Guild Wars 2

[Drakhon]

PC Gamer multi-part feature (this week)
http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/10/18/gu...ds-on-preview/
http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/10/19/gu...ngeon-reveals/
http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/10/20/gu...hen-sink-post/
http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/10/21/gu...otransactions/


Developer-commentated play from Gamescom (a couple of months ago)
This was a single showing that's been broken up into three videos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPl7oVC7IWM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSDlH4LRakw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7E5Ziga3uM


Shatterer boss fight from Gamescom
The video quality is not great, but this one has the developer commentary.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX8GJcGIVbI


There is obviously much more out there, but these are things I think are cool that I've found recently. GW2 has moved up to my almost-certainly-buy list.

It seems like there has been a definitive lack of strong-looking MMOs recently and then BOOM! 2011 has TOR and GW2 and possibly TERA, Rift and Firefall. I guess they're trying to get them in before the end of the world in 2012

Edit: Added today's PC Gamer post.

[Rimalder]

Oh, and an article came out today saying the Mayan calendar has some errors in it after it was converted to the modern calender. We may actually have several more decades left to enjoy gaming.

[Drakhon]

Well, considering the whole premise was "this date in 2012 is the end of a period of a certain length in the Long Count calendar, clearly it must be the end of the world!", I wasn't exactly worried about it to begin with.

[Drakhon]

http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/10/21/gu...otransactions/

So content purchases between expansions. I like his reasoning, but it's only good if it's really stuff that we would not have gotten anyway (or there's just much more than otherwise). For anybody who has played GW1 over a long period, did they release more content between expansions?

[Vasan]

Didn't play GW1 at all, so cannot address the content question.

Still, nice to see online games that try to add dynamic, innovative content and having alternative versions of the same dungeon is a great idea. Wow should have tried such a system ages ago, instead of relying on stale gimmicks and over simplifying it's core systems. But I'll stop now before I go on an extended anti-wow rant.

[Drakhon]

From what I've been told, GW1 has periodic holiday-type events, but nothing that I would consider addition of meaningful content. This is as I expected.

What's interesting is the amount of negative feedback from GW1 players about the possibility of what I will now call "microexpansions". The only good arguments I see are that it can fracture the player base (we want to do Dungeon X but you didn't buy it?) and that it could lead to content being shifted out of expansions and into microexpansions without appropriately adjusting the price of the expansions, so they're not really "extra content". The latter concept is one of my fears with DLC in general, but perhaps ArenaNet would do it right, I don't know.

[Vasan]

I would bet that negative feedback regarding micro expansions arises less from lofty concerns regarding fracturing the player base, and more from baser concerns. Thought I would agree the actual issue is fracturing the player base where everyone has a hodgepodge of accesss rights to various dungeons, I suspect players just don't want to have to pay for more content.

It's an odd fear, since they aren't paying a monthly fee.

[Drakhon]

Well, nothing says they have to buy it, which is kind of the point. If we assume that the base game and expansions are similar in scope to GW1 and released with similar regularity (which people seem to have been happy with) and the microexpansions are priced at the same money per "unit of content" (whatever you might designate that as, probably time) and don't contain game-altering gear, I really don't see the objection on that front.

A lot of people played GW1 because there wasn't a monthly fee, but if the microexpansions are optional, they still don't have to pay if they don't want to.

Also, I've found that a surprising amount of people feel that sub fees for MMOs are "scams", mostly because the successful ones bring in far more money than their server maintenance fees, which I guess was the original "justification" back in the day. They don't seem to understand that things are priced based on what people will pay for them, not how much they cost to make.

[Drakhon]

Here's a nice quote from a couple of months ago from Colin Johanson (Lead Content Designer):

World vs. World PvP in Guild Wars 2. I think that will impact PvE as well. Which is your server shard matched up against two other servers in open world PvP. If you like Dark Age of Camelot, this is, in our minds the next evolution of that. It is something that really drove community and you care about what you are doing on a PVE and PvP side. You care about the people on the server. We think we will have those bonds because your server is matched up against two other servers. So it is just that much more important that you become friends and you bond with the players on your server. So the friends you make through PvE and Dynamic Events, those friends will carry over into World vs. World PvP. You may get out of World vs. World PvP and go back to early zones to do events with new people and help encourage them to join you in the fight for your server to take part in battles and beat the other two. We expect large strong communities on each server and I think PvP will end up affecting PvE because people will work together.

As Gisli is fond of pointing out, the outcome really depends on the community-building/supporting features that are available, but at least Colin appears to have a good mindset.

[Gisli]

The idea of randomly matching up against two other servers on a rotating basis sounds like a really good idea. I hope it works out like he is saying.