Guild Wars 2 Trailer blows minds but... - Keen and Graev's Video Game Blog

Not sure how much more “straight and informative” they can be than putting it in the FAQ. Which, as you mention, says:

“While Guild Wars 2 adds a persistent-world experience, it retains the unique characteristics of the original game, including strong narrative, extensive instanced gameplay”

How much clearer do you want them to be?

It’s no more of an MMO then Diablo II was..

“Will Guild Wars 2 be solo-able?

Yes. You will be able to advance your character to the maximum level without ever joining a group if you so desire. Most content will be designed in a solo-friendly way, though often with mechanisms for scaling up in difficulty when more players are involved. This will give players the option to experience the game however they prefer.

At the same time, it is important for an MMO community to join together to overcome challenges. Guild Wars 2 will feature challenges that require players to join forces.”

@Bhagpuss: I think what Keen means is that instead of showing this video of awesomeness and making people assume that it’s not instanced, they should’ve just said it outright.

Because, you know, if you take everything according to that FAQ alone, then this whole thing is instance-based and there’s really nothing to be excited about.

What ArenaNet is doing with Guild Wars 2 Sounds great. However there truly isn’t anything that amazing about it in the end. So they are changing the way we play single player dungeon instances? Sounds like all they are doing is glorifying a Single Player experience, but Co-Op this time, and placing it in a Lobbied-MMO world.

This has been done already, there are games that the NPC’s are standing still and you get to see them destroy villages. We however have not seen this done in an open-world, every body witnesses it, setting.

Once that is happening, I will bow to the company that delivers it. But for now, as amazing as GW2 looks, it’s not doing anything worth taking my eyes away from current gaming . At least, not yet.

My understanding is that it is a persistent open world. The extensive instancing is mostly used for your “personal storyline” quest chain.

I might be wrong but I’ve read just about every bit of info released about this game, and from all that I have understood that these changes WILL infact be taking place in the persistent world. They stated somewhere that they will be using heavy instancing for your personal storyline but these dynamic events are supposed to be WORLD events where your participation and the outcome DOES infact change the game world for not only you but for everyone.

For instance, if you are in a town and suddenly find that centaurs are attacking, guards will start rallying players to help defend the town from the attack, if you fail centaurs WILL kill NPCs, they will burn down the village and leave it or maybe even claim it for their own and inhabit it. Any player reaching that town later on will see the same thing, but they might trigger a new event that will help the former citizens of the town reclaim and/or rebuild their lost town to its former state.

I suggest reading this Q&A session about dynamic events;
http://www.arena.net/blog/colin-johanson-answers-your-dynamic-event-questions

Again, I might be horribly wrong but what I make out of all the info I’ve read is, again, that the world will indeed be an everchanging world where your actions will in fact impact how everyone else perceives it.

@ Proximo If thats true then I’m sold!

As a little teaser and “proof” that these changes are indeed viewable to everyone, here’s a cut of the Q&A i linked:

Can two events that run parallel to each other influence each other?

Colin: Yes, they can! At times, our dynamic event system can create situations where events can overlap, creating these really interesting moments of emergent gameplay. For example, one group of players could be escorting a merchant to the town of Beetletun with a shipment of beer from Divinityâ€™s Reach. When they get near Beetletun, the players could discover that Beetletun is currently under attack by centaurs and the players can join in the battle to save the town. Saving the town not only liberates the now grateful citizens, but also allows the beer shipment to reach the now even more grateful citizens! The merchant will set up shop in town and a new beer merchant becomes available for a while, all due to the players completing two events that ended up running in parallel and influencing one another.

Seems a bit knee jerk reaction to me. I agree trying to parse devspeak from the actual game can be challenging depending on whether they are overpromising or deceiving. Warhammer videos anyone? I still look forward to seeing what they do to make GW2 pull us in for longer than than GW1.

“Individual player choices are made in each playerâ€™s personal storyline which leverage the use of instances to reflect that different players can make different choices. In each characterâ€™s personal story, they will get to make decisions that will change their instanced version of the world, but in non-instanced areas, player choice will have an impact on the greater environment and therefore on all other players in that world.”

Looks like the only instanced used are for your own personal story, these dynamic events seem to be in the “real world” with players all around. What I wonder is how BIG is that world?

Personally, I loved the part where they said:

“If you love MMOs, you have to check out GW2. If you hate MMOs, you REALLY have to check out GW2.”

I’ve been in a love/hate relationship with MMOs for over a decade. I’m really curious to see what they’ve done about the elements I despise in MMOs; for instance, unnecessary timesinks and gear vs. skill disparity.

As for the instance vs. persistent world issue, I guess we’ll just have to see. Doesn’t WoW handle this all quite brilliantly with the phasing mechanic?

Oh, and looks like I might need a PC upgrade. 😛

In Guild Wars 1, gear was absolutely no problem at all. Infact, you almost didn’t need to sweat to get the best of the best stuff out there. Skills on the other hand, were a bit trickier. They took some time, but ultimately, you can attain any skill that you want in an acceptable amount of time. And seeing that you only really needed eight of them to build a role, then that wasn’t really a problem. Most can be obtained from playing the story mode (Story & Competitive multiplayer were separated).

I don’t know how it will work in GW2, though.

Two thoughts:

1)those graphics are awesome. If it was a true open world in the sense that we all mean, then your fps would average around 1 with more than 5 or 6 player characters on your screen. The only way i see around this would be to jump about 20 years into the future, buy a top of the line computer, and bring it back to 2010. If you’ve figured out how to do that though,you probably have better things to do than play video games. Which sucks for the rest of us.

2) Everything i’ve read from the devs implies they are trying to appease all types of gamers out there. (see quote in reply #11 above for a top-line summary of their philosophy). I’ve seen this tried many times, with a 100% failure rate.

I stopped with GW1 just about when the first expansion was released, so I dunno what happened after that, but before that gear was seriously a non-issue.
I’ve posted this once before on Keens blog I think but I’m gonna repeat myself.

When you hit levelcap in GW1 (lvl 20, didnt take long to reach), you could head out into the world to farm mats that drops from mobs which you would trade with an NPC for a gear set. No other requirements and you could have an entire set in a day or a couple of days nps. Then there was this awesome looking Fissure of Woe armor…
That armorset took weeks, months to farm due to several reasons, but it didn’t matter cos the set was IDENTICAL to the set that you could easily get. People still farmed it, cos it gave them that epic feeling of achieving something when they got it and stats was a non-issue.

Now THAT is how I want my MMO to be, your characters visuals should reflect how much effort you’ve put in and what encounters you have beaten, but it should not improve your characters ability to compete over the others.

@Jordan:
1) you must not have tried Aion which gave stunning graphics without the incredible performance hit that you’d expect, that or you have a truly shit computer. Also, keep in mind that GW2 is not aimed towards large scale siege warfare, it’s small group PvE and instanced PvP, I doubt we’ll even get ANY world PvP.

2) one should always filter a devs grand words before buying the hype, I completely agree with the WAR example given earlier and I’m trying to stay closer to earth this time since I got burnt badly by WAR, but it’s hard to not get a wee bit excited by what they’ve shown so far 😛

I read that on the FAQ, too. Kinda doesn’t mesh with everything that they’ve been mentioning how if someone comes along you won’t feel like they’re stealing your kills (not an exact quote, mind you, but it was probably a while ago I read that)… well how can someone just “come along” if its not an open world? I’m sure there will be a lot of instancing with personal stories, instanced dungeons, etc, but I’m hoping they keep it to that… however… the FAQ leads me to believe it won’t just be kept to that. You’re right… ANet just needs to be clear with where the instancing is going to be.

If I were them, to keep the game really fun, have the world be open, but limit the number of people in one area (like they do already in GW1… gets too populated, jump onto another server, or you get placed there automatically…). Playing with others is what makes MMO’s great, and ANet is not stupid, they know this…. we’ll just have to wait and see how its implemented, I guess….

Would I prefer an open world with no instances? Yes. Do I care if the game is fun and entertaining? Not really.

My ultimate MMO would have an Earth-sized world with no zones, persistent impact of player actions, and non-repetitive quests perhaps with a customized player-unique dynamic experience. It sounds like both GW2 and SWTOR are making advances toward that end so in some way I am excited (tempered by my expected disappointment that always comes) by what I am seeing.

” I play MMOâ€™s to be in a world where the decisions of others change my gameplay experience. I play for the community and the interaction.”

You say this yet you are currently playing WoW where the progression in end-game is made in instanced dungeons and barely has any effect in the world. A typical theme-park.
If you play MMOs where the decisions of others change your gameplay you should be playing sandbox MMOs, not theme-parks.
You should be playing EVE, Darkfall, Ultima Online and games similar to those.

Either way, the answer to these concerns of yours have already been answered in the comments by Proximo

@Bhagpuss: They could tell us whether or not what we’re seeing is actually in the persistent world. Don’t you think that would sell a lot more people on their plan? I do. And you know it would too.

@Proximo: What I want to know is whether or not the stuff we actually saw in that trailer is persistent open-world or instanced. I’m betting on instanced.

@sleepsam: Not kneejerk at all. You yourself point out WAR’s video podcasts as a prime example. They mislead players into thinking the game plays one way because they leave out crucial details or misrepresent the actual implementation of what they’re talking about. What I’m doing is raising a very valid question. Their FAQ says extensive instancing and we know MMO developers have a perfect track record of bs’ing players.

@Snafzg: Don’t let them fool you with that line bro. That’s the biggest hype line I’ve heard all year. Make them prove it to you with real explanations of their game (IE: telling us straight up what we’re seeing) or by expounding upon what it is exactly about their game that would make players feel that way.

@Pedro: Just because I’m playing WoW doesn’t mean my reasons for playing MMO’s have to change.

And no, my concerns haven’t been addressed by Proximo. Proximo discussed Guild Wars 2’s public quest (ala WAR) system. I’m talking about everything we saw in that video and the statements made by the developers. I feel like they’re misrepresenting what we’re seeing by allowing players to draw conclusions based on what is being said. See my thoughts on how this is similar to WAR’s video podcasts in my @sleepysam.

@ Keen: They said that dragon that comes out of the sky and the vortex looking thing were all dynamic events that players take part in, not sure about the rest. I think the more important question is how big these areas are.

@JohnnyLane: A dragon came out of the sky in the Elf starting area in WAR too. Players had to band together to fight the onslaught of attacking Dark Elves as they raided the town before the dragon finally descended.

