Guild Wars 2 beta: Quest mechanics

Last Updated on Monday, 30 April 2012 01:12 Written by Kadomi Monday, 30 April 2012 03:00

If you are not living under a rock, you’re probably aware that this recent weekend was the first of the closed beta events for pre-purchase customers of Guild Wars 2. I didn’t pre-purchase but was the lucky recipient of a beta key anyhow. As we’ve established you are not living under a rock, you might also be aware that Guild Wars 2 is striving to break the shackles of your typical theme park MMO à la WoW or SWTOR and instead promises a more open, innovative experience. As this weekend is not bound by NDA, I would like to share my impressions with you. But there are so many things on my mind that I decided to turn it into a 3 part series. The first part you are currently reading, about my experience with the new quest mechanics that GW2 introduces.

So what’s gameplay actually like? I have to admit it took me a while to wrap my head around it. It takes time to sort it out when you are used to a very established way of playing MMOs by moving from quest hub to quest hub. Once you are tossed out into the world after the level 1 tutorial you end up just outside your race’s capital with an enormous starter zone ready for exploration. The only pointer you are getting is to talk to a scout. Scouts in Guild Wars 2 serve an important function. When you talk to them, they will show a certain part of the zone map, and will point you to all Heart Quests in the immediate area. I was a bit slow when taking this screenshot, because it already fogged up the unvisited area again, and no longer shows the explanations for the heart quests. If I moused over the empty hearts, I would get an explanation and more importantly the level of said Heart Quest. Unfilled hearts are Heart Quests you have not yet completed. You can only ever complete them once. The map is pleasantly reminiscent of Google Earth. I really enjoy it a lot.

As soon as you approach the area with the heart, it will pop up in your quest tracker, describing the tasks you can do to help the questgiver. You don’t actually have to talk to them, but you can, if you need clarification on what to do. The Queensdale Heart Quests are all fairly rural and let’s face it, kinda boring. The very first heart takes you to a farm where you have the option of watering plants, feeding cows or flattening worm mounds, which inevitably leads to a pissed off worm trying to eat your face. You do all these actions until your progress bar for the quest has filled out to 100% and you are done. You receive experience and very little money. The quest giver turns into a vendor, for a currency called karma. Too bad you don’t have karma though, huh? In order to get karma, it never hurts to actually stick around HQ places. There are a number of dynamic events that might begin any time. For example, there’s the mother of all worms looking suspiciously like snatched right out of Dune, living right underneath the farm. There’s also a bandit attack where you have to defend the hay bales of the farm from 10 waves of bandits. You can kill bandits, or extinguish the burning hay using handy buckets of water standing around. There’s a huge amount of different events, and even though I have played through the three start zones multiple times, I always managed to stumble onto events I had not seen before. Soloing events is possible, but they were clearly designed with groups in mind. As mobs are not tagged in Guild Wars 2, you can help anyone anytime, and still get credit, and that’s what the events live from. You don’t need to be in the same party, you simply need to play with each other. Most support abilities that you have affect allies in your immediate vicinity, and again, it doesn’t require a party. Of course, with the gazillion of spell and particle effects going on, good luck figuring out what stuff you should stand in for healing, or you might suddenly stand in bad like a derp.

Unfortunately the group approach means that almost every single massive event I have participated in turned into a giant, laggy zergfest. Kinda like Rifts back in the day. I don’t know if it’s different in 5-man dungeons, but if you are looking for tactical, strategic fights in events, you’re not in the right place.

Deeper into Queensdale’s first area, you will come to an apple orchard that actually had the first chaining event that I noticed. The orchard is overrun with spiders, and in one of the dynamic events you have to take out every single spider in the orchard. Once you have done that, a spider boss will spawn, and need a group to take her down in a second event. For each event you will receive experience, money and karma points. This is where the karma vendors come in handy again because that’s how you will get the majority of gear upgrades. As you won’t do traditional quests, you are reliant on karma rewards and drops. The only quests that offer immediate rewards are the personal storyline quests.

