Guild Wars 2 (all this info you will ever need)

[Fragged Rabbit]

Alright I have been playing Guild Wars for a while now; since the beta in late 2000.
I'd like to inform you all of the newest and possibly the Greatest MMORPG to be released, Guild Wars 2.

People are beginning to talk and are saying it is going to be BIGGER and far GREATER than WoW. Upon release of Guild Wars 2 Blizz will possibly be lossing 2 million accounts to NC Soft as well as more than 50,000 employees.

Below I have highlighted many key articles that you must read.

Features that need to be mentioned.

-Guild Wars is being intirely reverted, you will no longer have you own specific world. It will play much more like WoW in this sense.

-Free Movement will be implemented, Advance emotes, Jumping (even casting while jumping to make you skills do different things when jumping), swimming, Mounts (I wonder were they got that idea from), climbing trees, and much more yet to be released. Direct character control, more freedom of movement.

-A boundless level cap (I dont quite get this. But if they do have an unlimited level cap then Guild Wars would be the first game to do it which is very awesom.

-No Subscription/monthly fee (this is were WoW might lose it members)

-Chain Reaction Events

-Persistant World

-Enhanced graphics engine

-Roleplaying features

-"Return to Tyria," hundreds of years after the events of Guild Wars Prophecies

-New playable races, including Humans, Charr, Norn, Asura, and Sylvari

-Companions

-Integrated World-vs-World PvP

-Structured Guild-vs-Guild PvP

Bellevue, WA., March 27, 2007—NCsoft® and ArenaNet® today revealed their exciting plans for the future of the hugely successful Guild Wars® franchise. The companies announced that development already is underway on a full sequel to the original Guild Wars games. Guild Wars 2TM will draw from the game mechanics that made the original Guild Wars one of the most popular online games ever and will add a fully persistent world. It was also revealed that, like its predecessors, Guild Wars 2 will not have a subscription fee. No launch date was announced, but the ArenaNet team anticipates that Guild Wars 2 will go into beta sometime in the second half of 2008.

Blizzard Employees are Moving


Jeff Strain, former Blizzard coder and co-founder of the dev team behind Guild Wars, is clearly enjoying having me on the hook while I'm on the horn.
He's talking up Guild Wars 2 when I break in with the most, I believe, relavent question: Are you going to charge a monthly subscription fee this time around?
"With Guild Wars 2 we will be introducing a persistent world," he says, as almost an excuse. "We will have playable races. Everything you expect in a subscription system..."
He pauses for dramatic effect.
"...and we decided not to charge a subscription fee."
Strain and the people on his side of the phone call break into laughter.
"Funny," I say, genuinely amused.
The phone call is about two things, first that Guild Wars, what NC Soft believes to be the second largest massively multiplayer online game around, is getting a final expansion and that the final expansion will prepare gamers for Guild Wars 2.

Since the game is essentially starting with a clean slate, Arena Net decided to make some pretty substantive changes to the game. First, and most importantly though, the game will remain subscription free.
This time around the game will have a persistence world, one still set in Tyria, but now hundreds of years after the events that took place in the original Guild Wars.
"The big new feature is a persistent world," Strain said. "I think Guild Wars has some very radical departures from typical role-playng. One of those was the instancing model.
As each of the campaigns was released we took greater and greater pains to do that.
On the other hand, there are things we missed out on, like the more organic type of community building where you wandering through the area and hook-up with other people."
"In Guild Wars 2 we wanted to have the best of both worlds. We are retaining the strengths of instanced areas, but we are also integrating a persistenced world. We are not making a World of Warcraft clone here, we are not trying to do what other MMOs have done."
Arena Net's new spin is sort of an amalgam of both instanced and massive environments, where instanced events can have domino effects on other parts of the world, or zone..
Here's one example of this Strain used:

