Guild Wars 2

Yeah you definitely don’t want to hold down “dodge” and THEN tap movement, or you’re just going to dodge backwards and the move will do nothing. Tap the dodge button while you’re already moving in a direction – since double-tap moves you fractionally in that direction before the move anyway, you’re really not losing precision. Plus you don’t have the infinitesimal not-moving-at-all delay in between.

I mean, I’m sure once you’re really good at the option you chose, either works. If you’re more comfortable with double-tap because you came from FPS games or something, by all means continue – but if you’re not used to dodging, it’s probably easier to learn if it’s bound to a separate button.

Tallahassee.4907:

I have gotten a few chuckles over the name of my thief : Cull Me Maybe

As you should. Witty.

Yeah, this sounds like a special form of PvP. I’m not sure how well it’d work in practice though – balancing tends to go such that eventually the deck will be stacked heavily in either side’s favor, once people work things out.

Ooh. Necromancer I’m guessing? Definitely looks the part, and still very norn! Can’t really fault it (well, maybe there’s no anti-aliasing but really now), so I’ll just say 10/10

Mine’s a little cross-posty since this isn’t the first place I’ve shown it, but still.

Wow. You put a lot of work into this. Well done.

Tachenon.5270:

I turned off double-tap when I started doing the jumping puzzles as it lead to far too many incidents of my characters plunging to their deaths.

Totally saw that coming. I had double-tap disabled long before, but after picking my way across narrow ledges in the likes of UT, I pretty quickly realized it could make jumping puzzles suck big time unless you were really careful about how you hit the movement keys.

(Which you still have to be, really, but it’s more of a timing + “can my character jump that far?” thing. Less boneheaded shoot-self-in-foot.)

Yeah, the dungeon at the end of the personal story is the exception to the solo rule, but by and large you don’t need to nag others to help you get through it.

Was going to say “yeah but it’s not an MMO” then… doh ESO is a good point, really. Not much chance Argonians won’t be back.

On GW1 H/H: There were also rot wallows but I’m pretty sure those aren’t going to make the grade. Or for that matter golems (M.O.X.) or whatever Razah was. Maybe if that question were answered…
Oh, yeah, and Ogden/dwarves. There are a few people requesting them, but odds seem to be against it… or they wouldn’t have gotten stoned in the first place.

Well, yeah, having some relation to Tyria’s “dinosaurs” isn’t a terrible idea, and it also wouldn’t be the first “ancient” race. There’s probably something good to be found there. I’d advise against it having “way stronger abilities” than humans though – because once it goes through the grinder that is game balancing, we really don’t need another race like the norn – that is hyped up then comes to look more silly than it should have in the actual game.

Usable concept at its core; I’d prefer a different visual design, but such is life. It does recall to mind that “four-armed creature” concept art from ArenaNet that never got used in the game, though I’m not sure that was meant to be reptilian or would make a good playable race either. But, speaking of imagination again, they do have some amazing concept artists that could probably come up with something good.

Last month, I think… farming its sea-life for armored scales. Yes, it’d have been easier to buy them.

Fair enough, it’d be much more satisfying storytelling to give the tengu a lead-up for sure.

On reptilians: considering GW2 doesn’t really have one as a playable race at the moment, and there could be some space for a different kind of society there, I wouldn’t be totally against it. But I really think it’d have to be done well. Just a “lizardman” or a man with an alligator head or something is kind of lame and gives the impression we’re on a descending spiral to furry/scaly fantasy land (if you’re into that, no problem, but it’s not what GW2 seems to be about). I’d want to see something a bit more different… more its own thing, more thoughtfully and creatively designed, and less just gratuitous.

Jski.6180:

Its always in wvw when ppl getting a bit too mindless and jump off a cliff when the person leading had a fall skill.

Hahahaha… the Pied Piper.

I want to see this now.

Well hey, looks like there’s something that didn’t change from GW1! Every man and his dog is CoF farming.

Some of what you say about tengu is accurate, but it looks like there are a few things you’ve missed. It doesn’t change the fact that they have little presence in GW2, but there is a lore-explained reason for it. Even if it does set up their introduction to look like a kitten-pull… too late to change that now though. Maybe through some “Living Story” content leading up to an expansion – probably about Primordus making a move.