As soon as you have completed your first HQ, you will receive a mail that will start your personal storyline quests. This weekend I played a street rat human mesmer, so her best friend Quinn asked her to come see him in their home quarter in Divinity’s Reach, the capital. Storyline quests are instanced and just about always difficult. It really makes no sense to even bother trying them if you are underneath the recommended level. Every single street rat story quest involved me going against huge numbers of bandits. The story quests follow a pattern. The first one is level 3, then level 4, and from that point on every even level. This means from the point of view of experience flow, you should do HQs and events inbetween story quests to advance. Once you have done all HQs in an area, it’s time to find the next scout on the map (they’re clearly marked) and move on. I found the flow from one scout area to the next fairly nice. You can also hunt for Points of Interest on the map, or skill challenges. Those usually involve fighting a veteran mob, but there are also challenges that are jumping puzzles. I wish more of them were puzzles. They reward you with an extra skill point so you can buy more abilities for your hotbar keys 7-9.

Exploration is a huge deal. In order to explore a zone 100%, you need to complete all HQs, find all fast travel waypoints, solve all skill challenges and find all Points of Interest. For 100% map completion, you actually get a reward. Not that I have ever seen what it is, because I usually fail at finding Points of Interest, and generally have struggled with skill challenges. In this beta weekend, I spent a good deal of time exploring Divinity’s Reach. I got 100% map completion there, but there’s no reward because there aren’t even any skill challenges there. Just very pretty sights. It satisfies the same exploration itch that I had in Rift when it came to locating artifacts. It’s fun. It’s a HUGE world out there, feels a lot more vast than any zone in WoW ever, and it doesn’t hurt that it’s a very pretty game, IMHO. I don’t have a great computer at all, yet I still manage to find the game very pretty. I took a couple high-res screenshots.

The gardens of the Queen's Palace in Divinity's Reach

One of the ramps in Divinity's Reach

Queensdale, lovechild of Elwynn Forest and Westfall.

I have a feeling humans will be a very popular race in GW2, and it might be an homage to WoW that the first zone Queensdale plays like a mix of Elwynn Forest and Westfall. There are the farms and copious amounts of masked bandits. There’s also tons of woods, wolves, bears and…centaurs. Who brought the centaurs from the Barrens? All three available start zones have a particular group as nemesis. Centaurs for humans, Sons of Svanir for norn and the charr have to battle the traitorous Flame Legion.

I have no beef with the quest mechanics in Guild Wars 2. I find them fun, even though some HQs are really mindlessly trivial and not the least bit heroic. I like that there are alternative ways to complete them all. Nevertheless, the experience is not as seamless as it could be. If you are very unlucky and no dynamic events are triggering while you are in the vicinity, well then, you are screwed. HQs alone give little experience, and even though Guild Wars 2 stated that this game means the end of grinding, that’s simply not the case. Without dynamic events you have to grind, and even painfully so. Killing mobs gives very little experience as well. What might help is that you buy tools to mine and fell trees, as the experience from doing that helps. You are dependent on dynamic events to keep you afloat on the experience curve, and hanging around simply waiting for something to happen, well, that’s not fun, is it? Yesterday, I got stuck because there simply wasn’t anything going on at the HQs I was doing. I somehow managed to miss the Queen Wasp event, and there were no other events firing. That is worrisome. Once you have to start grinding, it’s no longer fun.

In total, the quest mechanics are certainly different, and they require you to be proactive in your exploration of a map. I am hopeful that ArenaNet will smoothen out the experience so that you really move on without any need for grinding. It’s not as innovative as it’s made out to be, but it will certainly entertain me quite well.

In part 2 tomorrow, I will have a look at ArenaNet’s design manifesto for Guild Wars 2, and how I feel they did in reaching their goals.

Guild Wars 2 Beta: a look at the design manifesto

Last Updated on Tuesday, 1 May 2012 07:16 Written by Kadomi Tuesday, 1 May 2012 07:16

When did the hype cycle begin? I remember there was a time when people waited eagerly for a new release of a game, without heralding it as the second coming. But that was then, and this is now. Since the days of Warhammer Online, I have watched from the sidelines how games were heralded as the WoW-killer, the revolutionary MMO. The game changer. People go into those releases with a heightened sense of expectation, and not once have those expectations been met. This then creates jaded bitterness, until the next game is announced, and the hype machine begins anew. Keen once called it ‘The Vicious Pattern of MMO Rise and Fall‘, a practice he heavily participates in. No game seems to embody the hype cycle so much for me as Guild Wars 2 does.

