GW2 Beta impressions

[Jaerin]

First off I'm one of the people who have had VERY few problems connecting, staying connected, playing with relatively low lag ect...

So with that said its a fun game. I like it a lot, but I do have to say that some of the "conventions" that they say they are casting aside as not really all the different. The events and such are just like quests the only real difference is you don't always have a clue why you're doing something when you first come up on it, if you don't go talk to the person like a normal quest you don't know what's going on really, and they don't tell you specifically how much you have to do to complete it. The idea that you can do 2-3 different things to complete the task is kind of nice because you can't do something else if you don't like picking up things or fighting those mobs.

I admit I'm avoiding the storyline a bit because I don't want to really ruin it for me. I've already pre-ordered it and I know I'll play it at least for a while.

I would say the creatures and the character models are much more detailed than WoW, but the landscape textures and layout are kind of disappointing. It's not bad per se its just not what I would have expected for a game that's been in development this long. I would have expected the world to be pretty well fleshed out, but the ground look pretty barren and the textures don't do a very good job of covering it up. Again not the worst I've seen, but it is a little disappointing.

They group play with complete strangers is great! You don't have to say a word and you can help each other complete things, but if you want to play with a friend its a nightmare. The whole concept of the overflow server doesn't make much sense to me. It's almost like a hybrid between a single instance like WoW and a channeled instance like a lot of F2P games. Except there doesn't seem to be any way to select which channel your character is playing in and there doesn't seem to be a way to pull someone into your instance with you. The PVP is the same, you have to queue at the same time to hope that you get grouped together. For a game that wants people to group together and play together it doesn't seem to have a very organized group mechanic.

I get the distinct impression that this is going to feel a lot like a coop single player game to an extent. Instead of your single player battle being filled with mindless NPC's fighting along side you, you have human strangers fighting along side you. On first impression this idea is really neat, but in practice the interaction with those other players is as much or less than what you would with an inanimate NPC. I tried a number of times to have conversations with people and they just ran off to do their thing. No real interest in the social aspects. Only when someone couldn't complete a task on their own did I start to see people call for assistance and grouping. Often times people just left the content behind and moved on to the next.

From the achievement whores point of view this game is a wet dream. Everything seems to be well laided out and tracked as to what you have and have not completed. So you can be reasonably sure when you leave an area that you have it complete. This does a pretty good job of giving you lots of pieces of candy to eat as your led around the world.

Finally I'll save combat for last. The combat feels very action oriented with dodging and the life, but its a bit of an illusion. Spells and missiles do often impact enemies even though they dodges, and hits will land on you when you are clearly not near mobs. The dodge mechanic is VERY limiting in the amount that you can jump around and dodge. This isn't a complete action button masher as much as it appears to be one. It can be pretty difficult to know what exactly is hitting you in a larger battles. A lot of times you end up spamming buttons or just running away because you are getting hurt. I'm sure in time people will figure out the best means of fighting in an organized fashion, but right now its quite the cluster when there are a lot of people around. The scaling doesn't always seem to be correct either. It feels like at times its only scaling the amount that people have to complete rather than the actual difficulty of what is there. The mobs still die in 2-3 hits, now you have to kill 100 instead of just 10, but you don't know that because they only display a bar with no indication as to how much it will take to fill it.

I like the game and I won't be cancelling my pre-order of it, but its not the game that people hyped it to be by any stretch. It will be fun to play as a F2P jump in and kill some stuff, but I highly doubt that it becomes a real long term player. Much like the first game ended IMO.

[Forza44]

I have to completely disagree with almost every one of your statements.

-Dynamic quests are NOT the same as questing. Do you still have objectives? Well, obviously, but what else were you expecting? The 'typical' MMO consists of quest grinding just finding a ton of people with question marks over their head, blindly following the instructions on the side of your screen, going back to the guy with an exclamation point. I find questing in GW2 to be incredibly immersive (I love the story line quests) and dynamic questing generally consists of a single objective that you get to enjoy with many other people.

-Do you have your graphics settings tweaked to the best you can get them without FPS lag? Can you manage to have good settings without FPS lag? I admit when I first turned the game on I found the world to be quite average (not as nice as the videos I had seen on their site) but once I raised my graphics settings I was DUMBFOUNDED by the beauty of this world. Even with bad graphics settings it completely trumps WoW and the feel of the game is much better as well in my opinion. What do you mean by the ground looks barren? I can see every crack and edge of each slab of concrete on my screen, as you can see in the picture below. The white specs in the image are obviously caused by ScreenSnapr and have nothing to do with the game itself.