Now, the details I mentioned earlier:

• There is at least another optional stage during one of the personal story tracks – Soar Goldbeak reportedly shows up in one of the sylvari branches. While Jormag is a prominent feature in the norn starting areas, there aren’t a whole lot of personal story steps that involve kodan either – although there are a few, and likely more than for tengu.
• There’s a skill point in the sylvari starting area that requires you to fight a tengu named Swift Arrow. Reportedly his combat animation is based on that for a charr, though, which probably explains a lot of other things too.
• There are two tengu outposts outside the wall; the Hanto trading post in Caledon Forest, plus another trading village in Kessex Hills. They’re good places to learn details about the tengu and how they see the world, although you’re definitely not going to learn as much as you would from the kodan.

There’s plenty in game to suggest that the Dominion of Winds will at some point be relevant, but I can’t disagree that things seem more imminent on the Jormag/kodan front.

Every time I make an excessively wordy post on these forums, they have to store that on their servers, too

Hmm. Well, I wouldn’t object to the kinds of mounts that are basically just riding brooms with different models. Especially if they’re the kind you’d have to licence from Hasbro, just to see how much people really want them.

That aside, there’s the annoying issue of actually animating them, and that includes adding animations to player characters if you don’t want it to look terrible. So even if, from a gameplay perspective, it behaves like a riding broom (albeit one that collides with many many more obstacles, have fun!), it’s still going to be a lot more work. For that reason I’d hope it’s not much of a priority.

And then, once we have them, people will say “but my mount should let me go faster!” And I will say “if my norn can’t outrun an asura, why should you?”

I suspect (though it’s not a given) it’d be heavy armor as well. Past that it gets trickier to call; it can’t be too similar to a guardian or warrior or you might as well play one. I could see a more offensively-oriented “spellsword” to contrast the more defensive guardian though.

While the “samurai” idea sounds intriguing considering where races are probably going to go, in and of itself it’s way too similar to the warrior to merit a separate profession. You’d need to add something extra, and I can’t think of anything that is both distinctive and not so un-authentic that you’d really need a different name for the profession. Maybe ArenaNet could come up with something, but I’m not counting on it.

Outside the heavy armor set there may be a few more options, although there are questions to be answered. For a bard profession, mightn’t constant music eventually start to grate?
I can see a druid working, although there is some overlap. If it summons wild animals, we basically have a necromancer’s summon ability with the flavor of the ranger’s animal companion. Nature magic, well, the ranger has some of that too (granted, it’s not particularly broad and they’re all utility skills; a druid could much more conceivably run staff/scepter/torch). Wildshape has issues with making character customization irrelevant if it’s too dominant a mechanic. Oh, and the D&D version also had an animal companion. That’d definitely have to be dropped since it’s the ranger’s thing.

I think, though, you could definitely make a viable druid profession within GW2’s setting that would be distinctive and have its own niche. Just have to play up the nature magic thing – there are plenty of things you can do with that.

Oh, yeah, and the other thing that hasn’t really been done in GW2: a monk. Specifically, the oriental martial-arts kind. It’d probably require new weapon types (bo/quarterstaves, unarmed/brass knuckles, etc) but could work pretty well.

It may be, but it doesn’t apply in this case; most of the norn elites are not very good for either. Even Snow Leopard is probably better for WvW than PvE – in the latter, it has its uses, but I almost never have to use it because things don’t get out of control much.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

First: Not having to have someone mail me payment for crafting them armor before I send it to them, or sending the armor and hoping they send me payment

Actually, yeah, there’s definitely a hole here in the current system for crafters making stuff on contract. I’m not sure whether the trading window would be the optimal answer, but at least you could hold onto the goods and sell them to someone else if the deal fell over.

Actually it does, those are just very large tusks. Most (though not all) tengu in GW1 had those – they look more like teeth in GW2 though.

Heavy armor: I suspect it just hasn’t been done yet. I’m kind of hoping for the GW1 BMP tengu weapon skins to come back, except for heavy armor as well this time. It’d be pretty sweet.

