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Preview: Guild Wars World Wide Event
ArenaNet and NCsoft over the weekend launched their free World Preview Event, which was to begin Friday evening, Oct. 29 and end Sunday evening, Oct. 31, but kicked it a day early for Guild Wars, their upcoming MMO game where players can take part in large head-to-head guild battles, cooperative group combat and single-player missions, players explore a fantasy world and test their skills against chosen rivals. During the event, we were invited to view first hand and witness what the developers saw during a private event hosted by ArenaNet and NCsoft at the elegant Cliff Hotel in San Fransisco, California. Being a PvP based game, we had to grab expert opinions on the game and contacted the guild known for Killing As An Organzied Sport, KAAOS. We were not dissapointed at what we learned about the game.
Guild Wars has been in closed Alpha testing for some time. This weekend (Oct. 29 - 31) ArenaNet and NCsoft kicked off their Guild Wars World Preview Event. From Friday to Sunday they opened the Guild Wars doors to the general public. Anybody and everybody could download the free gaming client from www.guildwars.com, which was approximately 90KB, and participate in this event. After Sunday Guild Wars goes back to being a closed alpha. Never fear though, their beta period is scheduled to start the weekend of November 6 - 8. It is my understanding that their beta period is going to consist of closed beta with the first weekend of every month being open beta. It is also my understanding that this will be the format for beta until release, which is tentatively "scheduled" for "early" '05. To participate in the open beta you simply need to pre-order Guild Wars. During the World Preview Event, ArenaNet and NCsoft held a private reception of sorts at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco (the event your faithful reporter is supposed to be covering... in between the free cocktails ;p). ArenatNet is located in Bellevue, Washington, and is a wholly owned subsidiary of NCsoft (which has offices all over the place). ArenaNet and NCsoft sent several people to San Francisco (coders, art guys, PR people, etc, etc.) and every one of them was very friendly and willing to discuss the game and their involvement extensively. When Ku and I arrived at the hotel a representative downstairs promptly showed us to the reception area where we were greeted by Kristen Ryan, ArenaNet public relations and Gaile Grey, community public relations. After a brief conversation with the two of them (more like after we convinced them that they shouldn't throw us out... the KAAOS charm strikes again ;>) Kristen showed us around and introduced us to everybody.
I wasn't sure what type of questions Div was interested in so I approached it from a guild/gamer point of view. There are several games due out and my guild (KAAOS) is still undecided as to which game we are going to focus on. Basically we are a Player vesus Player guild and Guild Wars claims to be a PvP game. Of course, several games over the years claimed to be PvP games and they, well, didn't quite live up to expectations. I must admit, after 10 years of watching failed attempts at PvP by game designers I have become a little jaded. It seems to me like, for quite some time, the genre has been heading for mass PvP where the prime requisites are coordination, communication, numbers and time investment. For some strange reason personal skill has been a forgotten ingredient. I am not opposed to mass PvP, although I don't think technology has come far enough to support 40 person battles, but I would personally like to see the prime requisites for success to be coordination, communication and personal skill. Numbers should play a slight role when there is a slight number advantage and a much larger roll when there is a large number advantage. As it is in most games, even a slight numbers advantage plays a very large, typically insurmountable, roll. As far as time, I believe any system that inherently gives an advantage in PvP to those who spend the most time in PvE is flawed. In the past I've spoken quite a bit about top down development. For an example of what I mean by top down development you can read this article, however I must warn of explicit language. I'm not a developer though and there are a lot of things to consider (mainly $$) when it comes to the where's and how's to designing these games. I've spoken to a few developers in the past and, while they know a whole lot more than me about game design, I haven't really gotten the sense that any of them knew much about what makes PvP compelling.... That is until I spoke to Jeff Strain. Jeff and I spoke casually about PvP, while we watched others playing some matches, for quite a while and I was impressed with his views on PvP. The story of ArenaNet is quite interesting. It's common knowledge that the core founders of ArenaNet were developers from Blizzard who worked on such titles as Diablo and Warcraft (just to name a few). What really interested me though was the passion that these folks had for PvP. They had to be passionate to take the risks they have taken. Now this is simply my personal observation, which could be completely wrong, but they left an established company because they were not happy with the direction of the particular games they were working on. They wanted to create a good PvP game in the MMORPG genre.