I do agree with the grouping aspect of your argument, it's the only part of this game I really hope they improve on by the official launch. I definitely like the fact that if the servers are full you get put into an overflow server because it beats the hell out of sitting in a queue. However, whenever I'm with friends we always end up in different instances so it makes grouping sort of a pain. I would be surprised if this wasn't improved though and it really is the only somewhat major problem I have with the game so far. I actually had quite a few random chats with people in the game but don't expect everyone to waste away their first GW2 weekend chatting, people want to play as many professions and get as much done as they can this weekend.

I think what I most disagree with you on is combat. Every MMO I have ever played in my entire life is essentially setting up a line of spells and mashing buttons with little to no coordination. Yes, I understand that some classes take more skill than others but, let's face it, in the end it's nothing more than organized button jamming. The dodge feature on GW2 has been working perfectly for me, perhaps you have a little lag causing it to look as though you've dodged but you were too late. Nearly every skill in this game is just beautifully done, it looks fantastic and they seem to all have a purpose, rather than just a stupid skill at a low level you'll never use again. I love the way skills are set up and I love the balance (that I have seen so far) of the different professions. Everything about combat in this game is epic and amazing in my opinion.

Rating: 10/10

[Jaerin]

Max settings on graphics....

From my original post:
"First off I'm one of the people who have had VERY few problems connecting, staying connected, playing with relatively low lag ect..."

Dynamic quests are NOT the same as questing. Do you still have objectives? Well, obviously, but what else were you expecting? The 'typical' MMO consists of quest grinding just finding a ton of people with question marks over their head, blindly following the instructions on the side of your screen, going back to the guy with an exclamation point. I find questing in GW2 to be incredibly immersive (I love the story line quests) and dynamic questing generally consists of a single objective that you get to enjoy with many other people.

When you walk into the first area they even point out all the quest areas and skill point tasks that you have available to you. You don't have to go click on a ! to get the quest, but its just the same. They totally are quests...you still have the same quest tracker that every other MMO has. It just says do these 3 things to fill this bar instead of 3 quests that say go kill 10 of these,pick up 5 of these, and clean up 4 of these. Instead you get a bar with no definite quantity on it and you aren't sure if you need to kill 10, 20, 100 of those or maybe just pick up 5 of those things...the fact you can do different things is nice, but its totally disingenuous to not call these quests. So yeah I can run up to a guy and he's yelling Bandits are attacking me, but who are the bandits? Why are they attacking? Why do I care if they are attacking you? As I said to find out that information you have to go run up and talk to the guy and go through the communications options to find it out just like any other quest. The only difference is you don't have too care about why any one wants something. You just kill stuff and get free stuff, you don't have to be bothered with the how's, why's, or whatevers....seems ideal for the speed racer to the top. In fact some how these people that you help who you may have never talked to send you money in the mail for helping them. A complete mute stranger, who came, helped, left, and was never seen again....yet I'll send a letter to him with a thank you.

I'm not saying the immersion isn't nice, but its not a complete replacement for the standard quest mechanic. Just like there is still tanking, dps, ect. As a necro I can't solo everything, someone has to tank things for me. I can only dodge so much so really I need a tank. How many times have I seen those tanks go down because these no healing? TONS why? because no one around the tank cares about what's happening to the other people, they are just spamming buttons and doing damage. It was horde of strangers moving from one pack of enemies to another and afterwards they just picked up the people who happened to go down.

As I said in time they may develop more strategic fighting, but right now the game doesn't much care if you spam buttons or play skillfully when there are 100 other people around. Not to mention there were plenty of times when I was getting hit with things that I had no clue as to what was causing it. Was it a DOT on me that was ticking me down? If it was how do I do anything about it? There were places where the ground was burning and it didn't hurt me and there were times when there were flames on the ground when it was slaughtering me.

[Forza44]

Well I don't think dynamic events were ever really intended to do anything more than make the idea of questing more engaging and fun. The point I was making is that you can level at a steady pace by simply exploring the world and having quests pull you in, rather than running to 100 different people and grabbing 100 different quests. I find this system to be much less of a grind than I am used to. I'm sorry you haven't had a great experience so far but I've found the community on my server to be ridiculously helpful. Every time I get knocked down, some random person ends up reviving me. I get random heals thrown my way all the time (and I'm just an elementalist).

I haven't had a problem soloing anything yet but I have noticed when a quest instance says the recommended level is 4 you should really be 5 or 6 to solo it. Anyway, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but at this point I really do find this to be the most fun game I have ever played and it's only in beta. I had HUGE hopes coming into GW2 and was pleasantly surprised to have all those hopes met and even, in some situations, surpassed. Report your opinions to GW2 and they may incorporate one of your ideas if it's suggested by enough people.

[sitnspinlock]

i certainly think the game is living up to it's hype. there are some serious bottle necking issues and I am lucky to get 20 fps on low settings right now, but other then that I see this game as a success across the boards.

