Guild Wars 2

As part of the aesthetics endgame.

Like it or not, aesthetics are the endgame in GW2. Everyone is going crazy for gear skins and whatnot, but I feel a huge opportunity is being missed here by not including more miniatures. They’re even already modeled! Why put all the work on the arts team to crank out new skins? Throw in some minis to pad out the content in ways players can choose, not be forced to do.

Most specifically, I want the kitty-golems from the uncategorized fractal. They’re the best. I’m surprised there isn’t one already. You have to make it occasionally make the golem “meow” sound though or it’s worthless. I understand the need to sell the hottest swag on the gem store, and I’m sure everyone would agree Baron von Scrufflebutt counts as hot swag so you could put him in the next gem-store mini pack series. You could make all the different kitty golems come from different sources (they each have a different color.)

We’re running out of things to buy with fractal relics, so stick the kitty golem on BUY-4373 and make it cost an obscene sum of relics.

But in general there need to be more miniatures. If you run out of unique models, color palette swaps seem to be working so far. I’d love to get my hands on some of the other colors of ooze for example. Idea: A purple ooze you buy with an insane amount of karma! I’d buy it for a cool million. You’re always looking for excuses to get players to dump karma, that one would definitely work. Get creative. Put minis everywhere.

I demand it or I will quit*!

*most likely just be sad

Chickenshoes.6250:

I demand it or I will be sad.

Yes, I’m sure ANet will get right on it.

I don’t like the minis, they are too far behind you and don’t follow you properly. If they change how they follow you and so on they would be a cool addition, but as it is now they shouldn’t prioritize them at all. I rather see them work on new ranger pets than minis, minis aren’t a core-feature or not a core-feature to any of the professions, it’s really just useless crap. Ranger pets, new ones, exotic pets, legendary pets. Make it happen.

Minis are effortless for Anet to create.

Ranger pets have to be run by the balance and combat department and tweaked and such and then find an excuse to place then in the world, and then if you want to put in a legendary pet there has to be a huge process implemented and all this for a single class nobody even likes.

For a mini, you slap the follow code onto the creature model and throw it on some vendor. It’s apples and oranges.

No one like rangers? hah. All classes are pretty much even, just 1-3% between the least played and most played, Warrior is in the lead. If minis are so easy to produce, then make them follow you better and not 500 meters behind you or even add some other mechanics to minis.

GW1 had ranger pets which was hard to get and took a lot of time, which was an achievement in itself. Current pets are normal animals, nothing special. I don’t care if they copy pasta skills from other pets, i just want them to look better, as ranger have pet 100% of the time unless you stow it (but then you lose dmg and F2 abillity etc), i’m tired of my ugly bear, of the spiders and the birds, birds got nerfed hard in damage by 50% and are easiest to kill ,lowest hp and armor.

Chickenshoes.6250:

Minis are effortless for Anet to create.

Ranger pets have to be run by the balance and combat department and tweaked and such and then find an excuse to place then in the world, and then if you want to put in a legendary pet there has to be a huge process implemented and all this for a single class nobody even likes.

For a mini, you slap the follow code onto the creature model and throw it on some vendor. It’s apples and oranges.

So you’re a developer then? You know exactly what goes into adding content, functionality, play testing, bug-fixing and QA?

Of course you don’t, otherwise you wouldn’t have posted this entitled little rant you just did. Oh, and many of us like rangers, so don’t presume to speak for everybody else, when you are expressing what is, to all intents and purposes, your own view. Thanks.

uknortherner.2670:

Chickenshoes.6250:

Minis are effortless for Anet to create.

Ranger pets have to be run by the balance and combat department and tweaked and such and then find an excuse to place then in the world, and then if you want to put in a legendary pet there has to be a huge process implemented and all this for a single class nobody even likes.

For a mini, you slap the follow code onto the creature model and throw it on some vendor. It’s apples and oranges.

So you’re a developer then? You know exactly what goes into adding content, functionality, play testing, bug-fixing and QA?

Of course you don’t, otherwise you wouldn’t have posted this entitled little rant you just did. Oh, and many of us like rangers, so don’t presume to speak for everybody else, when you are expressing what is, to all intents and purposes, your own view. Thanks.

Lol okay, so tell me what you would even think a simple extra mini needs that’s so involved? This thread isn’t about crud the poor rangers feel so deprived of, it’ about minis. Take your ranger indignation to the ranger forums.

I don’t even know why I’m even bothering to entertain your whiny comments, but I’ve got an hour or so to kill, so why not?

I’m not a developer, but I know someone who is, who has worked on games in the past though not to this scale, but the processes are similar nonetheless (though any developers on here can feel free to correct me on anything I’ve written below) and they talked me through the processes involved with adding content.

Firstly, those minis. Yes, they can be shrunk down from existing models, but for efficiency, you also need to drastically reduce the polygon count for each model, otherwise the game will slow to a crawl trying to draw hundreds of the things on screen at any one time. Reducing the polygon count can be achieved through custom software (which Anet are probably using already for new minis), but the final result still needs a lot of touching up (reducing polygons can introduce gaps in the mesh) and retexturing to reflect the reduced polygons. Hardly, a “simple” job and can be very time consuming if there’s a lot of gaps in the final mesh.

Then, additional graphics (icons) have to be created for the bank storage area and general UI (if applicable). Again, this is still requires a dedicated artist.

After you have the assets in place, you then need to write the code to implement them into the game. Each mini behaves differently (different walking animations, sounds, etc) so the code has to reflect this. In some cases, you can use the existing animations, but in others, you may need to start from scratch which requires the services of an animator or two. As any developer knows, adding new code inevitably breaks something further down the line, no matter how well optimised the code is. It’s not a simple case of inserting a couple of lines of code and the job’s done: The code has to reference other pieces of code in the game as well as assets, otherwise you gradually end up with a load of bugs due to broken references.

Then, those minis have to be playtested. This can take weeks to make sure they don’t conflict with anything else, especially other new content that is being developed in parallel to these minis.

Once all that’s done, the new content can be rolled out. If done properly, then feedback will be generally positive. However, it’s impossible to account for every single user configuration that exists out there, and there will still be plenty of bug reports that need to be followed up.

I’ve probably missed a few steps (it was a long time ago), but as you can see, it’s hardly a “simple” procedure.

Oh, and actually, I’ll keep my ranger indignation here, since you were the one who brought it up in the first place!

aaaaaand none of that is needed for a color pallete swap on an ooze lol. congrats on a wonderful wall of text though.

And all of it’s cake compared to setting up new pets for just one class whereas minis work for everyone.

I’m done wasting my time with you. You clearly haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about.