What I want/ don’t want to see in GWII.

Hey guys (if anyone’s reading this). With the announcement of GWII I’m concerned on the welfare of both games. Hopefully most of you will agree to these points. I’m trying to get leet back together again, so check back often.

What I want/ don’t want to see in GWII.

I use GWI to represent Prophecies, Factions and Nightfall.

I use GWII to represent Guild Wars 2.

But if you can’t figure that out you probably shouldn’t be reading this…

I want to see:

I want to hate the Charr

I don’t want to see them turn into a goody-goody race that goes around making friends with the humans and swapping red-iris flowers. I want to hate them like I hated them in GWI, where we saw a beautifully designed, really polished land at the start, and then it was destroyed and replaced by this barren wasteland. That’s what makes it possible to just spend half an hour in an *exploraible* area with no quests just killing them.

Map travel

I hope they don’t eliminate this, but if there making it into a traditional MMO they might, so on the safe side I just put this in. Because I know that if they don’t put map travel in, then there will have to be a huge reason for me to play. There would be no “hey can anyone help me with Elona Reach?” Because that would mean a long trek to the desert which would mean that you wouldn’t be able to get guildies for missions anymore. Come to think of it…

Keep the old mission and bonus system

You know, the one from Prophecies, the one we know and love, I really want Arena Net to bring this back although thinking about it, if they go on there “traditional MMO” stand then missions may go completely.

Keep it fresh

If GWII is a WoW clone, I won’t be buying it. The reason we bought GWI in the first place was that it had no monthly fees, and it was groundbreaking. If GWII turns into a WoW clone then we can just go and play GWI again, that’s the thing with no subs, if we don’t like it, we will just go away. If they put some cool new ideas into it, then it should sell it to the fans.

Make PvP proper PvP

The way GWII is headed, it seems like it’s not going to be skill based, this sounds bad for PvPers, they play GWI for PvP as it’s skill based, they create builds, if Arena Net makes up this new PvP system witch is gear based that means a PvP player must get up to level cap on PvE, then Grind for hours to get his gear set, and finaly play, and if you want to play a different class? Well on GWI it was a case of just deleting a PvP slot, and creating a new one with a different class. The fix, a PvP system that feels like the old one, not tacked on, but one that looks like the game was designed while the PvP system was designed (see other MMOs on how to do badly) *cough* World Of Warcraft *cough*

A Browser

A Browser in the game would be a good idea, if we didn’t have to minimise to visit GuildWiki, then a lot of the game’s moments when someone has to look something up would disappear. When I say a Browser, I mean a Browser, not Internet Explorer but Firefox or Opera. Also if you need to check an email, you won’t need to be out of the game so long, and that can only be a good thing.

VOIP built in

Again, for convenience, I’d just like to press F8 or something, and a TS box comes up asking me for an IP to connect to, then you could just type it in, and connect to the Guild’s Teamspeak server. Same thing with vent, or I’ll get flamed with “Oh you didn’t mention Vent”. Yes I have both on my PC.

I don’t want to see:

Direct X 10 compatibility to be a must

I don’t want to have to upgrade to Vista to play GWII, XP’s fine. Give us DX9 Support too.

High/ infinite level cap:

When I saw this in the magazine I wanted to take a flight to Arena Net headquarters with a semi-automatic rifle and start killing everyone who works there (luckily, I didn’t have a gun, or much money.) What it was put down was “Guild Wars fans like it because they don’t have to pay sub fees. They don’t mind if the game is all grind, or skill based, so were going to make it grind central.

GWI Gathering dust

Arena Net need to improve GWI for the people who don’t make the switch, there will be some, no matter how well marketed GWII is. Look at EQ and EQ2 if you don’t believe me, there is an insane amount of new content to get through if you want to start playing any of those old games. So a few new expansions, with perhaps an extra couple of missions and a few zones (and some skills) etc… On the same note:

Keep updating/patching GWI

I don’t want GWI to turn into a “one build beats all” kind of game. Arena Net Should keep updating GWI as long as people still play it. Yes that includes nerfing “your build”. If we didn’t have these patches, wouldn’t we still see the same builds again and again, this would mean that in time, everyone would know them, meaning that everyone would have lots of money, and that would corrupt the economy (especially as armour prices are always the same. Destroying the game. Again, this is one of the things I’m most worried about, if there are no updates to GWI then Arena Net may close it, as it’s not making them any money. This is why we need expansions (notice how I didn’t say chapters. It is my belief that GWI doesn’t need more chapters as we already have 3 starting points for the game. The new players have plenty to go through. Although if you expand High Level content, then the people who play the game already will have stuff to do no matter what they play.)

Grind

The reason I like GWI, and recommend it to people, is that there’s not much grind, if grind appears, I may not want to recommend GW to anyone anymore.

