Guild Wars World Preview Event

[Sol Invictus]

MMORPGs -always- involve 'interaction' with asinine shitheads in towns or otherwise combat zones. You can ignore them, but they can always follow you around and harrass you, stalk you, take your kills, or in the case of crap like Lineage 2: even kill you. In World of Warcraft, they'd have to belong to the opposing group (alliance vs horde) and they'd be able to kill you.

In WOW, one of the biggest problems with player interaction on the PVP server was the presence of bored really high level players ganking newbies in newbie zones. Nobody would do anything about it and the town would remain 'guarded' by those shitheads.

That's what happens in an MMORPG.

This does not happen in Guild Wars, because there are no 'combat zones' where thousands of people roam around and butcher respawning rats and goblins, nor can anyone stalk you, even if they wanted to. You can ignore a player and he will pretty much dissapear from your gaming existence. That's the beauty of Guild Wars. In many ways, Guild Wars is an even more private experience than Diablo 2. In Diablo 2, you couldn't kick players out of games you created unless you made them private. People could join whenever they liked and ruin your experience if you didn't password protect your game. In Guild Wars, -every- game is private. Nobody can join after you've created it, and the party you go in with is the party you'll come out with (unless someone leaves during the course of the mission). Nobody can harrass you at all, as you simply don't have to play with them.

So much for an MMO experience.

 

[fnordcircle]

They're lobbies, you dolt. You don't play there. Remember the lobbies on Battle.net? same thing! Except: it's graphical. OH NO, IT HAS GRAPHICS!

This doesn't even qualify as a reach.

They aren't lobbies. They are towns. With vendors. And trainers. And no attacking.

JUST LIKE ANARCHY ONLINE TOWNS.

It's a mission-based MMO.

 

[Mendoza]

Well, you can get skills from boss monsters by using the Signet of... something on them during or after they cast the spell you want. In the alpha, you could get skill gems as drops, I don't know if they're gonna be in the final but they probably are.

Remember that skill charms are disabled in the Preview. You can actually have 9 or 10 skills with those.

The explorable areas are empty because they left them that way for the preview. The only filled explorable area is the one north of the first town, in the Preview. The ones in the E3 version were a lot better, as were the missions. As for the plotlines, Diablo wasn't very good, either. You really can't compare something like (a diablo-like action rpg) this to a proper non-action CRPG.

The problem with this is that people who are demoing the game for the first time (like me) don't know that explorable areas will have npc's in the final game, if skill gems will be drops etc.

The game is only 3 months away, so I'd assume that the only things missing are areas that they're still working on, and some further polish and balance. I'd assume any areas I can play in this weekend will be pretty much the same as retail. Otherwise how should we know what's fixed and what's going to improve.

I'm enjoying the game more now (and have still only done 2 missions). Once you realise what all the controls are it's much easier to play (rather than struggle against the interface) and the missions are actuallu much less railroaded than they might first appear. It's just that sometimes the alternative routes aren't staring you in the face.

 

[Sol Invictus]

This doesn't even qualify as a reach.

They aren't lobbies. They are towns. With vendors. And trainers. And no attacking.

JUST LIKE ANARCHY ONLINE TOWNS.

It's a mission-based MMO.

How nice of you. You missed everything else I said about MMO interaction with other players and how that is not present in Guild Wars and decided to 'refute' all of my arguments based on your simple belief that 'they aren't lobbies, they are towns'. They are lobbies. Ever been to a mission lobby? All you can do there is recruit other players, or henchmen to join your party. I've played Anarchy Online, and suffice to say it doesn't have any fucking lobbies.

So the Town lobbies (of which there are several in the game) have a few NPCs, that makes it an MMORPG? Because the town lobbies are more interactive than Diablo's lobbies? Give me a fucking break. I will bet you didn't know that Battle.net on Diablo 2 was originally intended to have support for Vendors and NPCs in the lobby, and there were supposed to be Guild Hall 'areas', as well. But none of that came to pass (with the exception of Player Avatars in Diablo 2's lobbies and Clan Channels) due to time & money constraints, and technology constraints. If anything, Guild Wars is the Diablo 2 these guys wanted to make. Hell, I'll bet you didn't know that they made Diablo 2, either, and that the original design document of World of Warcraft was similar to Guild Wars, but Vivendi Universal didn't want to go along with it because it didn't entail monthly fees and wanted an EQ-like game instead.

