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Flameseeker Chronicles: Glitching in Guild Wars 2
Last week was crazily newsy in the world of Guild Wars 2. One might even call it newsilicious. Between a look at the next handful of months, an announcement about guesting and paid world transfers, and a developer livestream about rewards, WvW, and other stuff, last week was just ridiculously full of information. We'll be seeing the first bits of all that prophecy come into being on the 28th, when January's patch officially hits, bringing with it, among other things, guesting. The guesting announcement was fairly ill-received, due almost entirely to the news that it wouldn't work between North American and European servers. Up 'til now, you could always talk to folks from the other data center, but you couldn't actually play with them without transferring. Now you still can't play with them without transferring (and you can still talk to them), and people were really hoping we'd be able to do the whole guesting across regions thing. I'm hopeful that it will come in at some point, but I still can't see guesting as a net loss in any way. There's a lot of digesting to do with all that news, though, so let's start things off by not talking about any of it.
Flameseeker Chronicles: Hopes for the new year in Guild Wars 2
It's the dawn of a brave new year. Guild Wars 2 is still in its infancy, really -- ArenaNet's work in this year will do a lot to shape the future and lasting impact of the game. With apparently an expansion's worth of content coming out in January and February, this certainly promises to be an exciting year. I don't know whether the following things are predictions or hopes, but they can't be all that much more inaccurate than fondling sheep guts.
Flameseeker Chronicles: Environmental weapons in Guild Wars 2
Environmental weapons were one of the early aspects of Guild Wars 2 that ArenaNet could talk up and players could get excited about. They were kind of the poster child for the interactive world that ArenaNet has been building, so we as fans heard about picking up rocks, boulders, and buckets of water many times. However, rocks, boulders, and buckets of water won't nearly do for defining the scope of environmental weapons in Guild Wars 2. The team went kind of nutso in creating items, forms, and stationary weaponry to change how users interact with the world. Sometimes that interaction falls well short of the mark, but when it works, it's particularly beautiful.
Flameseeker Chronicles: Guild Wars 2 dungeons and dungeon talk
I finally had enough time set aside to head into a dungeon this weekend. We made it through the Ascalonian Catacombs story mode with considerable grace, and I'm hoping to progress through each story mode before doubling back to start on explorable versions. Having made more than 60 silver in coin and drops (and only losing a small handful to a single armor repair after the dungeon), I feel a bit better about the currency gain throughout the game. I've heard plenty about people giving up on certain explorable branches of certain dungeons because they were effectively losing gold due to armor repair costs, but I can't really speak to that yet.
Flameseeker Chronicles: What's your golden carrot?
On the Sunday of the most recent beta weekend for Guild Wars 2, I found myself trying to figure out precisely what incentive my friends and I might have to go through the explorable mode of dungeons before we hit level 80. The question arose, in a roundabout way, because there's not a tremendous amount of XP available (you spend more time killing fewer things), which makes sense if you're a developer trying to discourage players from entering a dungeon they have no intention of completing in order to farm experience, but it left us wondering whether we'd feel compelled to participate in explorable mode dungeons as we progressed through the game. The point of the matter is, unless you're well and truly enamored of the armor attainable through a specific dungeon's tokens, there might not be much empirical motivation to get through a repeatable dungeon. This stood out to me because so much of the game's reward structure is so clear and well-designed. Although I'll certainly never make the claim that the game will please everyone, or even that ArenaNet's fine folks are trying to please everyone, it is evident that they're building in support for a wide variety of play and reward styles.
In the beginning: Guild Wars 2 shows off Ascalon Catacombs intro cinematic
Dungeons without context tend to just blend in with the other 55,000 instances we've run in our MMO careers, so a gripping backstory can make all the difference in how memorable a good dungeon run can be. ArenaNet has released a new introductory cinematic for Guild Wars 2's Ascalon Catacombs that helps bring players -- those both unfamiliar to the Guild Wars lore and heavily steeped in it -- up to speed. A Charr narrates a slice of history from the first game, leading up to how this dungeon was created and why it's so full of teed-off ghosts. In an attached developer blog, Horia Dociu tells us why these cinematics aren't just window dressing but essential to the experience: "These cinematics play at the key moments of the story mode in each of the eight dungeons in Guild Wars 2, setting the mood and delivering valuable info. Stylistically, we're pushing the concept of a visual storybook as a form of communicating to the player -- we want the cinematics to feel like moving paintings." You can watch the full intro to Ascalon Catacombs after the jump!
New Guild Wars 2 dev diary details dungeon-building
Following the recent blog posts on Guild Wars 2's underwater combat and dungeon-building, ArenaNet's William Fairfield stepped up to the plate today to give players another inside look at what goes into the creation of the game's dungeons. The post focuses on two dungeons that William has been involved with: the haunted Ascalonian Catacombs and Sorrow's Embrace. It's a very interesting bit of insight into how one goes about building a dungeon for the game that claims to have done away with the fabled "holy trinity" of MMORPGs. Another interesting point is the focus that went into ensuring that GW2's dungeon mobs seem to work together in unison, rather than just being separate parts of a disorganized mob. There's far too much to cover in-depth in the span of a news post, so head on over to the official blog to get a delicious taste of dungeon-building goodness.
