Guild wars 2

[eidos]

One time fee and no sub means I'll likely pick it up to mess with.

I agree. I wasn't enthralled with it when I was in the beta, but it does have the lower monetary commitment to it which is nice for me when I become casual about a MMO.

[Fozzik]

This video does a great job of illustrating a bit of the complexity and depth to the dynamic events system...and how ArenaNet really built life and personality into the world. For folks who are having a difficult time understanding these systems, it's a great example. Remember that this is a starting area (low-level), and events only get more complex as you level up.

I've never seen an MMORPG come anywhere close to doing this type of thing. This guy goes through and follows each NPC in a particular area as their overall story plays out right in front of the player in real time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CyqGJHTjes

[Dubhridir]

Well here's a very good article from someone with an open mind, its a bit of a long read,.... But I pretty much agree with everything the writer is saying.... And yes its in support for GW 2.... But none the less, the writer still makes very valid points all around.. Bossner don't bother reading, you probably won't like it

http://www.gamermc.com/2012/05/06/gu...utdated-genre/

[Fozzik]

Thanks for the link. Also, for those who don't follow Facebook, ArenaNet has been giving out some fairly awesome concept art. Check it out...the original sizes are gigantic and work great for wallpaper.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/arenanet/

[Altha]

On today for the stress test. Eternal Grove.

[Fozzik]

I'm a charr warrior (Fozzik) on Tarnished Coast.

At least I think that was the server...

[Fozzik]

New blog post with a very cool and inspiring story. Talk about building some backstory into your NPCs!

http://www.arena.net/blog/meet_ameranth
http://www.sunjournal.com/news/city/2011/10/24/seeking-adventure-monmouth-woman-walks-across-country/1102457


I actually ran across this NPC in Black Citadel, and listened to her story. I had no idea it was based on real life. Very awesome.

[Dubhridir]

Just to give you an idea on how massive this world is... this is just a short walk through of the human city of Divinities Reach.... I've never seen a city this huge in an MMO before lol Well this huge and looks this beautiful.... God I can't wait lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6e9XNCFlqQ

[Fozzik]

Here's another great video made by the same guy who did the dynamic events video I linked above.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbWn6...eature=g-all-u

He discusses some of the attention to detail and complex elements of the graphics.

[Dubhridir]

This was taken from an article written by one of the mods for guildwars2forums.com....
And I agree with everything he says at the end....

Six Things People Say about Guild Wars 2 that Simply Aren't True

In my journeys I've visited lots of forums and read tons of comments to posts about Guild Wars 2. Naturally not all games can be all things to all people, and obviously there are people who won't like Guild Wars 2 for completely legitimate reasons. I have nothing against these people, and hope they find a game that is more to their liking. What does bother me is when I read something in a comment or on a forum that is demonstrably untrue. While it's silly to believe everything you read on forums, some people are just silly. So this blog post.

1. Guild Wars 1 was instanced, and Guild Wars 2 is the same.

This is complete rubbish. Guild Wars 2 has a larger persistent world than most MMOs at launch, and even a larger world than many have years later. Tyria is huge in both area and in scale. Walking around the persistent world in Guild Wars 2, it's hard to imagine anyone saying the game is mostly instanced. There are instances of course. There are dungeons and there's your personal story instances, but the majority of the world is open world.
What causes some confusion here is that Guild Wars 2's large zones are connected by portals. The same thing can be said for Age of Conan, but no one every said most of AoC is instanced, even though there are instances within it. AoC is a true MMO with a persistent world and so is Guild Wars 2.
It should be noted that the zoning in Guild Wars 2 is a good thing. Due to the dynamic event system, Anet wants to keep zones from getting overcrowded, so they've developed an overflow server technology. The overflow servers keep people playing, even if the persistent world is full. It keeps the quality of the game high without anyone ever having to wait in a queue. Because once you're on an overflow server, you can just keep playing. There are other people around, just like the actual world and you can quest, run dyanamic events and even PvP, even if your world is currently full.
To be fair, there have been some beta bugs with the overflow system, particularly with regard to keeping groups together, but Anet is aware of and working on this problem.

