Relics of Orr have put our their 11th episode for everyone to check out. The theme of the podcast is “Gamescom Post-Game Show” and features Tasha from GuildWarsGuru.com and Split Infinity Radio and her impressions of the Guild Wars 2 demo that was featured at gamescom this year.
Podcast segments:
Sequel Scuttlebutt & Speculator’s Corner
Gamescom post-game show.
Togo’s Soapbox
Guilds, and namely, Alliances. How do these work?
Protips
How does the faction of an alliance/guild factor into daily gaming? How is it achieved?
Will Relics go Luxon, also?
After you listen to it, make sure to go and leave your feedback in the Relics of Orr news thread!
Since the last news post, a lot more gamescom interviews have cropped up. Because they deserve the spotlight just as much as the last batch, I bring you “Q&A Interviews from gamescom – Part 2“. Enjoy!
Here we have a video interview from Gamespot with Eric Flannum:
You mentioned dynamic, and obviously that’s a really big part today in the demo; we saw dynamic world bosses and as well as bosses that change in conjunction with the amount of players doing the content. Tell us about that.
One of the things that was really important for us with the dynamic event system was that players be able to play them kind of on their own terms. So that one player is able to go out in the world and if maybe there aren’t other players around that they can participate in these events, but at the same time if a lot of players have gathered together in an area, that the events are still good there for them, too. And so, we do a lot of dynamic scaling of the events. So, for example, in an event where you have waves of creatures coming in, you’ll see the waves get successively larger or smaller depending on the number of players there. And then you mentioned our boss creatures. Obviously, we can’t just spawn more bosses and things like that. What we do is, we unlock new abilities for bosses, which doesn’t mean that they’re harder, but they’re abilities that that allow the bosses to take on more players…
Destructoid.com brings us another video interview but this time with Randy Price (you can discuss the interview here):
You guys are marketing this as the MMO for people that don’t play MMO’s. Can you explain that one to me?
Okay, so let me think about your starting points here. This is a persistent, huge, triple-A experience. If you think about the way that we’ve designed our dynamic events that are out in the living, breathing world. One of the the things that – you know, we play MMO’s of course, and we know what frustrates us. The mundane frustrates us. It frustrates us when the next thing to do is to go click on an NPC to get a quest and be bombarded with a huge wall of text that I don’t even read. And I essentially run out, and I am told to kill 10 of something that are sitting around in a field. This is not all that fun. I kill them and I come on back and I have another wall of text and get a reward. Okay, that entire quest chain to us, it’s not something that we want to do. We’ve set all of that aside…
This is another video interview brought to us by GWcom.de with Mike Zadorojny and Devon Carver:
Can you tell us anything new about the races? If I take an elementalist that is a human, how is it different than an elementalist that is a charr?
Mike: Some of the skills that you are going to get are going to be race specific. So that will give you some indication that you’re skill bar is going to be a little bit different if you’re a charr elementalist than if you’re a human elementalist, and possibly some of the traits as well.
It looks like video interviews are the big thing right now because we have yet another one here brought to us by MMORPGItalia.com:
In most MMORPG’s enemies have a different appearance, but in practice they all fight the same way. Will GW2 be different than this point of view? Will there be significant strengths or weaknesses for the different types of enemies?
That is certainly one of our goals – to make combat between different creatures feel really different. The combat of the game is one of the core areas that we’re trying to innovate right now and we’re trying to make it feel like when you’re fighting specific creatures that you’re really getting kind of a unique combat feel out of it. Each of them uses different tactics and make you play the game a little bit differently to defeat them. Each of our creatures, when you select the creature, it will give you a quick little hint of the stuff that that creature can do and what it’s special abilities are to help give you an idea – if you’re a casual player of what to watch out for, and what the cool thing is that that creature does so you know a little bit more about it.
Here’s a change of pace. Univers Virtuels, GuildMag and Mondes Persistants bring us a written interview with Colin Johanson and Jeff Grubb (you can discuss the interview here):
My next question is about the link between Guild Wars 2 and Ghosts of Ascalon – which is a great book by the way (Jeff laughs and says thanks you). Aside from main lore characters like Logan, will we see things and characters in the game the way they are described in the book?
Jeff : The book and the game were written very closely together. As the game continues to evolve, lots of parts and characters from the book do appear in the game. If you go into Divinity’s Reach, in the Seraph headquarters, you run into Lieutenant Groban, who’s a minor character in the book. He’s the one who basically interrogates Dougal Keane in the early chapters. And there he is. You cannot find Dougal in the game yet, but that’s not to say he won’t appear. Almorra, the leader of the Vigil: she’s there. So basic characters, large and small, will be in there, connected within the book and the game.
Plus, you got characters in the game showing up in the books. We talked about Logan, we talked about references from characters from Guild Wars 1. Their legends exist in the book.
The folks over at GuildMag have just put up their GamesCom Q&A with Jeff Grubb and Colin Johandsome! A few questions dodged, but some interesting bits and pieces within.
There’s also an additional question over on the GuildMag page, which they forgot to include with the video. Check that out here!
With a hoard of information streaming out of gamescom this past week, I thought I’d put together a simple list of question and answer interviews – both in written and video form – that we’ve accumulated in the This. Is. GAMESCOM! thread.
First, I’d like to highlight the GW2Guru.com interview that were created by questions from the Guru community:
Can you give us any information on how crafting will work, or what types of crafting skills will be available?