I’m pretty sure there’s never been any concept art of tengu in GW2 though, at least not that was ever released. The picture linked above is actually from GW1 EotN.

But anyway, my thoughts on how they compare: eh, roughly even. The actual model art for GW1 tengu was usually not that good (they had an excuse, the whole game had lower detail), but the animations were certainly unique. I kind of figure the run style and backhand-sword thing ought to make a comeback once we see more of them.

GW2 ones so far are probably executed better but I’m not going to argue – the beak does look funny. And between the leaning vs. standing stance, I’d have picked the latter too, given the choice. The model textures are much better though.

Build-crafting was always a joke unfortunately – 1% of players did the real work, half the remainder copied them, and the other half just came up with something bad. GW2’s system is dumbed down in comparison, but there’s a lot less PvXwiki.com in our lives these days at least.

And I so, so don’t miss GW1’s trading. I’ll take impersonality over wasting time any day of the week.

BUT. I do miss how GW1’s performance felt right out of the gate at launch – it was very fast, and very stable. GW2 isn’t too bad at stability but it’s never really been a speed demon. (Yes, the graphics are better, but they aren’t good enough to justify Lion’s Arch running 30 fps on a Core i7/GTX 670.)

The only thing picking norn will give you grief on is jumping puzzles – even then the challenge isn’t insurmountable, and plenty of people don’t care for them in general.

PvP, WvW, endgame? You can get by with any race, regardless of profession I’m pretty sure (some might argue “except for professions that are bad on every race”, YMMV). One of the things ANet did deliver on.

They could honestly go with no cooldown at all for the first-tier norn elites and they wouldn’t be overpowered. Snow Leopard obviously would be though.

Anyone know if the devs have shown any sign of paying attention to this (or other racial elites, maybe elites in general)?

Honestly, since story mode seems intended for players to go through at some point, it should be a lot more accessible than it is (easier to group for as well, IMO, but that’s a different topic). It should definitely never be more difficult than explorable mode.

I do recall some comment from a developer to the effect that explorable mode was GW2’s “hard mode” – which sounds fine to me (though less so if it takes GW1’s “let’s just push the damage numbers over 9000” approach), but most enemies in the story mode have quite a crazy amount of HP as well.

Didn’t stop me for the dungeons I’ve tried so far, the main issue has been that it’s annoying to even get into them, but I definitely agree that having to bash on trash mobs for half a minute each even in a group of 5 is doing nothing to make the dungeon more enjoyable.

And all that’s left is Trahearne? Careful what you wish for

I tried out GW2 on a Windows 8 tablet with a high-resolution screen just to see how it ran, and noticed that because the tablet is running in 150% DPI (the setting under Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Display; can get to it via “Make text and other items larger and smaller” in the Screen Resolution dialog), some things seem to be behaving awkwardly.

• When GW2 is running in full-screen mode, mouse hover/clicks don’t register where the cursor is – they’re scaled so that if you click the right-hand side of the screen, the click registers somewhere around the 2/3 mark from left to right.
• If GW2 is running as Full-screen Windowed, it looks like the window is larger than the actual desktop – large parts of the interface are off the screen.
• If GW2 is running as Windowed the game is more usable, but there are still some rendering glitches – you can see bits of a second window frame, the top of the 3d-rendered area is offset a bit from the top of the client area, etc.

Obviously the workaround is to reduce the DPI scaling to 100%, but as these sorts of high pixel density screens become more common it might be nice not to have to do that

Yes, it uses the same sort of hardware, at an instruction level, as a PC. But that by itself doesn’t mean anything; Linux and Mac OS X run on x86 as well. There’s a port for the latter, but for Linux you still need WINE.

Since PS4 is not likely to have WINE (even if it were based on Linux, which is by no means guaranteed), that means ArenaNet would need to port it to a different API, and at that stage it’s of modest (if any) benefit that it shares the same instruction set. It’s still going to need rewrites of large chunks of code and recompilation.

Paulytnz.7619:

I get a lot of guild influenece items, boosters and coin bags. One coin bag gave me 80 silver once! O.O

As impressive as that is, keys are actually more expensive than that at current exchange rates, aren’t they? Which really only proves the point you made later on.