Sounds epic, right? Except it wasn’t. Anyone remember how lame the public quest system was in implementation and how awesome it sounded in the video podcasts?

If this is like WAR’s public quest system then we’re being fooled.

Except that WARs PQ system, albeit poorly done, was pretty innovative. So, why is it so hard to believe that after a few years.. someone would improve on it?

@Shadrah: Probable. Very probable.

I want to also raise a few other points.

1) Persistent does not mean the same thing as open-world.

2) In that video when the bridge breaks, is it broken by the first person to break it? Aha. Here’s the difference between persistent and open-world.

Persistent can mean for just YOU.

So we have either A) instances or B) phasing. Phasing being the better of the two.

3) When the town is rescued and the villagers remember that you rescued them, that’s not open-world it’s persistent. That must be A) instancing or B) phasing.

The trailer has me excited again for Guild Wars 2. I was a huge fan of the first game but wished it was more like other MMO’s.

Keen you just sucked the joy out of my day lol 🙁 I really can see this being more like PQ’s in WAR and even if those are slightly improved upon it’s still a big MEH.

@Keen: However, to counter. Persistent could simply mean that the world itself will remain changed based on public action. Of course, it probably means that it will remain persistent for just you. However, I’m more inclined to believe that it will be persistent to everyone. Meaning you will have dynamic events that take place and those changes will become static for all to see.

I can dream, right?

@Russel Gusto: That’s me. The Fun Sucker! Really though I don’t want to demean the game. Graev and I watched the trailer together again and we’re both stoked. We want to play it.

We just don’t want to make the same mistake we made with WAR and make assumptions based upon a few things that devs say and details they (PURPOSELY) leave out.

It just has to be A) Instanced, B) Phased, or C) Reset like a Public Quest.

A village is only rescued once and a bridge only breaks once otherwise.

@Shadrah: Definitely dream. I do. Just remember you have to wake up. It sucks waking up. 🙁

@Keen:

I share some of your concerns on this one. The GW2 hype machine really does talk a good game, and they’re giving *some* specific details about things they’re doing, but there are still huge gaps in what we really know about the game. One thing everybody should know by now is to reserve judgement until people are actually playing.

That said, they’ve really hinted at things that *look* cool on paper (lack of dedicated healers, skill based progression, etc), and I’m hopeful that they actually *are* cool in practice.

I do have a sense that these dynamic encounters (or whatever they’re called) are going to be similar to WAR’s PQ system. That system didn’t work at all in WAR, but I’m not sure the fundamental concept is flawed; I think WAR mostly just failed to put the right numbers of people at the right quests (due to logistics, player population issues, reward imbalance, etc). I know how much you hate instancing, but this is where instancing could really work if done well; have the PQ areas seamlessly instanced off, and automatically divvy people up amongst them so that there are always the appropriate number of participants in each one. Once you complete it, you end up in a “completed” version of the instance, where your consequences are reflected in the surroundings.

@Keen — That was definitely a hype statement, but it was a good one, hehe I guess it’s basically a rewording of “Our MMO will have nothing that makes MMOs suck!”

But man, if anyone can pull that off, ArenaNet can imho since they aren’t charging a subscription or running an item shop as far as I can tell. As it was with GW1, it doesn’t appear GW2 will be a conventional MMO, even if it is more MMOish than its predecessor.

I basically feel it comes down to incentives. What are the incentives for having sucky mechanics like artificial timesinks, static/boring gameplay, and overpowered gear when you’re only making money off the initial box sale and expansions?

@Keen:
“3) When the town is rescued and the villagers remember that you rescued them, thatâ€™s not open-world itâ€™s persistent. That must be A) instancing or B) phasing.”

Care to explain just why it must be instanced or phased?
They haven’t explained as to how they remember you, it might be as subtle as a chatframe message when you enter town, discounts at vendors etc.

I can see why you compare it to PQs, which prior to launch seemed awesome but in the end became repetitive and boring. And it was just that which made them boring. They where static and repetitive and the main reason for doing them past the first time was getting rep/influence grinded.
I’m trying real hard not to hype this up, but IF ANet delivers on the info they have released these events/PQs will have some things that makes them different to WAR PQs, randomness (no not in terms of loot, WAR PQs had that for sure :P).
Considering how different events can lay dorment for weeks, even months until someone triggers it is VERY different to the static WAR PQs. Considering how different events actually can influence each other it is very different to PQs. Considering how ANet and GW is about NOT grinding the influence/rep grind not being there is very different.

Add to that that events in GW2 actually will scale in difficulty depending on number of participants is also VERY VERY different to WAR PQs. Some of the PQs in WAR actually ARE epic and great, it’s just that if you didn’t start playing at release you’ll never get to see them cos there’s never enough people around for the hard epic PQs. And again, once it’s completed it has no effect on the world and just resets after the timer runs out, it’s called Waithammer Online for a reason. 😛

And did you even read the Q&A I linked? Cos your answers give me the feeling that you didn’t (no offence intended).

@Proximo: That village has to exist right? Let’s assume it’s captured or not rescued. I come along and rescue it. Does it appear rescued to you? If so, the first person to rescue it is the only one who gets to do it.

But the problem here is that we have a limited size world, limited number of events, and a much greater number of players.

I read the FAQ (reread it since I read it before). It’s basically WAR PQ’s that happen once. If they matter, people are going to complain that only the hardcore do them all. If they don’t matter then wtf does anyone care about them?

It goes beyond just the events though. I’m talking about the game in general and this idea of persistent vs. open-world being minced.

I like a lot of what they have to say, but like Keen said, I’m not too happy (I almost said ‘keen’) on how they’re delivering it. Instancing? That’s very single-player focus.

Though to be fair, phasing can be pretty jarring when suddenly most of your group disappears because they’re out of phase with you since they didn’t do the quests you did.

I’ve been wanting persistent world experiences that can be shared with friends for a long time but nothing has really delivered. While this won’t really be a MMO, you’re also not looking at facing any subscription fees.

Maybe we shouldn’t box this in with MMO, instead, view it as a multiplayer game that can deliver on some things MMOs are lacking.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this. I could see myself playing this with friends, so long as they were willing to play. Otherwise? No thanks.

Keen,

What the hell did you think it was going to be? It’s going to be instanced, because quite frankly, all of the open world games of late have been complete and utter failures. It also fits their subscription model, ie, there isn’t one other than buying expansions.

There’s only a few companies that can pull off a truly open world experience. CCP comes to mind. Other than that, you have serious challenges with not only technical issues but also game dynamics.

GW2 will be a great game. It will attract alot of us who are waiting for something fun to play again, because quite frankly, despite your pumping up WoW on this blog, it’s stale and it sucks.

I’d appreciate if you would quit shitting on games in which you don’t understand.

I really wish I could see the future like you!

Here’s what your comment read like to me:

“WoW Sucks. Guild Wars is awesome. Guild Wars 2 will be great because. CCP has never made an open world game but makes great open world games.”

Aite, I didn’t link the FAQ but one of many Q&As that they post on their official blog (not on the official website) after each new piece of info is released. It’s questions asked by community answered by devs.
Anyways, I see your point on the whole thing, but it’s a trailer and nothing else so we need to treat it as such.

And to answer your question;
“That village has to exist right? Letâ€™s assume itâ€™s captured or not rescued. I come along and rescue it. Does it appear rescued to you? If so, the first person to rescue it is the only one who gets to do it.”

Yes the village has to exist, and yes you’ll be able to rescue it and everyone else will see it as still thriving. If you fail everyone will see it as overrun, burnt or captured (or whatever). That is until some other event in the zone or world triggers the event to either reset or start a “recounter” event allowing some other player that happens to be there and then to help recapture the city, hence resetting the event.
This is how I have understood it at least.

Does it repeat itself like WAR PQs? Yes it does, but in a much more fluid way that requires player interaction and not by some static timer.

Can they pull this off and will it be as awesome as it sounds (to me), no idea, only time can tell, but imo there’s two companies that can if anyone (based on experience with earlier games) and that is ANet and Blizzard (I’m tempted to say Bioware but I’ve never played a Bioware game so can’t vouch for that ^^)

Anyways, sceptic or not, no matter if I believe it will be great I sure HOPE it will be, cos it sounds like a game I could play for a very long time. 🙂

I hope that it is pulled off well. As Shadrah said it could be a much, much better attempt at doing what WAR PQ’s have done. However, until we see it done better all we have to go by is what has been done before.

That’s pretty much all I have to say on the events. As for the rest of the world, they’re saying “Persistent” a lot, however they’re also saying right in their official FAQ that they’re using extensive instancing. See what I mean about being confused w/o clarification from Anet?

NCSoft makes pretty games… pretty and lame. Everything they’ve done lately has been super instanced to the point of almost not being a MMO.

@ Keen following on what Proximo wrote:

And if no one does anything the invaders will start to patrol the roads and will expand their invasion and if no one still does anything they will capture the whole area.This is what they refer to as a dynamic world.

I can appreciate the hesitation to believe the hype, but a lot of your worries could be relieved with a little research. Instead of just watching a video and jumping to conclusions you could maybe read up? From gw2’s own website.

Apologies in advance for the long quotes, but since you won’t go to them…

http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/dynamic-events/dynamic-events-overview/

“In GW2, the outcome of every event will directly affect the game world around you. If an enemy dredge army is marching out of their main base, players will be asked to mobilize with their allies and help destroy the army. If the dredge army is defeated, other events will cascade out from there. Players will be able battle their way inside the dredge base, face off against their commander, rescue captured friendly troops being held in the dredge prisons, and even hold the captured base while fighting waves of dredge, who arrive from deep underground to try and take back their home.
Dynamic Events

If, on the other hand, players fail to destroy the army, it will establish a fort in friendly player territory. From there, the dredge will send shipments of troops and supplies to the fort from the main base while building up walls, turrets, and siege engines to help defend it. Enemy dredge forces will then begin to move out from their newly established fort to attack friendly player locations in the area, sending snipers out into the hills, sending assault team forces to capture friendly player villages, and trying to smash down friendly fortifications with massive dredge walkers. All of these events continue to cascade out into further chains of events where cause and effect is directly related to the player’s actions.

For example, if the players do not mobilize to stop the dredge snipers, they’ll begin to shoot down all the villagers and merchants in nearby friendly villages. If they fail to stop the dredge assault teams from capturing a village, players will need to lead a force to help liberate the town and free the villagers. All of this content is derived from a single initial event – the dredge army marching through the map.”

