GUILD WARS BETA KEYS

[Sol Invictus]

Guys. Go to Gamespot : http://www.gamespot.com/promos/guildwar ... _downloads

They are giving out free beta keys on a first come first serve basis. Game starts tonight at 12:01 am and ends on sunday midnight.

 

[Sol Invictus]

mmmmmmmmm

 

[Sol Invictus]

One question: where the fuck do I go to activate my account?

 

[Whipporowill]

If you're not a G-Spot complete dude - you'll have to wait, like me.

Or, huh. I got the key directly. Odd.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Bumfuck. I know there is an address you have to go to to activate the account. Gamespot are just being retarded by withholding it. Anyone with a preorder thing will have the instructions written. If anyone has the preorder can ya please post the address?

 

[Spazmo]

"The event will begin at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Saturday morning."

http://guildwars.com/events/faq.html

It's 12:10 AM Eastern now. Just sit tight for another three hours.

 

[Whipporowill]

Myself I have to get up in 4 hours anyway - to bad I just haven't gone to bed yet! As I'll be working I won't be able to get in the game for 12 hours from now either...

 

[Otaku_Hanzo]

Gamespot are just being retarded

Why does that not surprise me?

 

[Astromarine]

man, is this game sweet

 

[mathboy]

Is it possible to turn down the resolution and the level of detail? It hardly runs on my computer.

 

[Surlent]

REX U ROCK !
THNX MAN

I even had my old characters still there, cool.

 

[DarkSign]

DAMN DAMN DAMN....

I wanted to get in so badly but my wife (whom I actually put first) wanted us to go out of town.

sigh...why does it have to come out MIDDLE of next year! Ok. I can wait for a good game as opposed to World of Witlessness and EverCrap2

 

[Astromarine]

plan ahead for the weekend of Dec 4th. If you got a weekend pass from someone, and didn't use it, it will still be valid for the next event

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

I played the weekend thing in my free time. I'm still not too sure about this game.

For one thing, there's a lot of missions that really suck. The Prince Rurik missions, which all revolve around escorting an NPC moron around and making sure that he doesn't die. It's not so much an issue of him being moronic, but that is an issue, it's more a matter of wondering why you have to make sure he doesn't die. If a player dies, you can ressurrect them. If a henchman dies, you can ressurrect them. If Prince Rurik dies, the scripting kills all the players and the mission is a failure. Why is it like that?

Escort missions really aren't that cool in most games, and too many games have them. However, in a game like Guild Wars were ressurection is pretty easy and only takes some time, they make no sense. Keep someone alive or else everyone dies and you have to try, try again. Things like that pretty much suck.

In the open weekend, there was a mission that involved getting crystals to pedastals. If you got all the pedastals filled with crystals, your team wins. If the AI enemies do it, everyone dies and you're back to try, try again. While this might be a fun mini-game type thing, that sports arena style scenario takes place after a trudge through the jungle, killing lots of monsters, this and that, blah blah blah. To go through all that just to win something that seems more like a Tribes multiplayer game is fairly crappy.

That's one problem I see with this game. A lot of the missions are very long, and there are some questionable aspects to them. These are even more questionable when they occur near the end of the mission, which means you have to endure the whole thing over and over again. I can see a lot of people playing the game and getting feeling of Just get me through this one mission, maybe the next one is more fun. The problem will be that maybe, just maybe, somewhere down the road you'll want to try out a new character. That character will be inflicted with dealing with missions that may have given you a headache the first time around, but will be genuine torture the next time.

 

[Mendoza]

I played the weekend thing in my free time. I'm still not too sure about this game.

For one thing, there's a lot of missions that really suck. The Prince Rurik missions, which all revolve around escorting an NPC moron around and making sure that he doesn't die. It's not so much an issue of him being moronic, but that is an issue, it's more a matter of wondering why you have to make sure he doesn't die. If a player dies, you can ressurrect them. If a henchman dies, you can ressurrect them. If Prince Rurik dies, the scripting kills all the players and the mission is a failure. Why is it like that?

Escort missions really aren't that cool in most games, and too many games have them. However, in a game like Guild Wars were ressurection is pretty easy and only takes some time, they make no sense. Keep someone alive or else everyone dies and you have to try, try again. Things like that pretty much suck.