GW1 wasn’t all roses… I’m sure people remember the stomach-talking that soon got replaced by Monty Python jaw? Any animations were emotes and usually nothing else? That pretty much hammered any attempts at believability right there – until you learned to look past that.

It had its highlights once you did (by EotN they got pretty skilled at working around it at least), but it still wasn’t without its flaws. Prophecies largely wound up being abandoning one group of allies after another, and after the end of the mission you hadn’t really solved any problems other than averting a cataclysm that you were instrumental in setting in motion in the first place. The charr weren’t solved, and neither were the White Mantle (that happened in WiK many years later). I didn’t really care at the time because it was more about the journey, which took you across vast stretches of the world – but that was the point. The story felt more like an excuse to trek around the world than a structured story with a build-up, climax and conclusion.

Factions had a more traditional story, but it just made it worse – it was very short, and even then half of it was filler (including everything to do with the Luxons and Kurzicks… spear and urn were useless, and their military support against the Shiro’ken felt completely unnoticed, even if in lore it probably wasn’t). And it had more than its share of dull (Togo) or annoying (Danika… you thought Trahearne was bad?) protagonists. It attempted to humanize the villain, but unfortunately his acting was so wooden that fell flat on its face. Not to say that Factions didn’t have some redeeming value, but the story really did very little for me.

It got better after that, thankfully – although I know most people take much more exception to Kormir than I did. EotN I would agree wholeheartedly was probably better than GW2’s story. Better characters, better character development, felt more like a story. But before that, hearing people tout GW1 as a paragon of what storytelling should be just sounds strange to me – it was almost an afterthought at the beginning, and it took them several attempts to find their feet. GW2 is off to a substantially better start, even if I find it pretty average so far.

Guild halls were a planned feature for GW2, and as far as I’ve heard they weren’t cut from the plans. It’ll happen eventually. You can be upset that it’s not already done if you want, but arguing that it should be in the game doesn’t serve much point considering the devs already know that

Player housing is a different situation – not all MMOs had it and it took different forms in the ones that did. If GW2 implemented it – and it’s not out of the question, GW1 made sizable changes in expansions too – it would have to be in a way that made sense for the game. The personal instance wouldn’t be a bad spot to put it, except well… norn. Yeah. I guess you could occupy a wing of the Great Hall and renovate it to your liking…

Some random thoughts on this:
While I doubt that the underwater system was designed because of the largos race, it very likely could be the other way around – they might have been an effort by ArenaNet to highlight that part of the game after the initial five races didn’t focus on it.

I don’t believe that racial sympathy races inherently can’t become playable – they wouldn’t be able to have racial sympathy for themselves, obviously, but that’s not really a problem. Looking at the individual options there are, they all have big stumbling blocks going down that road though, so I wouldn’t consider them likely. It’s also not impossible that they were chosen as sympathy options because they weren’t designed to ever be playable, but it hasn’t been overtly stated by the devs that the two sets are mutually exclusive.

Lot of complaints above that one race or another is too ugly. I can’t entirely disagree but it’s usually a fixable problem. You’ll recall that there tend to be quite a few face options for the playable races and some of them are ugly – new races can do the same thing! I think the character artists are aware that there won’t be many takers for ogres, so to speak.

It’d be the block of area between Caledon Forest and Lion’s Arch – put together, that’s a comparable size to the other starting areas.

Fair enough; in between worrying about the things that are kind of screwy, I have to agree that there are a lot of big things they got right. I wouldn’t even be playing GW2 were that not the case.

Indeed. I propose they add a bush in the middle of nowhere and label it “Unsuspicious Bush”. That’s where the real comedy is.

Also, +1 on the dialogue above. Would be hilarious

Maybe it’s her shield arm?
…wait, light armor. Well, a few of them might use shields…

Yeah, after reading about that I started using Snow Leopard in WvW regularly (on my guardian). It’s not particularly interesting for actually fighting with, but for running away – I’ve seen nothing better. I’m sure there’s some irony in that.
Skill 4 can be a little unpredictable though. You want to use it when there aren’t any reds too close to you (or target one off in the distance the way you want to go… just stealth and WASD around a bit to get your bearings if needed).

