Guild Wars 2

Creating new zones, to the quality of the ones they made for release, takes time and a level of production ability that the company no longer has. Those zones were made over 5 years and they have steadily been losing veteran staff over the past 4.

It will take several years to rebuild to their 2007 glory, if they ever get there again.

Wait…spy kits still work?

Bumping so hopefully it is acknowledged. This can be a run ender.

Yep same issue. Cliffside as well. Huge bummer.

+1’ed for truth.

They need to play through this fractal and time it. Then compare it to the other tier 3’s. It’s ridiculous.

I would probably keep the final boss though. That is an interesting fight.

We do need to let them know it was disappointing and why, so that they can make the changes needed to do better next time.

I think the boss fight and the room puzzles were fun. But no new enemies and an all-too-familiar setting was boring. Maybe I’m just bitter because I was hoping for the Crystal Sea, Abbadon, his Margonites and the Forgotten. #Evon4life

And while I thought the mechanics of the boss where fun, the art design just wreaked of corners cut and time crunch. It’s just a male human with a glowy shader effect. This would have been a perfect place to introduce a Mursaat boss. Or something entirely new.

Shiren.9532:

This actually annoys me about this update. They’ve abandoned the original style of FotM (which was a huge success, especially compared to the hostile reception this update has received) and done a hatchet job on the two Living Story dungeons despite them not fitting the style of FotM. Now we have three fractals with NPCs, story and dialogue, all of which are established canon instead of actual Fractals. It was cool to see fractals as this glimmer of something, now they’ve outright plonked an actual story component into them (Scarlet’s presence at the reactor) which makes that fractal different from the originals.

I agree. One thing I liked in the old fractals was how there was little exposition or dialogue, and what was there was very vague and cryptic. It added to the mystique.

So far so good. We have groups going from the sub 10’s all the way to the 30+’s. Soon we will have people at fractal level 40.

Fun fact: Several of the lead designers of Warcraft 3 founded Anet. They left Blizzard during the production of WoW.

Less fun fact: All of them left Anet during the production of Guild Wars 2, except for Mike O’Brien.

We <3 you Mike. Please rescue Guild Wars.

I would much rather throw down 40-50$ annually for a good expansion then to watch my favorite series die.

We are going to be raiding fractals pretty hard following the fractured update.

John Smith.4610:

Account.9832:

Unfortunately, “I can’t go into details” is typical game publisher code for “we’re not going to do anything about it but we’re also not going to say anything, so people think we’re doing something about it”. Of course, that applies mainly to games with subscriptions (where the publisher doesn’t want to lose income, so they value cheaters the same as honest players). GW2 isn’t really subject to that kind of pressure.

Still, if you do intend to punish them in some way, announcing that would act as a deterrent.

Will you ever “go into details” ?

I have a proven track record here of taking action when I say I will take action. I’m not sure where your idea of a typical game developer response derives from, but given that assumption we’re clearly not typical.

I trust John’s Statement. Think about it. They know who their dev’s accounts are, and they surely know who their tester accounts are, and their IPs. All they have to do is review their trading and mail record to see if they made any big transactions after finding out the info. It is not that complicated to figure out cheats…as long as they have the technology to do so.

Sirendor.1394:

QUAGGAN. Yeah it’s annoying that you don’t have access to their meshes. Could be nice to toy with them a little.

Oh we do have access to meshes. That nightmarish fish man is a mesh. :S

We just do not have access to skeletons and animations as far as I can tell. I could rig my own skeleton to the meshes(or even use Oblivion’s player skeleton) and make poses out of those, but that is a lot of work for an amateur and would probably cause me a lot of headache. It is normally the kind of work you pay a professional to do. Maybe someday if I get back into it.

The more I think about it, the more I think that animations might not even be in the DAT, but rather are handled server-side so they can not be modified by players. If you could modify animations, I think it could open the door to all kinds of cheating and shenanigans. But I’m no expert so I could be wrong. I can not confirm without a better way to search the DAT.

If someone knows how to extract the DAT while preserving file paths, shoot me a pm.

Conncept.7638:

And you can tell just by looking at them that the male and female do not share the same skeleton.

That’s why I added the caveat “or at least the bones have the same names(some could be missing)”

Sometimes two different skeleton files can be different, in that the vertices might have different lengths, but as long as the naming convention of the bones are same then they will still receive motion data from the animation files. So different animations, made with different skeletons, can still be interchangeable.

I base this off my experience as amateur animator back when Oblivion modding was big, and not as a professional. For example, in that game you could play a dog’s animation on your player, with some hilarious and creepy results. This was despite the fact that the dog’s skeleton did not even have all of the same bones as he player, and the ones that it did had completely different proportions. But the names for most of the bones were the same.

I could be wrong about GW2, specifically, but I doubt things are that different across the industry. If, for some reason, they did things very differently and all of the bones between the males and females had different names then the player would likely just float around in a T-pose if the animations were switched. But they could still be switched.

I could confirm this if I ever manage to extract the skeletons and animation files.

I once attempted to extract npc models/anims for GW2 into blender, so I could create some rendered poses for the official gw2wiki… and failed. The community-made extractor that I found did not preserve the file paths. All I found were unrigged meshes.