I wanted to reserve my judgment of their product until I had more exposure to Guild Wars. I spent a bit of time playing Guild Wars at the event and quite a bit of time watching the developers play at the event while Ku and I spoke to Jeff about the game. Everybody at ArenaNet seemed very interested in hearing our input about particular features. I tried to keep most of my suggestions away from core game design because I felt like I did not know enough about the game to speak on such things. However we made suggestions regarding the interface (friends list options for example), guild hall features and PvP arena types that they seemed interested in discussing. In most games it appears as though the content is worked on first and the PvP combat is balanced last. It appears as though ArenaNet has been working on the endgame PvP combat system first and as a matter of fact, their problem might be crunching to add non-PvP content in time. If that's a problem then it is a problem any PvPer would want in a game in development. Now mind you, everyone has a different idea about what makes for good combat so I'm not going to debate their system but, as I said when I mentioned top down development, it is my belief that a PvP game needs to have the PvP combat system built first as the core and the rest of the content added around that core. In this regard it appears as though ArenaNet has taken that direction. Additionally, their mindset when it comes to development appears to be "If it's not fun it shouldn't be in the game". There is no travel in the game per-se. You can get to any place of interest by clicking on it on the map and you are instantly teleported there. There are only twenty levels so it doesn't take forever to max. You can group with anyone at any level so you don't have to worry about keeping up with your friends if you can't put in as much time. Leveling increases your effectiveness slightly with each passing level but what leveling really does is add more strategic "options". The game is set up with a core combat system and everything else seems to be "plug in". Which is good because they can add content and change skills by plugging them in with expansions. All spells/skills are unique in that they are not upgrades to other spells/skills.
As far as my actual experience testing the game: For testing purposes Guild Wars starts everyone out at level 15. You select two classes for your character (1 being primary and 1 being secondary), which offers quite a bit of strategic variety. Whichever class is your primary determines the armor you can wear, the weapons you can use, and the attributes you can raise as you level. The characters don't have attributes like strength, stamina, intelligence and whatnot but rather skill type attributes. For example, if your primary class is Mesmer you have an attribute called “fast casting”, or some such, that you can raise. You will have attributes from both classes you choose but each class has a primary attribute that you can only have if that is your primary class. One of the concerns I had was with melee combat as no company has designed a system yet where melee integrated well with casting combat. One of the problems in previous games is warriors (for example) are built to withstand melee damage (high armor) and typically have a lot more health than casters (in some games three to four times more) and melee damage is typically scaled to face other melee classes (high health, high melee defense, etc.). This creates a situation where melee classes can literally take down casting classes in mere seconds simply by pressing auto-attack. I don't know how a rational person could possibly find that a challenging or engaging system. I am not so sure that melee combat is balanced yet but a few things I have noticed are a definite improvement over previous games. One of those things is health. Melee classes don't have much more health (if any, didn't pay enough attention to the exact differences) than casting classes and simple auto-attack damage is typically only 1/10th of player health. Certain classes also have defenses against melee combat (but remember, out of 75 skills, or 150 since you are dual class, you can only bring 8 to the table). Vendors, Gear & Crafting:
I haven't spent enough time leveling up to know exactly how skills (skills being spells also) are handled but the way I believe it works is there are no skills with a "level requirement" and there are no skills that are power ups of other skills (each skill is it's own unique skill). I am not sure how they will handle it on release but as it is right now, you start out with about 8 skills (the actual number you can use in any single mission) and when you get to the main town there is a guy with a few more for sale. When you first buy a skill it costs 1 gold, the next one costs 2 gold and so on (so it can get expensive). In order to get skills that this guy doesn't have you have to do PvE missions (or buy them from other players). You buy a signet of capture and load it up as one of your skills, you do a PvE mission and when you see a boss mob casting a particular spell (or using a skill) you want you use the signet to capture it. I believe you can then either sell the spell captured in the signet or learn it for yourself. I didn't fool around with it too much (as all I wanted to do was PvP ;p) but what I did mess around with was fun. Speaking of missions:
In addition to the PvE instances there are a few more dots that will populate the map. One of them is your guild hall (if you are in a guild). You can instantly teleport there. Why would you want to teleport to your guild hall? Well it's a place to hang out with your guild mates ;p And I believe they will be adding other features to guild halls later (like storage bins and whatnot). Guild Halls are also used on organized guild PvP maps though I didn't get a chance to participate in any of those so that's only hearsay. There are three PvP areas you can instantly teleport to as well. One is for random 8v8 teams (which used to be random 4v4 teams up until the other night). You teleport to this area and select enter mission and in a few seconds you will be teleported into an area and automatically grouped up with 7 other random people and you will be facing off against another random team of 8. It's a lot of fun but it's nowhere near as fun as the organized maps. Another PvP area is a guild area where you and 7 other guild members take on another 8-person guild team.
The thing that intrigued me the most about PvP combat was that it seemed very fast at first (your entire team can get wiped out in seconds) but as your team gets better it slows down quite a bit (some matches seemed like they lasted 20 minutes or so). I don't think the game is completely balanced yet but that indicates to me there is definitely depth to PvP and personal skill (rather than time spent PvEing) makes a huge difference. We want to thank ArenaNet for inviting us for a first hand look at the game, as this is one title which will change the face of gaming for PvP, for the better! Discuss: What did you think?
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