You are wandering through the countryside and you see a dragon flying overhead. You and a group try to stave off the dragon. If you are successful the nearby town gives you a treasure.
But if you don't drive off the dragon, the bridge will be destroyed. This will lead to a team of carpenters gathering at the bridge to try to fix it and then you will have to protect them from bandits.
"The idea is that there will always be something going on in the world," Strain said.
He said that there will be hundreds of these types of events that happen in the world, some daily, some hourly, some will be triggered by specific player actions.
"That is what persistence allows us to do. That is the type of content and play experience that we can offer in Guild Wars 2 that we couldn't offer in Guild Wars."
Another major change will be in the way the game handles player versus player.
In Guild Wars 2, the same character you use in-game will be used for player-versus-player conflicts that will take place in the Mists, the place between the many worlds, aka servers, of this new Guild Wars. Despite having several worlds, the game uses a global database so you can instantly transfer between worlds, Strain said.
And these inter-world battles in the Mists, which Strain says almost play like a large real-time strategy game, can have a real impact on the worlds.
"By achieving victories in these battles there will be benefits to your world," Strain said. "Bonuses, advantages, maybe everyone gets increased energy regeneration or healing rate or enhanced loot drop rate."
Strain says the world-versus-world match-ups will be shuffled every couple of weeks to make sure things stay fair.
Every week or every two weeks we will shuffle who is matched up.
Arena Net, it seems, is trying to tackle many of the biggest drawbacks most current massively multiplayer online games face. Chief among them is level capping. Why, once you top out, should you stick around in a game?
Guild Wars 2 is trying to deal with that issue by using a system with a high level cap once that could be set to 100 or even boundless.
"So there is not a level 20 cap," Strain said. "Either it will be a high level like 100 or unbounded, we haven't decided."
Besides these significant changes to the game, Guild Wars 2 will also introduce plenty of smaller ones, like the ability for your characters to do things like jump, swim, even climb trees.
The combat though, Strain says, will remain purely RPG
"Our belief is that role players aren't playing a RPG because they want a twitch action," Strain said, "there is a difference between playing a game like an RPG and playing a game like God of War."
Guild Wars 2 is expected to hit public beta next year, but now release date has yet been set.
galleryPost('gw2', 13, 'Arena Nets Next Step');








Interview: Guild Wars 2

In the process of gathering information for my upcoming feature on the future of MMOs, I happened to cross paths with Jeff Strain and Mike O'Brien, co-founders of ArenaNet and the folks behind Guild Wars. Guild WarsGuild WarsGuild Wars 2. The guys gave me a bit of insight into how the new GW will differ from its predecessor, and I must admit, I'm a bit tingly. Wait, maybe my foot's just gone to sleep. Nope, nope, it's the Guild Wars. rattled a few cages in MMO-land when it debuted without a subscription rate--pay by the campaign, not by the month--and its insistence that players didn't need to devote a lifetime to the game world in order to have fun or make progress. Though Strain and O'Brien are quite proud of what accomplished, they acknowledge some if it could've been done better, so guess what? Here comes
Keep reading to find out what I think sounds so darn nifty.

