Guild Wars 2

[TheMeekon]

Ah that's interesting thanks

So could you chuck enough money at it with the best tech etc and make it work or do you think because of the graphical quality today's computers/connections would just fail at the requirements?

Speaking to our tech department I think it's more of a management/money/user experience problem than a tech one.

Either keep it simple like WoW, stylised, mainly diffuse texture based or go to town with all the eye candy but suffer loading screens/instances.

These things have to scale as well for the target audience so you have to be careful with lighting/shadows etc.

I don't understand how server loads, the code etc work so I'm talking about art here.

 

[TheMeekon]

I don't know much about game-design, but all I can say is that other games have managed to have relatively beautiful, portal-free worlds! GW2 is a great looking game but - pardon my blaspheme - it's not that stunning. I would much rather turn down the graphics detail a notch and be able to run from one zone to another. It's just part of the 'massive' experience.

I agree, they need to find a balance with these things. Swtor suffers badly from this and disconnected me from the experience.

Another point here is that you need the people to be able to do this. If you don't have the staff that can manage and produce this you need to be realistic. We develop for handheld and insanely complicated getting it up and running. I cannot imagine the experience and management dedication it is needed produce an MMO. Maybe Blizzard snapped up all that experience and everyone else is catching up!

Working on a GTA like world with an expansive world is bad enough (I've worked on one title). You have one player but now x that by 1000s and stick them in the same environment. Splitting this all up into chunks makes it more manageable in all aspects.

 

[Ripcord]

I played 3 char characters over the weekend, warrior, guardian, and the last was necromancer.I really loved the necromancer, and found i leveled up much faster than the other two.

 

[No1newts]

So it might be money then. No fact to base that on but I am a little surprised, a potential drawback of the FTP model they have trumpeted.

Still, great gameplay would make up for this

 

[No1newts]

Re-posting this, as the last 5 pages have been punching each other in the face.

Did anyone find any decent combo skills?

As an elementalist I was having a blast setting up combo fields and firing arcane blasts / arcane waves.

As a warrior w rifle it was more of a case of trying to position combo fields in between the targets. The sniper trait made this a little more involved as it then became an effort to line up combo field - target - more targets as the shots pierce.

Edit - guys can you post on this to give it some attention: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/suggestions/Trait-Feedback/page/1#post80078

I think some of the trait descriptions are dire and it really makes picking and choosing difficult, advanced tooltips would be an awesome addition imo.

I didn't play mate but how do these combo things work? They sound quite interesting.

 

[TheMeekon]

Out of interest can someone list me MMO's that have seamless worlds to an extent like WoW.

Newts, I think its the complexity of it. Money comes into everything, as developers we would love a relaxed milestone with all the tech and staff hired with experience.

Age of Conan, Warhammer and the last 5 years releases have instancing so I doubt its a problem with the FTP model but I understand where you're coming from.

I would take the seamless experience over the eye candy by the way.

 

[9TurningMirrors]

I'm confused. I thought GW1 had content streaming long before WoW took it onboard?

 

[TheMeekon]

I'm confused. I thought GW1 had content streaming long before WoW took it onboard?

Playing the game while downloading content is a different system but uses the same tech. It simply allows you to play the game while downloading it. Doesn't effect performance.

Inkursion was talking about actually streaming/processing the data from the storage to the display.

 

[9TurningMirrors]

Ah, okay.

I'm really looking forward to GW2, TL2 and D3....hopefully I will get enough time between work, course work and IRL to play them all! Although I'm going to effectively need a new PC, I think.

 

[Smite]

It was actually my single biggest concern on the official GW2 Forums, too. When I first reached the end of the massive and awe-inducing Human quest zone and witnessed an instance portal... my heart positively sunk . This isn't an MMO, in my opinion. Every single mainstream MMO that I have played which uses this 'loading portal' system really shatters the illusion, for me at least, of playing in a large and persistent world. I don't know why, it just seems like a real atmosphere ruiner. It sucks when you realise that the higher level players are actually playing on an entirely different shard of the server to you, separated by several discrete zones; it also makes each quest-zone just seem more like a large levelling sandbox, rather than a zone with any contiguous relation to a wider 'continent'. There is no continent, per se, it's just a chain of quest-zones stacked next to one another with instance portals.

I did have to seriously consider asking for a refund when I discovered this. I can't explain why it feels so important and integral to the MMORPG experience. It's just something intangible and hard to qualify.

I would say EVE is an MMO. EVE has warp gates, you can't just fly between systems like that.

Not having a pop at yer, just an exception to your rule that was way too AHMAGAD MUST MENTION for it to stay in my head.

 

[ThomBassmonkey]

Surely the concept of an MMO is that it's a game where a large amount of people can interact with each other.

I don't understand why people (including the devs) don't class GW1 as an MMO. Technically you could interact with anyone on the game on any character, you can't even do that on WoW (you'd need to make a new account to interact with people in a different region).

GW2 is definitely an MMO, you can interact and even fight alongside anyone in the game. Just because they're in a different shard at a given time, it doesn't mean they're not there.

 

[No1newts]

Out of interest can someone list me MMO's that have seamless worlds to an extent like WoW.

Newts, I think its the complexity of it. Money comes into everything, as developers we would love a relaxed milestone with all the tech and staff hired with experience.

Age of Conan, Warhammer and the last 5 years releases have instancing so I doubt its a problem with the FTP model but I understand where you're coming from.

I would take the seamless experience over the eye candy by the way.

Top of my head only WoW and Rift.