Before I start looking at specifics of the game’s hype, let me make one thing very clear: I had great fun playing the GW2 beta. It’s a fun game. It’s definitely worth the box price once they have polished the game some more, and with no subscription fees at all, it’s a fantastic deal. It has challenging gameplay, tons of exploration, and that’s enough for me to find this more exciting than the upcoming MoP expansion. And yet I can’t keep quiet about feeling it’s hyped ridiculously, and people should be aware of that.

The hype cycle comes both from ArenaNet themselves and from their fans. Longtime Guild Wars players and hardened MMO veterans alike. Some call the people zealots because they have the tendency to swarm blogs that criticize GW2 and fling poo at them. That’s alright if this happens here today, just like Harry Dresden I can deal with flaming poo. I had the opportunity to check this game out before, and came back for this beta event, to have another look. So let’s look at ArenaNet’s GW2 design manifesto, and how I felt the aspects of it in the actual game. It sounds fantastic on paper! One thing you can say for sure, they’re definitely not having low expectations of themselves. Can they meet them, though?

…if you hate traditional MMORPGs, then you should really check out Guild Wars 2

What a curious statement to make. I actually don’t know how I feel about this statement. To me, Guild Wars 2 feels like an MMO that brings some innovations to gameplay, but it’s not revolutionary. You still kill mobs, collect loot, pick herbs, mine ore, complete quests. Sure, the way you receive the quests and experience might be different from the static quest givers we are so accustomed to from WoW and co., but the core gameplay is that of a traditional MMO.

Shouldn’t great MMORPGs be great RPGs too?

I really feel that people who enjoy RP in MMOs and who want to look into the lore of Tyria will have a winner here. The capital cities of Guild Wars 2 ooze personality, are enormous and even I, who never RP in MMOs felt that it could be so much fun to actually indulge in it here. Sunday afternoon, I spent a pleasant two hours or so exploring every nook and cranny of Divinity’s Reach, the capital city of the humans. It’s enormous, has several distinctly different city quarters, including fairgrounds, and is basically Stormwind-like, but on a grander scale. If you prefer the cold reaches, the Norn capital of Hoelbrak is equally grand, and feels very Norse alright. I also did some exploring around the Black Citadel, the fantasy-steampunk fortress of the Charr, which I found very fitting for the race, but extremely confusing. It’s a giant maze of metal ramps and machines, and was my least favorite capital. Nevertheless, in that respect, I feel RPers should be able to thrive. It’s a rich world, with enormous zones.

This section of the manifesto goes on to state ‘Each time you play through the game, you can experience a different storyline‘. Yes and no. The personal story in Guild Wars 2 is determined when you generate your character. You are asked to pick one of three origins. For humans, you have to pick if you are a street rat, a commoner or a noble. As charr, you have to decide if you are the militaristic Blood Legion, the cunning Ash Legion or the gadgety Iron Legion. The level 1-10 storyline is based on the origin. If you only enjoy human characters, you sure won’t have a different storyline every single time. Once you hit level 10, the storyline branches out again. Again, for humans, you have to make a decision of your biggest regret: never finding your lost sister, not joining the circus, or…some other option I just forgot. Then at 20-30 you have to run errands for three different organisations. The design manifesto states that you have to make decisions, and this is correct. There will be parts in the storyline where you have to make an executive decision. But if you compare it to the personal story in SWTOR, it falls incredibly flat. They’re not the same kind of storytellers that Bioware are. It’s not exactly helped by the voice acting being very inferior compared to SWTOR. I know that ArenaNet is probably still working on that, because I saw an announcement that Felicia Day is recording for Guild Wars 2. They better be replacing that female norn voice soon, it haunts my nightmares. You do have options with the story, but they’re not as diverse as they’re made out to be.

In this section of the design manifesto, my biggest beef is that they proudly announce their dynamic world, and how you can directly make an impact on it, citing the defense of a village as example. Unfortunately, it’s not anymore dynamic and world-changing as rifts are in Rift. Let’s take the Wayfarer Foothills, the norn starting zone. Around level 10 you reach a small town that is frequently attacked by Sons of Svanir, the crazy cultist type in GW2. You can stick around and defend the town as dynamic event. Should this defense fail, you can also participate in a follow-up event and defeat the invaders, retaking the town and the waypoint for quick travel. So yes, this type of defense is available in all zones. It ultimately feels pointless, because when you leave, and come back 30 minutes later, the dynamic event might have fired again, and the Sons of Svanir might own the town again. Nothing lasts forever, events are on timers, the only impact for me was that you can never really win. It gets as old as rift invasions got, regardless of how fun it is initially. And if you are actually on your own and just want to talk to a vendor, it’s a pain, because you get overrun in no time.

