Guild Wars, rather than GW2, but...this is awesome.
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Feedback:Game_updates/20120817
A bunch of people from my GW2 guild and I all joined up to go through some of it tonight, and it's just neat. And there are tons of new NPCs in the cities named after various devs. Such a cool idea.
Apparently during the stress test today (which I missed), the /dance emote was finally added in. Which makes me happy as whenever I'm idling around somewhere in GW1 waiting on something I start dancing. They are, as ever, great.
Also, this exists already. I don't know why I'm surprised, but damn that was fast 😂
For those who've never heard Gangnam Style - prepare to have it stuck in your head for the next week at least.
Also, looks like the tradition of naked dancing shall never die!
There was a very brief stress test tonight (hour long, was announced ten minutes ahead of time)...so my friends and I did this (my character is in the middle).
We started a huge naked dance party in the middle of the bridge, and then were dancing on the diving board in LA, but fraps flipped out on me and didn't record it. Grrrr. I did get this hilarious screenshot when one person decided to jump off mid-dance though.
Hall of Monuments info!
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/claiming-your-hall-of-monuments-rewards/
Well, here we are then- one day until release (for those who pre-purchased anyway), merely three years after I opened this thread.
There's been a bit of a shift in the gaming scene in those three years. For MMOs in particular, the default model of large investment for a subscription game has been dealt several huge blows as a succession of games have failed to take off , with TOR's shift to free to play probably being the fatal one.
It's not just MMOs though. In an era games like Kingdoms of Amalur can sell over a million copies and still apparently tank so badly that the Governor of Rhode Island declares the game a failure and the studio implodes (though that was also because .38 Strudios were investing in... yup, a MMO), questions are being asked about the viability of the current extended game design process. Look at THQ- they have some solid gold licenses and, in Saint's Row, a guaranteed repeatable money spinner. Yet they came close to death's door earlier this year and are betting the farm on their releases next year. If they go under, it will be ludicrous, but the fact is that many major companies are desperately cost cutting. Gaming development times are getting longer and more expensive and they need to score HUGELY to have any hope of recouping their investment. Even when they have the resources needed behind them, the game is not necessarily guaranteed to be that great relative to those resources (I'm looking at you, Diablo III- not a bad game, but I'm not saying where all the development time and money went).
This article has a very neat analysis of the issue:
http://www.notenoughshaders.com/2012/07/02/the-rise-of-costs-the-fall-of-gaming/
Rising game costs and development times are effectively unsustainable- it seems the future will be with a much scaled back model, with a few very particular exceptions (Like Assassin's Creed, and frankly they don't actually spend very long on those games). The Nintendo model also seems to have worked better for them as a company.
And I agree and am happy; of late I've seen a lot of my gaming tastes move towards the types made by Paradox Interactive- smaller teams, smaller development times, but creating grand strategy games with huge replay value, or publishing games of other types built on similar principles (Mount & Blade, King Arthur etc.) They are buggy as heck because they don't have the legions of manpower needed to debug on time but the community involvement is huge to find and fix them all, and the modding environment is strong too. Their sales are lower but their development costs are so low that it gets covered. Regular expansions, regular releases, no one game that can ever bankrupt the studio- sensible.
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So, it does seem ironic that my number one awaited game has remained this ridiculous behemoth of a game that has taken some five and a half years to produce after growing and growing in scope. It started as just an expansion to GW1. It then became so radical they they decided they had to make a new game out of it. The ideas for that game then in turn grew so big that it took over two years before they could even show any of it at all, which was so long that people suspected it was becoming vapourware (this is the point at which I open the thread). And even that point was less than halfway through development. The beta test was delayed again and again, the reveal of the professions was re-arranged because they kept re-designing the professions during the revelation stage, and even one of the races was given a total ground-up re-design years into the project. This should be the very definition of one of the bloated, over-produced games that I refer to above... and furthermore, never has any game been so strongly tied to the studio. Guild Wars IS ArenaNet; they literally do nothing else. They have, knowingly, bet their entire existence on halting GW1 development and putting everything into this mammoth. It really shouldn't have worked.
(And on that point- kudos to NCsoft, who are generally asses but their constant funding of ANet to make GW2, a company that had only made one game ever (though a highly successful one), has made all this possible)
But there we are. It's here now, and somehow the darn thing worked. We'll still have to see what sales and player retention are like, of course, but from my point of view it's a damn good game.
It's interesting to look back at the early parts of the thread and see what people thought and were worried about. I didn't like the open world model and I thought dynamic events would be subject to griefing and player manipulation. Well, we'll see what the wider public brings to that, but my experience of all of that in the betas and stress tests has been overwhelmingly positive. I also spoke about the need to remove Monks from these types of games, and bugger me then they went and did it, leaving TOR looking bloody stupid with its WoW-style healers in Star Wars battles.
