Be Excellent To Each Other

Guild Wars 2 release date has been announced then.

http://www.guildwars2.com/en/

28th of August.

Didn't really play the first one much, as I was too embroiled into WoW, but this is looking pretty good I'm intrigued to see how they have broken the holy trinity (tank, heal, dps) and interested to see if that actually works.
Plus it looks very pretty

I have pre-ordered, anyone else?

Tempted by this... the lack of sub fees takes away a lot of pressure to play play play, plus the Charr look really cool.

It's on our radar, a couple of us (not me) will probably jump straight in at launch, me and the rest will probably wait and see how it goes.

Plus it'll be launching right around the time that the kung-fu pandas go live in WoW, so I'll do pandas first and then take a look at how Guild Wars 2 is shaping up.

Released this weekend Beexers. Pre-purchasers can play from Saturday.

Release day for pre-orders!

I've managed to login and create a character, after about 10 attempts. Can't actually get the game to start though.
Will there ever be an MMO released that is planned for correctly?

I was going to try this out. But I can't be arsed a) spending £50 on it, and b) fucking around trying to get it running on a Mac. It looks quite good, though. Let me know if it's worth the hassle, when you finally get into it properly.

I see no need to jump in TBH.

Pandas are a month away, I've got CS and Manhunt to play in the interim, then I'll hit the Pandas for six months or so, then I'll see what state Guild Wars 2 is in by then.

Nothing good ever comes of jumping into an MMO at launch.

Managed to get on a play it for a couple of hours. Pretty nice so far

Screenshots or it didn't happen.

It's dead again now...

Yeah, so this is pretty good so far. I've put about 10 hours into it in the past couple of days I think, so it can't be that bad!

Good things:
Lots to do. (pvp, crafting, questing, world events, etc...)
Story driven rather than quest driven (so far)
Very pretty
A lot of the usual annoying MMO bullshit has gone. No worrying about tagging enemies, just hit stuff and shoot stuff and everyone gets rewarded for doing so. All your crafting materials have a central place to put them which doesn't fill up your backpack. You bank is across account and most stuff so far is not soulbound.
Fighting actually takes a little bit of skill, rather than just standing still and timing your button rotation. Plus your skills and abilities are largely based on the weapon type you have equipped, carry lots of weapon types and you have lots of different toys to play with,

Bad things:
Took ages to get the servers up and working, and still takes a few goes to get it. I predict it will melt when actual release day comes.
It's very linear, I haven't progressed outside the starting zones yet, but you pretty much only have 1 or 2 quests you can do at any one time, so if you don't fancy them, tough.
Some of the world events and shared quests are hard, and don't seem to scale to how many people are in the area. It's fine while it is busy, but I imagine it'll be pretty much impossible to do some of them when the zones start to empty.
Only 5 character slots per account, yet 8 classes? Who thought that was a good idea?



So far I have a L8 necromancer, a L7 engineer and a few others at L1 just to try stuff out. Throughly enjoying myself, I wonder how long till I get bored.

So is it a proper MMO this time though? I remember the first game had hubs and instances, didn't it? Is this properly multiplayer all over like WoW?

It still has instances for your story quests, but out in the world while you are levelling it is properly multiplayer. If you ever played the Warhammer MMO, then it is essentially the same as that.
Bear in mind i'm still in the starter areas, so it may all change as things progress.

Definitely interested in checking it out once I upgrade.

I'm out for a few beers with a chum this evening, he's been bumming the game for the last couple of days so doubtless I'll get the full rundown on it.

With a WoW expansion so close though, including loads of really fundamental class changes, I just can't get up any excitement for a new MMO.

It's weird playing an MMO from the start again. It's taking ages to level, I'm L12 on my engineer after 10 hours+ playtime, and i'm flat broke. Had to spend all my cash on buying the L10 trait unlock and the auction house isn't up and running, so everything I pick up is pretty much worthless at the moment.

I'm thoroughly enjoying it

Worth a try then? Certainly it looks and sounds amazing, and I wanna try the underwater bit with the harpoons.

It's kept me entertained all weekend at least

That's one of my favourite things in an MMO: the first innocent steps it a huge living world, seeing the high level players do unthinkably awesome things, the gibberish lingo on the global chat channels.

Was chatting to my mate about this last night and he thinks it's a solid enough MMO but not exactly a ground-breaker.

I got the overall impression he'd rather not have dropped £50 on it.

Rock Paper Shotgun's write-up doesn't exactly have me reaching for my debit card either.

This one?
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/08 ... ld-wars-2/

I've just hit L15 and that article has pretty much nailed it and says everything i'm thinking. So if it doesn't appeal on the back of that, then fair enough

Yeah that's the one.

It's clearly a good game, I'm not getting the impression from anyone/anywhere that there's anything really wrong with it, but at the same time, I've not read/watched/heard anything that's made me shout 'TAKE MY MONEY' either.

If the Pandas weren't a month away I'd probably give it a crack, but the Pandas are just a month away, and that'll probably give me 6-9 months of solid WoW play, so I see no reason to kick off with another MMO at this point.

The huge flaw sounds exactly like the one that sullied both Test Drive Unlimited games. I'd be amazed if they didn't fix it, but we'll see, won't we?

More good things:

Some lovely little touches. If you craft a lot of stuff at once, each successive item gets crafted faster and faster. Enemy mobs have bonus xp based on how long they have been alive, so if you find a lesser travelled area the mobs are worth more.

Scaling. All content in whatever zone will be worth something, no matter what level you are at. If you are above the level for the zone you get scalled down to the appropriate level, yet still get rewards based on your actual level. Scaling doesn't work upwards though.