It’s time to make MMORPGs more social

Word, bro. With the advent of LFD, MMO players weened on WoW seem to have lost the ability to be social without the aid of a crutch like the LFD tool. I can only commend a game that is trying to bring back a social element. Questing is very public in Guild Wars 2. See what I did there? Welcome back to Warhammer’s innovation, public quests. Not that that saved the game. You do not tag mobs, so if you see someone out there killing the bandits you need to kill as well, you can go right along and help. You are a passionate crafter and see some ore? Hooray, because that dude over there rushing to get to it as well can’t steal it from you. Resources are shared, you both get the ore. You start a dynamic event, killing a huge spider, and then others come to join you? The spider scales accordingly, so the more people, the merrier. Those are all good things I approve of.

Do they really make the game more social though? I don’t think so. I have only been invited to a party once, when a guy and I tried to tackle a fairly difficult skill challenge boss in Queensdale in the bandit caves. There is no zone-wide chat at all, so if you are a solo player, you will not hear anyone talk whatsoever. You can only talk locally, with people in your immediate vicinity. The only time I have seen people talk in local was if you happen to resurrect them. If you run into a social person, they might thank you for the rez! Amazeballs. That’s about all the interaction I have had. Mind you, I am strictly speaking PvE. I have never been a PvPer in any form, so the experience there might differ hugely. I have also not been a member of a guild in the beta event. As you simply do not need to group to play with other people, you also do not develop any form of connection to other people. There is no need to have a friends list because you’ll simply join others, no word spoken. That’s my personal experience, and from reading beta forums, I know I wasn’t the only one with that impression.

The sidekicking system is a great social tool. You will automatically be kicked down to an appropriate level for segments in a zone. What will likely be wonderful for joining friends who join the game, is a giant PITA for solo play though. It’s a beta, so they might figure out how to solve this better. Currently, there are areas where you get knocked down to underneath the mobs’ level so you never really get the feeling that you are powerful. A group of level 8 mobs will be able to tear you apart if you are level 16 and sidekicked down to 6 because you wanted to go back to mine some copper. Been there, done that. Still, I won’t complain too loudly about this feature, because it offers amazing play value if you are a completionist. You can explore any zone below you in level without ever facerolling your way through it. Challenge in games is good! It’s actually one of the most innovative features for me.

Rethinking combat

Guild Wars 2′s combat system has been heralded as innovative, action-packed, ‘immediate, active and visceral’. It’s not in any form like combat in say, WoW or SWTOR, because constant movement is a requirement. This took me forever to get my head around. I kept dying and dying, until I got it into my head that I needed to move, constantly. I think in other games you can call it kiting or strafing. You have a dodge key for fast movement, but you also have a stamina bar which limits how many times you can dodge. In other words, be ready to get your circle strafe on. Is this highly innovative and awesome? Not exactly. It’s different. It’s also a giant PITA if your preference is to play melee characters because it’s inevitably much harder to circle-strafe and still stay in range for melee attacks. I’ll give Guild Wars 2 one thing. Weapon-swapping in combat is fantastic. GW2 has a very unique weapon system. Once you swap a weapon, you get specific abilities for that weapon. Your main hand weapon is abilities 1-3, your offhand weapon is 4-5 and 2H weapon is 1-5. As a warrior, you have a huge amount of possible weapon combos, and you need to learn all those abilities. To actually learn an ability you don’t go and see a trainer, you active use any previous abilities you have and learn the next ability after a certain number of kills. I have spent some time playing a guardian, and I can effortlessly swap from my ranged weapon set with scepter and focus to my melee set with sword and board and close in. The whole skillbar based on what weapon you are wielding can make a really boring profession become a fun profession to play. It can also be a pain because I feel that in a set of 5 skills per weapon-combo, if only one is really weak it might already make that combo obsolete because I am looking for five fun skills, not just four. It suddenly feels very limited if you are used to games that offer you tons of different skills. Compared to a WoW warrior, you don’t have a lot of buttons to push unless you’re not swapping weapons constantly, and playing that for 80 levels might turn into drudgery.

