And the Guild War 2 flood of information keeps coming out of Gamescom. Today GWcom.de released an a video demoing the crafting system found in GW2 and providing some more information about how it works.
To start off there will be 8 total professions players can choose from with 2 professions being active at any one time. The twist is that players will be able to switch from one profession to another without losing their progress (level) in that profession, which basically means players will be able to master all 8 professions if they want to.
Now I’m going to assume there will be some restriction or cost to switching your profession otherwise limiting players to 2 active professions makes no sense.
In Guild Wars 2, there are two basic crafting mechanism, Discovery and Crafting. Discovery is the recipe system where players experiment with various materials to see what types of recipes can be created. Then once you have some recipes, you’re able to start crafting items. Guild Wars 2 takes the XP approach with crafting, so the more items you craft the more XP you get and eventually level in your profession.
Recipes also have level ranges, however it was not fully explained how it works in the video. From what I can gather, by using the Discovery Recipe system, players can discover higher level recipes then their current crafting level, but whether or not you’ll be able to use those recipes at the lower level has yet to be answered.
Check out the full GW2 crafting demo below. Only the first 2 mins 30 sec have any commentary, the other 20 mins is just crafting.
Discovery type brings a Minecraft-esque feel to the game, and will reward those that get the game on release with the chance to craft undiscovered sets (but I expect a mass of wiki crafting articles to pop up soon enough)
For the profession change ability I’ve heard it’s available at the in-game cash shop (which usually only sells cosmetic effects and extra character slots so as to not force people who already bought the game to pay more for microtransactions or be left behind – this is their stated philosophy), however I’m 99% sure you’ll be able to change professions for free just like you can get transmutation stones for free – it just costs a lot of karma.