Community. Every node and item found is for you and you alone, and any xp gained on kills is also yours, based on the amount of contribution you made. This means no killstealing, no ninja of nodes or drops, you are actually happy to see other people around and help them out, and vice versa, as it only positively affects your game, and every time I have gone down, someone has gone out of their way to rez me

Can you rob other players?

Nope, you'd hate it.

Can you kill other players?

You certainly can. There is a whole element of the game which is PvP and there is also World v World v World.
I've had a quick go on PvP, which was ok. Need to try WvWvW though.

What the hell is World v World v World?

Sounds a bit like Realm vs Realm

Is it?

Is it, haven't tried it yet but it is apparently very much like Alterac Valley used to be, but with 3 teams.

Well having put more time into the game - (and I mean a LOT more time, he's already into danger territory with it, like his missus going to bed with a knowing 'I'm going to bed now PLEASE COME THROUGH AND FUCK ME I WANT SEX COME AND GET IT' and him making it to the bedroom after 1am and she's fast asleep, that didn't go down well) - my chum has decided that this game is the bestest thing ever and that we should all be playing it.

He binned us off last Saturday to play GW2 instead of the usual BF3/DiRT2 shenanigans, and he's already told me he'll be fucking us off this Saturday as well. He's especially delighted because his missus is out so once he's got the children down he can play GW2 until the small hours - uninterrupted by moist women.

Point being, I'm starting to want to give it a go myself

Yes, sex is indeed exciting; but if you want to experience it then please find your own wife instead of using your chum's.

I really enjoyed the first Guild Wars for the duration of my standard MMO playing time. (Usually around 40 hours in, then staggering boredom.) I especially liked the environmental art, with the charred wastelands and lovely valleys. Characters were a bit too fey and fantasy-silly in appearence, though. I was also astonished at how beautifully well it was programmed, running on my pocket calculator of a PC at max settings at the time.

Sadly, I can't quite bring myself to be excited at Guild Wars 2. End of world quests and the like are really beginning to bore me now. Yes, I know it features spotting incidents and weighing in for a more fluid and plausible alternative to the questing system, but that just doesn't mask the grind enough for me.

I think I need my RPG's to be really, really story intensive with a sense of urgency and purpose - like the Mass Effect series. Or funny and silly and lovely, like Phoenix Wright. I'm even flagging a bit on Skyrim, to be honest. I'm level 23 now and there's just too... many... damn... quests.

I think the MMO's I enjoyed most of all were Lord of the Rings Online for the exploration and community (some gorgeous world building in that one, Rivendell was incredible) and City of Heroes for being my first one, and being so *Biff* *Pow* comic book fun about it. CoH soon paled a bit too though, due to almost every mission being set in the same repeating warehouse/corporate headquarters/factory/cave/sewer setting.

Well after a discussion at work today we have decided to chuck my GW2 obsessed chum to the wolves and he can masturbate himself furiously to it in solitude. We're all gonna stick with BF3/DiRT2 for now, also, a consensus has been reached that those of us who don't already have it will get CSGO - and we'll use those games to keep us in a holding pattern until the WoW pandas arrive.

Also there's a new BF3 expansion coming out next week so we'll get some good mileage out of that as well.

GW2 is certainly on all of our radars, but probably a few months down the line. (And it should be cheaper by then too!)

I think, as you said about LOTRO, a community and a cool world are more important to MMOs than single player RPGs. I won't get into my whole 'games using multiplayer as a crutch' thing but for an MMO, just having the unpredictability of other people to encounter and have adventures with is a huge plus.

Now supports Macs: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/anno ... -mac-beta/

I got this. It's good! They should port it to the 360, it'd work really well with a pad.

You're right actually, that gives me an idea. I wonder how playable it is if I map the controls to buttons on my xbox controller that is already connected. The only problem I can think of is closing any dialogs that pop up, as just hitting F doesn't toggle them off again.

Good. The Mac FAQ is broken though (clicky) so I can't find out of characters made in the Mac client will stay after it leaves beta, though given it allegedly runs on the same live servers as the Windows version I think the answer is probably 'yes'.

I'd say certainly yes. The client is in beta, not the servers.
I'll download the OSX client at some point, as it'll be nice for if i'm working away and stuck in a hotel

I'm a Sylvari Elementalist... and it's leading be through various and GRIPPING OH REALLY story quests. It tells me to go meet Caithe in such and such a place. I go the wrong way because I'm lost, and encounter her elsewhere, and she acts like she has nothing to say to me.



It's also odd to be told 'stomp on ten toxic mushrooms' or 'kill five zombies' and as you're in the process of dealing with one such thing, some random fucker happens past, fires a ton of lightning bolts/fireballs/summoned spinal column things at it and then disappears into the distance. Perhaps the game is odd, perhaps I'm spoiled by EvE where anyone who appeared would immediately blow you the fuck up.

I'm bemused that the Sylvari all have Celtic language-based names. All this plant and nature shit is a bit tiresome but at least it's a change from yet another medieval Europe setting (which I imagine the Human and Norn starting areas are). Likewise, the 'British' voice acting is a bit much.

It's frankly amazing... They've designed a MMO where everyone co-operates all the time.

I have noticed that people who are passing by and see you struggling will come and help. Likewise if I see a very new player (I'm only level 12 but I mean level 2) struggling with a tough mob I'll cast a healing spell on them.

Nothing yet has given me the feeling of power of the resurrection spell from Neocron, but the 'make rocks erupt out of the ground and make the target bleed a lot' spell is nice.

Dimrill, look! Teh Forg Ppl!