The design manifesto speaks about combos, and I have to admit, I don’t understand those at all. I have not once seen them in action. This might require a better tutorial. Combos, chains, finishers, they’re all a complete mystery to me after significant hours of gameplay. ‘Then we add environmental weapons to mix up combat even more.’ They are so-called bundles. They’re everywhere. Planks, boulders, metal bars, sticks, etc. If you pick them up, your skill bar changes. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Only they do significantly less damage than your normal weapons, and feel non-intuitive to use. When an elemental flings a boulder at you, you don’t really have the time to pick up the boulder, read what the abilities of the boulder are and then use them. Mobs are no joke, by the time you’re done reading, you have been downed. Instead, you simply don’t pick up the boulder. I have the same issue with the downed system. In Guild Wars 2, you do not die immediately, you are in a so-called downed state. You get a second health bar, four abilities and you have until the healthbar is at 0 to actually kill any mob. When you first get downed, prepare for some confusion, because it’s absolutely not clear what those abilities do. You are about to die! If you read the tooltips, you will be dead. Button-mashing, woo-hoo! Also, it’s not clear that you might want to tab target to find a mob at really low health so you have a chance to get back up. Once you understand the downed system, it’s fine, and it’s super-cool to actually get up again, quickly get off your self-heal and save the day. It’s also extremely frustrating if the mobs wipe the floor with you twice. Chain-downed state, I had it.

I know this all sounds incredibly negative, but it’s all an example how ArenaNet has turned on the hype machine from the get-go, and that might mean they shot themselves in the foot. Overhyped games that don’t fully deliver will pay the price, as Warhammer Online and SWTOR had to learn. I am always finding that if I keep my expectations low, the reward is much greater. Enjoy a game for the game’s sake, don’t go in expecting always expecting more. I am convinced that if WoW was released today, it would bomb. That’s the power of the hype cycle. I wish it was a cycle we would break.

I will go into Guild Wars 2 with realistic expectations: to have as much fun as it can offer me. Nothing more, nothing less. It does not need to change my world.

Tomorrow, I will post part 3 of my initial GW2 impressions that I had to get into written form, and ultimately, my biggest disappointment with the game: the presentation and over-sexualization of female characters.

Guild Wars 2 Beta: Barely covered

Last Updated on Saturday, 5 May 2012 11:46 Written by Kadomi Thursday, 3 May 2012 03:00

I love playing strong female characters. No matter what game I try, I tend to veer away from the overly-feminine character types and pick tough ladies that get the work done. My WoW main used to be an orc warrior, and I think their character model is fantastic. Sure, no pretty faces anywhere, but they are toned, strong, awesome, but also look good in a robe/dress. I also like the chiss and miralians in SWTOR, or the bahmi in Rift.

Obviously I had been looking forward to playing around with character generation in Guild Wars 2. Unfortunately I came out of this experience sorely disappointed. Of the three races that were available in the beta, both humans and norns left me disappointed. Guild Wars 2 has eight so-called professions, and three different armor types. There are warriors and guardians wearing heavy armor, engineers, rangers and thieves wearing medium armor and finally mesmers, elementalists and necromancers wearing light armor. In the case of female charrs, this is pretty much perfect. No matter which profession, they’re always covered and unlike, say, WoW tauren, there is no unnecessary addition of breasts or anything. They look like mean kitties with horns, and are pretty bad-ass. If you like running around on all fours. Takes some getting used to.

Problems begin when you start clicking through character generation for female humans. The heavy armor involves chainmail bikini, but nothing dramatic. The medium armor looks very good. Leather coats, pants, I thought it was all very cool. And then I stumbled across the light armor. Let me introduce you to the default look during character generation, for all three light armor professions:

The female human elementalist. Straight from an Asian MMO, eh?

Hello goth girl. Uh, I mean, human necromancer.

Live at the Moulin Rouge, the mistress of illusions, the mesmer!

