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A foundation for future growth: Examining LotRO's class restructuring
Let's start out with the elephant in the room: The comprehensive and radical class changes that are coming to Lord of the Rings Online with Helm's Deep have a portion of the community rattled. After all, we are protective of our characters and concerned about changes that affect them, and this looks to be a doozy. You want to hear a secret? Turbine's a little scared too. When asked if this might become LotRO's NGE -- the reviled shift in Star Wars Galaxies' gameplay structure -- the devs said it's something they've been asked a lot these days. They know that there's a part of the playerbase that's fearful, and in all honesty, the devs have had a few sleepless nights over the changes too. But past the fear is the certainty that this is the course the game needs to take right now, and that certainty grows by the day as they continue to test the changes on the beta server. The team told us as such during a class tour today, going on to show us the scope of what's going to happen. What we're looking at here is the old class trait system thrown in the trash to be replaced by specializations and trait trees, as well as the paring down of many class skills into a more manageable number. It's going to impact everyone all at once, so if this is your game of choice, you'll want to read on.
Custom-tailor your character with Guild Wars 2's traits and attributes
To many people, character customization is an incredibly important part of MMORPGs. We're not just talking about cosmetic customization, though; many of those players also want the freedom to customize how their characters play. The Guild Wars 2 team is well aware of this, and in fact the devs have released a new dev diary detailing just how players will be able to tweak their characters through the use of traits and attributes. Players who have been following GW2 up until this point may already be familiar with the game's four primary attributes: power, vitality, precision, and toughness. But the team decided that four wasn't quite good enough, so five more attributes were thrown into the mix. While these five new attributes (three for offense, two for support) offer new and exciting ways to customize your playstyle, the catch is that players can only gain points in these attributes through trait lines or gear. Each profession also gets a profession-specific attribute. For instance, Rangers get the empathy attribute, which increases the attributes of the hunter's pet. Traits, on the other hand, operate more like traditional MMO talent trees. Each class is given access to five different trait progression lines; each of these trait lines matches up to a pair of attributes that will be improved each time the player puts points in the corresponding tree. The trait lines also unlock major trait slots that can be filled with -- you guessed it -- a major trait to further customize the character's playstyle. But there's a lot more to the system than we can fit here, so click on through the link to the ArenaNet dev blog below and give the full blog a read.
