Need I say more?
Showing posts with label guild wars 2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label guild wars 2. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Friday, August 19, 2011
No heals for you
So, last post about Guild Wars, I said I'd write about some of the reasons I'm hanging out for Guild Wars 2.
I'll start with a link to an article ArenaNet published about a year ago: "A New Way of Looking at Healing and Death". This, probably more than anything else, was instrumental to capturing my interest (bearing in mind that when I first read this, I had never played Guild Wars). In particular, the second half, where designer Jon Peters explains why GW2 does not feature the dedicated healing and tanking classes of the traditional MMORPG trinity.
Now, let me preface this by saying that I played a healer for years in WoW, and loved it. During Burning Crusade, I decided to switch mains from my original rogue (created on release day) to my priest, and I never looked back. Peters gives an interesting description of the appeal of heals:
"It's not about clicking on a health bar and watching it go up, it's about being there for your friends when they need you"
That's what I was after. Having raided as a rogue for a couple of years, I yearned for a position of responsibility. I wanted to feel that I could make the difference between success and failure. Between the group wiping and me keeping them alive. Not between the group doing x dps and doing x+1000 dps.
Peters says "we don't like sitting around spamming 'looking for healer' to global chat". I'm sure dps players didn't like that. I didn't like having to call raids because I was there but no other healers were. I also didn't like it when I got benched because we had too many healers online that night! Granted, raiding was more flexible than 5-man instancing, where it really was "1 tank, 1 healer, 3 dps, or go home." But we still didn't have that much wiggle room.
The actual gameplay? The "clicking on a health bar and watching it go up"? That wasn't what I was there for. Don't get me wrong, playing reactively has an appeal over the pursuit of mechanical perfection involved in mastering your rotation as a rogue. But then I think about interrupting, as a rogue - a real high-pressure reactive role. Or playing a Guardian in LOTRO, where you have a raft of attacks that can only be performed following a successful block or parry. That sort of thing keeps you focused on the game, you don't need to be healing to be reactive.
Next thing on my mind: tanking and healing is a pretty weird implementation of heroic fantasy. I really can't think of tank and healer archetypes in the great works of fantasy. I felt far more like a fantasy hero playing Diablo 2 - slaughtering hordes of monsters before they could reach me and devour me, desperately running around to avoid Diablo's flames - than I did playing WoW, standing at the back of the group spamming heals. And if the trinity model doesn't really resemble classic fantasy, don't even get me started on Bioware's bizarre decision to try to bolt an EverQuest-style trinity class system onto Star Wars: The Old Republic. Yep, that's how I remember the Star Wars movies, lots of fights where an armoured rebel trooper stood in the front line, soaking up blaster fire, while a Jedi stood behind force-healing him. Ridiculous.
So, if Guild Wars 2 can deliver us fantasy action, where every player is trying to deal damage, whilst avoiding damage, interfering with the enemy via debuffs, interrupts and knockdowns, and performing a limited amount of healing, then I'll be ecstatic.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
A funny thing occurred to me about Guild Wars..
One of the main driving factors behind me deciding to check out Guild Wars a couple of months ago was that I was liking so much of what I was hearing about the upcoming Guild Wars 2, and thus thought it made sense to try the original game.
And, as I said in that previous blog post, I'm enjoying it very much.
But the funny thing is, a couple of the elements I find most interesting in Guild Wars are going away in the sequel. This isn't necessarily a huge problem, since the sequel is also promising some very cool new ideas.
The huge one, obviously, is the departure from the "heroes & henchmen" model. I have played Guild Wars 100% solo, never grouped with another human in the two months I've been playing. I guess I've been treating it like Diablo 2 - a solo game which can be played online to give the opportunity to trade with other people. This is certainly not the only way to play, and the hardest areas of the game were surely not designed to be played this way (although there is an active community dedicated to doing so, as can be seen in guides like Completing the Underworld with Heroes). But it is what made GW different, for me, after so much time spent playing traditional "solo content / group content" games like WoW and LOTRO.
Guild Wars 2 takes a much more traditional approach. You play a character. No henchmen, no heroes, if you don't want to be alone you can either play with other people or play a ranger so you at least have a pet. And there is traditional group content in the form of dungeons: "Unlike most of the rest of Tyria, which can be explored by solo players, dungeons are designed to be played and enjoyed in pre-arranged groups, composed of either your regular guildies or a pick-up team".
Actually, an equally huge change is going from the lobby & instance model of Guild Wars to a true persistent world. But the instancing isn't one of the things I find interesting about GW. Well, it allows some novel ideas, like "vanquishing" (the achievement of killing every single monster in a zone in hardmode), which really couldn't work in a massively multiplayer persistent world, but really, it's hard to argue that this change will lose more than it gains.
I also really like the fact that GW has quite a horizontal character development model. Getting to the maximum level, 20, really doesn't take that long. There's no real gear grind for powerful weapons and armour. Progression from level 20 is mostly about making yourself and your team more and more flexible, collecting more and more skills and getting all the heroes in the game recruited, so you've got more options when it comes to arranging your build.