“Traditional MMO quest systems will send multiple players off to kill a boss. One player kills the boss and gets the loot. The rest of the players have to stand around and wait their turn for the boss to re-spawn so they can kill it and get credit for it. You don’t want other players around you because they’re stealing your kills and slowing your rate of achievement. MMOs are supposed to be about hundreds, if not thousands of players, playing together in a community, not putting them in the same world and then pushing them apart!

The event system in Guild Wars 2 is designed to specifically address this problem. All players that fully participate in an event are rewarded for doing so; everyone who helps kill a monster or blow up an enemy catapult will get credit for doing so. There is no kill stealing and no quest camping. Everyone works together towards the common goal of the event and everyone is rewarded for doing so. To help ensure there is always enough for everyone to do, our events dynamically scale, so the more players who show up and participate in the event, the more enemies show up to fight them. If a bunch of players leave the event, it will dynamically scale back down so it can be completed by the people who are still there playing it”

I’ve done the reading on the subject of these events. I just don’t believe it, yet. 🙂

The problem is that this sounds EXACTLY like what Mythic tried to sell us with the Public Quests system. It’s was worded and pitched the same way.

If you played WAR in T3/T4 there were several public quests that could be worded to match this overview.

Anyone here play Tabula Rasa? I wonder if it’s a bit like that system? Where the enemy could take over bases and seemed to pop up out of nowhere.

Until a new game comes out and blows me out of the water, I don’t see getting fired up for any game’s promotion anymore.

I’ll try any new game that comes out, and then will see if I like it. I’ve just grown negative to any promotional trailer, and do not value any of their information.

But you sure can’t deny that there are some fantastic talents in the marketing department for game companies.

Keen, except a couple of very important differences, which I mentioned in my previous reply.
I loved WAR PQs for a long time, until it became a INF grindfest doing only the first and MAYBE the second stage then waiting for it to reset cos there was noone around to complete the whole PQ. So basically I don’t see how ANet trying to improve the PQ idea is a bad thing at all, if you absolutely want to simplify events so much as to compare them with the PQs. 🙂

As I understand it, it’s basically an entire world full of nothing but WAR PQs, with the following differences:

a: They events scale dynamically to match the number of players in the area.

b: There is no competition, everyone who does a minimum amount of work killing a given mob gets full credit/loot etc.

c: There is no “reset” and wait time, and the events don’t just progress in one direction – they can branch, or move backwards if left long enough. That is, some of chains are designed to move slowly back through their stages to a set point (I.e. the centaur are out of control), or they will cycle endlessly through the chain, branching based on player intervention.

d: there are no quests in the WoW sense, so if you show up after a village has burned to the ground, you’re not “missing” a specific part of your quest line or anything.

This last point is the important one, I think – once you remove WoW’s idea of linear quest progression, where every player *must* be able to get and do every quest in the game in a specific order – well, there’s no longer a need for instancing or phasing. You can let the world change, and it doesn’t matter.

As has been mentioned, the instancing refers to your personal story (since it’s tailored to you based on your biography, to a degree) and your “home”, which is both a house and its surrounding area, which will be filled with trophies and NPCs based on your choices and accomplishments in the personal campaign. You can invite people into these instances, in which case they scale based on party size, so they could be sort of like your WoW dungeons. It’s basically a single player story/campaign integrated into the MMO, that you can play as co-op with friends, and drives your travels around the world where you interact with the open-world events.

All that being said, who knows whether they’ll actually pull it off. I’m personally cautiously optimistic, based on following their interviews and CM interactions, but I’m also quite confident that this will probably not be the kind of game that you’re hoping for, Keen.

Also I don’t think Arena Net is trying to please everyone with GW2. I think they *are* casting their net across a number of different genres (including elements from FPS like being downed rather than killed, a server browser like interface to find PvP matches, etc.), but not really going out of their way to court the hard core MMO players who really want a steep leveling curve or raiding (both are out).

I will add that I think ANet has really done their research on this one – the mass PvP format, or World vs World, has been talked about a bit:

Will be a rotating 3-way FFA between 3 different servers – thus server community > all, you need to work with everyone on your server against the other servers. Also, 3 fucking sides. Thank you.

Will feature keep-based combat, in addition to trade caravans, mines, lumber mills, and other resource nodes around the map. Capturing resource points allows you to build siege engines.

Controlling certain points awards bonuses to the server who controls them.

Should allow hundreds of players per server to fight simultaneously.

There is also a smaller competitive format that will be 5v5 for tournaments. But I thought that the 3-way FFA part and actually allowing success in the large scale PvP to give bonuses to your server was a great throwback to DAOC.

Again though, we’ll just have to see when people start playing the demo.

@Proximo – I think the point Keen is trying to make is that he’ll believe it when he sees it. Marketing speak, FAQs, and design documents are one thing but in-game implementation and how players react is quite another.

For me, it’s far too early to get too pumped about GW2. It’s probably the game I’m most looking forward to based on GW1 and what I’ve read about the sequel so far but there’s a lot of time and games between now and release.

Given GW1’s immense success (7M copies sold?) I think the model is a proven one and the minor tweaks to the model they seem to be making for GW2 sound like quite an improvement imho.

@everyone

As for seeing how it’s actually implemented: If anyone isn’t aware, the first playable demo is at Gamescom next week. They’ll have the human area from level 1 available, showing the personal story and event system (I.e. how much is instanced vs how much is open world). Also a high level area (in the upper 40s), where the big purple tesla dragon hangs out.

Anyone in the northwest can also play the demo at PAX Prime in 3 weeks.

I guess until then we just have to wait on a lot of these questions.

@Snafzg: Ye I understand that, and as said it’s a trailer and marketing info so far so we’ll just have to be cautious about buying into it all.
I’m just trying to point out some info released that makes dynamic events that much different to PQs, unless they go about implementing them completely different to how they have said they will (which wont be the first time in MMO history I know :P)
Looking forward to hearing more after Gamescom for sure!

Any time you -simulate- persistent events in an MMO as the GW2 staff claims to be doing, it will always suck. There are only two ways that this can be done:

A. Everything is really just instanced and, therefore, things are really only persistent for your own character, not the whole world.
B. Dynamic events really do happen and the entire world collapses in a matter of hours after server launch because all the events have run their course and there are no cities left.

I don’t know, for some crazy odd reason I think the true story here lies in “A”.

Seriously people, this is not hard to figure out: THEY…ARE…LYING! How many times do we have to be fooled and tricked to understand that these big budget developers promise crap like this all the time and never deliver.

I like to use the “Cryptid” analogy (think UFOs, Big Foot, Lock Ness Monster, etc). Isn’t it odd that the only evidence of the existence of these things come from heresay, fuzzy photos and a bunch of redneck hicks?

Think about it this way: IF Arena Net had actually pulled it off, the most revolutionary system ever created in a MMO history (possibly gaming history), don’t you think you’d be hearing a little more about it? Don’t you think that every gaming news outlet would be screaming about this revolutionary system from the top of their lungs for months? Instead, we get these photo-op articles and trailers from the developers touting some secret amazing thing that we are only supposed to know bits and pieces about.

All of this brings back memories of Oblivion touting “Radiant AI”, or WAR’s “Public Events”, or Dragon Age’s hyped “Origin Stories”, or Mass Effect’s hyped “free-roaming interplanetary exploration” system. I’ve stopped drinking the Kool-Aid, when will you guys?

Me too! Based on what I’ve been reading, it has the MMO flavour minus several things that annoy me most about MMOs so my ears are definitely perked. 🙂

@ Lumin and a number of others saying roughly “THIS IS UNPOSSIBLE. THEY LIE. THIS CANNOT BE DONE! IT MUST BE INSTANCED!!!”

Wow fail post. Sorry. Trying again.

@ Lumin and a number of others saying roughly â€œTHIS IS UNPOSSIBLE. THEY LIE. THIS CANNOT BE DONE! IT MUST BE INSTANCED!!!â€

Calm down. Read the explanations in this thread regarding how things are described to work. Breathe. It’ll be OK. As far as I can tell, phasing is much more technically complex than how the event system has been described to work.

The only person outside ANet who’s played the game and been given any room to talk about it is Scott Kurtz over at PvPonline. He was overheard on his livestream discussing the game after being invited to play it with Tycho and Gabe. He seemed to indicate everything worked like it’s been described to.

As I said earlier, we’ll see in about a week.

Bootae’s been begging for 3 Realms for Warhammer forever. Now Guildwars is going to do it. Wonder if the game will have collision detection in its guild vs guild. (pvp)

@Sisyphean

It’s not UNpossible, what exactly are you UNplying? don’t be so UNplicit with your UNposition. 🙂

Prob picked that up from the ring of blood questline in Nagrand in WoW where an ogre screams UNPOSSIBLE!

DAoC’s frontiers were persistent and non-instanced. There is plenty of opportunity for any players actions to be undone by the next player. Bridge destroyed? The next player farms mats from nearby mobs or resource nodes so the nearby townfolks can rebuild it. Repeat ad infinitum just like beating down the door and claiming keeps in DAoC.

@ 53: Collision detection is… out and in.

There is no body blocking, they hope that function will be replaced by stuns, knockbacks, etc. I’m skeptical about this, to say the least, but I’d prefer smooth movement to buggy body checking, if those are my options. I’d prefer full CD.

On the other hand, projectile attacks (and in GW, many spells are projectiles, as well as arrows and bullets) will impact the first solid surface they hit, be it a wall, a tree, or the ranger in front of you in whirling defense (which will reflect the projectile back). So collision detection is of the “stand behind the warriors and be shielded from arrows” not “warriors stand in the doorway and passively block the enemies from entering”.

@ Lumin in 54: 😀 I know I come off as a rabid fanboy in here, and sorry to single you out. But I think GW2 hasn’t gotten the coverage it deserves (in terms of depth). There is a lot of info that has come out in Q&A sessions or from CMs on the forums that is very hard to find if you’re not following it all as it’s released. Just trying to fill some of those gaps, here, since I spend far too much time reading about the game… T_T

@ Proximo: Indeed 🙂

I can envision having the events work in such a way that they build off one another.

For example, folks describe that bridge being destroyed as a one time thing… but it’s entirely plausible that such an event sets up another future event, perhaps triggered by player actions, that involves players escorting a work party to rebuild the bridge.

WAR’s PQs sucked because they were static and arbitrary. They didn’t affect any aspect of the world. Not even the patch of dirt they existed upon. The reset based on timers. Success/Failure only resulted the in the acquistion of goodies or failure to acquire said goodies.