[Jaerin]

I went back and reread my post and I'm not sure why you think that I'm not having a good time. I've given the game a number of compliments and offset them with a number of criticisms. I'm having fun with the game by all means, but to me its not living up to ALL the hype. There are things that they said they were trying to change to a completely different style and its a bit misleading. As you say the flow is great if you want to run around and level up, you certainly can do that, but by the end of it you may not have any idea what you actually did in the world, other than slaughtering enemies in mass. And filling the hearts...

I never had a problem with collecting quests because its what conveyed the story of the world. To me it gave those characters some depth, I think they are on the right track with the way that things are added and removed form your quest log, but a little better method of explaining what's going on and why would be nice. Also with some of the DE you'd end up running up to them at the very end and I was given some pretty significant rewards for doing nothing, but be in the area of the event. That's going to get exploited I'm sure.

[sitnspinlock]

i just can't help myself

[Unholyshaman]

As I said in time they may develop more strategic fighting, but right now the game doesn't much care if you spam buttons or play skillfully when there are 100 other people around. Not to mention there were plenty of times when I was getting hit with things that I had no clue as to what was causing it. Was it a DOT on me that was ticking me down? If it was how do I do anything about it? There were places where the ground was burning and it didn't hurt me and there were times when there were flames on the ground when it was slaughtering me.

I tend to agree that this in a way is a bit of a problem, but from what I can tell this is actually done on purpose because large battles (specifically WvWvW) are not designed to be balanced and the primary feel they want to get out of pvp is "epic". They don't want you to be worrying about micro-details and strategies - they want you to get caught in the moment of the adrenaline-rushing pvp style without much time to think.

To touch on some of the other subjects:

• Graphics I haven't had much of a problem with and I'm running a fairly old PC with mid-range i7 and radeon hd 5850 gfx. I love the refreshing change from the wow themed graphics (which I've typically been a fan of over the years).
• Grouping they definitely need to sort out and I'm sure they will.
• I love the quests and events in GW2. Something that has susprised me about WoW (considering how MMO orientated it is supposed to be) is how they actually seems to dis-encourage group questing with things like xp penalties and a large number of drop quests which aren't multi-player friendly.

What has impressed me the most about GW2 is how dynamic and original the fighting styles are. The first character I tried was a Mesmer and I loved it - I thought WoW I've really hit the jack-pot and chosen the most original and unique character out of all of them on my first try. I then tried several others and was continuously amazed at how different and original all their fighting and combat styles were. Not just different "abilities" but entirely different ability mechanics.

The combat and movement system is also incredibly fluid which I believe has been one of the primary problems for most games trying to compete with WoW. They didn't have that "high-quality" movement feel to them.

[mrnice]

just frapsed a little things.. and cutted it.. enjoy

Guild Wars 2 (closed beta) - YouTube

another vid coming soon..

here it is..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDJVlkYnUPo

[Unholyshaman]

just frapsed a little things.. and cutted it.. enjoy

Guild Wars 2 (closed beta) - YouTube

another vid coming soon..

You know we are currently in the open beta right? Not "Closed beta" anymore. Still, thanks for the video will watch it later.

[mrnice]

You know we are currently in the open beta right? Not "Closed beta" anymore. Still, thanks for the video will watch it later.

you know that open beta means that everyone can get for free in the game.. that is not the situation.. you can only play if you have pre ordered or selected from normal beta opt in.

in my opinion this is a closed beta

[Unholyshaman]

you know that open beta means that everyone can get for free in the game.. that is not the situation.. you can only play if you have pre ordered or selected from normal beta opt in.

in my opinion this is a closed beta

I know that Open Beta means thank you very much, but you apparently don't.

Closed Beta means that players are under the Non-Disclosure Agreement and may not release any information about the Beta to those not involved - it's effectively a private beta event. An Open Beta means that the event is open to the public for viewing. How you gain access to a beta event is irrelevant to it's status.

Release and testing

When is Guild Wars 2 going to be released?
ArenaNet has announced that Guild Wars 2 will be released some time in 2012.

Can I get into the alpha test?
Alpha test is for friends and family only, and is already in progress. [2]

So can I beta test instead?
Closed beta testing started on December 16, 2011, and will not be open to the public.

A press beta weekend event was held February 17th to 19th, 2012, with press open to post their impressions as of February 20, 2012.

For just over 48 hours, on February 22nd to the 24th, 2012, there were signups for beta on the official site. Signup is now closed. Testing that includes more of the general public will start after this, with timing dependent on the feedback to-date. These events will be similar to the open weekends used for Guild Wars testing.

The official Guild Wars 2 website will be the only place that will allow you to sign up to participate in these tests; the official newsletter on the main site will also be the first place to announce the next round of testing. Keeping checking the news frequently or sign up for the newsletter.