So I guess it's an MMO because it has interactive lobbies. Dungeon Siege has those too, so I suppose that makes it an MMO as well.

 

[fnordcircle]

No, wait, I get it. The joke's on me. I admit it, you pranked me good.

Nobody could seriously argue that Guild Wars isn't analogous to an MMO in nearly every way. Good show, Exitium, you are a king of comedy in my book.

You almost had me going with the 'graphical lobbies that are called towns in the game with NPCs, and scads of PCs' schtick. You big kidder.

 

[Sol Invictus]

The problem with this is that people who are demoing the game for the first time (like me) don't know that explorable areas will have npc's in the final game, if skill gems will be drops etc.

Fair enough.

The game is only 3 months away, so I'd assume that the only things missing are areas that they're still working on, and some further polish and balance. I'd assume any areas I can play in this weekend will be pretty much the same as retail. Otherwise how should we know what's fixed and what's going to improve.

Well, you'd assume wrong, because the areas you can play currently are only a small portion of the missions available in the retail. If you look at the map you'll note how much of it is unexplored, and if you played the E3 demo you would have been treated to an entirely different set of missions.

The missions you can play currently are balanced for the preview, in fact. The loot tables are completely whack - giving you sword drops all the time, no runes, no skill gems, no uniques (yes, they exist), very few rare weapons, no weapon upgrades, etc. The spells available are low level spells, similar to Diablo 2's spells at Level 1-6 or so. There's even Elite Spells, which although present in the preview, are not numerous.

 

[Sol Invictus]

No, wait, I get it. The joke's on me. I admit it, you pranked me good.

Nobody could seriously argue that Guild Wars isn't analogous to an MMO in nearly every way. Good show, Exitium, you are a king of comedy in my book.

You almost had me going with the 'graphical lobbies that are called towns in the game with NPCs, and scads of PCs' schtick. You big kidder.

You're quite a shithead, you know that? Most of the people I've talked to about the game, including Saint (I know you'd like to suck his dick and all that, judging from your replies in his JJ86 is Dumb thread) agree that it isn't an MMORPG. As stated previously, the game's closer to Diablo 2 and Dungeon Siege than it is to any stinking MMO, and the game's creators and publisher refuse to bill it as an MMORPG, because the gameplay itself is fast, fluid and in other words: nothing like an MMORPG's, aside from the interface. But since when did MMOs have interactive compass/minimaps? Since never. The Myth series are the only games I've seen with that sort of minimap. I just wish it could be oversized.

Why wouldn't they call it an MMORPG? Those games have a huge fanbase, especially the hardcore players, and remember this is NC Soft we're talking about - they're one of the leading companies which believes "MMORPGS ARE THE FUTURE!"

Also, you seem to have left out my post about interaction in MMORPGs. If I were you, I'd stop making straw man arguments in the face of the evidence I've presented you with.

 

[fnordcircle]

Saint (I know you'd like to suck his dick and all that, judging from your replies in his JJ86 is Dumb thread) agree that it isn't an MMORPG.

You mean the thread where my sole reply is to quote a SP episode?

The thought processes that would lead you to believe that Guild Wars is completely different from an MMO are starting to be clear.

Why wouldn't they call it an MMORPG?

Because everyone goes 'Oh, another MMO. The MMO scene is so crowded.' Also, the most negative connotation of an MMO is 'monthly fee'.

Regardless, I am totally agreeing with you now, this game is the farthest thing from an MMO you could get. 'Graphical Game lobbies' with NPC guild registrars, vendors, people going around saying 'lfg'. Nope, a completely divergent gameplay approach. *wink* *wink*.

