“I swung a sword... I swung it again!� Eric Flannum talks about active combat in our 2 part article! Pg. 1 Jon Peters gives us a morbidly refreshing look on healing and death, give it a read on Pg. 2 Colin Johanson and Ree Soesbee talk about the new Dynamic Events system and Personal Stories on Pg. 3 &4
Skills One of our priorities in developing Guild Wars 2 has been to make the simple act of moving around and interacting with the world an enjoyable experience for our players. We often refer to this as introducing “joy of movement” into the game. This means being able to jump and swim freely, but it also translates directly into combat. To reinforce the importance of movement in the game, we want your character’s position in combat to really matter. You’ll see a lot of attacks in Guild Wars 2 that encourage and reward tactical player movement and positioning. To illustrate what I’m talking about, I was watching two of our game designers--Jon and Isaiah-play the other day. Jon is using his shield to deflect the fire breath of a drake, when Isaiah hits the drake from behind with a skill called Devastating Hammer, launching it into the air. The drake is sent flying over Jon’s head, who immediately turns and uses a skill called Savage Leap to impale and finish the drake right as it hits the ground.
Combat This was a very cool looking (and effective!) sequence of events that flowed very naturally from how combat in Guild Wars 2 works.
Much like in Guild Wars, the skill bar in Guild Wars 2 is limited to a set number of skills. Like a collectible card game, we provide the player with a wide variety of choices and allow them to pick and choose skills to create a build that best suits their particular play style. For example, one Guild Wars 2 warrior might decide to build his character around gradual damage which causes his opponents to bleed out, while another may choose to knock his opponents down, controlling their movement with slow, large attacks. Both warriors can choose to equip the skills that matter most to them. It is also very important to us that our skill system be simple to use, leaving the screen as clean and unintimidating as possible. All of this combines to give us a skill bar and skill system that’s a bit different than what you’d typically find in an MMO.
We want combat in Guild Wars 2 to really be visually appealing. We want you to be able to identify the skills being used at a glance and also have a good idea of what that skill is doing. Does a skill have an area of effect? Is it doing damage? What type of damage? Our goal is to design skills that are visually unique and explain them without overly complex skill descriptions. This has resulted in a lot of distinct and impressive skill effects in the game. Even a simple skill like fireball explodes in such a way that you can clearly see the area that they will affect. Beyond your typical fireballs and lightning bolts, you’ll see skills that create giant crushing stone hands, turn their users into massive tornadoes, and summon flocks of vicious birds of prey (a particular favorite skill of many people after they see it in action).
To provide additional variety to the mix, most professions can have two different weapon sets equipped and can very quickly and easily swap between the sets. For example, a warrior might keep a longbow or rifle for engaging foes at a distance, and then switch to a hammer when that enemy gets close. Elite skills are designed to be infrequentlyused, ultra-powerful skills that have a dramatic impact on the game. An elementalist can call upon the power of the wind to shapeshift into a tornado that knocks enemies around and inflicts heavy damage, while a warrior might choose to harness the power of Destruction, to make all of his blows inflict area-of-effect damage.
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Traits 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. Mastering Traits So how do you get all those traits to make a build? Good question. You acquire traits by completing profession challenges scattered throughout the world. For instance, you walk into an inn and persuade a shadowy stranger into telling you a rumor about a mysterious tome full of arcane knowledge. Or you challenge a legendary swordmaster to a duel while exploring Divinity’s Reach. Each profession focuses on different activities to develop his or her traits. Warriors train physically, bash stuff, eat stuff, and drink stuff. Elementalists, on the other hand, seek ancient knowledge locked in tomes or particularly powerful elemental locations. The different trait challenges accentuate the unique feel of that profession and really bring the experience of playing that profession to life. Your prowess will grow as you complete challenges that develop your character’s particular traits. The defeated swordmasters will teach you their age old techniques, allowing you to select the Swordmastery trait. Discovering the mysterious tome will allow you unlock the secrets of magical energy. To all you wouldbe heroes out there: go forth and adventure, and use the power of traits not for good or evil, but for awesome.