As of April 10th, 2012, pre-purchasing Guild Wars 2 grants access to all beta weekend events.

The first open beta weekend will run from April 27th to 29th.[3]

Frequently Asked Questions - Guild Wars 2 Wiki (GW2W)

[mrnice]

ok ok ok

[DaSoul]

Only because they name it "open beta" it is not the same what people understand in general.

In Fact, the previous NDA beta was a "press beta" or "familiy and friends beta" and of course, a closed version. Right now, the beta is open in the meaning of, there is no NDA, but it is still a closed one, as not everybody can join for free.

As from games in the past and present WoW/AoC/WAR/AOIN/RIFT/SWTOR/TERA..the general understanding in closed beta means you only get in by pre-order the game(if possible) or being lucky and selected to join the beta. An open beta, as we have seen it some time ago with diablo 3, means just everybody can join and play without having to buy the retail or a headstart/beta access.

That's why, i'm pretty sure, mrnice called it "closed beta".


After playing almost the whole weekend, i love the gameplay and style of gw2. I played wow since its beginning and even i always couldn't wait for a new expansion...it pretty fast got boring as it is always the same...quests are always the same "kill xx of yy" "go there" "go here" and stuff like that, compared with long time travelling and stuff like that. They stretch content, just to make you play longer and pay more months.

In world of warcraft you pretty fast get the feeling of "i need to be max level" to be able to join endcontent. With the same attitude i started to play WAR/AoC and SWtoR. So even as a long time subscription mmo player, i never had the feeling in guild wars 2, to have to level faster.

I started as an human necromancer, as it is the class i was most excited about. The class design to unlock new spells while playing and to get new skills with other sort of weapons is pretty good. Compared to wow, you start with the ability, to choose yourself, how you wanna play. In wow some classes get important or "endgame rotation skills" just in the end which pretty damn sucks if you wanna test a class.

Another very very big plus for guild wars 2 is, its design to be played with others. There is no mob stealing or wait times until quest item xyz respawns. It is just flawless questing with fun. People act helpful no matter if you die and they rezz you, or if they help you in situations where you have aggro from too many mobs.

This is how mmorpg gaming should be.

Beside escort and protect quests or events, the quests are varied and more feel like playing a story then actually doing quests...video cut scenes and conversation dialogues between your character and npcs increase this impression.

The only point that disturbs is the character movement..well i don't know, compared to wow it feels a bit like the character doesn't really walk on the ground. Sometimes it feels like it is walking a bit over the ground. Same goes for the strafe movement, but perhaps they will change it.

Technically as stated above, if there are a lot of people arround, the fps drops like shit. And it doesn't matter how you set the graphics...it just lags. But as far as you leave the starting area and the player masses diffuse in the world it runs pretty smooth.

I'm playing with an i5-2500k @4,5ghz, 8gigs of ram and gtx470 in sli but as right now, the game isn't optimized in any way. I made some tests, running only one graphic card and both and the difference was like 5-10 fps more with sli enabled, so not really a big improvement. (compared to other games where the fps is almost 100% more).

So while playing i did some monitoring of my hardware utilization. There wasn't a big difference between playing alone or playing in a group of 5/10..20 other players.

CPU load was never higher then 30 - 40%
GPU (single mode) load 40-50%
GPU (SLI) load card 1: 30 - 45% card 2: 20 - 35%

I had fps from 10 to 110 fps. In larger groups it drops to 10 fps and when playing almost alone (max 5 players arround me) i had between 70 and 110 fps.
Especially water reflection, very high shadows and under water animations seemed to be pretty intense.

I think they did and do a very good job with guild wars 2 and i'm definitely looking forward to play the next beta

[DaSoul]

Finally I'll save combat for last. The combat feels very action oriented with dodging and the life, but its a bit of an illusion. Spells and missiles do often impact enemies even though they dodges, and hits will land on you when you are clearly not near mobs. The dodge mechanic is VERY limiting in the amount that you can jump around and dodge. This isn't a complete action button masher as much as it appears to be one. It can be pretty difficult to know what exactly is hitting you in a larger battles. A lot of times you end up spamming buttons or just running away because you are getting hurt. I'm sure in time people will figure out the best means of fighting in an organized fashion, but right now its quite the cluster when there are a lot of people around. The scaling doesn't always seem to be correct either. It feels like at times its only scaling the amount that people have to complete rather than the actual difficulty of what is there. The mobs still die in 2-3 hits, now you have to kill 100 instead of just 10, but you don't know that because they only display a bar with no indication as to how much it will take to fill it.

/signed. just 100% signed. I don't know how many times i died..or almost died, just because i got punched and the **** didn't know where it came from. Especially when fighting against veteran mobs or small bosses and you think you are on target xyz and suddenly BAM your hp drops by 50-80% because the boss hits you.