Before someone accuses me of being a prude and that it’s the year 2012, bugger off. I am by no means a prude, and as gay lady, I enjoy a little eye-candy myself. It’s another matter entirely though if females are represented like that in an MMO that is supposed to appeal to the masses, not just hormone-driven teenage boys. Of the three light armor professions in their default armor (mind you, it’s not their starting gear), I can deal with the necromancer best. At least she has a certain goth style and is mostly covered. The elementalist looks like a belly dancer, not like the mistress of fire, earth, air and water. The mesmer? I cannot deal with. At all. Is this necessary? Garters, a middle part that is barely covering the assets, and a poofy skirt? Really? Ah, but maybe it’s just humans, and it’s better for norn women.

Gah, my eyes. Norn, so tall. So overwhelming.

Guess not. Norn in general have the problem that they’re basically a giant version of humans which on the women translates into big breasts. Not the race diversity I was looking for. Of course, I had to check out the male counterparts as well. Let me show you the male human mesmer.

I wonder if he would borrow me his clothes, this human mesmer.

He’s got all the poofy, flamboyant style that the female mesmers have, without flashing any skin. As mesmers have melee abilities, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? The two other light armor classes are similar. Long robes, pants, full coverage. All equally colorful, but the color of the gear is the least issue, as you can freely dye any gear in the game without any extra costs. Basically, Guild Wars 2 is all about the cheesecake and none of the beefcake. Ideally, for me you would at least have a toggle. I would want to be able to wear the male gear or robes in that style. But you can’t. In fact, you are locked into your mini-skirts. Even if you find a loot drop that says pants, it magically translates into a mini-skirt as female light armor. That just pisses me off.

But let’s move on. I was determined to torture myself and picked a female human mesmer for the beta event. The concept of the class is rather intriguing after all. In the next step of character generation, you actually get a first look at the starter outfit. It’s not as terrible as the default look, but not my favorite either. When you dig into further customizing your character, you will soon notice one thing: all Guild Wars 2 human ladies are teenagers. Fresh-faced, pouty, freckled. Two pages of faces of women I have no interest in playing. Barbies, one and all.

At the recent EU Fan Day in Brighton, someone asked questions about the human face being so young and pretty, and if there was no way to create a less attractive face. The disappointing response was that they want the human face to be one of idealized beauty. Pewter blogged about this a while back, and I am in full agreement with her. It’s just disappointing. Paeroka from Nerdy Bookahs recently posted her beta impressions post, and was very excited that ArenaNet apparently listened to the concerns. They added ONE older face. I am sorry, I can’t get excited about this, because it means we still have over a dozen young, ‘idealized’ faces, and just one that has some lines and doesn’t look like she’s 16. What a cop-out.

Nevertheless, that’s also what I went with. Picked a shorter haircut, and the older face, tweaked the face settings a bit, and voilà, an older mesmer in a frilly outfit. Not that it really mattered much which face I took, because mesmers hide their faces behind masks. Purple harlequin faces, wahoo. By level 8, I finally got a story quest reward to replace her pants. Uh, miniskirt. It replaced it with a miniskirt plus hose. I dyed the whole ensemble red and cream and was as satisfied as I can ever get when I play a character that is wearing a miniskirt.

My final beta look, after dying all of the gear in a different shade.

My biggest hope right now is that they’ll make asura and sylvari characters compelling without repeating the mistakes that I feel they made for the norn and humans. My biggest fear is that I am all by my lonesome self with my strong dislike for the overly sexualized character presentation in Guild Wars 2. In the beta, I mostly ran into female characters, at least for the light armor classes, so they’re probably a hit with the guys.

And that’s it for now for the beta coverage of Guild Wars 2, until the next beta event. Overall, I am likely going to be playing this game, if only to level to 80 and explore the vast world of Tyria. I find it compelling enough that the disappointing portrayal of female characters won’t drive me away. There will always be charr to play, I suppose! Also, they did things very right with the medium armor, after all. It’s not a total loss for me like TERA where I watched one video full of panty shots which was enough to drive me away forever.

Yet I am hoping that feminists will have a look at this game during the beta, and will raise their concerns, much like Milady from Hypercriticism already did. I think we need this discussion. I think ArenaNet needs to see it. While chances are fairly minimal that fundamental things will be modified, there is still room for change.

Update: I just found more great posts regarding the same topic, Dee from sixdee.net and Sunnier at Sunnier’s Art of War.