 

[Sol Invictus]

You don't need to type LFG, stupidhead. Just go to a lobby and people will undoubtedly invite you, and you can invite yourself into parties or start your own. There is no 'looking for group'. If you're at the lobby, your participation is a given.

Have you even played Guild Wars?

You are stupid.

 

[Whipporowill]

Hay, Rex - I hear www.corpgcodex.com is still available!

 

[fnordcircle]

You don't need to type LFG, stupidhead. Just go to a lobby and people will undoubtedly invite you, and you can invite yourself into parties or start your own. There is no 'looking for group'. If you're at the lobby, your participation is a given.

Make sure to login and tell the people I saw doing that to stop and they are playing the game wrong.

Have you even played Guild Wars?

Yeah. My character is Dr Thadeus Venture. I took time out from posting 'let me suck you off, Saint' posts in the Team America thread as you astutely pointed out.

 

[Mendoza]

The game is only 3 months away, so I'd assume that the only things missing are areas that they're still working on, and some further polish and balance. I'd assume any areas I can play in this weekend will be pretty much the same as retail. Otherwise how should we know what's fixed and what's going to improve.

Well, you'd assume wrong, because the areas you can play currently are only a small portion of the missions available in the retail. If you look at the map you'll note how much of it is unexplored, and if you played the E3 demo you would have been treated to an entirely different set of missions.

I realise there's way more missions than the ones we can play on the demo, although I still imagine they haven't finished all the missions that will be available retail. My point was that any area that I can visit in this demo, I would expect to be in its final state, barring any bugs and balance issues. So if there's miscellaneous quests and npc's in the wilderness, I'd expect them to to be there in this demo. If you hadn't told me otherwise, I'd have assumed that was what retail would be like, with explorable areas virtually barren.

Incidentally, the whole game world still seems pretty small for what I'd expect from an MMORPG, given how much I've explored in just a few hours. MY expectations maybe way off though, since I've never played an MMORPG before (and if you think the comparison is unreasonable, I'm only using it in terms of content).

 

[Sol Invictus]

World of Warcraft is the -only- MMORPG with a big amount of terrain content, but its few instances don't come to being anywhere as well designed as the many in Guild Wars. Lineage 2 and Asheron's Call are, in comparison to WOW, roughly equal to 3 maps of the 30+ maps in World of Warcraft but most of the maps consist mainly of a medium sized area which take around 6 minutes to walk across, 2 if you have a mount and a few NPCs. The reason most people don't walk across maps in World of Warcraft is due to the difficulty of the wildlife, and the amount of pain you have to endure to get your corpse back once you die.

The "Explorable" areas in Guild Wars are roughly similar to the size of most of the larger open areas in World of Warcraft, but with less content. The only area currently populated by NPCs and boss monsters is the one directly outside of Lion's. You can find a quest to kill bandits, about 7-8 or so boss monsters and a town with an NPC you can buy skills from. All the other areas are unpopulated, except by generic monsters.

The instances in this game are as large as the instances in World of Warcraft, but they're a lot faster to go through (meaning to say that it isn't a pain in the ass) and also fun, because you feel like you're kicking ass when you kill a bunch of monsters. There's no need to rest up or wait for your mana to regenerate as you would in World of Warcraft or any other MMORPG. You just keep pushing on. If someone dies, anyone can resurrect him. Everybody carries a Signet of Resurrection that works once per mission, and monks can resurrect people as much as they like. A couple of WOW's instances would be okay, if it wasn't for the fact that monsters within instances are all elites and kill you, but the majority of them are horrible, especially the jail in Stormwind Keep. It's terribly narrow and the monsters do 4x damage, with 4x health and 4x armor/resistances. Most of the instances in World of Warcraft require you to do quest chains that take hours to complete before you can even do the quests inside the instances, and once you're in there, it'll take you 2-5 hours to complete due to the difficulty and the fact that only priests and paladins can resurrect people. Meh.

None of these problems exist in Guild Wars. Missions take less than 30 minutes to complete and you don't even feel time pass when you're in them. At least I don't. I found myself checking my watch in WOW because those missions took too damn long, and all of them are as linear as a car on rails. Guild Wars at least offers Subquests and many times allows you choose which path to take to the completion of your goal.