A lot of companies are really protective of their 3d assets and make them hard to get to. Bethesda is a bit more open, so there is room for amateur modders to work with their stuff.

I did find this though…

There will forever be a monument to Tybalt… in my heart.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

There is no bias toward any type of criticism/discussion as long as it is productive.

Right but negative feedback is not necessarily unproductive. If people are saying that content is boring, or frustrating, and explain why, then that can be very valuable feedback and should be taken seriously.

What is worse than people who complain about what your studio produces , are those who simply move on, and are no longer there to use the gem store.

Let’s say that in the future you move on to a different company plan, like expansions, or even a new IP. If fans are too embittered by then, they might no longer be interested in Anet’s next product and not buy in.

This is why it is important to listen to the community, and not try to shut down or shut out criticism.

What is worse than all of the above, in my view, is if this infects your company culture and developers are afraid to speak up and ask for the big changes to process that are needed .

I would enjoy a lore related legendary quest.

I think it was because they moved the the embarrassing Dev twitch temple video from a few days ago here just now.

Moved both for fairness.

Conncept.7638:

That’s not even possible. This isn’t an MS paint picture, animation cannot be copy/pasted from one completely different model to another.

It is. Let me explain.

A moving 3d character in a video game consists of 4 types of files. The skeleton, the mesh, the textures and the animations. There is always a different animation file for each animation, such as running, jumping or punching.

The textures are mapped to the meshes, and the meshes are rigged to the skeleton. The skeleton consists of a set of vertices called bones.

An animation file governs the movement of the bones in the skeleton file and, subsequently the meshes that are rigged to it. These textured meshes are the characters that you see running around in game.

As long as the skeletons are the same, or at least the bones have the same names(some could be missing) the same animation can run on different skeletons. And different animations can run on the same skeleton, as long that they are addressing bones that the skeleton actually has.

In most games, males and females use the same skeletons for simplicity, but of course different meshes, textures and animations.

I don’t know what caused this bug, but you can certainly mix up animations by mixing up file paths or overwriting files.

- Edited for elaboration.

Haha even the Dwayna event had that crazy new graphics bug.

Clockwork Bard.3105:

A lot of the GW2 community kind of reminds me of that one kid at Chuck E. Cheese’s.

See, when you go to Chuck E. Cheese’s, you eat pizza and you play games (or I guess you could spend your whole day in the urine-soaked ball pit). Some games give out tickets. Those tickets can be exchanged for little gifts. To complete the experience, it’s nice to at least go home with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pencil topper.

But there’s always that one kid who knows the trick. He knows that skee-ball pays out way more tickets than anything else, if you’re good at it. And he’s good at it. So that’s all he plays for 6 hours straight, with only a quick break for pizza. By the end, he’s probably sick of skee-ball. But the tickets! He’s going home with pencil toppers of all four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

There’s a lot more to do in the game when you’re not chasing the tickets.

Best MMO analogy ever. +1

Too bad Chuck E. Cheese’s only exists in some parts of the US.

Edmo.7159:

I do not understand how it is new… they have the same style of our characters introduction.

It sounds like they are using video files now, instead of playing the cinematic out in engine, which is something many games do for their cutscenes, but neither GW2 nor GW1 ever had.

Oh by the way, here is the wiki page for all posted renders of GW2.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Renders

I’ll have to check if all of the work from the blog is listed, and add them if not.

The Twisted Nightmare is probably my favorite from a conceptual standpoint, but that has a lot to with the way it transforms and animates. It is a very complex creature.

I don’t know if Barry animated it too though. Some times 3d modelers do animation too, but I think Anet has dedicated animators.

People always say there is no endgame.

…in every game.

So your topic inspired me to do some sleuthing to find who worked of some of the new post-release creatures

Barry Sundt worked on the Twisted Nightmare and Molten Firestorm. He has a GW1 wiki entry but nothing on the GW2 wiki. We will have to fix that!

There are some great renders of these creatures as well as others on his blog.
http://artregurgitation.blogspot.com/

Oh right, how could I forget

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Category:Art_by_Aaron_Coberly

Current character Art Lead and has been at Anet since 2003. He is probably the most senior 3d modeler at Anet

Here is one

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Category:Art_by_Joe_Pikop

He doesn’t work at Anet anymore though.

Anet your new cinematics team keeps getting better and better. It is still not on the level of Horia’s pre-release animations, but it is getting closer.

Nick.6972:

GW: Factions CGI trailer was better.

That was done by a different animation studio that wasn’t even a game company. Those kinds of animations take way more time and money and are usually reserved for major releases. This was pretty awesome for an update trailer.

We’ve been doing some tower runs. Several of us have gotten our gas masks so far.

^^^ OK but after that they had vital NPCs in EoTN self-rez. Much better idea.

I’m not saying these criticisms are not valid, but those who are having trouble might consider forming 5-player groups to go up the tower together, like a dungeon.

This has provided some good group play for our guild. The events are doable with only 5 people.

Though I have always had the opinion that open world events should scale from 1+.