Pretty poor to be fair, as others have said I would sacrifice a little eye candy for a real world. I like the escapism mmo's offer and a seedless world only adds to this.

Slight direction change, did anyone play engineer in beta? Thinking of that class for my main and feedback would be appreciated

 

[InKursion]

I would say EVE is an MMO. EVE has warp gates, you can't just fly between systems like that.

Not having a pop at yer, just an exception to your rule that was way too AHMAGAD MUST MENTION for it to stay in my head.

I guess the significant difference is that EVE foregrounds its content-loading with something plausible and not immersion ruining. A warp-gate is conceivable and fine - it's like the ship between continents in WoW. You almost don't mind a loading screen then because you can accept, within the context of the game experience, that you are jumping some large distance.

Having to go through a portal to merely cross-over the liminal threshold between a level 17 and level 20+ area, however, breaks up the gameplay experience a little too much methinks. TheMeekon is right that this is unfortunately becoming the usual done-thing for graphically rich games. I'm still not sure why it's so important to me, it just seems to be one of those intrinsic things that I assign a lot of value to, if a game does it right. No real justification can be given! I guess I play my MMO's for total escapism and love the feeling of a whole other world to dip into with suspended disbelief. Haha. I like being able to say "okay, meet you [here]" to a friend in party-chat or guild-chat (or maybe even Teamspeak, sssh!) and then walking there and meeting them. It makes the world feel huge and actually alive.

 

[windheaven]

has anybody run a gtx 680 system on guild wars 2 yet, infact has anyone run a 680 sli setup on it?

im asking because i wanted to get an idea of how much video ram world vs world pvp in guild wars would take up, considering each map can fit 1200 players 300 players per zone (4 zones) surely would stress a gpu.

Plus i hate playing pvp on that scale, under 40 fps not smooth for me.

 

[HeX]

The BETA isn't optimised in any way shape or form for GPU's yet so it wouldn't be a useful test. Plus AFAIK SLi and CF currently don't work in GW2.

You're going to have to wait until closer to launch to find that kind of info out.

 

[Goates]

has anybody run a gtx 680 system on guild wars 2 yet, infact has anyone run a 680 sli setup on it?

im asking because i wanted to get an idea of how much video ram world vs world pvp in guild wars would take up, considering each map can fit 1200 players 300 players per zone (4 zones) surely would stress a gpu.

Plus i hate playing pvp on that scale, under 40 fps not smooth for me.

The Beta this weekend wasn't optimised at all as they were testing CPU performance etc so no one can really answer that. But from what I experienced once the game actually uses up all my CPU and GPU power it will not be that hard to run even in large scale WvW situations.

 

[Spektor]

Surely the concept of an MMO is that it's a game where a large amount of people can interact with each other.

By that definition any game with online functionality would be an MMO.

Typically an MMO just denotes the amount of players able to play on a single server being way beyond what you would typically execpt from other genres like FPS games. However that definition has become extremely blurred, with FPS games offering persistent characters (although not world) as well as various 'MMOs' using instancing so extensively to the point where you could play with more people on a random FPS game server.

Ultimately I just wouldn't worry about what to define it as, just take the game on it's own merits of what you want out of it and what it offers.

 

[InKursion]

TBH in games with the content broken up into many sandbox-shards, the only truly 'Massive' thing about it is the /Global chat pane (if it even has one )

 

[Smite]

snippety snip

I agree that *certain players* can be blind to some of the earlier tough as nails incarnations of these raids; as someone who dislikes WoW, its more on the basis that levels 1-80 is a bit too formulaic and easy to be honest, even the newer raids are a shadow of Vanilla raids (not a vanilla player, but i don't doubt the difficulty). I agree also that GW2 may not ever reach the levels of difficulty seen in these raids that existed, purely due to a lower probability of mess ups.

That said, I would suggest that WoW's difficulty was due to the higher probability of mess-ups not due to the mechanics as such, but more due to the act that higher amounts of players had to be orchestrated. For me, that is an artificial difficulty, and one that I personally feel, is a cheap way to make something hard. What is being tested is not your execution often (the actual ideas of not dying are actually pretty simple) but its your ability to co-ordinate with a larger group of people; nothing intrisicly wrong with that, in an MMO, its good, but the idea that its more likely to wipe due to one chap out of 40 walking left instead of right accidentaly, is not a sign of game mechanics creating difficulty, but instead a sign of the amount of people creating difficulty. Even if it ends up being less-wipey in GW2, to that singular player, I think it will feel more interesting and challenging because they have the license to place the execution barrier higher than they could if the game had 10/25/40 man's.

I'm not really disagreeing or agreeing with anyone here (except maybe disagreeing with Bhavv on the WoW point about early raids being tough) , I'm just saying GW2's difficulty will be of a different sort, and a complexity of a different sort; on a player to player basis, it will ask more of you, but on a group basis, it will ask less. Not to insinuate its going to be a zerg fest, far from it, but the chances of wiping because a player derped out is less, purely because there's less players.

I do agree that aspects of balance need to be addressed; but I think stuff like melee etc are going to be played differently in GW2 than in other games.

Top of my head only WoW and Rift.

Pretty poor to be fair, as others have said I would sacrifice a little eye candy for a real world. I like the escapism mmo's offer and a seedless world only adds to this.

Slight direction change, did anyone play engineer in beta? Thinking of that class for my main and feedback would be appreciated

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNK8cq3n4nk

This german engineer does unholy things with the enemy team. Bomb kit is best kit.

 

[Smite]

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