Healing and Death Defeat in Guild Wars 2 is intended to be an experience, not a punishment. Let’s face it: dying never feels great, even without a death penalty. As weird as it might sound, we decided to look into what would make dying a more enjoyable and memorable play experience. Rather than being presented with immediate failure, when a player loses all of their health in Guild Wars 2, they are put into “downed mode.” In this mode, the player has a number of downed skills they can use to target enemies and fight for a chance to survive. A downed player can still be attacked, which will send them into a defeated state, leaving them to either wait for an ally to resurrect them or to resurrect at a waypoint. Downed skills are less-powerful skills that a player can use in a last-ditch effort to turn the tide. A warrior might daze an enemy by throwing a rock. An elementalist might lock down their foe with Grasping Earth. While you are downed, if you manage to kill an enemy, you will rally, returning to life to fight again. When you rally, you are thrust right back in the action. This potential to rally from the edge of defeat adds greater drama to combat and gives a player some tactical control while in a state where they normally have none. Some professions will have special skills that will instantly rally a fallen ally. For example, when a warrior uses “I Will Avenge You,” and then kills an enemy nearby his fallen allies, his allies will rally. While you are downed or defeated, any other player can come to you and interact with you to bring you back to life. We call this “reviving,” and everyone, regardless of profession, can
do this starting at Level 1. If you choose not to be revived or rally, you can release to a waypoint. This brings up the world map and allows you to return through any discovered waypoint. The cherry on top of all of this: Guild Wars 2 will have a much milder death penalty. Players who have recently been downed several times will take longer to revive each time. If no one revives you, you can spend a small amount of gold to come back at a waypoint. It’s as simple as that, and why not? Why should we debuff you, take away experience, or make you run around for five minutes as a ghost instead of letting you actually play the game? We couldn’t think of a reason. Well, we did actually think of a reason--it just wasn’t a good one. Death penalties make death ingame a more tense experience. It just isn’t fun. We want to get you back into the action (fun) as quickly as possible. Defeat is the penalty; we don’t have to penalize you a second time. Simple systems like this, along with cross-profession combos, and the dedicated healing skill slot, help free players from the MMORPG shackles, and let us break the mold even more. We’re making players more self sufficient, but are also providing appealing ways for them to effortlessly work together to create a more inspired moment-to-moment experience. That is why Guild Wars 2 does not have a dedicated healing class. We have lots of people in our studio that enjoyed playing monks in Guild Wars and healers in other games. We examined what it was about the healer archetypes that people really enjoyed, and we took a look at what
it was about those archetypes that made the game less enjoyable. Then we created professions to appeal to those types of players. Support players want to be able to say, “Remember that one time when I saved you from certain death?” They want to stand in the line of fire and block attacks. They want to surround their allies with a swirling dome of air that keeps enemy projectiles from passing through it. It’s not about clicking on a health bar and watching it go up, it’s about being there for your friends when they need you. If you have played enough Guild Wars, or any other MMO with healers, you’ve sat around waiting for the right mix of professions before being able to continue. Or you loaded into Random Arena and both teams had two monks (or they had a monk and you didn’t), and you already knew the outcome of that game 99% of the time. But we’ve all had those 4v4 Random Arena battles where neither team has had a healer. Instead of not being able to
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kill anyone or being forced to attack the monk first, you can actually think about who to target, when to use your defensive spells, where to position yourself on the battlefield, etc. From the highest level of PvP, to the sieges of World vs World, to PvE in the far reaching corners of Tyria, that level of creativity and tactical freedom is exactly what we want combat in Guild Wars 2 to be about. We keep hearing other MMO developers espousing the “holy trinity” of DPS/ heal/tank with such reverence, as if this is the most entertaining combat they have ever played. Frankly, we don’t like sitting around spamming “looking for healer” to global chat. That feels an awful lot like preparing to have fun instead of having fun. Instead of the traditional trinity, every Guild Wars 2 profession is self reliant-not only can they all help each other by reviving in combat, but all professions have ways to build their characters differently to make them more versatile.
Dynamic Events When building an MMO, we had to examine every core piece of accepted content from traditional games in the genre and ask, “How can this be improved?” By looking at the traditional quest system used in basically every MMO ever made, we’ve come to the conclusion that quests have a lot of areas for improvement. To address these flaws, we’ve developed our dynamic event system. Traditional quest systems involve walking up to a character who usually has an exclamation point or question mark hovering over their
head and talking to them. From here, you get a massive wall of text hardly anyone reads that describes a horrible or totally mundane thing going on in the world that you need to help with. You run off, complete this task, then return and talk to this character again to receive another wall of text and a reward. Traditional quest systems rely on these blocks of quest text to tell you what is happening in the world; this is just an outdated form of storytelling. In Guild Wars 2, our event system won’t make you read a huge quest description to find out what’s going on. You’ll experience it by seeing and hearing things in the world. If a dragon is attacking, you won’t read three paragraphs telling you about
it, you’ll see buildings exploding in giant balls of fire, and hear characters in the game world screaming about a dragon attack. You’ll hear guards from nearby cities trying to recruit players to go help fight the dragon, and see huge clouds of smoke in the distance, rising from the village under siege. There is a second fundamental flaw to traditional quest systems: what the quest text tells you is happening in a quest is not actually what is happening in the world.