GW: EN GW 2 and Map Travel

Hey guys, the last post I did was completely wrong. Please send me hate mail at randomtime1@gmail.com. What's actually happening is, exactly as the article on the website "the informer" said. Guild wars is getting an expansion pack, Eye of the north (named by some players as GW: EN). Guild Wars will then stop having campaigns realicied, and go onto something called Guild Wars 2. Guild Wars 2 will apparently abandon click to move, and other features. There has been talk of a level cap of 100, or an infinite level cap. There will be the ability to "jump, slip and slide. Click to move will be removed.

You can also play as four new races You will not be able to transfer characters from GW1 to GW2. GW: EN will apparently have a "hall of monuments" that will transfer something, but no one knows what this will be yet. As for dates, GW: EN will come out "sometime late in 2007", and we've been told to expect it "in the holidays", I'll take a guess at October, so that it can be bought in time for Christmas. It will not be stand alone, you will need one campaign on your account to play. We can expect a GW2 beta in 2008, so they must be quite a bit of the way through it.

Shawn from http://www.guildcast.com has loads more info, as he managed to get an interview with someone from PC gamer magazine, that's running an article on it. So check that out. Guild cast comes out as a podcast every two weeks, and it's worth a listen. There's also an article and a press realicie on http://www.guildwars.com linked on the main page, so there should be no problems finding that.


So what are my views on all this? Well, I've been thinking this over. At first I'm shocked, Guild Wars was going so well. We didn't need an upgrade. Lots of MMO companies have been broken from not getting the sequel right, GW1 will be still here, I bet that many people will not play GW2 because they can't be bothered, or don't feel like getting a new game. I would like to make myself a Charr. My biggest problem is the GW1 online store, ever bought anything from that, you brought this because you could use them in all your guild wars campaigns, well with GW2, all your purchases will be gone. I don't really think that guild wars needs an update, we're happy with what we've got. On the other hand, I fully support Arena Net and whatever there doing.

I was going to talk about map travel today, so this part will be my thoughts on map travel. I really like map travel, it makes the world easier to get around, and it means that you don't have to walk all the way to one point, only have someone say they'd like to do a mission and you having to walk all the way back. There would need to be some kind of fast travel for this game to work. There are a few problems, when you map travel, the world is much smaller, and that means that you loose some of the "massive" part of the massively multiplayer online game. Also, if you can boat travel between continents why don't you go the whole way and have a little drop down menu at the top left of the screen, this menu could have the continents listed, you click the content you want, and the map for that continent appears (assuming you have unlocked travel to that contentment). I currently don't usually use boat travel that often because of the number of jumps it takes to get you to the continent you need. So that's a feature that should be in the game.

Theory

I have a theory. Prophicies came out, there were 2 major updates for it, then Factions came out after a year. When Factions came out, it lasted 6 months and there were no major updayes for it.

With Nightfall, is this the same thing? Will we get 2 major updates and then another game in October. It seems like that, perhaps this is the cycle. We've already had the first major update, the Domain of Anguish and the challenge mission. If you think clearly, you already know what the second will be, Hard Mode.

So tell me what you think, leave a comment or email me at randomtime1@gmail.com.

Until Next time,
Randomtime.

Low Speed FTW:

Hey, I'm randomtime, and I play Guild Wars. This going to be some rants about this and that, and mainly just stuff that you probably don't need to know...

I'll start off talking about my internet connection, I'm on broadband, and I regularly get dowloads at 36KBPS (killabites per second - That's 56 times as low as my promiced 2GB cap, and slower than dial up), Although to be fair, that's in the evenings, it sometimes gets up to 100KBPS in the mornings. My all time low was downloading a patch for GW at 1KBPS, I just shut down and played rise of nations for half an hour.

Normaly, this dosn't affect my play too much, as long as I'm not running Teamspeak I can play the game fine. I may get some lag at the start of an alliance battle, but that may be my shoddy 512 MB of ram. I'm constantly using lots more memory than that, but again I can still play Guild Wars. When my guild leader plays ABs it looks like he's leaching half the time. He can normaly be found in the hall talking.

So that's my internet connection for you, I hope you enjoyed hearing my woes, I'll be back soon with more of my game stories, I'll probably do something about the game, not about the tech next time, but we'll see. Oh, one more thing, Anet has started there own wiki, if you know anything about guild wiki ( http://gw.gamewikis.org ) then you probably know that it's a valuble sorce of information about the game, I've started writing a bit for the wiki, but at the moment I think guild wiki is better. I hope Anet won't moderate the official wiki too much, because then it would just be corpate informaiton. Check it out at http://wiki.guildwars.com

There's an exclusive weekend coming, you get free entry to UW and FOW, just take your ascented charcters to a statue of Grenth (for UW) or Balthazar (for FOW). You don't need favor, (which is good because America usualy has favor when I play and I'm English).

If you like this, leave a comment or send me a Whisp in game, as Omg Bananas. My Xfire is randomtime, and you can get my guild wiki page at http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/user:randomtime/ or email me at: randomtime1@gmail.com

Bye for now.

Randomtime