We don't have full details about how GW2 will work yet, but the level cap is apparently 80, which sounds like a large and imposing number. Apparently the time to level should be quite flat and not exceed 90 minutes, but even so, that could be 100+ hours of play to level cap. I guess that's shorter than some MMOs, but longer than Guild Wars. Will there be gear progression? I've read that "equipment will be a more significant part of PvE and World PvP gameplay" but that doesn't necessarily mean a full WoW-style ilvl progression.
Also, it sounds like skill combinations are going to be a lot more constrained in GW2. My GW necromancer, for instance, could choose one of 35 elite skills, and then seven of well over 100 other skills. Sounds like a lot of combinations? Well, on top of that he can pick one of nine secondary classes, and pull in skills from that class too. Or take up to three PvE-only skills from the dozens available from various factions. The combinations are, effectively, infinite. GW2 apparently condenses your options from an elite and 7 others down to an elite, a heal, and 3 others, with your other skills being determined by your weapon type. And the full skill list will be shorter, although no doubt future expansion will add more, just as each campaign and expansion has added more skills to Guild Wars.
This is probably sensible. I don't think anyone would claim GW necros had 35 useful elite skills, or 100+ useful non-elites. Nor would they say that there weren't genuine balancing nightmares in a game with so many skills. A "quality over quantity" approach is what I'd aim for if I was a developer. But I can't deny that I expect a frisson of disappointment at the shorter list of skills.
I hope this isn't all coming across as too negative about Guild Wars 2. I'm not intending to be - I'm extremely excited about it. Next post I'll write about some of the things that have me salivating with anticipation.
And, as I said in that previous blog post, I'm enjoying it very much.
But the funny thing is, a couple of the elements I find most interesting in Guild Wars are going away in the sequel. This isn't necessarily a huge problem, since the sequel is also promising some very cool new ideas.
The huge one, obviously, is the departure from the "heroes & henchmen" model. I have played Guild Wars 100% solo, never grouped with another human in the two months I've been playing. I guess I've been treating it like Diablo 2 - a solo game which can be played online to give the opportunity to trade with other people. This is certainly not the only way to play, and the hardest areas of the game were surely not designed to be played this way (although there is an active community dedicated to doing so, as can be seen in guides like Completing the Underworld with Heroes). But it is what made GW different, for me, after so much time spent playing traditional "solo content / group content" games like WoW and LOTRO.
Guild Wars 2 takes a much more traditional approach. You play a character. No henchmen, no heroes, if you don't want to be alone you can either play with other people or play a ranger so you at least have a pet. And there is traditional group content in the form of dungeons: "Unlike most of the rest of Tyria, which can be explored by solo players, dungeons are designed to be played and enjoyed in pre-arranged groups, composed of either your regular guildies or a pick-up team".
Actually, an equally huge change is going from the lobby & instance model of Guild Wars to a true persistent world. But the instancing isn't one of the things I find interesting about GW. Well, it allows some novel ideas, like "vanquishing" (the achievement of killing every single monster in a zone in hardmode), which really couldn't work in a massively multiplayer persistent world, but really, it's hard to argue that this change will lose more than it gains.
I also really like the fact that GW has quite a horizontal character development model. Getting to the maximum level, 20, really doesn't take that long. There's no real gear grind for powerful weapons and armour. Progression from level 20 is mostly about making yourself and your team more and more flexible, collecting more and more skills and getting all the heroes in the game recruited, so you've got more options when it comes to arranging your build.
We don't have full details about how GW2 will work yet, but the level cap is apparently 80, which sounds like a large and imposing number. Apparently the time to level should be quite flat and not exceed 90 minutes, but even so, that could be 100+ hours of play to level cap. I guess that's shorter than some MMOs, but longer than Guild Wars. Will there be gear progression? I've read that "equipment will be a more significant part of PvE and World PvP gameplay" but that doesn't necessarily mean a full WoW-style ilvl progression.
Also, it sounds like skill combinations are going to be a lot more constrained in GW2. My GW necromancer, for instance, could choose one of 35 elite skills, and then seven of well over 100 other skills. Sounds like a lot of combinations? Well, on top of that he can pick one of nine secondary classes, and pull in skills from that class too. Or take up to three PvE-only skills from the dozens available from various factions. The combinations are, effectively, infinite. GW2 apparently condenses your options from an elite and 7 others down to an elite, a heal, and 3 others, with your other skills being determined by your weapon type. And the full skill list will be shorter, although no doubt future expansion will add more, just as each campaign and expansion has added more skills to Guild Wars.
This is probably sensible. I don't think anyone would claim GW necros had 35 useful elite skills, or 100+ useful non-elites. Nor would they say that there weren't genuine balancing nightmares in a game with so many skills. A "quality over quantity" approach is what I'd aim for if I was a developer. But I can't deny that I expect a frisson of disappointment at the shorter list of skills.
I hope this isn't all coming across as too negative about Guild Wars 2. I'm not intending to be - I'm extremely excited about it. Next post I'll write about some of the things that have me salivating with anticipation.
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