2. Guild Wars 2 is predominantly a PvP game

Another entirely questionable claim. People are simply mistaking the idea that Guild Wars 2 games aren't PvE-centric, like many other MMOs. In fact, most big MMOs are centered around PvE and PvP is an afterthought that they throw in to get more subscriptions. Guild Wars 2 is different.
The Guild Wars 2 staff is quite large, over 200 employees, and some of them are PvPers and some are PvE'ers. Both sides of the development team take the game seriously, so much so that in Guild Wars 1, PvP and PvE skills are divided, so that one side doesn't affect the other.
More to the point, Guild Wars 2 has a personal storyline that spans all 80 levels of your character. Unlike most games, that story can vary even if two people are the same race and profession. So if I generate a human necromancer and you generate a human necromancer, we can still have different experiences in our personal storyline, because you might be poor and I might be a noble. Or if we were both Charr Engineers, we could have different storylines because I could be part of the Ash Legion and you could be part of the Iron Legion. The same is true for all races. These stories branch and branch again, so at the end of the game, two characters are unlikely to have the same story.
Also Guild Wars 2 has over 1500 dynamic events, that replace the traditional questing model, plus your personal story, plus a type of content known as renown hearts. In fact, Guild Wars 2 is in many ways a throwback to games of old, providing a huge world with emphasis on exploration. There are so many hidden areas, jumping puzzles, open world dungeons even...Tyria is made to be explored. You won't have quest givers leading you around by the nose. You'll walk into the world and go where you want and see what you want. I'd argue that Guild Wars 2 has more and better PvE than virtually any MMO on the market, even going down the route of having 4 different paths through each dungeon, with dynamic events in the dungeons changing them up further. So even though the game will release with only 8 dungeons, there are actually 32 different ways to play those dungeons. 8 of those are simpler story mode dungeons while 24 of them are hard as tacks elite explorable mode dungeons that require dedication and practice to beat.

3. Melee Classes Are Broken

People who aren't used to playing games with active dodge, or who are more used to other games where heavy armor means you can stand there like an imbecile and get smashed in the face with a hammer will definitely have a problem with Guild Wars 2. Guild Wars 2 has no tank class at all, and you can't sit back and depend on someone to heal you. While the Guardian is clearly tankier than the warrior, for example, if a guardian was to run in and stand in the middle of a huge battle, he'd go down pretty fast. That's because Guild Wars 2 isn't designed for you to stand there.
In order to be successful in Guild Wars 2, you need to move, you need to dodge and occasionally you'll need to retreat to regroup your strength. This is why EVERY SINGLE PROFESSION in Guild Wars 2 has access to a ranged weapon, which can be swapped to on the fly in combat from level 7 onward.
To be sure, there are slight imbalances between melee and ranged, and Anet will make minor adjustments, but that's what they'll be...minor. Those who have gotten the hang of playing a melee class in Guild Wars 2 (there are plenty of them) will back me up on this. Just ask Scott Hawkes (of Gamebeaker.tv fame).