In the open weekend, there was a mission that involved getting crystals to pedastals. If you got all the pedastals filled with crystals, your team wins. If the AI enemies do it, everyone dies and you're back to try, try again. While this might be a fun mini-game type thing, that sports arena style scenario takes place after a trudge through the jungle, killing lots of monsters, this and that, blah blah blah. To go through all that just to win something that seems more like a Tribes multiplayer game is fairly crappy.

That's one problem I see with this game. A lot of the missions are very long, and there are some questionable aspects to them. These are even more questionable when they occur near the end of the mission, which means you have to endure the whole thing over and over again. I can see a lot of people playing the game and getting feeling of Just get me through this one mission, maybe the next one is more fun. The problem will be that maybe, just maybe, somewhere down the road you'll want to try out a new character. That character will be inflicted with dealing with missions that may have given you a headache the first time around, but will be genuine torture the next time.

These are good points, but it never really affected my enjoyment. Prince Rurik only died on me once, and that was my own fault for abandoning him to explore. The crystals I did on my second attempt (ignoring the attempts where I failed halfway through the jungle) and I'd have been disappointed if I'd managed to beat it first time. That said, a checkpoint system might be useful. You could possibly have an intermediate point where you could restart from once, but at the cost of, say, two of your skills for the rest of the mission. Some kind of meaningful sacrifice, anyway.

I think (though I haven't tried) that lots of the missions are skippable though, since you can walk from lobby to lobby through the explorable areas, which would be much easier than the missions in a lot of cases. Or you could just PvP your way up to lvl 20, if you don't want to repeat missions with a new char.

The biggest challenge, imho, is finding good people to play with, since there's plenty of bad ones. I struggled with a lot of missions in the WPE which were easy this weekend with a lower level char, because I had intelligent people playing with me (and I probably improved a bit too). I was only level 16 after the final mission, and I'm sure plenty of people have done it at far lower levels.

 

[Whipporowill]

I'm pretty undecided as well - and agree fully with Saint on the Rurik missions. There should be save points in the mission, if you don't restart it fully - someway halfway through or something. Also, I'm getting a very generic mmorpg vibe from the equipment and hope it gets better before release.

 

[Sol Invictus]

I play with guild mates from #guildwars so we got through the missions pretty well. When we failed (which we did, on each of the missions once or twice), we'd just try again and not feel bad about it. Playing with guildies is a lot more fun than playing with strangers, because a lot of strangers tend to behave like idiots or leave because they have no responsibility to the party. With guildmates on the other hand, it's easy to castigate them if they fuck up.

Ventrilo's ALWAYS a huge plus when it comes to tactics and coordination, as well. I'm just glad they didn't implenment some sort of ingame voice chat, because I'd have to turn it off whenever some jackass 12 year old decided to start screaming profanity, which would happen in PVP. Using a program like Ventrilo for voicechat and coordinating that with the in-game map to draw orders and such is pretty good, and reminiescent of Myth II's gameplay.

That map needs work, though. I'd like to see where my teammates are when they run off my map. They should add arrows.

 

[Whipporowill]

Played with some rl friends this weekend, which was pretty fun - although I had to babysit one of them through levelling up, heh. They both pretty much liked it, and I guess we're likely to test it again later on. I made it up to level 7, and they to about 5. We botched the first Rurik mission - due to him running away after you open the door to the mages, and my friends following him - not realizing I went to get the mages - which was needed to complete the mission. I was hit in the back, and the mages killed - game over.

Mission objectives could be shown a lot better sometimes - like "a flashing get the mages", rather than in a small dialogue float over Rurik. Also, I lost Rurik in the next mission, since he ran off - and I had no idea in what direction. Arrows is a must.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Yeah, putting arrows on the map is one of the most requested features at this point, I should think.

 

[Astromarine]

erm, the mages were not a requirement for that mission. I did it mageless.

 

[Surlent]

Well the game isn't ready content wise, so I'd guess lots of things will change.
The QA review that Astro posted answers to a lot of questions.

But yea, Rurik was jackass and rushed always to his death. I filed few bug reports of its AI, hope they at least have a look at it.

 

[Whipporowill]

erm, the mages were not a requirement for that mission. I did it mageless.

Well, I figured they were a he said "I have an idea, bring the mages!". Too bad noone but me noticed it.

 

[Sol Invictus]

I did it with the mages. Place them on the pedestals with the Tesla Orbs on them and they'll keep the place pretty well defended, though you have to support them. It's a lot easier with them than without them.

The mission isn't difficult to figure out unless you run off of the beaten path. The first time I did it, I ran to the scorpions, so it took a long time to finish.