Ncsoft game: Guild Wars 2

Ok first off... we're allow to talk about Wildstar so I'm assuming that we're safe to talk about NCsofts other big hitter in the MMO market, Guild Wars 2, after all, the smack of double standards would be audible from space. After all...it is still an NCsoft game.

So having heard from various peoples play through of the starting areas in PAX the responses have pretty much being 'awesome'. Yup...from all the people I regularly watch which were bringing in the PAX news this year (The Yogscast, Totalbiscuit (who is notoriously hard to please in the MMO genre after burning out on the Big Gorilla of fantasy gaming) and even the dudes on Blistered Thumbs website) have pretty much said that the game, from what they played, looks awesome.

Heck in the Charr tutorial area (the bit BEFORE the starting zone) alone you get to fight a big boss battle.

Now despite never having played the original, I'm looking forward to this, it seems to do a lot of things right from what I've seen. Looking at the skills videos alone made my jaw drop (one of the classes has an awesome anti-spell reflection bubble which visably pings all spells cast at it, another can go into a shield stance where they drop to one knee with shield raised an at angle, demonstrated infront of a Dragon for the classic 'knight deflecting the fiery breath' moment with the fire flowing around the shield).

So yeah, personal first impressions from watching footage from PAX and the skills videos generally has me going 'oooohh boy...wantnowwantnowwantnow!'.

Some of the voice overs I've heard on YouTube have me a bit concerned. Stiff and unnatural. Maybe those are just alpha build placeholders?

Don't they have Jeff Grubb as a writer? I'm impressed as heck with that, if true.

Guild Wars was a successful niche title and GW2 will be the same, though it has the additional unfortunate task of living in the shadow of that one glow stick game. Didn't GW account for 5% or so of NCSoft's revenue at its height? Might be misremembering that. Kind of telling that the industry hasn't embraced the B2P business model (Freemium seems to be the most effective approach with western players).

At any rate, game will be solid as heck but I'm not too impressed with a giant monster in the tutorial zone. Even this game will be doing that very soon.

WARNING: I bold names.

I'm excited about this, but I'm not sure how I can juggle 3 MMOs come release time for the 2 in-production ones I'm following.

Still, assuming it keeps the same model as the last, its handy as a very casual game for when i'm a bit down on CoH.

Quote:

Originally Posted by VoodooGirl [*]Watching out for the Spinning Disco Portal of D00M!*

i have some interest, it did annoy me a bit with the standard weapon selections, i understand axes, swords and maces can share animations so thats why companies love to have them be the melee weapons characters can use, but the lack of fist based weapons and pole-arms (on land) kind of irks me. hire another damn animator. beyond that the ocean stuff sounds like it has the potential to be very interesting, particularly with the entirely separate weapon classes including my beloved spears. and the races each intrigue me, so i'll probably give it a shot as a side game.

one thing i'll miss from the first is the fast time to level cap, it diminished the importance of level grinding and placed more emphasis on smart deck building of skills. now it seems like its going to be more focused on the level treadmill.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

My biggest problem with guild wars... it's character customization. I was recently... 2 days ago... was like i'm going to get GW2 so I might as well try to play through the GW campaign I have, but I really couldn't get past just how crappy the customization options were. They were UGLY and LIMITED... one or the other is fine, but both is just too much for me...

GW2 looks like it will have great customization, awesome technology which will make the world organic rather than linear, and be action based which is almost a requirement for MMOs to have now for me.

I just hope they don't pull a DCUO and everything they have working and showing is suddenly recoded and readjusted to not be anything like what they are promising and then completely fail on just about every level as a company working on a game, let alone an MMO.

I got GW and liked it, but I never put the effort into playing it like I did for CoH. Since it has no sub, I'm looking at getting in on GW2 and see if I can stick with it better. The only other MMO I care about looks to be nothing more than an update on the game that need not be named and given moral choices, so as of now I'm sticking with CoH and GW2.

I've got to say, I never really got into GW. I've tried the various classes, I have someone in the... um... wherever that is, the dwarf-snowy-area, but wasn't interested enough to go past it. I think I start playing with it about once a year, play for 30 minutes, and put it away again.

So... yeah. Don't see myself picking up GW2. Unless they've gotten rid of the "Single player game with MMO trading in town" feel.

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Very much looking forward to Guild Wars 2.

Hopefully, and I suspect it is so, that NCsoft will offer a station pass type option so I can dabble without restrictions in GW2, Wildstar, and continue City of Heroes, otherwise it almost seems these would compete with each other? I can't afford to be a premium player in all 3, yet can't (or don't want to) choose, and dislike restrictions on non premium free to play so want to pony up full price for whatever one I have to choose.

The new integration of City of Heroes having to use the NCsoft launcher, going f2p, etc. makes me feel they have a plan. Looking forward to seeing what happens.

I didn't like the first game. Partly because I was stuck playing humans, and partly because advancement was turning out to be tedious to the point of impossibility for me. After hours of killing stuff just outside the gate of the first area past the tutorial, I was looking forward to several more hours of the same because even that was still proving deadly.

The first GW has some limitations that could be prohibitive to some. The lack of a Z axis prevents you from simple jumping, so it's all ground pounding. That and all AT types looking the same in starting areas kept me from playing the game after initially trying it for a couple years.

But then I picked it up again and really got into it. PvE can be a very rich experience if you like epic stories. By the time you finish the Nightfall campaign, for example, you feel like you earned the title of hero.

Another issue is the hundreds of different skills you can aquire, and even more combinations if you include secondary professions in your build. People in my guild are saying they will miss those secondaries in GW2, but some amount of streamlining was necessary. There are simply too many skills, with too many conditional requirements, in GW1.

In other respects, I agree that putting level grinding back in may be a step backward. For all their claims of revolutionizing MMOs, that one seems to make GW2 more conventional instead.

Lastly, some people say they will miss the hero sidekicks you can build. It has some similarities with playing an MM in CoH and was a necessary mechanic because all content was scaled for teams of 8. With dynamic scaling in GW2, that won't be necessary anymore. Still, they were fun to build, especially once you started running in hard mode. Sabway vanquishing, defeating NOX...

But yeah, anticipation for GW2 is very high.

Nah, Wildstar is a cool underdog. GW2 is crowd pleasing pap.