I’ve gotta say though, because of that I think it justifies the 30-point cost alone; it really would be OK to give the other forms move+attack as well. Snow Leopard would still be the better “panic” button.

I’ve never bought them (at least not post-beta, don’t remember whether I did or not with the free gems back then) – same reason as everyone above. If they were 10 gems as was suggested earlier, I might consider it a bit more.

They really should drop more often in-game, though.

schizandra.4587:

2) Tengu – while I wouldn’t play one, I like the Tengu presence in the game. They look cool. I’d be really interested to know what Tengu females would look like, as I don’t think I’ve seen any yet. If anyone has a link to a female Tengu, please post it! Based on the lore though, I’m worried that Tengu females might be disappointing compared to the males, since their colors are supposed to be plainer. ANet haven’t always followed gender lore, though. The female Charr are supposed to be lithe (I read: “feminine”) compared to males, but to me they just look like less ugly males.

Judging from voice clips there aren’t any in GW2, but there were some in GW1. They didn’t look any different from the males there though. I… would have to figure that’d change, but I’m not sure how much stock to put in the “plainer” line, since in the only canon place I remember that stated (Factions manuscripts), they completely ignored it in the accompanying game.

That’s what’s happening at the moment. Shouldn’t stop them eventually adding a few more options though.

That art is about 5-6 years old I think… but there are other signs that point to it. Mostly the DoW in general.

GMT, specifically. Found that out the hard way in January

That globe confuses me – it appears to show Cantha north of Tyria. Or maybe I was just looking at it wrong…

MehWhatever.1248:

For now, it’s just WinRT, but it’s only a matter of time (and one, maybe two subsequent Windows releases) for Microsoft to lock down the desktop, too.

This isn’t going to happen for a very long time because there are too many existing customers (mainly enterprise but not only) that depend on the current behavior of the desktop. Windows RT is a different kettle of fish since it’s new devices only, but even there I can’t predict whether it’ll last too long – does anyone really want it? Will anyone really want it two years from now as Intel CPUs continue to improve their power efficiency and there’s not much reason not to just go with Windows 8?

Anyway, there are some people who are looking at Linux due to being disillusioned with Windows 8 – not really that many in the grand scheme of things, but they’re there, and a lot of them are gamers. So this may be a conversation ArenaNet will wind up having, sooner or later.

There’s something rather funny about a billion Black Lion chests floating around that nobody can afford to open, and so the treasure within is basically landfill. Maybe hundreds of landfills.

They should just invent a Black Lion Sledgehammer and break them all open.

Legendaries are currently too expensive for me to even consider, and that’s not just down to precursors – the other ingredients are far more money than I have. I’m still working on a full set of exotic armor and it looks set to consume half my savings

If the prices come down I’ll consider them but it looks like that’s the point – they won’t. And I have no interest in paying a month’s rent for a virtual weapon, no matter what it looks like.

Ellisande.5218:

It is my opinion that you would not have multiple races either evolving or being created together.

You’re probably right, but realism is sometimes boring and this is one of those times

Josh Foreman.8250:

Indeed. I’ve been in this industry for 16 years and worked with a several publishers including Interplay, Sierra, THQ and now NCSoft.

Hmm. Did that include Descent 3 by any chance? I have a feeling.

It appears that if you have two accounts, you get those 50 (actually 100 I guess) free inventory spaces anyway. Since you can just mail your alt account, bounce it back, receive by the other character…

I guess the saving grace is that it makes it more inconvenient to do this, even though it doesn’t actually stop you in any way. We’ve seen this before with the muling trends in Diablo 2, but unlike that situation, this is basically about convenience – you can always visit a bank anyway – so it might not turn into the same kind of farce.

Just that bank NPCs will always be where characters go to log off.

Son of Elias.5420:

Unless one pole is pointed directly toward the sun. Assuming that’s possible.

Yes – Uranus has an axial tilt of nearly 98 degrees, so a little less than that would presumably be possible. Tends to make the seasons very extreme, of course.