Guild Wars 2 Previews

A few more previews have come in from the Penny Arcade Expo for Guild Wars 2, both hands-off and hands-on. Destructoid goes hands-off.

Your personal story quests, however, likely won’t make up the majority of your playtime. In fact, a good portion of what you’ll probably spend most of your time doing in Guild Wars 2 won’t even be NPC-given quests at all. The dynamic event system that’s being introduced is much more impressive than I was first led to believe, and one of the main reasons I nominated Guild Wars 2 as a Destructoid pick for PAX Game of the Show.

When this system is described as dynamic, it really means it. The only NPCs with quest symbols over their heads are for your personal story — the rest of your adventuring will be done by exploring the map. An NPC in each area will mark off a large number of spots on your map where people may need help, but you won’t have any idea what actually needs doing, if anything, until you get there. Events are randomly coded to trigger at various times all across the map, and most events feature multiple ways to contribute.

Game Kudos has an interview-preview.

“I hate the grind,” Price told me. “You click on an NPC, you get a wall of text that nobody reads. You go kill ten ogres, you come back to another wall of text.” Guild Wars 2 eliminates the typical grind with a dynamic event system that creates an organic, living, breathing world around the player. They may find a village under attack by Centaurs, and decide to intervene, and that spawns quests accordingly. Or maybe they let the village burn down and that leads to repercussions with quests attached. Maybe they save one particular villager who is a weaponsmith, and the player can then start taking missions from him. Whatever events a player experiences, they will chain off to many more events, all of which are determined by the player’s actions, or inaction, and these become the quests by which the player earns experience and levels up.

HardwareCanucks offers a video of their hands-on time at PAX.