Mike Ferguson on Guild Wars 2 World vs. World

We're finally getting some more details about World vs World. And some screenshots. After reading this, I think my anticipation for GW2 has almost doubled. The "the more the merrier" approach, the tactical elements that reward people for being organized and working together, the scale, the length of battles (each round is two-week long) favoring comebacks, it all sounds so awesome.

Of course, it might turn out to be not so great once we get our hands on it. If everybody fights at the center keep, we might be in for huge lag problems. And if nobody bothers with it because they'd rather play PvE, it's gonna be pretty boring for the few people in WvW. Since it's always going to be the same maps, it might get stale after a while too (a long while). And of course, if it's too popular, we might end up having to wait in a queue to get in (hopefully they'll find a way to avoid this). But I think it has the potential to be really great, and it's probably one of the first thing I'll be trying once I jump into GW2.

Humm. It reinforces my expectation that GW2 will be less enjoyable fr me than GW1 is. GW2 seems to focus much more on group play. So far, GW1 was the only MMORPG that I really enjoyed because it allowed me to get around that aspect.

But I can see how such features are being welcomed by players with different preferences. :)

One of the nice things about GW2 is that, in general PvE at least, group play should be much more natural and free-flowing. Basically, you don't have to form a group to get rewarded for playing with others. Anybody who helps gets rewarded, and the way dynamic events work encourage people to play together, but not necessarily to form an organized group or communicate. The way I hear it the personal story is mostly solo content too. They do kinda force you to form a group for dungeons though.

World vs World also shares this "the more the merrier" approach, but obviously organized groups will fare better and be able to tackle bigger objectives.

Well ... what I enjoy most in GW1 is skilling/outfitting my heroes (and my character) to form a synergetic, well-working whole. I can experiment as much as I want to, try stupid group builds and by surprised about their effects, and generally do things at my own pace (which is usually slower than most other people's as I tend to pay attention to detail a lot). I especially like that I can play the full game as party-based single player RPG, in fully instanced missions and exteriors, while it still gives me the opportunity to join groups if I want to (which I sometimes do, but not often). I don't care about PvP at all (except from dabbling a bit during events, before I get tired of people yelling "noob" at me because I'm not using the current cookie-cutter PvP fashion builds that apparently everyone is supposed to play).

How well will GW2 cater to my playstyle? Everything I heard so far makes me think that I'm not really in the new game's target group. ;)

I think you'll still be able to take it at your own pace, but you won't be able to design your whole party and play the game as a single-player rpg. I going to miss that too, but for different reasons: I liked that in GW1, every encounter was designed as a party battle. Apart from prophecies, enemy groups usually had mixed abilities and there was a lot of variety to the kind of situations you ended up facing. From the footage we've seen so far, GW2's PvE combat looks pretty boring in comparison. Maybe they we're dumbed down for the demos, but enemy attacks seemed pretty basic and combat outside of big events looked pretty repetitive.

That's my biggest fear for GW2, that the average PvE combat situation will be totally uninteresting due to being balanced for a single player character. On the other hand, the PvP footage I've seen looked really interesting, and I'm not even into PvP usually. Haven't set foot in a GW PvP arena since the Nightfall PvP Beta weekend.

I think you'll be able to play the whole PvE side of things not including dungeons without grouping up with people, so for your personal story(where the solo-instancing will be) and dynamic events you should be fine with doing your "thing" since your goals won't really set other players back(no kill stealing, everyone gets the loot and all that). It'll be co-operative even if you're not actively trying to help others. The cookie-cutter fashion builds are also less likely to be a problem with the first five skills being tied to your weapon and it seems like all the weapons will be useful and with different uses.

Hopefully the trait system will turn out to fit your customization needs!

Nice find :)
You do bring up the some good points, but hopefully they learned from the previous game about crowd management or the dangers of not having enough peeps willing to play.

Although, pvp isn't really my thing. I”m more the type who likes to fly solo, that and I don't like the elitism of the pvp community. Gaming for me is supposed to be for unwinding, not serious business. The meta builds can just die, if I want to experiment that is my business.

edit: I was glad in the original guild wars that they introduced the flux, it helped shook things up a bit

Thanks for the info. :)

I should probably get more info about GW2 - I assumed that the focus on multi-player gameplay (non-instanced areas etc.) meant foregoing opportunities for single-player gameplay. But from your description this doesn't seem to be the case, it sounds as if they rather tried to have cooperative play emerging automatically out of single-player gameplay.

I guess I'll be getting GW2 anyway ... The Woman Of My Dreams (tm) is totally fired up for it, and the myriads of gamers whose partners don't even understand their gaming hobby (let alone share it) would tell me I'm mad if I'm not getting it for her ... ;)

Hopefully it is designed in such a way that "the optimal path" is the fun stuff. If the emphasis is on PvP and not rushing past every enemy you see, I doubt it will get tiresome. If you feel like sponging up some information, go ahead and read [url=]http://www.guildwars2guru.com/forum/guild-wars-2-mass-info-t25557.html[/url] as it covers quite a lot.

There's also going to be quite a few press people playing the closed beta this weekend and they'll be allowed to show it to the public on monday! I'll be expecting plenty of videos from Totalbiscuit and the likes.

From what I'm reading, it seems Alterac Valley only had 2 opposing sides. World vs World actually has 3 sides competing at once, which should help keep things interesting a bit longer. But you're right, eventually patterns emerge and it gets stale. Hopefully the GW2 team will try to make some changes once in a while to shake things up.

nvm

^^ and ^^^

Yea, one'll have to wait and see.

Maybe they can add some requirements that would have to be done, for one side to be able to win the battle. Like, unlock specific areas only after X enemies killed or gold gained or something. Basically, anything to stop the players from directly attacking the main 'boss' / going PvE to win the battle faster.

I would imagine it'll be a lot like the RvR keep battles in WAR. That wasn't perfect, but you had to take multiple parts of the keep before attacking the lord. You weren't even allowed to attack some keeps until you controlled enough shit in the region.

They've said it will be a lot like the PvP in DAOC. But I've never played that so I can't really compare.