On some of the later missions, there's large maps which you can almost lose yourself in if you choose to head off the obvious path, with cool bosses and treasure. Having the Signet of (er, stealing skills) equipped allows you to steal Elite skills from bosses that you won't find for sale at any merchant, for example - so it's a good idea to go exploring, and what's better is that 'stealing' skills from monsters is something all players of the same class could do together if they wanted to, so it's not as if they'd have to fight over it like people do in other games.

MMORPGs are, in comparison to Guild Wars, completely sparse. Imagine the empty 'explorable' areas with monsters a couple of times the strength, and absolutely no henchmen, and some dickhead camping the -spawning- monster repeatedly for loot drops, dying and having to walk all the way back for 3 minutes, and you'll know what an MMORPG is like.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Hay, Rex - I hear www.corpgcodex.com is still available!

'Hay', Whip, tell me why we cover roguelikes again.

 

[Whipporowill]

I guess you should ask your buddy Saint that, I sure as hell ain't covering them.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Well I don't intend on covering Guild Wars at the Codex, either - in case anyone's asking.

As for Fnord, this answers his nonsense about how GW is an MMORPG:

Guild Wars has some similarities to existing MMORPGs, but it also has some key differences.

Like existing MMOs, Guild Wars is played entirely online in a secure hosted environment. Thousands of players inhabit the same virtual world. Players can meet new friends in gathering places like towns and outposts where they form parties and go questing with them. Unlike many MMOs, when players form a party and embark upon a quest in Guild Wars, they get their own private copy of the area where the quest takes place. This design eliminates some of the frustrating gameplay elements commonly associated with MMOs, such as spawn camping, kill stealing, and lines to complete a quest.

Guild Wars takes place in a large virtual world made up of many different zones, and players can walk from one end of the world to the other. But Guild Wars eliminates much of the tedium of traveling through the world. Players can instantly return to any safe area (town or outpost) that they've previously visited just by clicking on it in the world overview map.

Rather than labeling Guild Wars an MMORPG, we prefer to call it a CORPG (Competitive Online Role-Playing Game). Guild Wars was designed from the ground up to create the best possible competitive role-playing experience. Success in Guild Wars is always the result of player skill, not time spent playing or the size of one's guild. As characters progress, they acquire a diverse set of skills and items, enabling them to use new strategies in combat. Players can do battle in open arenas or compete in guild-on-guild warfare or the international tournament. But engaging in combat is always the player's choice; there is no player-killing in cooperative areas of the world.

Finally, unlike existing MMOs, all characters in Guild Wars inhabit the same virtual world -- they are not divided onto different servers or shards -- so players can always team up with or compete against any other player in the world.

 

[Sol Invictus]

This is for Ortchel's curiosity:
What playable races are there in Guild Wars?

In the first chapter you will be able to play characters from the human race. In subsequent chapters of Guild Wars, you may be able to play members of other races.

Goblins, maybe?

 

[Shevek]

Well, its pretty much 3D Diablo. I actually hate the 3rd/1st person perspective to be quite honest. Targetting, navigating the battlefield and so on is much more of a chore than good ole isometric Diablo 2. Still, its a fun game with plenty of polish (great grouping and soloing, a fair loot system, etc) and Im sure itll attract a loyal following.

 

[Astromarine]

I'm pretty hooked on the game. My main character is a warrior, using hammers and monk as the subclass (pretty useless that). I have about 12 or 13 different skills atm, and will start hunting for warrior bosses with signets soon (BTW, the Firstwatch on Lion's Thingy, the main town, now sells those as well as the Captain in the wilderness). I've also found a place that has level 19 crafted armor for sale, which was cool to find.

The game is absolutely gorgeous, and even though it suffers a lot from lack of loot tables and more distinguished monsters (I've seen under 15 types I think) I can say I've had more fun in this than in any other game I played recently.