I’m interested to see if the events in GW2 are dynamic as they’ve said. Having them chain into future possible events is a great way to make the world dynamic. If the servers player base sucks, they’ll all be holed up in refugee camps in the hills after a few months. If they’re good at managing the world and working together, they’ll keep evil holed up at thier entry points to the world.

Such a system reminds me of the GM led “invasions” in UO. If the playerbase failed, an entire city could be overrun for days. Maybe guild wars figured out a way to automate this type of thing and remove the need for GMs to initiate these types of events.

One can only hope 🙂

Well there are a ton of comments on a totally different track than my thoughts, but I’ll risk appending mine here anyway:

What makes me enthusiastic about Guild Wars 2 is how they’ve pointed out that their pricing model allows them to take chances. They can create content that you’ll either like.. or not. They don’t have to rely on content that traps you.

So it’s either going to end up the first deep virtual world in awhile– or it’s going to end up a decent co-op game. I’d rather have the former, but in the face of the current alternatives I’m quite happy to just get the co-op (without subscription or any sort of freemium bait-and-switch).

The whole idea of subscriptions to me was so that we the players could pay to maintain an ongoing, updated world. Instead lately we’ve been getting ‘balancing’ patches and cash shop items.

I want to either play a fun cooperative game with my friends, or immerse myself in a world. Too bad there are few options for both.

@ 58. Gali:

That’s exactly how they’ve been described to work, in fact.

So there’s a bridge. Centaur would attack it, that’s their basic goal in that event. If the players leave them that way too long, they destroy the bridge.

There are now no supplies coming over the bridge, so players have limited access to merchants, or the merchants they can get to don’t have much stuff.

If the players drive the centaur off, eventually people will come and rebuild the bridge, then there will be better stuff at the merchants again.

If the players keep pushing the chain along, perhaps they’ll push all the way back to the centaur forward base, where they have a chance to drive them out for a while and sack the base.

Perhaps at that point friendly NPCs move in and try to hold the base against the centaur. Over time special merchants become available. They’ve said there’s an event chain that works basically like this, where it then becomes an increasingly hard (and eventually nearly un-winnable, IIRC) struggle to hold the base. Eventually you’re overwhelmed, or the players give up, and the centaur begin to push back. I’m fairly certain there’s some mechanism to prevent players locking a chain in place, but I’m not clear what it is.

Once the players let things slide for a bit, the centaur make a comeback, and push back towards their “rest state” of attacking the bridge, through the other “states” of holding their base, etc.

At each phase there is a clear goal for any players in the area to work together towards (all the events are group-friendly, and scale with the number of players in the area). Any players who work together towards the event’s goal are rewarded equally with loot, XP, etc, whether they’re in a group or not – Like a PQ, but rather than open grouping, it just treats everyone who pitches in as an equal partner in the event.

They’ve said many of the chains also branch/fork in additional ways, or overlap in such a way that perhaps the bridge has two event chains linked to it at once. There are also some one-off events that are simply fun little things to discover, such as putting rabbits in hutches, or finding a wizard in a cave who will give you tasks.

And if it wasn’t made clear, all of this is *instead* of WoW style quests – there will be no question marks to follow. So all that time spent generating quests is out the window. Just think about it as a 2-way campaign, with discrete phases to pass through in each direction, and the whole system tends to flow back to a rest state (or eventually collapse to it, I assume) – to me it doesn’t seem like all that much work.

Once you remove the need to have everyone see every quest giver, so they can go through the same quest progression as every other person, it all becomes kind of simple.

Keen, are you that stupid?
Do you think the rest of us gamers are that stupid?
Do you think the folks at ArenaNet are that stupid?

Because a massive amount of stupidity would be required to flat out lie repeatedly to gamers about Dynamic Events in an open persistent world if it were really only in instances or phases–shortly before the public can play demos of the game themselves without being restricted by NDAs.

People keep bandying the word “War” to support their critique but why stop there? Let’s mention other words:
–“Allods”: It was a f2p mmo with one of the top critical and gamer reviews during beta right up until launch, at which point TPTB nerfed the game so that optional items they were selling in their cash shop at 10x reasonable prices were now required to play the game. The backlash that weekend of launch was instant and viral turning “Allods” into a cautionary nightmare tale you tell young game programmers to scare them into being good.
–“Cryptic”: With a one-two punch of Champions Online and Star Trek Online (the latter being game I really wanted and still want to do well, scifi and space oriented and you can walk around inside your spaceship and outside of it), both games majorly hyped but the reality is both were clearly released a year early as demonstrated by very thin content and massive grinding (tho some make like the latter, the far majority of American players don’t care for).
–“Aion”: You can fly! You can fly! See the big wings? You can fly! We all saw the trailers. Yeah, well, actually, adventure without the wings, without flying early on and tho there was plenty of content–early on until you ran out early on (around level 10 or 20?) and hit a grind wall where you had to do major grinding to advance to the in levels until you reached the fabled endgame where allegedly the game rewards you. Hopefully.

The point is we’re suppose to believe it’s only AFTER such craptacular failures that have roiled and burned mmo gamers left, right and center that only THEN did ArenaNet said to each other, “Hey, let’s flat out lie to a now exceedingly skeptical if not cynical populace. It’s only months / weeks / days away from our demo when the truth would be revealed. Shirley they will have forgotten about previous disappointments from other companies and even and buy our spiel, at least long enough to buy our game which isn’t close enough for release for us to even give a date / quarter / year when it will be released.”

Um, no, no, no, Keen.
You’re not that stupid.
We’re not that stupid.
They’re not that stupid.

We’re not stupid enough to fall for it and they’re not stupid enough to try it.

As for the “extensive instance gameplay”, that’s for your personal story, so no one else can grief it.

As for you destroying a bridge, what happens to the next player who comes along, they see the ruins of the bridge. As for you doing cool stuff that changes the world so the next player won’t be able to repeat it, yeah, that’s right. The next player comes along and gets to do OTHER cool stuff as result of the cool stuff you did earlier. For example:

You sabotaged a bridge over a river to stop an invading horde of enraged centaurs from swarming a village. The next person who comes along maybe has to dive into the river to retrieve an precious artifact that was on the bridge while fighting thru some water monsters. The next player comes along in time to protect the village from an invasion of enraged water monsters, but the player fails. The next player comes along to find ruins and a few people hiding asking you to rescue their neighbors who were kidnapped by the water monsters into their river bottom city–or if the previous player had succeeded in defending the village from the water monsters then they would have been asked to sail across the river to protect some villagers while they set up a rope bridge.

The consequences of one adventure persists and affects what other players see. You could even have players defending the village from enraged water monsters when enraged centaurs return and you could decide to let them duke it out amongst themselves weakening their own forces before you clean them up or taking them both on for the extra XP.

The way ArenaNet has described Dynamic Events is that some will cycle in chains in 10-15 minutes, some in hours, some based on the time of day (e.g., nighttime in a graveyard), some could take weeks or even months to cycle, or even longer waiting on players to act: E.g.:
–“Hey, this looks like a cool glowing ring lying by this bald almost naked shriveled up sleeping dude, he must not think it’s precious with it lying on the ground here. I’ll just take it.”
–“Hey, here’s weird box with a tag saying ‘Property of Pandora’, let’s see what’s inside.”.

But it’s not that there’s nothing to do while it’s resetting to the original condition (e.g., centaurs raiding a village could be a daily / weekly / monthly / seasonal event and if you win, the centaurs might take a while to gain the courage again to re-attack, meanwhile you might attack the centaur base so the village can expand or if you lose you might have to have to escape from a centaur prison with the help of a friendly centaur named “Zhed the VII”.

The idea of Dynamic Events is that you do cool stuff, and like IRL you actions have consequences that affect others can do–over a period of time. If you smash a bus no one else can ride it and they have to wait 10 minutes for the next bus. If you eat a burger someone else has to 5 minutes for the next burger. If you smash a building someone else has to wait months or years for it to be rebuilt. If you plant a tree someone else can relax in its shade for years to come–or until someone else chops down the tree.

Your actions have consequences that affect others for a long time. Perhaps permanently or perhaps said actions are undone by someone else. They rebuild what you’ve destroyed or destroy what you’ve built. So yeah with Dynamic Events you get to do cool stuff that has consequences and even tho other players can’t repeat what you’ve done (at least for a period time) but then they get to do OTHER cool stuff.

Finally, Keen, I’d like to say I’m not attacking or blaming you or the other people who’ve been agreeing with you. You skepticism is not your fault. If you’re skeptical or even cynical, it’s because of one thing:

Experience.

We don’t live in a vacuum (at least not within Earth’s atmosphere, for all those astronomy geeks getting ready to reply 🙂 ). You’ve been lied to before. We’ve been lied to before. Once burnt, twice shy. Vaporware isn’t a term exclusive to the mmo or even the gaming community. There’s a reason to be skeptical in the computer field (or in life in general). It’s good to prepare for the worst, but the worst isn’t the only possibility, not in real life, not in the computer field, not even in mmos.

Change is one of the few constants in life–and sometimes it’s actually positive. And sometimes, people actually mean what they say and say what they mean.

The scary part is that requires a measure of trust. Whether or not you think ArenaNet has earned your trust, that’s up to you. But consider they are promising to release a game that breaks the mold (and “mold” being the keyword) of the mmo and they did it before with Guild Wars, which broke the mold of MMORPGs then (so much they didn’t even refer to it as such but a CORPG, computer online rpg). Is it really so hard to believe they intend on breaking the mold again? Again that’s up to you.

The good news is trust won’t be needed for long. The demo drops in a week’s time at Gamescom and we get to see for ourselves (at least on video online) if ArenaNet is writing checks their game can’t cash or if they are indeed walking their talk.

— Ken from Chicago

sounds good Sisyphean. Looking forward to see how they pull it off.

I do not think they are outright 100% lying, just stretching the truth… I have big suspicion that these events are exactly like T4 WAR PQs.

I have not read much about this game though.. can anyone point me to an explanation of their 3 sided realm war system?

This is a great discussion so far, some great points. To me it feels like this game very well could break the mold, we shall find out soon!

Er… after rewatching this video again for the sake of this discussion, the first thing that came to my mind is that, “this looks a lot like cut-scenes in GW1’s campaign…”. I’m not talking about the graphic here, mind you. But the look & feel of the whole thing is more like in-game cutscenes or something from storyline missions than some random events that would happen in a non-instanced explorable world.

Don’t know, maybe that’s just me. Maybe I played too much GW1 and was too big a fanboi to be any optimistic.

