We spent some hands on time with Guild Wars 2 at PAX 2010, and came away both surprised and impressed by the game's ease of play, active combat, and streamlined game mechanics. From the moment you step into the game, it's obvious that Guild Wars 2 isn't cut from the same mold as other MMORPGs.
Our tour guide, ArenaNet's Global Brand Director Christopher Lye, guided and spoke with us we played a human Elementalist through the beginning stages of the game.
Every character has a story
Guild Wars 2 is built upon three key ideas guiding its design. The first is providing every character with their own unique, personal story—basically, a good, single-player RPG experience, with real benefits, consequences, and a sense of achievement that is far more satisfying and heroic than collecting 10 of anything.
The personal story is handled in an interesting fashion: basically, the game gives you an entire home town as your own personal, instanced home base. When you go to your town, you can do all the usual things you would do: buy items, visit the tavern, get quests, etc. But your hometown and the characters in it also serve to reflect the actions of your character.
For example, if an orphanage catches fire, you can rush to save it. But if you don't, your town will have a burnt orphanage (and maybe some angry orphans) sitting around in it.
The results of your choices both in and outside of your hometown will also be reflected by other characters there. In the aftermath of a tavern brawl (see Part 2), the city guard came to arrest us. But a commander whom we aided at the very beginning of the game (outside our town in the world at large) stepped in to speak on our behalf, sparing us a jail cell.
A vibrant, dynamic world
Grouping in many, if not most typical MMORPGs is frequently a chore and often requires a lot of preparation before the fun actually begins. How many times have you logged in to an MMORPG ready to rumble, only to spend 20 minutes waiting for the healer to show up?
To address this, Guild Wars 2 promises to be rife with dynamic events, designed to encourage players to group without the usual MMORPG hassles of grouping. The idea, according to Christopher, is to allow quick, easy grouping that anyone can immediately jump into if they so choose.
This idea isn't entirely new. Champions On-Line, for example, employs this mechanism. But Guild Wars 2 looks to improve upon and use this mechanism to an even greater degree.
Grouping issues are also addressed by making every class fairly self-sufficient, able to heal themselves from the brink of death and revive other players. You won't have to spend a half-hour waiting for that healer to show up so you can begin an adventure. You simply see an event—a massive monster might show up and ravage a town, or an explosion in the distance might draw your attention—and either jump in or not.
The difficulty of every dynamic encounter— and the rewards for getting involved—scale with the number of players. Monsters may even have new, more powerful attacks 'unlocked' as more players intervene.
Regardless of whether you jump into a dynamic event, the events spawn a chain-reaction and the effects will persist for minutes, hours, or even days. For example, if no one stops a group of bandits from poisoning a water supply, toxic worms will start spawning down river. If Centaurs take over a fortress, they may occupy it for days—or until someone comes and kicks them out.
Action-oriented combat
Turn-based combat is right out. Guild Wars 2 plays much more like an action RPG than an MMORPGs. This trend is echoing across the MMORPG landscape as more and more MMORPGs embrace it. It's likely just a matter of time before turn-by-turn mouse clicking is all but dead.
You can pretty much fight your way through hack-and-slash style with a mouse and hotkeys, crushing enemies and getting instant gratification while admiring the cool, spectacular things your character can do, even at 1st level. This isn't to say all tactics are removed from the game, but the typical click-swing sword-wait for cooldown-click sequence is gone.
Yes, there will be Dungeon Raids
Arenanet is pretty quiet about Dungeon Raids right now, but Christopher Lye did confirm there will be dungeons that require more planning and organization from grouped players than dynamic events require. Dungeons will cater to the more serious, hard core players who enjoy the large, organized raid experience.
Part 2: Game Play—Our experience as a Human Elementalist
Comments
I'm a little confused about what you're calling "dungeon raids."
There will be dungeons, and, as far as we know, the maximum number of people in a dungeon at any given time will be 5 people, the maximum party size.
When I hear "raids," I think of multiple parties organizing to form larger groups. While there will be dynamic events that require a decent size group of players to start it, we haven't really been told about anything that will require a large group of players and large-scale organization (like raids in WoW).
That was what our presenter (Chris Lye) called them. Perhaps a mis-step of the tongue. Essentially, they will be more like typical, organized instances probably more familiar to the 'core' audience for MMORPGs.
Please Please don't refer to another mmorpg when you talk about Guild wars 2
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