T w e n t y S i d e d
In case you missed it, Guild Wars 2’s final beta weekend started Friday. So we figured, why not let you all in on the magic as Josh drives everyone else who actually shows up completely insane by talking about Guild Wars while playing Guild Wars? Everyone wins!
See it here:
http://www.livestream.com/chocolatehammer
Edit: And we’re done! Thanks everyone for coming out!
Shamus Plays WOW
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
What is Piracy?
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
A Lack of Vision and Leadership
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
Silent Hill Origins
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
I just want to repost my comment about spec ops here:
You really should play it in one go.Yeah its a bit long,but it really is worth it.Get a day of,and go through the game,it really is quite immersive.
Also,like someone else said in the stream,going in and thinking its just another bro-shooter does emphasize its story much more.The game sneaks up on you so well.
I’ve been debating whether to try it out, but after the general response I think I might just get it.
If you dont like shooters,just put it on easy and go through with the story.It will be worth it.
Yeah that was me who said that, get it now!
Thanks for the Hangout, this was really cool, and I sure hope that Shamus is going to do a GW2 review. This game seems to get so many things right that are regular topics around here, and if nothing grave comes up, this will mark the point where I finally become a member of the MMO crowd that I have shunned for so long.
(OT: wow, a spell checker for comments! Opera does that for me anyway, but nonetheless a good thing)
This was a good idea. I love hearing from the SW crew and it’s other fans.
Anyone who wants to get together and play DayZ, my Steam name is matrix3509. Let me know when you can play, what voice service you want to use, etc.
So, my impressions on Guild Wars 2: Visually beautiful, but still boring to watch, which isn’t really surprising or a big problem since many games are like that and it’s harder to find something interesting when you don’t know the “rules”.
Everything mentioned about the actual mechanics sounded good, and since there’s no monthly fee I’m considering buying it. Depends on how much money I have for spending on games next month.
* I’m trying to play by a rule I created after playing SWTOR: Either full price on point of sale and no extra fees; no/low entrance fee and a monthly fee; or it’s F2P and doesn’t feel like it’s forcing me to spend money on it. Flexibility allowed according to how good the MMO seems to be.
Do we know whether Guild Wars 2 will have a demo, because I’m curious enough to give it a try but probably not curious enough to buy it sight unseen? At least not until the price drops dramatically.
Likewise. Watching it got me interested, but I’d still like a demo or a “free to play until level 15” or something like that.
I’d like to add an additional question: Will the game be available on Steam?
A dev responded to a similar question on the beta forums to the tune of “I’m not really allowed to talk about whether or not we will feature a free trial, but that tends to happen some time after release: never immediately ;)”
As for Steam, I have no idea, but Guild Wars 1 is up there.
On the other hand, if you can’t pre-order it on Steam, I’m not sure you can purchase it full on there just yet.
I couldn’t stay for the whole session, but I did enjoy the sneak peek at GW2.
Thanks for doing this.
I am shocked to my core that between Chris and Randy, neither of you went and played the EXCELLENT Keg Brawl PvP mini-game in the Norn town. Teams of ~6 players punching and kicking each other across a frozen lake, trying to score points by retrieving a keg and bringing it to your goal. I spent most of my time in the beta there, haha!
To answer poor Chris’ unheard questions (or at least I’m pretty sure they went unheard, no one seemed to respond to him lol)
1) There are two types of general PvP: the big World vs World siege PvP, where you are not level 80 automatically and do not unlock all your skills, and the matchmaking/structured PvP that Josh/Jarenth/Randy got up to.
In World vs World PvP, you gain XP, item drops, skill unlocks, and everything else exactly as you do in PvE. Each action you take in World versus World is treated as a dynamic event: if you take a fortress or intercept a supply caravan for the enemy team, you get exactly as much gold, xp, and Karma as if you completed a standard Dynamic Event at your level in PvE-world. Enemy players and guard NPCs drop items from a similar but not identical loot table as any other NPC creature in the game, scaled to your level. So you could go into WvWvW at level 1, and level up to 80 in only the PvP zone, getting all the gear, gold, and karma you could get in the PvE areas. And like I said, you actually are whatever level you enter at, so you get no free skill/weapon/trait unlocks, but everyone is given the base stats of a level 80 player to even the playing field.