I think everyone needs to remember that most of what has been shown and discussed about GW2 more and likely will be worth the box price which is all we have to pay.

That’s why I’m not being so skeptical with this title like so many others in development.

“The most important in an MMO should be the player. We have build an MMO for the player”

Even my politicians are better at talking non-informative nonsense.

I congratulate GW2 for trying something different. The graphics look amazing. The sound is nice. But it is a trailer! Just a trailer. Man have I seen beautiful trailers over the years! The WAR one was good. The AoC one was good. I don’t trust no trailer that doesn’t show me the gameplay and some concrete features.

So far the only thing I have learnt is that GW2 is no vaporware. I already knew this.

It’s only been a few months since they released the first in-game footage, and people are already whining about how we don’t have all the details on game play yet? That’s a lot of hate for a product I’d think most gamers would be rooting for.

When gameplay footage is shown and developers are making hype statements then yes, it’s time for details.

Can we believe anything the developers say about the details though? I mean I can’t think of 1 MMO other than WoW that has done what they’ve claimed they would in the last 5 years. WoW isn’t the perfect little house on the prarie either, they have their own things they fall through on.

I may be falling into one of those MMO pesimist phases but that doesn’t bother me. I can’t think of a single MMO in the last few years that has lived up to the hype it created. I really don’t see any MMO coming out in the next 18 months changing that either, yes SW:TOR included.

Can we believe developers? Honestly, no. But I’ll take details that might be fudges over just showing the videos with lines like “People who hate MMO’s will love GW2!”. I like commentary saying “This is what you’re seeing, and how we’re implementing what you’re seeing”. That’s how open I would be with my marketing/hype.

@ 67. Nils:

Even as a rabid supporter of GW2, I agree with you on this one. The trailer was pretty, but did a pretty shitty job explaining what exactly was going on in it, as well as being very vague in an attempt to create punchy sound bites.

I think they’ve done much better jobs showing their passion and innovative ideas in Q&A sessions and the articles on the arena.net blog. In fact, unfortunately, to get most of the juicy info about the game you have to look everywhere BUT the official site.

For example, the codex they’ve provided to explain what you’re seeing in the trailer is on the Arena.net blog, here: http://www.arena.net/blog/walking-the-walk – for anyone who hasn’t seen it. It described what will be in the demo, and to a degree how those elements appear in the video.

I don’t know why I didn’t think to link to that blog earlier… Either way, I think it’s kind of silly to release a video that requires an 800 word blog post as a learning aide.

In another example of how much digging you have to do to figure anything out, it was only made clear on one of the community forums that you can actually fight the big purple dragon, called the Shatterer, who appears in both the trailer and the demo. One of the CMs briefly noted that he had tried a few times, with little success, but that it was possible.

I dunno if I agree to that, a trailer is a trailer, it’s marketing jippo meant to point out the major selling points of the game, not explain mechanics etc. What you are asking for is stuff that belongs in things like WAR had in their production podcast, and I hope we get to see something similar from ANet before release. I think at this stage they are just not quite there to start talking about specifics, they are just trying to create some hype and doing that takes marketing jippo. ^^

Personally, I am pleased to see it looks like it’s coming along well, and I’m encouraged by what the developers are saying, and they’ve really done a good job filling in the details in their blog posts. Ultimately, like any MMO, we’re not going to get a full reveal until we log in on day 1, so a stance demanding details seems a little silly to me.

They are doing BOTH, showing video of gameplay, just without the HUD, AND giving details in their blogs and various Q&A interviews.

The manifesto trailer is a *summary* of their original manifesto blog and other blog entries–but those blog entries are still there for those who want the details.

Oh and for those who say the manifesto shows nothing new:
–Please provide the link where we were shown Steeleye Dan.
–Please provide the link where we were shown asurans riding inside golems.
–Please provide the link where we were shown golems as spinning tops of destruction.
–Please provide the link where we were shown centaurs raiding and destroying structures in their path.
–Please provide the link where we were shown elementalists and warriors combined powers to show an electro-bullet.
–Please provide the link where we were shown the new stone elemental creatures rising from the ground.
–Please provide the link where we were shown combat where combatants were not just getting knocked down but knocked back so far their opponent had to run after them in order to punch them again.
–Please provide the link where we were shown up close and personal with a mid-level crystal dragon.
–Please provide the link where we were shown characters swimming with sharks.

Since absolutely nothing new was shown in the manifesto video, those links shouldn’t be too hard to find. 🙂

— Ken from Chicago

P.S. Also arguing for details that ArenaNet has provided in blogs and interviews and them complaining they are just words because you want video proof only to then criticize the video that back up the words for not providing the details that ArenaNet has already provided … yeah, that only undermines your argument.

Cause of the lack of info with Arenanet and Bioware I am only following one MMO currently, RIFT. IMO it will be a huge sleaper and will surprise people, id love to see Rift become mainstream.

“Check out the scene in the video with giant hands reaching out from the ground creating a vortex of destruction. Thatâ€™s an earth elemental, summoned by an enemy shaman as part of a multiplayer event near the start of the human story. Youâ€™ll probably fight it as a level 1 character. Thatâ€™s quite a step up from killing ten rats!”

Yeah! Why don’t you let me kill the endgame boss at level 1, too? Would be even better wouldn’t it?

Really: Some ideas I’ve read on their page by now are nice. I certainly congratulate them, for not copying WoW, not copying a holy trinity. I do not congratulate them for stating that they want to make away with harsh death penalthies. .. What harsh death penalthies? Those in WoW, WAR or AoC ?

I do not want to defeat powerful opponents at level 1, because at level 1 I want to feel weak! Yes: Weak!

If I am allmighty already at level one, what will I be at max level? Mega-allmighty ? Where is the progression?

I certainly don’t like that for PvP I will get a balanced new equipment and normalized dps. This is silly! I want to do PvP with my individual character. The one who is so important according to ArenaNet. Instead, they basically give me a new character, because they still follow the Counterstrike ideology, that balance is the most ikmportant thing in PvP. It may be for tournaments. But it is not for MMORPG PvP!

The more I think about it, this cannot be a MMO that I will play for even a few months. Because they don’t want me to.

Since there is no subscription, they have no interest in player-rentention rate. It is like AoC: You create a giantic hype and a really fun experience for the first few levels. Perhaps even for the entire game. But the game is basically played through after a few weeks.

Why would they want it any other way? No subscription makes them lose money the more players play the game! They just want to sell you the box and have you like the game for a few weeks. After playing through and developing your character you can either reroll or what?

The whole trailer and all the stuff they have written concentrate on the leveling experience: “You will make a unique character.”
Great! And once you have done that and played through the content, you can replay the game with a different character or simply leave. Replay value might be good. But the most important thing for me is what I do in the long run.

Will there be a character progression in the long run? I haven’t heard anything about it! Will there be a story in the long run? Will there be player generated content of any amount? (Like e.g. guild at make war with each other). No.

If you want to do PvP with your individual character, you certainly can. If you don’t want your character to be normalized (i.e. balanced) then you may enjoy the WvW side of PvP more than the tournament side.

The focus on the game is more about providing a lot of varied content for replay purposes, rather than on providing a very linear guided tour that every character follows. If you are looking for a game where you have endless raiding for gear at the end of a long leveling curve, then no this probably isn’t the game for you. If you don’t care about experiencing different content with different characters, then likewise.

Personally, I’m just as happy to do without that stuff, and roll a few alts. It worked well enough for GW1 and GW2 looks to have much more re-playability built in than GW1 did.

@Ken from Chicago: I second that. Nuff said

@Nils

Exactly.

Whenever i read “get away from harsh death penalties”, i immediately know it is a game i’ll never play. Especially when they say that in this day and age. If they consider today’s games having harsh death penalties what happens when you die in this one? Are you awarded an epic weapon every time you die?

ughh…just completely lost any dwindling interest i actually had in this game.

I reckon they feel the death penalty in GW1 wash harsh, and tbh so do I. Every time you died you got a -15% debuff to ALL your stats (health, damage EVERYTHING), stacking up to -75%.
At -75% you could not complete the mission you where on, you had to start over and loose all progress so far (being instanced and reset when you zoned out).

@ 78,79. Nils and 82. Jordan:

I’m the first to agree that GW2 is simply not going to be enjoyable if you’re looking for a traditional MMORPG experience. That’s why I think it’s silly when people accuse them of trying to be everything to everybody – they’re clearly not. Raiding’s out. Having to “work” for max level is out. Corpse runs and the trinity are out. Other, new systems, are being tried in their place, but it’s a unique effort, and who knows if they’ll work. It’s kind of a risky game in a lot of ways.

And yes, the power curve has always been very muted in Guildwars, and I think this continues in GW2. The focus is on customization of skills, traits, etc. Not maximization of power, if I understand it correctly.

Similarly, when asked specifically what one can do once you’ve hit max level other than dungeons and PvP, they offered that they hope people will go back and explore the entire world (when you enter a lower level zone, you’re scaled down to a power level more appropriate for the zone – again, being all powerful, not the focus), rather than being limited to a few end-game zones. They also are placing a big emphasis on alts, it’s true. Historically the Guildwars endgame has been one of gathering prestige armor, doing dungeons, PvP, and making Alts. That’s their model. And players adjusted – they play for a while, get bored, do something else, and come back again later. That doesn’t look like it’s going to change.

As has been mentioned, there are two forms of PvP – World vs World, a 3-way FFA between 3 different servers, where you work with your guild, alliance, and server to win buffs and other benefits for your “world”. This format you bring in your character at whatever power level you’re currently at, be it level 1 or 80. The competitive or tournament play is modeled on FPS games, so yes, everyone is scaled to max level and has all skills and the best gear unlocked, exactly as it should be for tournaments. Anyone who cares about competition will be happy with those modes, and anyone who wants more typical MMORPG PvP should get more out of the World vs World play anyway.

As for griping on the death penalty wording… Again, they seem to lose a lot of detail in hopes of making a punchy marketing statement. The truth of it is that more than removing “a harsh death penalty”, they just changed how MMO death works. They introducing a system similar to the one in Borderlands, where players are first downed, and then bleed out eventually if they continue to be attacked and no one picks them up. Obviously not a system for people who want a traditional MMO.

I’m not going to argue that one approach is better than the other, but I think GW2’s has value as an option. As I put it in another blog comment, I think there’s a great possibility for good old fashioned role playing in the new death system: Anyone, of any class, can come along and find another player who’s been defeated by a monster, and help them up, just as could happen in say, a fantasy novel. Rather than your ability to help someone being limited by whether you have a res on your bar, it’s now a choice that you make while playing your character.

