Guild Wars 2 Preview

Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Alec Meer has penned an in-depth preview about ArenaNet’s ambitious sequel to Guild Wars, courtesy of a hands-off presentation, and seems to have come back with only good things to say about the title.

Once you’re out of the opening stretch which ends, portentously, with (this is my story.) and into the game proper, you’ll be able to visit your Home Instance, a section of the game which exists just for you. You can drag other players in for a visit and to nose curiously at how it differs from their own, but really it’s something only you will spend any time in. You’ll see characters who survived the tutorial missions in there, while an NPC you save later in the game might show up as a Vendor in your home instance.

My immediate concern is about the practicality of generating enough content that players feel they’ve had a tailored or at least apparently meaningful experience throughout. Arenanet folk on hand claim to have (a huge team of writers) and understand that stories are key to ensuring longevity: (your Personal story isn’t something that peters out at level 20 for example.) They also estimate that that there are 60 feature films’ worth of voice-over in the game all-told, so hopefully you’re not going to hear the same 12 lines over and over again. Hundreds of hours of content is the promise and a great deal of it will be solo-able if you want to.

In terms of that content, as Arenanet have said many times already but which bears reiterating, they’re trying to get away from what we would call quests. To some extent, this going to prove a semantic argument, and one that frankly irritates me a little but I understand that the devs want to strike a difference from other games. Quite clearly the game is full of quests the difference is in how you acquire them. Instead of some bloke hanging around standing on the spot with a large punctuation mark hanging over his head, you’ll simply be informed that you’ve become involved in a an event when you happen to wander through one in your travels. Obviously you don’t have to take part, but it’s the main way to gain precious, precious stuff.

If it sounds a bit like Warhammer Online’s ill-fated public quests, in a way it is. I think, though, only in foundational concept, not in actual practice. Rather than neat little bubbles of action, they’re something you’ll stumble into regularly and which, crucially, will scale to how many players join even to the point that some enemies will have new abilities unlocked once a certain number of people are in the fight. So you can tackle most of .m solo or in tiny groups, but you won’t resent more players turning up and stealing your kills because the whole damn scrap will become bigger and better-rewarded when they do.