I'm starting a monk now, it seems pretty cool.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

It's nothing like Diablo. It's a lot more like an MMO than Diablo. For example, on those missions, you pretty much have to have a big party to do them - or henchmen. There has to be a group because you have to be doing more damage than a critter can heal, or else it's impossible. Diablo 2 would scale it's difficulty based on how many people were playing at the time.

I don't know how many missions I've tried to play only to have someone just up and quit the mission, thus screwing the party. When your dedicated healer quits, some people with secondaries can sort of make up for it, but when two or more people drop, the mission becomes rather pointless. You'll often be fighting a critter and it's healing itself at about the same rate you're damaging it. The end result is that you're going no where, and fights can either take tens of minutes to win or it's a stalemate.

Heck, it just seems to me like it's better to have the AI controlled Monk than a player, just because the AI one won't quit because it gets bored or has to have dinner or whatever.

I also hate the fact that I have to hunt around for just the right shop to sell things. That's one problem I've had with a lot of games, and MMORPGs seem to like having dozens of speciality shops all over the town. This game is no different.

They may not bill it as an MMORPG, but it certainly has all the problems of one when it doesn't really have to be that way.

 

[Astromarine]

"all" is quite an overstatement, don't you think? It has *some* problems of a MMO, and maybe also some new ones, but most definetely not all problems of a MM

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Well, the problems I see are:

• If you don't have a good, dedicated party to play with, the game is pointless. People drop in the middle of the mission because they don't like dying and waiting to be ressurrected or they have to eat dinner, or whatever.
• If the server is down, there's no playing at all. I'm not sure why they don't allow an off-line mode or even a set up where you can play with JUST friends like your own dedicated server or something.
• Lag bites. I don't get much of it, but when you're playing with others that are lagging, then.. Well.. That sucks.
• Towns are spammy.. "I GOT 2 GREEN 2 TRADE 4 2 SILVER" and shit like that. It'd be nice if there was some sort of localization on the chat or a dedicated trade channel for that shit.
• Parties break for town trips. I'm not sure why they can't allow a whole party transit to and from the towns, because when you have to go sell stuff, it breaks the party affiliation. That's actually not an MMORPG problem, in fact, that's one thing MMOs have OVER Guild Wars.

I had a good party this evening, so it was a lot better than my initial reaction. The only problem I had was that I was one of the few people in the party who knew when it was time to run like hell.. So, I had to sneak around and ressurrect a lot. At least those guys waited for me to clear an area to get to them, though.

 

[DarkSign]

Hey guys...havent been around for awhile but wanted to chime in.

I LOVE this game.

Exit is right...its not an MMO really. Yes you get a persistent character with stats that can be manipulated, BUT

The majority of the world being instanced takes it right out of MMO status. To me, an MMO has a majority world that the same for all characters...requiring their interaction and conflict.

Coming from other mmos where classes are pretty static, im digging the class combination and template systems definitely.

I also LOVE the graphics. MUCH better than EQ2 and WoW, both. They are a bit stylized, but the use of light and shadow really make a visually stunning world to explore.

I'll buy it for sure.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Most single player CRPGs are persistnt, far more so than any MMORPG. "Persistent" was just a bullshit catch phrase Sony used with Everquest and it stuck, but the fact of the matter is that you never actually change anything in the world no matter what you do. You make a stack of junk in Fallout, and it stays there the whole game. You make a stack of junk somewhere in an MMORPG, and it'll eventually fade away and vanish. You kill a shop tender in Fallout, and they stay dead forever. You kill one in an MMORPG, and they'll eventually respawn. Samr thing if you wipe out a camp of bad guys in either game.

Like I said in an earlier post, I'd be more inclined to buy the thing if I was relying on ArenaNet for the game. If ArenaNet goes out of business, you're fucked. You can never play the game ever again. If I'm coughing up $50 for a game, I want it so I can play it whenever I want no matter the status of the developer or some server out there. If they offered up player shards/dedicated server downloading, I'd be more inclined to buy.

 

[xemous]

its a shit game period dont waste your money
its full of kids ffs