Granted, having more rigid class roles is also an attractive system that I appreciate, but I’m ready to try something new, at this point.

I should perhaps say that I am happy that an AAA-game tries something else in the MMO szene.
That’s great.

I might even buy that game and have some fun for a while and apparently that is all the developers want me to do.

Still, this is a rather small step towards better MMOs and it might even contain several steps backwards.

What’s interesting is the non-holy-trinity system. Problem is: It’s easy to remove the trinity. It’s is much harder to replace it with something worthwhile. Let’s see if they managed to do that.

What might be a step backwards for MMOs in your eyes might be two steps forward for someone else. People are looking for different things in games and luckily there’s very few rules to what makes a good MMO, having harsh death penalties not being one of them. Maybe thats one of the things you like in MMOs you play, but just because a game doesn’t fit your interests doesn’t mean it’s less of a game or MMO.

Funnily enough, ArenaNet has also talked about what they mean by “getting rid of the trinity” and what they intend to replace it with. It’s all on their website.

It’s weird; it seems obvious that the trailer was meant to deliver a few broad, cocky statements, show some impressive gameplay in progress, and get people talking. In that, it was successful. However, I’d also wager that the intent was to get people to say, “hmm, I want to know more” and then visit the website and read up on a few things.

Instead, it seems people have flocked to blog and forum posts, asking questions that have been answered elsewhere, because the trailer wasn’t informative enough on its own. I’m not sure what the solution is here, except for ANet to release a half-hour demo painstakingly walking through each of its game systems so that nobody has to look anything up…

except that’s what it seems they’ll be doing at Gamescom, so.

Well, I spend yesterdays evening reading the web page .. I cannot read everything, though. And the first thing I read were the official links on the page, not 6 months old blog posts ..

Well, that’s the rub isn’t it? There’s a lot of material to cover, as ANet has been releasing huge blog posts for months (followed by follow-ups and Q&As) and some want it all covered in the trailer? There’s a lot to be covered and most of the questions asked on this page have been answered, but there’s no real way to compile the info that won’t be TL;DR anyway.

At any rate, to simplify your search, this is the article on healing and death (in which the holy trinity is ditched): http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/combat/healing-death/

and some follow-up:
http://www.arena.net/blog/jon-peters-answers-your-first-batch-of-healing-and-death-questions

http://www.arena.net/blog/jon-peters-answers-more-healing-and-death-questions

@ 88. Nils – yeah, that’s a big problem. As I said earlier, a lot of the best information isn’t even on the website, but in the Q&A articles linked to from the arena.net blog.

I think that’s why I’m spending a lot more time than usual trying to address questions here – I think the game has a lot of potential, but it can be hard to find the good details that flesh that potential out as more than just marketing hype.

Anyway, even if we do like to see something different being tried, I also really do feel for the people who have been wanting an old-school MMORGP to cater to *their* tastes for once. It seems like everything these days is more casual, more action, more themepark – it’d be very frustrating to see something like GW2 come out and feature an even bigger departure from traditional MMOs, but to really not see anything pushing the other end of the spectrum, offering what Keen always talks about: A real homage to what made those old MMOs great.

Hopefully some day a stable company makes the game that old EQ players want, and really does it justice. I feel lucky that a company with ANet’s resources happens to be on the same page as me, in terms of design philosophy. Many aren’t so lucky, and have to make due with small companies that are likely to fold months after release if their game doesn’t hit the jackpot.

It’s a frustrating time to be a gamer, in may ways. Hopefully the renaissance in indy gaming continues to build momentum, and someone figures out how to make a good MMO model within that economic space – it seems like that would be a great way to make the kind of niche games that we all seem to want in one way or another.

@ Nils – I tried responding to you and I fear my post got caught in a spam trap or something for link use, so just look at Sisyphean’s comment instead :).

This blog post over at ANet explains even better about persistent and permanent changes in the open world vs your instanced storyline:
http://www.arena.net/blog/mmo-manifesto-reactions

@ 92.Proximo: The way they explained it makes it sound a lot like WAR’s PQs, lol…

In the past, they’ve explained the persistent events as lasting a bit longer than 15 minutes, but I guess we shall see.

Yes, some reset every 15 mins, some reset based on player actions, some reset as a chain effect from other events, all this leading to events NOT being as static as WAR PQs.
And again, WAR PQs was a awesome idea poorly implemented.
I loved the first times I did PQs, it was seriously fun compared to the first quests in WoW where u got to kill kobolds and rats. The problem with them where several;

They are static, as in they do not scale with amount of players present, leaving the hard ones unused today cos noone gives a shit.
They are static, as in the same thing happens every time at the same point, and then a timer tells you when it resets so you get to do exactly the same thing over again.
They are static, as in they do not have any effect on the world surrounding the PQ, PQs are isolated events, dynamic events can affect eachother and trigger new events.

In the end PQs was nothing more than a way to grind influence so u’d get the reward, you basically never saw the last stage(s) of any of the coolest PQs cos there’s not enough people there to complete the hardest stages, so you wait for the timer to reset so you can start farming from stage 1 again.
In GW2 events will all give you the same reward, so there’s no reason hanging around waiting for a particular event to cycle, you will merely be running around the world looking for fun stuff to take part in and get rewarded for it.

That blog entry plays a bit of damage control. Like I said, they spoke in hyperbole and created a false picture of what people should expect.

“When she said this she was talking about this”

That’s clearly an indication that they were not clear.

After their clarification, it seems exactly like I thought. Anything meaningful and truly persistent will be in instances. The events will likely reset much like PQ’s with some additional modes.

It’s hard to really glean anything grander than a WAR PQ now that they’ve made it more clear. Hopefully they do something to add to the system though, or else this is nothing special.

“These event cycles vary dramatically on a case-by-case basis. In some large event chains, depending on player participation and the outcome of events, the chain could go entirely from one end to the other over the course of hours before it cycles back. In other cases, the event may change the world for 10-15 minutes before it can cycle back around. Some events only occur when specific conditions are met, like a snow storm rolls into the map, or night falls over the graveyard. If an event reaches one end of the chain, it could sit at that point for days, weeks, or months until a player comes along and decides to participate in the event chain.â€ (Quote from ANEt blog Q&A on dynamic events, back in May 2010)

I haven’t seen anyone here advocate that persistent = permanent, not even with repeated links back to the blog content.

Every darn week I pluck weeds from my lawn for hours, and the next week there are just as many back for me to pluck again. A house burned down down the block a while back, and these people keep milling around it now putting frames up to rebuild it! I demand more permanence in my RL!

Haha well put Randomessa ^^
Also, if you fail to see the difference between WAR PQs and GW dynamic events you either haven’t been reading what we have posted here (and official info) or you’re just incredibly narrow minded.
I see the similarities, but I also see the differences that makes them, on paper, a lot better than WAR PQs. That said only time can tell if it will be.

Well, the three biggest differences between PQs and Dynamic Events are

1) Amount: PQs were hyped at 300+, DEs are hyped at 1500+. How close to reality this number is, is currently unknown.
2) Scaling: PQs could not be completed without adequate numbers and could be trivialized by excess numbers, DEs are supposed to scale based on number to avoid these problems.
3) Persistence: PQs were always going to reset in a couple of minutes, DEs will cycle anywhere from 10-15 minutes to months based on current intel.

The two criticisms I’ve seen about these differences is that

* population scaling would impact immersion, and
* any amount of content cycling is non-permanent and therefore no better than a 2-minute reset, regardless of duration.

I’m not sure how a game developer could rectify these problems AND not instance the content AND avoid griefing, but if they can pull it off, ANet has reached the optimal compromise point to please me.

@ 96.Randomessa: Nicely put, if a bit sarcastic. 🙂

The take away here is that ANet isn’t sure how to sell their own ideas yet, and they’re not very good at it. 😛

Given that we’re all on the same page as far as how the system works now, I’ll give this one more try:

I’m excited about this system because it’s what I’ve always thought made a ton of sense. I never got why mobs just stood around in a field – they should have a simple goal, or script. They should be doing things that show your their motivations, culture, fears. If the players fail to kill enough of them over time, they should hit a tipping point and move out across the world, ransacking towns. Old MUDs used to have systems like that, if I remember correctly. The tech is there, it was just a matter of giving up on the questing orthodoxy and its dead, sterile world; full of rote actions and mindless shambling husks, instead of living beings.

This system sounds like it should do just what I’ve described. No you can’t do the equivalent of killing Thrall permanently. Sure, if you save a city from bandits, they will rally and launch another attack, and it will need saving again. I’m personally OK with that, because it still makes the NPC actors in the world seem that much more alive.

Basically all that’s happening here is that cyclical systems in the game world are being modeled in a slightly more sophisticated way. Sort of like how WoW has wolves that will occasionally attack squirrels. It isn’t the burning of the Shire, but it does make things feel *alive* and dynamic. It adds that spark of causality and believability that makes the world feel like more than a bunch of mobs standing around waiting to be popped for their juicy XP.

As much as I loved WAR’s PQs for the mechanical things they did right – open grouping, replacing static quests with interactive (if repetitive) story telling – they never really added life to the world in this way, because the mobs were still fundamentally just standing around waiting for PCs to kill them. In contrast, if ANet can pull their vision off, I think it will be a major achievement. Though oddly, all it’s doing is finally living up to the potential that existed in MUDs many years ago.

In an age where game worlds are getting smaller and smaller, and story telling is becoming ever more controlled, cinematic, and linear, I’m just happy to see a system that is willing to let go and make some room for capricious timing – where two people could make many of the same choices as they played through, yet still experience a completely different personal narrative, one collectively crafted by the actions of the entire player base.

And that *should* happen in GW2 – even if events do cycle over a matter of minutes or hours, two otherwise identical players could come through and see radically different worlds (something WAR’s PQs only began to hint at). Worlds that they impact and change, even if only temporarily. I think that this by itself is an incredibly cool possibility.

You tell me I’m assuming, but aren’t you doing the same? That is, unless you’ve actually played the game. I’m assuming on the side of educated guesses. Educated in the sense that we’re often told things by developers which appeal to our sense and desire for it to be a certain way. Ultimately they rarely turn out like we wanted.

Based upon WAR’s PQs and how they were presented, and based upon how the GW2 devs have said themselves what we’re looking at, I can’t see any reason to expect anything more than an updated version of WAr’s PQ’s.