In structured PvP, the little matchmaking control-point games, you are auto-levelled to 80 in full (You unlock every skill in the game except your racials, you get access to every weapon for free for PvP only, you get all Trait Points unlocked), and you gain no “real” xp. Instead, you gain PvP rank.
2) Chris mentioned it being odd “that the whole game world is broken up by teleporters”. I think you were referring to the stargates (Asura Gates), and not the fact that each zone is instanced?
Basically the whole world is semi-continuous: You can run from one end of the planet to the opposite without ever having to use a purple teleportation gate. However, all the zones are instanced, so if you come to the border between the level 1-15 zone and the level 15-20 zone, there will usually be a small tunnel or path that leads between the two zones with a transparent portal-looking thing hanging in the air: you step into the portal, you warp to the next zone.
So yeah, the world isn’t really continuous, but the zones are all located geographically adjacent to one or more other zones, and you can run from zone to zone without having to utilize the purple gate network. And as Josh pointed out/you discovered later, you can open your map and quick-travel to any location you have previously visited, it just takes some time to familiarize yourself with the map :).
I watched the whole thing.
Thanks for tweeting it beginning Shamus.
It was really fun, glad you guys are doing these every now and again. It even helped me decide to preorder Guild Wars 2 since the game looked so damn fun.
Another long play-by-play response to stuff said in archived video. Feel free to skip.
When I played WOW, I totally would wander around and look at stuff. That was really the main reason for leveling up, so I could survive in higher level zones. I managed to glitch into a few places that weren’t normally accessible. (There are pics on my website)
Having NPC’s remember stuff you did before you talk to them is awesome. One begins to wonder how they get their news though. I mean, you just got there. Do they have surveillance cameras in the forest?
I’m sorry I missed the SWG space/ground combat. That sounds like something that we should be seeing all over the place.
Visual noise in combat could be solved in a fairly straightforward fashion, but it could require completely re-writing the graphics engine. I would suggest doing a partial color mask, and use the color channel to convey in-game information, like the primary type of damage. It might not be worth it though, and you’d need to do a ton of testing to get it to look right.
Really, you could do this with the rest of the game as well. Players can choose their own clothes colors, etc, but you could do an overlay with the primary colors of the zone to keep people like Josh from standing out like a stripper. It should really be a display option, “Normalize player colors” or some such.
Ideally, all display would be normalized and white balanced on a per-frame basis. This would ensure that you always had good contrast and didn’t get the uniform-color-wash effect. That this hasn’t been done bears testimony to the difficulty of implementing it. But it’s how your eyes work, so that’s where we’ll end up eventually.
Yeah, doing things over again is a pain. I’ve written a few articles about this actually. Games should make more use of existing AI and painless automation of tasks where the player has proven proficient.
Super Mario Galaxies was great fun. I beat both games with my wife, playing two player. It wasn’t really that difficult, but I really enjoyed it. Beautiful environments, fun kinesthetics, good times.
Yeah, DF interface is terrifically horrible. Also, so amazing. Wrote an article about that too (haven’t we all?).
“Fighting over time itself” sounds like an excellent core mechanic for an experimental indie game. Probably been done already and I don’t know it.
Splice reminds me of Space Chem in many ways. The pure puzzle solving, the programming analogies. Both have that horrible difficulty knee, where you suddenly realized that you’re in way over your head, and it’s not clear when that happened.
Enjoyed the GW2 preview play. I’m not sure I’m going to play GW2, but I’m planning on buying a copy just to support these guys.
Paul, I dropped over to your website, could not find the WoW screenshots for the life of me, though I found lots of other things.
Yeah, sorry about that. My site is rather a treasure hunt. Glad you took a look around. I hope the stuff you did find was enjoyable. From the landing page it’s “Photojournals” >> “World of Warcraft explorations”
Or just go here:
http://www.peripheralarbor.com/exploring/index.html
I learned my lesson when I played the first Guild Wars and all those expansions. Never again. There’s no question about whether or not it’ll be fun; it’s just too addictive for me.
Have fun killing pixels and don’t forget to get some sunshine and exercise boys :)