Every trait is given out in a very unique way. Like a sword mastery trait gives you plus bonus damage, you have to go defeat five sword masters around the world, and you’ll have to find rumors from different NPCs that tell you where they are. Killing a random sword master will give you an update to the progress to all of that.

So every trait becomes an interesting little task for you to go find or interact with. One of the traits in the game is to do more damage with environmental weapons, and that could involve killing different people with environmental weapons and stuff like that. There’s lots of interesting ways that we can give out these traits that kind of become a whole other type of content that you can do, and find some of that exploration thing that we did have with our Guild Wars 1 elites within the trait system.

And the trait system is a way to really interact with the skill system. A lot of people have been asking about character customization, and the traits system is a really big way to do that. Two characters with the exact same skill bar but different traits are two very different characters. A mace warrior that sets himself up to do a whole bunch of spike damage will do a lot more damage in a short period of time than a guy who sets himself up to apply Weakness every time he criticals. Those are two very different characters yet they can have the same skills. So traits interact with skills in a very different way.

Then GameFocus comes in with their own PAX-based preview:

Another aspect to MMOs that Guild Wars 2 hopes to address is allowing newcomers to still have fun regardless of when they start. On top of the story being separate from the events of the first game, the developers are introducing a level balance feature to give new players the opportunity to still have a good time with their friends who may be at a higher level. What this entails is that new characters can “move up” to the same level as their partners or those higher level players can “move down” to be at the same skill as their new friends. In this situation, the experience gained at these new levels will still be on par with what they would get at their original level; meaning that you can’t create a new character, pair up with a level 60 and earn the same EXP that they would get. This implementation should definitely make it easier for newcomers to enjoy the game without missing out on playing with their more-experience friends.

We have all heard stories of people losing their jobs or taking things a little too serious when it comes to MMOs and depending on how you look at another cool feature Guild Wars 2 is going to introduce, your life playing an MMO could drastically change. Whenever the game releases, the developers will also be making available an iPad/iPhone application that allows you to monitor your friends as they play while you’re either stuck at work or on the bus. This real-time GPS program shows the game’s world map and lets you watch your friends actions on the map. You’ll be able to see where they are at any particular moment, which helps you stay close to the action even when you can’t actually play. On top of that, there is live-chat support, so communicating with people on your friend’s list can happen anywhere. You might not be able to see what exactly is happening in the game world, but getting updates from your friends currently playing and knowing where they are at any time makes this one of the most interesting new features and one that I was surprised no other game has done yet.

Destructoid does the PAX preview thing, too:

Unlike traditional MMO quests, these tasks will differ wildly depending on what kind of character you’re playing and what you’ve previously allowed to happen in the story. A human noble who prefers to solve problems through diplomacy rather than bloodshed will have a totally different story arc and set of quests than a brute who grew up on the streets. To make the story even more personal, your character will be directly inserted into cutscenes, and the cutscenes will also vary significantly depending on all of the previous factors and variables mentioned.

Personalization is a big deal in this game, and this is also reflected in your appearance. The actual armor your character wears is purely cosmetic; stats and bonuses are instead conferred through crests that you socket into your armor. While it does sacrifice realism for the sake of personalization, since in the real world a pirate costume is obviously less effective than a full suit of plate armor, the crests will allow you to give your character a look you actually like, and will hopefully keep everyone from running around in identical gear. It also allows characters to become legitimately recognizable beyond the name above their head, with the idea being that you start recognizing people on your server simply based on their looks.

GameKudos follows up with much of the same:

All players will now have three utility skills, like buffs, and an Elite skill. As an example of an Elite skill, Price discussed the Warrior’s War Banner skill. The banner gives heals and buffs to other party members, who can pick up the banner and move it according to where the flow of battle dictates it can do the most good.

The tenth slot in the skill bar is a dedicated healing skill. All players can heal or resurrect. “There is no dedicated healer class in Guild Wars 2,” Price said. “No more tapping your fingers waiting for a healer to show up.” While he did say that having someone who specializes in healing will make things easier, the goal was to get rid of “profession handcuffs” and disrupt “the holy trinity” of MMO party builds.

And then GameSpy brings us one of their interrogation room features for the game:

Will Tuttle: What made the story so good? I’ve heard you say before that you generally just click through quest text when you play MMOs. And did you get an idea of whether Guild Wars 2 is a continuation of the first game’s story, or if it’s a standalone sequel?

Ryan Scott: The first Guild Wars’ quartet of campaigns each followed very linear story sequences. I mean, you had your dumb kill-10-of-these quests just like in any other MMO, but it was all held together by a specific narrative arc that told a full story. And it was all voiced-acted with cut-scenes and stuff. For whatever reason, it interested me, and made me care what happened to these characters. Guild Wars 2 jumps ahead some two-and-a-half centuries into the world’s future, so everything’s all different and weird. I suppose all the old characters are dead at this point, so who knows what’s going on now. But it’s definitely a continuation of Guild Wars’ story. I just hope the world’s awesome Asia and Africa analogs (introduced in GW1 expansions, but inaccessible in GW2, as far as anyone knows) make it in at some point.