While the beta tests for those who pre-ordered the title are ongoing, we have rounded up a few previews for ArenaNet’s ambitious sequel to Guild Wars, starting with this world vs. world-focused piece from G4:
Holding objectives isn’t easy, and it can take hundreds of people to attack a point successfully against another team. The World vs. World map itself is broken into four massive areas, one for each team and a center map in the middle featuring Stonemist Castle. Each map has various points that each team can try to attack, including resource camps (worth five points), towers (worth 10 points), keeps (worth 15 points), and Stonemist Castle (worth 25 points). Each point, once captured, spawns some tough NPCs to help defend it.
In order to capture a point, your team will need not only the pure strength of players but siege weapons as well. Siege weapons can be built by teams to accomplish specific objectives and to help overrun pesky defenders. The different types of siege weapons are arrow carts, ballistas, catapults, siege golems, and trebuchets. Each siege weapon requires a blueprint to create, which you can purchase from a siege master. Teams can also build cannons, mortars, and boiling pots of oil, but they don’t require a blueprint, just supply.
Unfortunately, you can’t just use the blueprint and magically a huge catapult spawns. Your team has to actually build the weapons with a resource called supply. Spread throughout each of the four WvW maps are supply camps that take about two to three people to secure. Camps have different amounts of supply within them, and players can carry 10 supply around at once. Supply caravans also wander around the map from place to place, automatically replenishing the supply in that area.
PC Gamer:
I’m the first player to reach the guardhouse, and as I arrive a message pops up: event started, defend the gate. Centaurs charge in from the hills and, of course, I fight them. I’ve got no kill-quota to hit, and I don’t actually know how long the siege will last. More players join, and the centaur onslaught increases in intensity I suspect the game is scaling up the encounter to match the amount of defenders, but my focus is on murdering horse-men, not mechanics. I’m paying attention to my goals as a character rather than my goals as a player.
Guild Wars 2’s events system is starting to make sense. (Events are very visual,) Flannum says. (They don’t require a lot of explanation. You run into a city and there are centaurs attacking everyone you kind of know what to do, right?)
Eventually the gate opens, and I receive a gold ranking for my contribution to the fight. This grants an experience bonus as well as karma, a currency earned through events that can be traded for loot later on. This is GW2’s replacement for traditional quest rewards. The tutorial builds to an encounter on a scale that most MMOs reserve for their late-game, and one I don’t want to spoil.
Three days later, my character wakes up in a land still recovering from the attack. Normally, this is where I’d be given a quest line to start on, or at the very least a crowd of NPCs with icons over their heads. Instead, there’s only one: a scout, whose icon is a spyglass. Talking to him boots up the map, and he highlights various hotspots. These are places where adventurers are always needed, and form the breadand- butter of GW2’s content. Each of these locations has an NPC in need and a range of tasks that can assist them. In the farmlands around Shaemoor, my only objective is simply to help somebody.
Digital Trends:
The dynamic events system works well visually, allowing players to see hot spots as they occur. In the human storyline, in the farm area outside of the main castle, a giant queen worm will erupt out of a field and require multiple players to take down. The worm can be seen from quite a distance, allowing players to see the event and run to it. Later on, that same field comes under fire again, this time by bandits setting the hay ablaze. In both situations, there are visual cues and audio cues as farmers cry for help. ArenaNet awards people for chipping in to help by offering every player a full complement of experience points and loot for their good deeds.
Mike O’Brien, the head of ArenaNet, said that his team of 270 people set out to create a new type of MMO, one that made playing with others a fun and interactive experience. It’s in these dynamic instances, as well as in the game’s world vs. world modes, that you really understand what he’s talking about. Seeing players run to fight a boss monster in the game’s main campaigns or align with one of three factions (red, blue or green) under a commander in world vs. world is quite a thrill. The variety of player-created characters complements one another, opening up interesting battles that are never the same.
As many as 500 players will be able to join together in one map to battle in the world vs. world mode, which keeps score over the course of two weeks before reshuffling the decks. ArenaNet decided to go with a three faction system in this gameplay mode to encourage more even fighting flow as players defend towers and castles across a map, while building up supply posts to create cool weapons like the powerful, but slow and lumbering Siege Gollum.
GameSpy:
Part of the reason we haven’t heard all that much about the dungeons in Guild Wars 2 is because they don’t appear until level 30, comparatively late in the game. I only leveled to level 24 myself in the beta, but it wasn’t enough to do anything but get slaughtered by the first enemy the second I attempted the first dungeon. “Level 30 is when you really start to open up your character,” Fairfield said. “You get your first elite skill, you’ve made it out of the beginning racial storylines, and you’re moving out into the world. We want to give you a chance to learn how to play your character and get a feel for it and then.”
I learned just how important that was not long after, when we and three members of the development team ventured into the Ascalonian Catacombs, the first dungeon that players will encounter. It’s frankly a gloomy place for a starter dungeon, and the claustrophobic passages within both complement the movement-based combat and surprise you with attacks around corners. Here, the ghosts of Ascalon (a human zone in Guild Wars 1) take out their revenge on the Charr who finally overcame them in the intervening years. The best way I can describe the combat within is orderly chaos — even though I was playing with four people who’d tinkered with this game almost every day for the last five years, it wasn’t long before they were dying on the damp floor and needing assistance via Guild Wars 2’s co-op shooter-style resurrection mechanic (think Borderlands). As an Engineer, I needed to put down a healing turret to lessen the damage and use my rifle’s net to keep the bad guys off of my fellow teammates. And these, mind you, were just run-of-the-mill ghostly ‘trash mobs,’ although I couldn’t help but notice that there were a few more minibosses than I was used to seeing.
WorthPlaying:
If you try to play GW2 like it’s almost any other MMO, the incoming damage can add up ridiculously quickly. Combat in GW2 is balanced around evading attacks rather than taking them on the chin and healing afterward. We got a chance to play-test a five-man, level-30 dungeon as part of our beta experience, and most of us spent a lot of time on the floor. In a quest that’s designed for group play, the enemies are powerful enough to kill you in seconds unless you’re very careful and you work very closely with your party. This is not a game you’re going to want to play with random strangers, and if you’re in the habit of running dungeons with the same people, you’re going be attuned to each other like some kind of commando unit.
When you do go down, death doesn’t kick in right away. After you run out of HP, your character hits the ground and starts bleeding out. At that point, you have a number of class-specific options to attack an enemy or get yourself back on your feet, sort of like when you’re incapacitated in Left 4 Dead. If you manage to kill an opponent with whatever weak attacks your class has throwing rocks, casting spells, calling a pet to help you, etc. you Rally and pop back up at roughly half your maximum health. Otherwise, you have to rely on a party member to help you back up to your feet, or else an enemy may finish you off.
A friend of mine was talking about this a few weeks ago, and I said somewhat sarcastically that it sounded like he was describing a massively multiplayer brawler, like Streets of Rage or something. After having played Guild Wars 2, that comparison’s a little more apt than I would’ve guessed. It doesn’t feel like MMO combat; instead, it’s a complex action game that’s sort of dressed up in an MMO’s clothes, with a significant emphasis on cooperative play. “Alone” in GW2 tends to mean “dead.”