For example, in a traditional MMO, the character who gives you a quest will tell you ogres are coming to destroy the character’s home, and you need to kill them. You then get a quest which says, “Kill 0/10 ogres” and you proceed to kill a bunch of ogres standing around in a field picking daisies. Since every player in the game needs to be able to do this quest, the ogres will never actually threaten the character’s home - they will just eternally pick daisies in the field. The ogres aren’t actually doing what the quest says they are - the game is lying to you! At ArenaNet, we believe this is NOT good enough. In Guild Wars 2, if a character tells you ogres are coming to destroy a house, they will really come
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and smash down the house if you don’t stop them! By building a world where you see and hear the experiences, Guild Wars 2 will evolve the MMORPG genre by making a game world that feels truly alive. The core of this evolution is our event system, which allows the world to dynamically change based on actions and decisions made by the players. A single player decision can cascade across a zone, changing the direction of a chain of events until they dramatically alter the content played by players in a map. Other developers have tried to tackle this problem, but in Guild Wars 2 we go further. Where other multi-player quest systems were pass or fail - our
dynamic events evolve in response to player interaction and the outcomes they achieve. Where previous systems reset and start again and really don’t change the world, dynamic events chain and cascade across a zone and leave persistent effects in the game world after the event has ended. These are just some of the thousands of events we’ve designed in Guild Wars 2, where every action taken by the players will have direct, visible, cause and effect in the game world. Our new dynamic event system is putting the “MMO” back into “MMORPG”.
Personal Stories One of the challenges of a massively-multiplayer game is that in being inclusive to a vast number of people, it loses a lot of the personal interaction that makes single-player RPGs so much fun. When you’re looking at the games on the store shelf, it seems you have only two options - a game that you can play with your friends, or a game that has a satisfying personal story. The Guild Wars 2 design team believes that a game should have both. We believe that telling a story begins with creating a deep, realistic world. Player characters should be the focus as much as possible, and be offered choices and decisions that meaningfully impact the world around them. NPCs should have understandable motivations, real character flaws, and believable relationships with the player and with each other. Cities should feel like centers of activity. The world’s history should make sense. The original Guild Wars had already done a great deal of work in that direction - Tyria is an amazingly detailed fantasy setting, a rich and vibrant world. We wanted to live up to what we had done in the past, and carry it forward into our new game. There are several distinct, but intertwined, storylines in Guild Wars 2. One is the overall story of the world - the awakening of the Elder Dragons and their ravages and destruction across Tyria. Another is the rise and fall of the adventuring guild ‘Destiny’s Edge.’ We also have a personal storyline shaped for each character at creation. Choices a character makes in this storyline will affect their lives, their homes, and their interactions. Lastly, there are the ongoing stories of the world, with constantly changing events occurring throughout each region that allow the various factions, races, and individuals of the world to interact. Tyria is a busy place!
We’ve heard a lot of complaints that nothing you do in an MMO truly impacts the world. Fighting an epic enemy only to see him respawn a moment later, or feeling as if the most important thing you did today was murdering ten rats, can cause a game to have a flat, repetitive feel. In Guild Wars 2, we want to make sure your accomplishments are meaningful, and that story outcomes
story they will experience. Players can make multiple characters, choose entirely different answers, and see a completely different personal story experiencing a different perspective on the epic story as well. In this way, the game is not only more personal, it’s also more replayable, ensuring that each time you level a character, you encounter different aspects of Tyria. Tell Me a About Yourself…
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A character’s biography will influence their storyline immediately. Once you have created your character’s race, class, and gender, you may choose your physical appearance - and there are a ton of options! From there, you are offered a chance to answer several detailed questions about your character’s personality, history, and background.
have an impact. In short, Guild Wars 2 provides stories that are both personally meaningful and epic, and to do so for each of thousands of players - all within the same interactive world. Difficult? Yes. Impossible? No. When you first build a character in the world of Guild Wars 2, you are faced with many questions. What race will you be? What profession? Most MMOs ask that much, and the answers are fairly straightforward. But Guild Wars 2 takes character creation a step beyond. It offers the player an opportunity to go deeper, with another roster of questions designed to develop a character’s personality. These comprise a character’s ‘Biography,’ and cover relevant parts of the character’s history as well as their hopes for the future and the
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Home, Sweet Home...
A player’s biography choices immediately tailor physical parts of the game to their character. Each character is given a home instance, personalized to their biography choices, located in their racial capital - Hoelbrak for the norn, the Grove for the sylvari, and so forth. Within this home area, things are more personalized to your character. Your home instance never stops updating; as your character becomes more involved in their story, it will alter accordingly. Two norn will quickly differentiate their personal area through choices in the storyline. They will encounter different adventures, make different decisions, and their home will change to match their story. Our philosophy is that the player is the most important part of the game. ArenaNet is bringing to life a massive world of events, storylines, and characters - all we need is you. So now I just have to ask you one thing...
What is your story?
For more information check out the official website at www.Guildwars2.com Make sure you visit the official facebook page at www.facebook.com/GuildWars2
look for both Guild Wars 2 novels Ghosts of Ascalon and Edge of Destiny Available now