Part of what made the first Guild Wars stand out from its fantasy-flavored MMO brothers and sisters was its lack of a persistent world. Though some fans of the genre cried foul, it wasn't done simply to be different, but rather to combat some of the frustration of "get in line to complete the quest" that players of other MMOs were facing. In a persistent world, explained Mike O'Brien, when there's a quest you want to complete, there are about a zillion other people trying to complete it, too, which leads to a lot of waiting around for creatures to respawn or for the folks ahead of you to hurry up with the adventuring. So what's the single biggest change to Guild Wars 2? Why, adding a persistent world, natch. Bwah?
It makes more sense when you back up and get the big picture of what Guild Wars 2 is trying to achieve. As I talked to O'Brien and Strain, what they both kept emphasizing was the desire to give the player as much freedom as possible. Keeping the incidence system from Guild Wars and combining it with a more traditional, persistent world gives players the freedom to play the game however they like--run around the world, meet people, enjoy the community, or just go raid a dungeon. Your choice.
Speaking of running around the world, that's something you'll actually be able to do; run, jump, basically just dork around however you like. When you land in a new world, O'Brien explained, you don't want to have to read a bunch of skill descriptions, you want to run around and jump and swing, so that's what you'll be able to do in Guild Wars 2. It's meant to be a learn-by-doing sort of situation--rather than have overly complex skills that take an excessive amount of brain matter to understand, players will learn less complicated skills that they will be encouraged to test out in any situation they can think of. What happens if you use this skill while jumping, or that one while surrounded by monsters? Who knows? Give it a whirl and find out! Strain referred to it as "emergent complexity," and if it works the way they say it will, I shall personally send them each a fruit basket. Having a wide variety of skills in a game is great, but the amount of reading and memorizing you usually have to do to have even the most functional ability in an MMO is enough to drop me into a deep state of catatonia.
If you're currently a fan of Guild Wars, and debating whether or not to "jump ship," as it were, to Guild Wars 2, the ArenaNet boys have included a little incentive for you, via the Hall of Monuments in the latest Guild WarsGuild Wars--maybe you finished a particularly gnarly quest--a monument is erected in honor of the event in the Hall of Monuments. The Hall carries over into Guild Wars 2, and all the greatness you achieved will still be on display, despite the fact that the action of the game takes place several hundred years after the first GW. This is about more than just bragging rights, though. Thanks to your efforts in GW, your character in GW2--the descendant of your GW character--will have access to exclusive titles, companions, pets, armor, and weapons. None of the unlockable content will give you a huge edge over other players, but it will provide you with a nice badge of honor that brands you as an Old School Guild Wars pro and personalizes the gameplay for you just that little bit more. Personally, I think something that nods to the old fans without screwing the new ones is a great idea. expansion, Eye of the North. It goes like this: when you accomplish something great in
Of course, we couldn't have a new Guild Wars without a new playable race or two, and the bad guys from GW Prophecies, the Charr, fit the bill here. All of the playable races in GW2--humans, Charr, Norn, Sylvari, and Asura--make appearances in Eye of the North, so pick that up if you want to do some recon on your future GW2 character.
So that's all the good news. The bad news is that the beta isn't expected to start until the end of next year. Boo, hiss! Still, I'm excited that there's at least one MMO in development that isn't simply trying to be World of Warcraft 2.0 (I'll be telling you about some of the others in that feature I mentioned). One more thing: Strain and O'Brien take input from gamers very, very seriously, so if you have something to say about your Guild Wars experiences, now is the time to speak up.



The Beta will take place during the end of 2008 so dont expect it to come anytime soon. 2010 or 2011 is what NC Soft is shooting for.

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Get a sneek peek at Guild Wars 2 by playing



The Expansion, Guild Wars: Eye of the North,

will feature:

Worldwide release is holiday 2007

• No price at this time, but less than a campaign
• Reveals what happened in Tyria after the end of Guild Wars: Prophecies
• Introduces the Norn and Asura, which you can enlist as Heroes
• Primarily set in the dungeons and caverns north of Ascalon
• 100% max-level content
• The Hall of Monuments - Provides access to exclusive Guild Wars titles, companions, miniatures (mini-pets), armor, and weapons that are not obtainable in Guild Wars 2
• 18 new multi-level dungeons
• 150 new skills across all ten Guild Wars professions, of which 50 are special PvE-only skills
• 10 new Heroes
• 40 new armor sets across all ten Guild Wars professions

[X-Gogeta]

Wholy... shit ... My level 20 w/mo and e/mo ( yes emo ) got interesting

[Flying Piggy]

-A boundless level cap (I dont quite get this. But if they do have an unlimited level cap then Guild Wars would be the first game to do it which is very awesom.

Yeah , that does sound pretty good .

-No Subscription/monthly fee (this is were WoW might lose it members)

Thats where WoW already loses members .

[Snitch]

Boundless level cap? Oh great that'll drag in members, they'll see no lifers at level 300 and give up. They would not be able to supply the content for this and if they did (say by killing the same mob repetitively) it would destroy the whole basis of Guild Wars as a story MMORPG rather than a roaming MMORPG.

Snitch

[Versius]

What Snitch said...

How the hell are the lvl 300s going to get anyhting to do yust kill the same old mobs over and over and over and over and over and over and over again?

(cant be much fun)

[Snitch]

Even if they update the content, they won't be able to do it fast enough unless they release the game unfinished with content already available when someone reaches a current level. However why pay 30quid for a half completed game.

Snitch

[X-Gogeta]

Oh well, the only fun thing i see in being level 300 : Is soloing Fissure of Woe. Must be great fun..... for 15 seconds.

[Obex]

well get out the crayola and coulor me ticked pink!

guildwars yay

also it says at the top no more solo worlds and half way down it says persistant world wich is the same thing anyway i like persistance world thing more loot! (And if u wipe u dont look retared)

[Dragonshadow]

Can you jump in GW2?