So... what's made this work in an era where this sort of game developmental style is under attack? It's hard to pin down but I have some ideas
- The costs weren't as high as some other projects. Despite the extra time taken, word is that development costs are nowhere near as high as TOR's were.
- They've innovated in the right areas. TOR sank a fortune into voice acting every tiny detail of each quest- but the quests themselves were the same as the WoW model. This just meant they turned into quests where people skipped the voices instead of skipping the text, so much of that money was literally wasted. GW2 put its innovation into creating a whole new sort of MMO environment where quests like that don't really exist, and there's still a heck of a lot of voicework. That voicework is also in the right places, like the ton of ambient conversations that help make the world a far more vibrant and living one (something that I also felt was absent in TOR)
- They got the revenue model right. I was always in favour of the no-subscription-fees model, but games like WoW were making insane amounts of cash on subs and they did look like the way to go. Well, GW2 has been a big winner here as it is coming out just, as I noted above, as it is becoming clear that the market has gone off subscription games. It couldn't have timed out better for them
- The weaker areas are not gamebreakers. Let's take cutscene presentation for example. TOR is much better at this than GW2, whose side-by-side artistic dialogues for cutscenes are ok (and certainly cheap) but uninspiring and do not bring you into things in the way that TOR's cinematic Bioware-style cutscenes do, let alone the cgi cut scenes. But it doesn't matter, because those presentational touches did NOTHING for TOR's longevity. People watched them once, and that was it. They liked them, but they weren't going to keep subbing to see them repeatedly. Another waste of money. GW2 here is not the best but it's good enough, and I feel it is the best in plenty of other areas.
- Community engagement. I'm not a huge community hog on games so I can't speak for all companies, but comparing dev involvement on the forums and for wider websites compared to that of, say, Bioware for TOR and Blizzard for D3, I have been truly impressed by their process of giving out information, trying to build a community and, most vital of all, responding to criticism. I was amazed when the lead story writer for GW2 came into the beta forums for the first beta to talk with those who were complaining about story quality, saying he'd like to hear comments and would change what he could in the base game and would bear it all in mind for expansions. At the first beta! In comparison, those complaining about TOR story issues got a stony silence. Story as far as I can tell so far, is one of GW2s more average areas (as opposed to their creation of a setting, which is fantastic), This is impressive stuff.
- The game just plays great. I'd like to think this is number one reason, but this is such a tricky area to define I think we have to look at quality in more particular fashions in order to define why some games sell well and others do not. Regardless... it's the main reason I've loved it so far.
Well, that's that. I'll be playing this time tomorrow. I don't know if there will ever be a gaming project of this length of complexity that I'll be invested in again, so it's good to enjoy this moment.
As far as the community thing goes, I can probably put into perspective just how amazing this game is.
I am normally a very shy, asocial person who does not like doing things like putting myself or my stuff out there. I do not talk to others much. I HATE the idea of playing games with other people and prefer to run around alone.
...and then GW2 came along.
I've written blogs before, but never have I kept one up for any period of time. I've been writing Under the Pale Tree for close to a year and a half now with no sign of letting up, and its been an undeniable success. I used to hate posting on twitter, until I started following some of the GW2 devs. Now I'm on there all the time, have made a huge group of friends (the twitter side of the GW2 community is very heavily made up of bloggers and really just amazing), and talk to several devs on there frequently enough that I can say they're actual friends of mine. I play with the devs in-game. I'm leading a guild that is around the 70 member mark, that started out as a bunch of us on Twitter being silly during BWE3. I've done one interview with Anet, should have another back next week, have been granted beta keys to give away myself, and am basically well enough known in this community that the creators of the game consider me someone important and vital to this game's community.
I have never, ever been that involved in a game, nor certainly a game community before. But the dynamic for this one is just so different. They're so open about the process of making the game. They listen to concerns about things. The devs themselves are really down-to-earth people who are just great and fun to talk to. Every one of their community managers started out as a fan of the game.
Essentially, they do something that most dev teams tend to forget about, and they actually care. About their fans, and everyone that'll be playing the game, and what we think of it and what we like and don't like.
It's not hard to see how they've inspired such a huge, passionate community that sustained for years before release, and will keep going for a long time.
Incidentally, now if you log in at account.guildwars2.com you can make sure your accounts are linked.
https://account.guildwars2.com/account/link
(btw, Ush, I'm somehow thinking that when you got me interested in GW you never expected me to get this into things 😛)
Originally posted by Peach
SPvP is not boring at all, and all starter armors are plain. Basically every PvE armor can be unlocked in PvP though.Guardian is fun. I was surprised at how much I liked it.
It took a few more videos but it does look interesting. Its just tough from seeing FFXIV's graphics and going back to this.
