Shawn Schuster and Rubi Bayer are back again with episode 8 of their Guild Wars 2 podcast. This time they have an interview with the prolific actress and writer Felicia Day about her voice acting role on Guild Wars 2!
You can find that episode over on the GuildCast website, here: Episode 8
Sabre Wolf is back again, this time giving us an overview of all of the Warrior details we have!
If you have any comments or feedback feel free to post over in the forum thread: GW2 Info Video Series. Transcripts will also be coming soon for a few of the videos! You will be able to find those in the thread.
Onlinewelten has an interview up about the recently unveiled Warrior profession and the ‘Traits’ system:
Onlinewelten: ArenaNet has just revealed the traits system of Guild Wars 2. Naturally we are very curious about it. Will the traits completely replace the attributes, which we know from the original Guild Wars?
Eric Flannum: Traits do partially replace attributes in that they allow a player to customize their character beyond the choices they make with their skillbar. We do however have a set of attributes that more directly replace those that we had in Guild Wars 1. Instead of being heavily profession oriented these attributes are more general, much like those you’d find in other RPGs.
In part two of Guild Wars 2 news today, we have ArenaNet’s Ben Miller, posting on the official website to tell us more about the ‘Trait’ system.
“Howdy! My name is Ben Miller, Game Designer on Guild Wars 2. While Eric and Colin have been busy writing blog posts and interviews, we’ve been working on a little system called traits. There has been some speculation and questions about traits on the forums. What are traits? How do you collect them? Does Colin Johanson secretly run a moa ranch in eastern Washington as a front for the Order of Whispers? I’m going to answer two of those three questions right now and leave the third open for future elaboration.
What are traits?
At a basic level, traits make you better at what you choose to do. You slot traits in order to modify skills and attributes. Once you have mastered a handful of traits they become a key component in creating your overall build.”
See the rest of that article here, and comment over in the forum: Traits Overview
“The warrior is a master of weapons who relies on speed, strength, toughness, and heavy armor to survive in battle. A warrior can shrug off blow after blow to stay in the fight, all the while building up adrenaline to fuel his offense.”
Also included in the article are the usual skill preview videos, one of which we have here:
Click here to check out the rest of that article here, and head over to the forum to add your comments: Introducing the Warrior
More on Guild Wars 2 personal stories, with another article from the Lore and Continuity Designer, Ree Soesbee on IGN.
“The personal storyline starts at the very beginning,” Soesbee tells us. “The minute you create your character, you’re faced with questions about your history, your personality, the hopes your character has. As you play through the game, your answers to those questions unlock stories that you will encounter and be able to play through.” The idea is to, from the very start, give your character a reason to adventure through the world that synchronizes with the character you endeavored to create, and for the story to feed off of your choices throughout. “By the time you’ve reached the end of the game and are fighting the epic villains you have a personal reason to be there – personal things that you are protecting or vengeance that you’re seeking – that have come about as a result of this personal story.”
Check out the rest of that article (and some fantastic screenshots) here, and add your comment in the forum: Creating Your Story
The next big update is here! This time it’s focused on the personal stories behind our characters. ArenaNet’s Ree Soesbee, the Lore & Continuity Designer for Guild Wars 2, lays it all out for us:
“One of the challenges of a massively-multiplayer game is that in being inclusive to a vast number of people, it loses a lot of the personal interaction that makes single-player RPGs so much fun. When you’re looking at the games on the store shelf, it seems you have only two options – a game that you can play with your friends, or a game that has a satisfying personal story. The Guild Wars 2 design team believes that a game should have both.”
ZAM has another interview up today, this time with game designers Isaiah Cartwright and Jon Peters, discussing the Guild Wars 2 combat system.
ZAM: How do the combos and tactics that we’ve heard so much about in the developer journals work? It seems like a very “real time” sort of effect for an MMO…
Isaiah Cartwright: The biggest thing that has allowed us to achieve this sort of comboing system is the fact that we’re changing the way we do skills. In Guild Wars 1, the designers would come up with the skills and then we’d hand them off to a coder and the coder would create the skills for us. That worked really well in that it gave us a lot of skills rather efficiently and the skills did exactly what we wanted them to do, but that didn’t give us a ton of room to experiment. Every time we wanted to come up with some crazy weird idea, we couldn’t really do it because of the process involved. It also meant that the coders were spending a lot of time doing pretty simple code.
This time around, we really changed the philosophy in how we create this kind of content. The programmers now build us a lot of pieces, and the design team sits down and puts them all together. What that allows us to do is come up with lots and lots of ideas that we then turn into something cool. Additionally, the programmers now spend their time making these neat little building blocks rather than crafting out each skill.
‘Guild Wars Info’ episode 10 is here, and this time Sabre Wolf is talking about the Luna Atra interview, and particularly the news of a marketplace trading system in Guild Wars 2.
If you have any comments or feedback feel free to post over in the forum thread: GW2 Info Video Series
