Guild Wars 2 Combat Articles: Healing and Death

The newest article for Guild Wars 2 brings us news of death penaltys and healing from one of the game’s designers, Jon Peters.

Let’s talk about healing and the traditional MMO trinity of DPS/Healing/Tank. Well, I guess the big thing is that there will not be a dedicated healing class(le gasp!), which will leave the monk profession either gone completely or as a fist-to-face action hero (One can dream). So what does this mean for your party? Well, for one, you don’t sit around with an almost-full party looking for a healer when you could be out bashing faces in. That’s always a plus in my book. Besides, players get their own special healing skill so who needs a silly healer? Read the rest of this entry »

Guild Wars 2 Combat Articles: Traits

This week saw the release of more enticing information for Guild Wars 2 in the form of Ben Miller, a game designer for GW2, talking about traits and their role in the upcoming sequel to ArenaNet’s hit MMO, Guild Wars. “What are traits?” you might ask. Well, according to Ben, “At a basic level, traits make you better at what you choose to do. You slot traits in order to modify skills and attributes. Once you have mastered a handful of traits they become a key component in creating your overall build.”

Now, I hate to compare, but this sounds similar to World of Warcraft’s glyph system, except more elaborate because that’s just what Anet does.

According to Ben, there will be 100 or so traits for each profession to master, which as you may guess, leaves a lot of room open for different trait-builds, and each profession will focus on different activities to learn such traits, so, for example, a warrior would train physically while an elementalist would study ancient arcane tomes. This will help to make each profession feel even more unique, which sounds fantastic to me.

Combine the trait system with the new skill system in Guild Wars 2, and I’m starting to see how players will be rewarded more for experimenting or even running unorthodox builds, which I’m already accustomed to. Ask anyone in my alliance about the guy who runs crazy builds that don’t work half of the time.

You can read the full article on the main Guild Wars 2 website and I suggest you do as I barely cover the article and it’ll help you get more excited for the release of GW2!

P.S. Guild Wars 2 will be at PAX Prime

End of the Week Notes, WWDC Has Ended

That’s right, today is the final day of Apple’s Wordlwide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco and it seems to have a pretty big hype, especially for the new (but not new) iPhone 4 which will bring some pretty cool features, like a 720p HD video recorder and a front-facing camera. I wish I could get one, but I guess I don’t have enough friends to warrant buying one. There were some other things that might interest everyone, but chances are you’ve already read up on it so we’ll leave it at that. you can tell I’m not a big apple guy.

On the gaming side, this past Thursday was to be the the beginning of the ‘Key to the City’ event for everyone who pre-ordered All Points Bulletin, but it seems that has been put on hold for…actually I don’t really know.

We’ve worked tirelessly to bring the service online, installing and configuring a massive amount of new hardware in our data-centres, to help meet the high demand and bring you the best experience we can. As we’re sure you’ll appreciate, this is a huge undertaking and unfortunately on this occasion, we’ve hit a number of installation delays.

Oh, okay, I guess that makes sense. So while I’m waiting for Saturday to roll around, the War in Kryta in Guild Wars is still raging on with new quests and bounties being given out, and there’s some more info on GW2 that I’ll go into more detail about in a later post!

Have a fun weekend, everyone!

P.S. I’m going to PAX Prime this September. Which is cool I guess.

What Will Be Your Story In Guild Wars 2?

It seems Ree Soesbee would like you to stay a while and listen, because she is sharing with players and fans how Guild Wars 2 will have a storyline for every player and how this will take shape in the upcoming sequel.

Right from the get-go Soesbee talks about the one major flaw in MMO story telling, that “it loses a lot of the personal interaction that makes single-player RPGs so much fun.” but that doesn’t stop these games from from having a strong and deep lore within the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Guild Wars 2, Elementalists & Combat Articles Part One – Skills

God dammit! I just got through posting my thoughts about the GW2 design manifesto when i’m hit with, well, the following.

Over on the main Guild Wars 2 site, there is an article by the lead designer for GW2, Eric Flannum, who will be telling players about the Races, Professions, lore, and game systems over the next few months. I’m giddy with excitement!
Read the rest of this entry »