4. Guild Wars 2's Cash Shop is Pay to Win

This is one of the sillier comments I've seen around. Obviously anyone who's played a pay to win game will immediately see it's not true. What I think is happening here is that people who haven't played p2w games are looking at the cash shop compared to something like WoW's cash shop, which only sells cosmetic items, rather than convenience items. Of course, WoW also has a monthly fee in addition to the cash shop items so in reality, Guild Wars 2 is really replacing the monthly fee with convenience items, something I don't mind at all.
Another thing that adds to this misconception is how gear works in other games. Let's pretend, for argument sake, that it takes a month to reach max level in Guild Wars 2. At that time, everyone is pretty much on an even playing field because everyone will have similar specs. You can get many different looks and styles to differentiate yourself from other players, but at the end of that day, that dungeon armor you worked so hard for won't be any better stat-wise than the armor I've crafted or that my wife has bought with karma. The power of the item is the same (or at least equivalent, if focused on different stats). For example one might give you more health and one might give your more armor, but you're trading health for armor. One isn't better or more effective than the other, though each will fit better with different play styles.
So after a month or two everyone will be walking around with equivalent specs. The cash shop will allow you to buy experience point buffs to get you there faster, or magic drop buffs that will give you a 10% chance of getting an addition magic item from drops for an hour. At the end of the day, that might mean that someone will have a new weapon a few minutes before another player who doesn't use that buff. Even the karma buffs still require you to play, and a player who does a couple of extra events will end up with the same karma as a player who used the buff. Karma is easy to get anyway. Will it make a difference in game play? Sure, for as long as it takes for a player who doesn't use that buff to get enough karma to upgrade their equipment. So far, without the buff, I've been able to upgrade to every single piece of gear that would do me any good. I'm not even sure why someone would waste their money on a karma buff.
And none of this affects structured PvP at all, because in PvP everyone is raised to level 80 and has every skill and item unlocked for their use while they're in PvP. No buff sold in the cash shop has any effect on structured PvP at all. Everyone there has a completely level playing field, so the cash shop will never affect the outcomes of structured PvP in Guild Wars 2.
The only possible argument people can give is that it will affect WvW PvP, and perhaps, in that, there may be some small truth. It will affect it for the first month of the games life cycle, until most players are level 80, after which it will have negligible affects. First of all, stronger buffs than you can buy in the shop are avaiable free in game through crafting, karma rewards, and influence rewards purchased by guilds. By comparison the rewards we're talking about from the cash shop are laughable. Beyond that, these battles are huge two-week long affairs, between hundreds of people on three different servers. How a single player's one hour buff will make any difference at all, I can't imagine. Because those buffs are available to everyone anyway, if they want to spend in game gold to get them instead of cash. Let's be clear on this.
Gems to use in the cash shop are available also for in game gold. While no one knows how much they'll cost, certainly some people will put the time and energy into farming gold in order to buy buffs. Either way, the game isn't pay to win, since a number of people will have access to those buffs without paying a cent.
What these buffs can do is to help PvE'ers get to level cap faster, but in Guild Wars 2, as with Guild Wars 1, the end is just the beginning. Once you max out your character stat-wise there's still plenty to do. The dungeons are still waiting, elite dynamic events will still be there and, unlike other games, you can even explore and enjoy earlier zones due to down-scaling so the entire world (and it's a big one) can become your playground. There's no reason for you not to go into earlier areas, since drops are scaled to your level, not to the area.
Games that are pay to win allow you to buy permanent stat increases that you can't get in game, or weapons and armor that you can't get in game. Guild Wars 2 simply isn't p2w.