It is great to see Anet trying to get back to the style of Horia Dociu’s old cutscenes. Those were superior. If there are any devs reading this, could you tell us who is animating these now? They are doing great.

Constructive criticism: In game assets fall flat and are goofy-looking in this context. It would be worth cutting the length of the animation down a bit if it meant the art could all done by some of your better character artists like Jamie Ro or Jia Ruan.

Join us next week for the final installment of the Tower of Nighmares.

Nick.6972:

I no longer care about the Living Story updates, I really don’t.
I don’t care if I don’t get all achievements or minis.

Honestly, I’d rather wait 1-2 months and get no new content for 3-5 New Crystal Desert maps with new Dungeons and WELL WRITTEN story.

You are looking at closer to 1 or 2 years for something like that, but even then…yes I would be willing to wait that long.

That’s a nice piece. Good to see that they are getting their stride back with the new concept artist.

Don’t get me wrong I think the guitar is alright, but it is so out of place and random. Random as the year of post release has been after GW2.

You guys need to find yourselves.

What is going on over at Arenanet?

Join us next week for the Tower of Nightmares!

That is the same color glow of Scarlet’s Clockwork Nightmare minions.

….just saying.

We have been forming parties for getting the halloween meta and dailies

I think it is more sad that 99.9% of TQ spawns are a wasteland.

Delvoire.8930:

Sorry. I was speaking to stories in general. I never played GW1 so I can’t speak to that having open story lines that never were fulfilled….

That does strike a good question on if open threads will ever get tied up though. They are generally just loopholes in case a writer wants to use past story lines or plot points.

I think if you had played through those quests, you would see that it was very obvious that they wanted to do something with them. At least, the old designers and writers did.

knbBlackTemplar.3059:

Yes, it’s great enemy, but we already fight for guite long time. We still have 4 dragons to kill and lot of unexplored zones in current world, why we stuck with came-from-nowhere aetherblades and etc.?
+ mysteries and unfinished gw1 stories.

Your English doesn’t seem too great, but I think we are speaking the same language. +1’ed

Emanuel.9781:

Mom said it’s my turn to use condition builds in dungeons today!

I was playing a zerker for like a year, but I just changed to Pvt Hammer out of spite.

I hope you are happy.

Ah yes stacking. The bane of fun.

I agree with you OP. I would rather get nothing for 6 months to a year, and then get a really good expansion at the end of it. Right now interest is falling off massively from my friends in game and people are getting more and more grumbly.

Contrast that with the fact that every time an expansion came out in GW1, or on the release of GW2 my guild exploded with activity and people were generally happy. And activity remained steady from one release to another.

They change.3526:

But look at Tequatal. It’s like they sprinkled sugar on him and within one week it was all licked off by us.

O__O In one sentence you managed to capture TQ so perfectly. xD Even then, I believe over 90% of the players thought that sugar was bitter. But yes, the majority of the minority that did it have stopped/grown tired.

Don’t leave the fans hanging, is all I am saying.

Delvoire.8930:

You’d be hard pressed to find a long story line that ties up every loose end. They keep them loose for a reason, so they can go back to those points or tie them to other stories in the future. GW2 is a game that has years of longevity. Why not start a story that will have one loose end, and that finally takes shape a year later or what not. It’s about payoff and it’s personal opinion if you want that to happen instantly or if you like it to be drawn out and revealed later.

Consider that many stories were heavily foreshadowed in the GW1 games between 2005-2007. Livia and the sceptor, Bahltek’s investigations into other realms, Evenia’s disappearance, the Mursaat, the Seers, the isles of Janthir, the other Bloodstones, the cyphers, Palawa Joko’s conquest, the Winds of Change, Primordius’ rise and that of the other dragons. I could go on.

All of these quests/stories were so heavily foreshadowed over the course of those games that it was obvious they had a plan to design content to tie them up. But it is now 2013 and we have had nothing on them. That is 6 years. Can you see how the long time fan base is getting anxious? You say it be ok if stories get tied up in a year, and I agree with you, but that is not how things have gone. Would you be ok with them not explaining what is up with Scarlet until 2019 at the earliest because that would be similar.

Note that many(all?) of the people leading those projects, both in writing and design, have moved on from Anet, at least in a full time capacity, and there are many new people with new ideas, which is fine . However, the franchise has its own life and deserves the respect of being properly attended to by its new caretakers.

raptor.1064:

real answer – They are all made by different teams so they don’t flow well together. The teams have also individually admitted to having to cut stuff they wanted to do out due to the forced 2 week release schedule, so everything is a disjointed mess even within a single patch. We will never again have good content “when it’s done.”

On point.

We need to get back to high quality annual expansions. GW1 built a strong reputation over 3 years with its stellar expansions. The reputation Anet built from those 4 games played a huge role in GW2’s success at release. The feedback on that system was overwhelmingly positive from both players and the media.

It’s over one year after GW2’s release and the general feedback on the LW from both is “meh”, while die-hard fans from 2005 are pleading with Anet to save the franchise.

The sooner they realize the better because, once they do, it will still take about a year to produce something that can do the series justice.

Yes this was smart and necessary.