That is currently in design. We’re still working out all those pieces. We didn’t have it in the demo because it isn’t quite ready. We’re going to have a very extensive crafting system, lots of gathering and all of those pieces you’ve seen in basically any other MMO in terms of crafting systems. One piece that you have seen in the demo currently is a lot of the little types of activities when you run around in the game use a very similar system which we’ll use for our gathering system. For example, when you run along the dam and see lots of water coming out of the dam, you can run over and use that spot of water and turn it off. Also anyone that is with you can also run over and turn off that specific spot of water. It’s something that we’re trying to obtain in our game, you’re never really going to have someone close to you being able to take that spot of water from you. We want to carry this system over to every aspect of the game, including battle.
Here we have a video interview conducted by JeuxOnline with Colin Johanson:
Will players be able to have fun and be useful in the World vs. World, whatever their level?
Yes, absolutely. One of the goals of World vs. World is that if you want to play the game entirely just there, you can do that. You can go level up; you can gain experience; you can do everything you want just in the World vs. World area. You don’t have to play PvE if you don’t want to. It’s totally up to you. And in World vs. World we’re trying to make it so that there’s something anybody can do. So, for example, there are large keep assaults where everyone on a server goes and attacks another server’s keep. There are smaller type things they might have like a copper mine next to the keep and you can get a smaller group of players together and try to assault the copper mine and take it from the other team. And there will be little caravans that are sending resources back and forth between the copper mine and the keep, and one player, for example, could go and actually just attack the caravan. So there’s stuff for one person to do in World vs. World, there’s stuff for groups to do, and then there’s stuff for large groups to do so that everybody has something they could be doing to take part.
Univers Virtuels brings us a written interview in French and then translated in English. Comments on this particular interview can be found here:
Can you give us more information about the personal stories, for example what happens if the leader wants to kill an NPC, I’m in the group and I don’t want to kill him ?
Every character has his own story, you can help the leader to kill this person, it does not affect your own story, you can come back and save him if you want it.
This is another video interview, but this time it’s brought to you by AFB Media with Eric Flannum and Randy Price:
I think the Guild Wars 2 game is more focused on role-playing. Why have you changed that?
Eric: We had a pretty heavy focus on story in Guild Wars 1, and we wanted to kind of take that to the next level. We felt that a lot of online role-playing games lost the role-playing part of the game and so we really wanted to change that. One of the primary things that we do is that in most games you’re kind of this nameless, faceless character with no history, no past – that sort of thing – and so we’ve created this character biography for you, so that you can fill out some things about who you are as a character and really help role-playing. We also have a personality system that reflects how you treat NPC’s in the game. You know, if you run around being charming to everyone, then it will reflect that in your personality and it will open up some new options for you in the story. We really want to support that role-playing game feel.
In this video, we have an interview with Annie Mitsoda from Gamerspawn:
Guild Wars 2 is ArenaNet’s next big MMO. It is unlike Guild Wars 1, which was a lot of small persistent areas, large instanced areas. We now have a massive persistent world that follows a personal storyline, dynamic events throughout the world, and has a much more active dynamic combat that encourages you as a player to experiment with new things, move around a lot more, and rewards you for the choices that you make throughout the game.
And last but not least, InGuildWars.de brings us this two-part audio interview on with Chris Lye and Jeff Grubb:
It always seems silly to us that, say, you’re supposedly on the same side in an MMO but if you’re both on the same quest at the same time, you’re actually competing for resources. You don’t want that person there. But if you were really in a fantasy world, and there was a dragon, you would want as many people there helping you as possible. We felt that the promise of online worlds was getting compromised by some of the decisions people had made in the way, like quests are structured. That’s one of the things our dynamic events are set up to do – they are set up to actually reward social gameplay. You don’t have to be partied, you can just all be in the same area and say, “Oh my god, there’s a big dragon!” It seems like we should all be attacking it…
If you come across any interviews that aren’t listed here, or other sort of interesting information coming out of gamescom, you can stop by the mega gamescom thread and post about it, send me a PM, and/or create a thread in our News, Interview & Articles forum!
We’ve all known how great Guild War 2 is setting up to be, and now the rest of the world agrees! Guild Wars 2 has just been awarded Best Online Game for gamescom 2010!
We’ve got an exclusive interview for you today with with Game Designer Isaiah Cartwright, Content DesignerLeah Rivera and Content Designer Devon Carveranswering questions the community has asked over the last several months.
Will rangers start with a pet or will they have to go out and tame one? What kind of starting animals will be available for each race?
Well as we just now said, you do chose your pet at the character creation for your ranger. You also have the option to go out and tame other pets. You will always start with a pet. Also each race will have their own pets to start with. Some of the starting pets that exist right now are: the char have the devours, humans have the moa (large dog) or a bear. Another thing that is great is as you play the game there will be a ton of pets which you can chose from to tame.
We even have underwater pets such as sharks and fish that you can have too. (Zyuu: this is awesome!)
Another surprise for us today! This time a behind the scenes video focused on the creation of Guild Wars 2 cinematics! Click this link if you want to watch it in HD.
The folks over at IGN had a chance to play Guild Wars 2 at gamescom already, and put up their first impressions:
“Then I was asked what, of three options, was my greatest regret. The first two were boring things like avenging my sister’s murder or something. I didn’t even really pay attention to them, because the third option completely overshadowed them. My character’s greatest regret is that he never had the opportunity to perform in the circus.”
Check out the rest of that hands-on over here, and hit the link below to comment.