I’m empathetic towards what you’re feeling. I felt the same with WAR and we never had anything to go by with the PQ system.

Could it be amazing? Definitely. Is it amazing? You just don’t know. Does it sound like PQ’s? Yes, and if you say no you’re not following the game or other MMO’s as well as you can.

As for persistent, a simple dictionary search up will clarify what persistent means. The “manifesto trailer” definitely makes it appear that what we’re seeing is persistent, but it turns out it’s instanced and only persistent to the individual when they’re in that instance. This is what this entire entry is about — they’re saying stuff in that trailer which doesn’t make sense.

The blog entry proved everything that I’ve said in the original blog entry to be 100% true.

@ Keen:

wait we’re back to that again? I… OK. I’m pretty certain only one or two visual elements in that video show up in instances, based on several anecdotes about their experiences playing in the open world internally. But yes, we’re both assuming based on what they say, and past corporate behavior. And yes, most of what the female dev described occurs in instances (she’s the personal story lead, so…)

More so, I think you’re in the right here to be circumspect. I had promised myself I’d avoid being hyped after WAR, but then ANet sold me. Them’s the breaks. If only I were as skeptical about the game as you are…

I’d say we’ll find out in a week, but what will that really tell us? Even if the demo is amazing, and goes further than any of us hoped for in terms of making an engaging, persistent experience, there’s no knowing whether the later-game content will hold up.

I seem to remember that everyone thought WAR was amazing when they played it on the con circuit. And it wasn’t really until tier 3 and 4 that the PQ system really broke down, IIRC? At least they’re letting us play a level 47 character as well as a level 1.

Anyway, hope you don’t feel like I’m trolling your comments, Keen, this has been a very stimulating discussion, even if it’s veered towards redundancy a number of times. Great job as always getting good conversations going.

At least in terms of the demo itself, we shall find out.

Yeah, I know other games may have turned out to be lame after they got released and they weren’t as good as they told us. But I just see no reason why would A-net do that when they already released a game which is just as good as they said and is, in fact still better then most other MMORPGs out there, if not all.

GW1 is most surely not designed to just make people “buy the box and get bored after 2 weeks”. Even though there are no monthly fees, they actually never stopped adding new free content to the game for the last 5 years, not mentioning skill balance amongst other special thingies like fighting bots.

Simply put: They have never let us down before.

Knowing this, I can’t not trust this company.

@sisyphean: I most definitely do not feel you’re trolling. I enjoy the discussions and welcome those who disagree to comment. That’s what it’s all about.

In the end it’s definitely just about the trailer for me. The comments have veered towards discussion of the events and at times the use of instancing. In a way they’re all intertwined.

My #1 complaint is simply with the trailer. I would much rather the developers write blog entries with good solid clarification and facts (like the blog entry) and not these videos which really tell us nothing and show us things which may not correspond with what is being said.

I replied to a thread on guildwars2guru.com which quickly sums up what my initial angle was when writing the topic.

“GW1 is most surely not designed to just make people â€œbuy the box and get bored after 2 weeksâ€. Even though there are no monthly fees, they actually never stopped adding new free content to the game for the last 5 years, not mentioning skill balance amongst other special thingies like fighting bots.

Simply put: They have never let us down before.”

You either were joking or you didn’t start playing the game right from the start like I did.

Fair enough. Like I said in my reply to you over on Guru, I think you offer great insight into the Big Ideas that sit at the heart of MMORPGs. So I enjoy discussing things like this with you and your readers.

At this point I pretty much agree with what you’re saying. I agree the trailer is vague and uses too much hyperbole. I agree ANet does their best PR work when they’re talking details, such as in blogs and Q&As.

I still don’t think that they’re misrepresenting as much as you feel they are, but there’s nothing to discuss about that – we just need to wait and see.

Anyway I think I’ve worked through my thoughts on this matter, finally. Hopefully I’m done. Mostly wanted to post this to let you know I replied to you over on Guru. 🙂

From what we know, sir, a majority of the world is openly persistant. The areas of the game Ree is referring to are separate instances that are being used to offer different storylines within a character’s personal choices. One of these areas is Logan’s offices in LA as head of the Seraph. Dungeons are another area where instances are being used. Your home area/home “block” as I like to call it will feature an entire city block that has NPCs, your achievements, trophies, etc… that display what you have accomplished in GW 2 and how you played out your [B]personal[/B] story.

Do realize that the personal story is completely irrelevant from the main story arc about the elder dragons. The personal story is what personality is your character (amongst a combination of charm, ferocity, and dignity), how NPCs react to your character, and what kind of image you want to make for yourself within Guild Wars 2.

The dynamic events are essentially the main leveling feature within the game and occur in the persistent world. They are, as is clearly stated in their name, dynamic. They scale up in difficulty and numbers depending on how many players are attempting the same event. They have multiple consequences and branches from both success and failure. And there are a number of different ways for them to be triggered (either on a timer, player interaction, player proximity, or item activation)

I would advise you to thoroughly read the below links before voicing yourself so publicly and possibly mis-informing interested peoples in Guild Wars 2.

Thank you for your consideration,

Malchior Devenholm

P.S.

Be sure you watch the GamesCom live stream, so you can see what we the fans have been talking about 😉

My mistake, I forgot the links 🙂

You can find them in my guru post, sir.

“Your home area/home â€œblockâ€ as I like to call it will feature an entire city block that has NPCs, your achievements, trophies, etcâ€¦ that display what you have accomplished in GW 2 and how you played out your [B]personal[/B] story.”

Hall of Monuments much?

“They are, as is clearly stated in their name, dynamic.”

It’s like saying that WAR’s Public Quest is “public”; it means NOTHING.

I’m sorry MD but you’re making it worse.

@ Cacheelma, no it’s like saying WAR PQs are STATIC but GW2 events are DYNAMIC. Both are indeed public!
Just the mere fact that events are dynamic instead of the static state of PQs make them a THAT much better idea from the get go. But you know how it is with MMO devs, ideas and implementation, most lack little in the first and all in the latter.

(And indeed some lack both)

The thing is they already have written blog entries with more details than the trailer, months ago. The trailer is meant to capture attention from a wider audience. Of course more details are welcome, but they can come at any time, especially with a TBA release date.

From the blog:

Are dynamic events cyclical? If so, how often do the cycles occur?

Colin: Dynamic events are cyclical in nature, yes.

Many of the events in the game belong to large event chains that cycle in various directions based on the outcome of the events in the chain. Other events can be one-off events that can occur, change the world, and cycle back so some conditions must be met in the world to make the event start again. These event cycles vary dramatically on a case-by-case basis. In some large event chains, depending on player participation and the outcome of events, the chain could go entirely from one end to the other over the course of hours before it cycles back. In other cases, the event may change the world for 10-15 minutes before it can cycle back around. Some events only occur when specific conditions are met, like a snow storm rolls into the map, or night falls over the graveyard. If an event reaches one end of the chain, it could sit at that point for days, weeks, or months until a player comes along and decides to participate in the event chain. Weâ€™ve tried to vary the conditions that trigger events and change the length and variety of the event cycles so that everything feels organic and unique.

http://www.arena.net/blog/colin-johanson-answers-your-dynamic-event-questions

I never played Guild Wars either. But I have been following the development ever closely, ever since I read somewhere (as they mention in the video), that a village about to be attacked by demons will not have demons milling around a designated area outside town, waiting to killed, they will ACTUALLY ATTACK THE VILLAGE. That is exciting stuff, I don’t know how it is even possible, but that is very exciting stuff.

@Bronte: Instancing. Simple as that. It’s like in Lord of the Rings Online when they’re able to pull off great events. If not instancing it will be done where an event starts and the demons attacking just spawn and start attacking.

@Malchior: The things you’re saying are pretty much irrelevant to what I’m talking about here. It’s about the terminology used and how they’re presenting details.

I did not misinform anyone, and I was proven correct by their clarification. The very fact that they had to post clarifying what is said in their trailer is justification for my comments.

Keen, PART of what they said in the trailer is instanced – the personal storyline. The OTHER part of the trailer content is going to be in the persistent world. So, no, you are HALF right in your original post. “Real” NPCs that EVERYONE interacts with can die due to monster attacks.

@Mongoose: I’m half right on the instanced stuff, and the other half I’m right about the fact that the “persistent” game changing elements end up resetting and thus are not “persistent” beyond the fact that they are events that are always there.

So maybe I’m 75% right? 😉

GamesCom will serve to be the ultimate clarifier.

Perhaps, but keep in mind that you’re not going to see much or in the context of actually playing the game as you normally would at launch.

They can’t show you how real persistent elements will play out during a demo at GamesCom like they would on a live server.

What will be clarified is a small portion of what we’re talking about: the PQ-like events.

If you want REAL persistent effects, or say permanent as ANet calls them, you should turn your head to Mortal Online. Bosses there don’t ever respawn and thus your actions alters the world, but then again its a sandbox game.
I for one wouldn’t play such a game, I’ll rather have less content that is better developed and polished that repeat more or less than content that a select few players get to experience only once and thus locking out everyone else on the server from ever experiencing it. You’ll just end up with devs trying to make new content for you at a pace they can’t possibly make quality content at, well that’s my 2 cents on that. 🙂

I’m not interested in that “bosses only die once” stuff. I think people aren’t understanding what I’m trying to (obviously failing) convey.

The trailer, which is what I’m critiquing, says stuff like (I’m going to go point by point for you guys):

“Guild wars 2 takes everything you love from GW1 and puts it into a persistent world”.

Not entirely true. Their FAQ and blog state they’re using “extensive instancing”. Some will be persistent, but “Extensive instancing” is clear to me.

Soesbee says in the trailer “you affect things around you in a very permanent way”. “You’re rescuing a village that will STAY rescued.”

This was clarified in the Arenanet blog to be instanced.

The ONLY reference to events is the centaur example. Instead of centaurs standing around they’ll be charging an outpost attacking merchants. There is absolutely no further explanation here, so we must infer on our own. I can infer WAR’s PQ’s just as easily as you can infer some glorious week long event.

“A single decision made by a player cascades out out in a chain of events” — What does this mean? Soesbee goes on to talk about instancing right after. Is it related? Wish we had an explanation.

Have I made it easier for you guys to see what it is about this trailer that I’m critiquing?

Well there isn’t much point to critiquing the trailer because it is used as a marketing tool for a wider audience than those that are interested in specific information about the game. If there WEREN’T specific information about the game, then I’d agree with the critique, but there is.