5. Dynamic events are repackaged quests, the kind you find in every other game

On the surface, this might seem true. It's not very hard to see how someone might mistake this. After all, in most games, you have to kill a certain number of creatures, or you might have to defend an area against attack just like a dynamic event.
To further add to the confusion, a lot of people see renown hearts as dynamic events...they're not. They're a completely different type of content, closer to quests than dynamic events are, but still different. For example, renown hearts all give you multiple ways to complete them. It doesn't matter which you do. If you happen to be at the shrine to the bear spirit in the Wayfarer Foothills, you'll find a renown heart that asks you to either wipe blasphemous marks from the cave walls, feed fish from traps to hungry bear cubs, or kill the Son's of Svanir who are trying to desecrate the shrine. Any combination of things will help fill the meter to complete the heart, thus turning the heart NPC into a karma vendor from which you can buy rewards any time you want using the karma currency. Even this is different from traditional questing but it's still not a dynamic event.
Dyanmic events are truly dynamic, however they might not seem so, particularly in the starting area, the place where most people so far have encountered them. Let's look at how a dynamic event differs from a traditional quest.
First, when you quest in most games, the quest is something you do, and the person behind you does the same thing. In other words, if a guy's house is about to be attacked, and you do nothing in most games, it will remain standing. On the other hand, if no one helps that guy in Guild Wars 2, the guys house will indeed be attacked and perhaps destroyed. This means the world is actually persistent..which isn't to say it's permanent. I mean, in the real world houses get leveled and rebuilt all the time and the same is true in Guild Wars 2. However, for a time, that demolished house will remain demolished and, if the man who owns it is dead, he will stay dead until rezzed.
Events in the earlier areas, however, are less chained together than they are in later areas and, because the earlier areas are particularly crowded right now (the game is in beta and two of the starting areas are closed), the times between event repetitions is artificially increased. A week or two after launch and that all goes away.
In higher level areas however, events do chain, and the persistent results of those events continue to affect the world. This is in counterpoint to a game like Rift where invasions happen all the time, but if you ignore them they go away. In Guild Wars 2 that's not the case. The reason Rift had to go this route is because they kept traditional questing in the game and overrun quest hubs was no fun for people who wanted to play their character. Guild Wars 2 does things differently.
If an area is overrun by the enemy it remains that way until you do something about it...or someone does. In fact some events happen whether players are around or not. Furthermore, events chain. If centaurs take over a town, they will own that town and often that waypoint, preventing you from being able to use it, or the merchants in the town. But then the centaurs might start cutting down trees to make siege weapons to reinforce their ability to defend the town against recapture. This will lead to a dynamic event, where you have to prevent the centaurs from making those weapons, because if they fortify the town it will be harder to take later. If they succeed in building those weapons they might spread out more. They might start raiding nearby settlements or they might destroy a nearby bridge. Sure the bridge can be rebuilt, but that's another dynamic event. Events are related and change based on whether you fail or succeed in the previous one. More so, dynamic events can overlap, thus changing how an event plays completely.
The further you get into the game, the more you'll see that dynamic events unlike traditional quests actually change the world for a period of time. The more you'll start seeing how they're linked together and the more you'll start seeing why this makes for a living/breathing world.

6. Guild Wars 2 is a game for button mashers and requires no skill.

Of everything I've heard, this is the silliest of them. I'm assuming the people who claim this to be true didn't bother PvPing, but even in PvE it's not true. It is true in crowded beta starting areas, where everyone is congregated into huge zergs that run around taking out everything in their path, but go into the level 20 plus areas on your own and try to mash buttons. You won't get very far. If you don't learn when to dodge, when to use which skills, you're going to be toast.
As an example, my ranger has a knockback skill on his long bow. If I use it every time its off cool down, I might not have it available to use when I really need it. I mean some foes can two-shot me. Having that knockback ready and available for use is damned important.
Nor is dodging the ultimate panacea for such encounters, since dodging can't be done continually. Dodge too frequently and you use up your stamina and won't be able to dodge when you really need to.
There are so many examples of how you'll need to think before you use a skill, that I can't imagine anyone who's actually gotten deeply into the game can believe otherwise.
That said, there will be easier encounters and harder ones. Let's see someone try to do some of the harder ones, just spamming abilities. Maybe in a group you could get away with it, but then you wouldn't be pulling your weight.

Guild Wars 2 is obviously not going to be the perfect game for everyone, but after playing it for many hours, I can safely say that it's the best MMO out there for me, a player who loves immersion, exploration, PvE and a player who dislikes cash shops generally and hates p2w games. If you're not going to buy into the hype (and I see no reason why you should), try not to buy into the unsubstantiated negativity posted on some forums by players who don't know any better, or didn't give the game a chance. And always remember, a lot of people who post negative comments about games are simply trolls who don't even believe what they're posting. They're just trying annoy people like me.