Guild Wars 2 fansite GW2Guru spoke with game designers Eric Flannum, Isiah Cartwright and Ryan Scott in what seems to be a continuing effort to get more word out about their upcoming MMO set for release sometime in 2011 with a beta to take place in late 2010. The interview about Guild Wars 2 centered around implementing a structured PvP system. Little info besides general understandings were given about the skills and professions GW2 has to offer.
Firstly, player customization was discussed saying that massive amounts of unique changes to your player are available. Height, weight, general body type and facial features are all used, allowing yourself to craft a distinct look; as well as a biographical section to fill out the personal details about your character.
PvP was one topic that the game designers had a lot to say about. GW2’s restructured PvP system will allow the same formats for both pick-up/random and tournament play. Plus, there are no longer any different game modes for differing skill levels, so players can learn skills that are relevant in all levels of competition. Pick-up and play is now fully hot-joinable, meaning you can exit or jump in a game already started. The designers were confident that this would remove the aspect of groups disallowing newer players to join, thus keeping them from improving. Tournaments will also be held, so prepared teams will be able to fight in competition with one another. Since games are now hot-join, support for micro-communities will be added to give player’s control over the type of game environment they want while still letting all players develop the game as they see fit, however, details about how this new system will be used won’t be available until “later this year.”
The interview wrapped up with talk about professions and different races. Professions in Guild Wars 2 will be unique and differing and no single profession is required to build your character, however, designers were scarce divulging details concerning the actual kind of professions and their impact on game play. As for different races – different races will each have a “different figure, flavor, story, and a little bit of skill variety” but again the developers don’t want to put too much game play significance on different races. These later aspects of Guild Wars 2 don’t seem as fleshed out as some other ideals like the intriguing concept of a Dynamic Event System, but instead seem to follow a rather traditional MMO path. Hopefully, in the near future, Arena Net will release some more concrete and interesting concepts concerning the idea of how profession and race will act in their upcoming MMO.
For the full GW2Guru interview, click here.
From the linked article:
“…making the game more spectator friendly.”
I totally forgot about that mode. I used to love just watching the battles and wishing other games would follow suit.
Not sure that PvP adds much to a RPG game. It is popular with players, for sure, but some games companies seem to add PvP “content” only when they don’t want to invest time and money in new expansions. Hope this isn’t the case here as I quite like Guild Wars.