Again, a three month old entry in the blog specifies:

“In other cases, the event may change the world for 10-15 minutes before it can cycle back around. Some events only occur when specific conditions are met, like a snow storm rolls into the map, or night falls over the graveyard. If an event reaches one end of the chain, it could sit at that point for days, weeks, or months until a player comes along and decides to participate in the event chain. “

In any case, the trailer is not meant to impart specific information but to simply grab attention. Just like how you might watch a trailer for a movie but then want to read an actual textual preview instead of going to the theater right away.

I see you point, and I’m not disputing that the trailer has lack of details in regards to the information given, but as I’ve said before it’s a trailer and needs to be treated as such. It’s marketing jippo made to catch the interest of people that previously did not know of or had no interest of the game. To be perfectly honest I didn’t listen to a word they said the first time I watched it, I was merely looking for graphics and trying to not drool. 😛

What I’ve been discussing with you (trying to at least) is whether or not Dynamic Events are hyped up PQs. I still believe it’s not. It might be a spin off of the idea but it’s certainly not the same.

Let me use the same example that you did, the centaur attacking the village.
WAR PQ:
The centaurs come running to attack, some players are there and fail to “defend the static point which is nothing but a PQ and serves no other purpose than hosting this PQ” and thus the Centaurs stay there and inhabit the area until the timer runs out, then they magically disappear and respawn as attacking centaurs.

GW2 Events:
The centaurs come running to attack, some players fail to defend their social hub, a hub where there are actual vendors that players would use, pubs to RP in or whatnot, the centaurs overrun the village rendering the players unable to use vendors, the pub etc. And now the village will STAY THAT WAY until some other player triggers a counter event and gets to claim the city back!
Now this is the big part, cos unless ANet has been bullshitting all along, the centaurs wont just despawn then the town reset like would if it was a WAR PQ, you’ll actually have to claim it back in another event that might not even start for a couple of days or weeks depending on what actually triggers the counter event to start.

As mentioned like a broken record above, some events reset after a short time, some wont reset until a reset or a counter event is triggered by another players actions or a chain of other events happening.

I felt a bit unclear when I wrote this, struggling to find words but I hope you got the picture nonetheless.

In GW2, the outcome of every event will directly affect the game world around you. If an enemy dredge army is marching out of their main base, players will be asked to mobilize with their allies and help destroy the army. If the dredge army is defeated, other events will cascade out from there. Players will be able battle their way inside the dredge base, face off against their commander, rescue captured friendly troops being held in the dredge prisons, and even hold the captured base while fighting waves of dredge, who arrive from deep underground to try and take back their home.
Dynamic Events

If, on the other hand, players fail to destroy the army, it will establish a fort in friendly player territory. From there, the dredge will send shipments of troops and supplies to the fort from the main base while building up walls, turrets, and siege engines to help defend it. Enemy dredge forces will then begin to move out from their newly established fort to attack friendly player locations in the area, sending snipers out into the hills, sending assault team forces to capture friendly player villages, and trying to smash down friendly fortifications with massive dredge walkers. All of these events continue to cascade out into further chains of events where cause and effect is directly related to the player’s actions.

For example, if the players do not mobilize to stop the dredge snipers, they’ll begin to shoot down all the villagers and merchants in nearby friendly villages. If they fail to stop the dredge assault teams from capturing a village, players will need to lead a force to help liberate the town and free the villagers. All of this content is derived from a single initial event – the dredge army marching through the map.

http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/dynamic-events/dynamic-events-overview/

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/forum/showpost.php?p=274477&postcount=1003

I quote: “Some of the ‘events’ seem to be like the public quests from WAR, but done a hundred times better. The starting and progressing of these events is entirely seamless, so it seems like things are actually happening in the world, rather than little mini games.”

So we where all right, right? 😛

This subject is what I love most. Because it really is the direction that MMOs will move towards next.

I have been in Japan for the last 2 years, and while there I was a bit out of the MMO news loop, but now that I’m back I’ve been doing a lot of research. From the sound of it, WAR’s public quest system, and this new Guild Wars 2 persistent world system (as well as a few other MMOs), are going for the

1. Persistent
2. Dynamic

Approach. Same with WoW’s Cataclysm (a little bit).

The problem with outfitting an existing engine (WoW or GW) to be truly both dynamic AND persistent, is that it causes more problems than it fixes (players destroying too much, getting out of control, computer generated events going wrong, developers unable to develop content fast enough for players to discover/destroy it)…

In order to make the Dynamic and Persistent world, I believe you have to start from scratch. It has to be designed WITH that built in from the beginning. It can’t effectively be thinly layered over the existing standard gameplay model.

I want to see a really dynamic world more than anything. Right now I am working on an MMO that is Exploration-based (which naturally requires new content to be discovered added all the time). It’s an engine that can maintain itself, create interesting events, and constantly change the world (under the watchful direction of the developers). The players have lasting impacts on the game world (not an instance).

Let’s consider some of the nice advantages of a truly dynamic persistent world (and I understand this is not fleshed out perfectly, but it’s one more step in that direction):

1. Let’s say you break that bridge that we saw in the video. So now all NPCs, mobs, and players will have to go the LOOOOONG way around that dang chasm to get from point A to point B. NPC factions (such as governments) might have great interest in moving their people/troops/armies/merchants from A to B much faster than that, and one solution is to build a bridge. So they BUILD one. Government A dispatches an escorted construction team to build a bridge. They allocate a certain amount of resources to the project, and send them on their way. An enemy, Government B wants to own the choke point for themselves, and so they dispatch some assassins, to lie in wait until the bridge is completed (thus saving themselves the effort of building it), then kill the guards, and post their own. Over time, it becomes a hot spot of skirmishes over the contested area… The governments send groups of troops, under a Chain of Command style AI. Quests are generated for the players to sabotage or otherwise hinder the efforts of the other side…

A dynamic field of play has been made. Players matter, but more importantly, the stage is set by what I call, EvE. Environment vs. Environment.

Interesting concept, not at all in final stages, but getting there.

I sound a bit like a broken record with my previous post. I think most of the people here understand what we’re all getting at with the dynamic persistent world. Good examples used by all 🙂

That said, by biggest concern is not whether GW2 will be persistent or no, but rather whether it will be really DYNAMIC or not.

Are the ‘events’ going to be triggered and de-triggered (still persistent), but always remain the same pre-programmed events?

Will those centaurs always keep attacking the same village, eventually capture it, then finally be driven back, only to repeat the same wash process over and over? It’s still persistent, and player-driven, so I would still give it a thumbs up. It a good move in the right direction. But I want to know how FAR of a move it really is.

@ Humble Hobo:

I get the impression that the most dynamic situations occur when multiple event chains overlap. At that point you seem to really not be able to predict what a given area will look like. They’ve described towns that are often affected by multiple event chains at once, but those details are pretty scarce. In those situations, it seems the events do interact in many ways.

Frankly it’s hard to tell exactly from the demo, since the devs have said at least some of the events have been modified so that they occur more frequently, or otherwise work slightly different for demo purposes. One example I know of that addresses your question is the attack of the Shatterer – the big purple dragon that appeared in the trailer. That takes place in the open world, and depending on the player’s success or failure of a different event (unsure whether it’s from a different chain or the same chain in an earlier stage), which requires them to repair gun emplacements, they may not be able to man said guns when it’s time to fight the dragon.

So the events can change at least somewhat based on the success or failure of other events. However, I don’t think they’re truly dynamic in the way you envision; the NPC actors don’t have AI, as far as I can tell. They seem to just be scripted to act a certain way.

The illusion is quite good from what I’ve seen, however. Mobs don’t spawn out of thin air in front of you – they all spawn out of sight, and run into the combat/event zone in groups, for example. And it seems like you will often run through a familiar area that seems completely different – where once there were invading Branded humanoids, there are now friendly NPCs, merchants, and no aggressive mobs to be seen, as they’re attacking elsewhere. That sort of thing.

I’m still gathering information on the longer-term ramifications of the event system. Since the demos are on a time limit, most people spend their limited time running around as many places as possible, rather than hanging around one spot to try to catch an event resetting.

Well, they won Gamescom 2010 Best online category (SW:ToR was among the competition)…

The trailer looks great but i need to see more on the gameplay.

Once again Keen you should not speak about what you have only speculations on as truth.

Goto Youtube and enter Guild Wars 2 gamescom then select upload date for filter.

Eat your own words.

GW2 is open world. Dungeons are instanced. Cities are instanced. and your PERSONAL AREA are instanced.

Everything you choose to do int he world will affect your PERSONAL area (found in the areas city). In this area NPCs you have helped will gather and actually build housing and move in. They will offer you food, items, more hints on what is going on int the world etc.

I wish people could just keep their mouth shut on anything but the facts.

Wanna tell your readers how PvP works while you are at it?

It disgust me to read the crap you and others are spewing from your mouths about a game made by the devs that left their MMO companies because they were afraid to risk innovations *WoW, Rifts, WAR, Allods, Champions, AION, Final Fantasy*. The MMO industry was beginning to look like the FPS industry, thank god Bioware and ANet are standing up for risking innovations THAT COULD FAIL but lead to sparks of ideas in other developer minds.

Here is a fact for everyone. When asked “when?” at PAX. Eric Flannum, lead man behind the project, responded with “We want to make the best GAME ever and we can’t do that with deadlines”.

I rarely hear those two words now days. “BEST” and “EVER”. Too much settling for playing safe and only doing what has been proven to work.

Try to keep in mind while reading the above and below comment that I have many friends that are apart of this project. I am only standing up for them as you would do if your freinds were being insulted, called liars, or told they suck at what they do.

PS: all those “feelings” and “theories” you guys have as a Fan or Skeptic please keep them to yourselves. You are killing an possibility of innovations in the gaming industry that appears to have gone corporate with DLC, Subs, and increased prices.

It seems like ever since blogs came about all people do is use them to leave hate comments or pessimistic outlooks on whatever the subject is about.

We have more information and and in-game footages about the game since Gamescom and PAX. Guild Wars 2 indeed does take place in a mostly open and persistent world. Cities are persistent and so are the areas outside it. Home district and Dungeons are the only known instances. Most of the PvE content are Dynamic Events. All Dynamic Events are persistent. Personal Story is instanced. Personal stories can happen in the persistent world but they only appear to you in an instanced manner, similar to cutscenes and loot distribution, they are instanced but happen in a persistent world with other players around you. This is not a HUB-lobby MMO like Guild Wars 1 was.