Guild Wars 2

So I was remembering the original trailers for all the classes for gw2 and thought how much I enjoyed them. Here is a video someone compiled of them for all those who wasn’t with us from the start when gw2 was coming out.

https://youtu.be/anpHAUe0Ni8

It made me think how fun it is to look back and compare to what we have now. What saddens me though mostly is how some skills and animations are completely gone that added little bits of flavor like the guardian idle stance with the mace and shield jumping like that or some of the necro and mesmur skills looking way more interesting imo.

I love how the camera angles prove that great cinematography can add so much to a scene that seems sorta mundane to me now in game. It looks way more epic in the trailers naturally but its still the same game after all! Point of view wow such amaze.

Excelsior.

I think some more animations are available but no usable/used ingame. There is that one stance in the Asura storyline (if you chose you’ve created the VAL golem during your college times) during a cutscene where the player is being very angry, ears in tension and fists ready just like about to smack someone’s face. I’ve never seen it again so far.

Personally, I wish there would be more emotes and animations. The idle animation update a couple of months ago showed how talented these guys are.

I often go into stealth as Thief and use dagger skill #1 just for that awesome stab animation. In general, as hobby photograph, I record and then pick out screenshots to process further and the animations are well done in general, but often the engine might seem odd (two light sources at once where only should be one…????).

Wow neat! I love tid bits like that Zedek. It fills me with great nostalgia and makes me want to jump right into the game honestly.

many of those skills are in the game. I would rather blame mob design and ai because all those cool looking abilities has been overshadow by high health bars

For example, this element skill. I think the majority of ele use this scepter 3 skill as a blast finisher because extra might stack are much more useful than using it by itself.

https://youtu.be/anpHAUe0Ni8?t=29

I started GW2 (or the whole Franchise) at the day FF14’s Heavensward was released. I started to dislike FF14 and pre-ordered HoT on that day (June 23rd, 2015 AFAIK). It was a faithful decision for my gaming life because I never dove into a such a franchise. And I love it. I’ve really missed a lot and don’t know why I always walked past the GW2 boxes in the video game store. Probably because I expected all U.S.-based MMORPGs WoW clones in J.R.R Tolkien worlds with Dwarves and Elves. But boy, I was wrong.

When I pull out the (German) magazine PC GAMES, I discovered a preview in a 2012 issue and I often read trough this to fire up my love to this game again. All the praise, all the real stuff (5 totally different races! I mean, look at all the almost-the-same races in nowadays MMOs, often genderlocked!) – and it’s still the awesomeness it was in 2012. It does not change. People often look forward to the next shiny game, call this game “old” and stuff, but man, I could still dust off my Sega MegaDrive and distinguish a good game from a bad game.

To get back to the topic, I have spent so much time in getting perfect shots of animations done, e.g. for my current desktop wallpapers. And I often ShadowPlayed a couple of minutes just to play it frame by frame. The animations in this game are high quality, and if the engine would not screw* it over sometimes I’d call it even top notch.

Firing a pistol as Asura frame by frame is such a thing: He straightens his arm, aiming for a couple of frames. When he is ready and pulls the trigger, the actual shot is being fired, the recoil raises his arm, he opens his eyes a bit in shock/surprise of the blast, the ears are moving like in a small shockwave and bob back and forth. Manwhile, the muzzle flash develops, blends in a big, bright explosion (good ol’ gunpowder?) into a cloud of smoke while there are 10-15 little sparks are flying in every direction. Then you have the bullet casing sound effect being played, depending if you are standing on solid ground (“ding-dingading”) or on wood (“tock-tocktock”). How often do we fire bullets during gameplay? And how much takes it to appreciate it?

Firing dual thief pistol skill #3 in SlowMo while moving the camera is a bit like Matrix: Both pistols are fired left-right-left-right with all the details from above. The bullets fly all over the place, rip apart bushes and make them move as the projectile travels trough. At the place where I have been 25 frames ago the smoke of the gunpowder fills the screen with gray. Then two bullets hit my enemy (a Dredge), he was totally obvlivious and is getting shaken by the impacts. The damage number adding up, one is a crit while my Asura still fires at this point, his ears bobbing up and down. Then I hit a beam and accidently dodge, doing nice acrobatics with the distinguive thief dodge sound. It’s also, depending on your pistols, a hell of a noise.

Many other details are done at the same time, e.g. hair moves, my trench coat flares out, my ears do move, you blink your eyes etc.

The throwing animations of stolen items as Thief is also kinda cool. I love when I hurl poison ooze into a bunch of enemies.

I could go on and on. It IS very often hidden in a very fast gameplay, some is not implemented maybe. But if you look, you will see the details ArenaNet’s guys put into this game to enjoy for us all :-)

Zedek.8932:

I could go on and on. It IS very often hidden in a very fast gameplay, some is not implemented maybe. But if you look, you will see the details ArenaNet’s guys put into this game to enjoy for us all :-)

actually it is possible to enjoy these animations. The problem is that anet never bother to properly implement first person view and only added a simple zoom in to front camera.

If the community was a bit different, gw2 can end up a different fighting game. You dont need click on target to use guardian scepter. You can rotate your camera to aim it instead.

ANet is definitely capable of implementing them, all the new emotes they added a few months ago have been in game since the start. They just need to take the time to write it in emote form.