As a character crafts items they will gain crafting experience. As they advance in their profession they will automatically learn new recipes for standard components. The player can then try to combine these standard components into other items to discover new recipes. For example, as a weaponsmith I automatically know the recipes for turning copper and tin ore into bronze ingots and for taking green wood logs and turning them into soft wood planks. If I place copper ingots in the crafting window while at an anvil I can make a copper axehead and similarly if I take the green wood planks to a workbench I can make an axe haft. I don't actually have a recipe for an axe but if I combine those two items then I will create a basic axe and the recipe will be stored in my recipe list. With further experimentation and by adding other ingredients I might be able to make a statistically better or different looking axe.
This is actually somewhat concerning for me as someone who braved the FF14 beta. Having mystery status crafting is more annoying than beneficial in a lot of ways... Guessing for material counts is just frustrating or feels like it requires a secondary resource (like a wiki, or Wowhead) to facilitate. I would actually like to know a lot more information on their basic approach.
I do think it can be done well as long as it follows a really "keep it simple" approach, which is something FF14 didn't do... at all. If 1 ingot always makes an axe head, 1 plank always makes a handle, and you can throw in rare reagents for "seasoning" to add stats, I would more than welcome this kind of system.
I think it will probably be systematic like that. It would be pretty silly to design it otherwise.
ANet have explicitly said they designed it so that people could play with it if they want to, or go visit the wiki if they'd rather skip that bit of tinkering and just craft something specific.
Really awesome gameplay video from PAX can be found here
Gameplay starts at 14mins and ends around 45 mins.
Alex Wilder on
Time is a flat circle
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
edited March 2011
Playing thief looks like it's straight out of an action game, and that's a good thing.
reVerse on
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HalfmexI mock your value systemYou also appear foolish in the eyes of othersRegistered Userregular
edited March 2011
So, the release date hasn't even been announced for this yet? Goddamn. These class announcements are becoming more torturous with each new one released.
Halfmex on
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reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
edited March 2011
Guardian's basic sword attack: lightsaber.
edit: Also, they move quite a distance in the latter part of that demo. The zones are definitely bigger than the ones in GW1. Not that they were small or anything, but some people have been worried about how often you walk into load screens.
Really awesome gameplay video from PAX can be found here
Gameplay starts at 14mins and ends around 45 mins.
Wow, very nice video. Some of the info is nice, too. Stuff like the catapults out in the field having an effect on the state of the town. I particularly liked that when they "rescue the prisoners" I was thinking ok, that's pretty normal sort of MMO quest, then he mentions that those prisoners are actual NPC characters who will then return to town as merchants, etc. Those are minor things but they will make the world much more impressive.
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
edited March 2011
That centaur public quest is epic. Smash catapults, go free prisoners, oh shit they're trying to repair catapults... and there's only three players there. Goes to show that you don't need a raid group full of people to have epic encounters in an MMO.
Rogue looks like a lot of fun, but with so much based on maneuverability it seems like it would have a rough learning curve. The look of the thief in action actually reminds me a bit of when Batman starts racking up the combo in Arkham Asylum. All leaping all over the place and kicking ass.
And a stray thought: It seems to me that the order for the class releases is roughly in order complexity/difficulty (which I am deriving in part from one of those linked interviews above). Which makes sense given that it takes more time to make sure a more complex class is functioning as it should and is ready to show the world.
Since this is all speculation anyway, I may as well make the leap to come to the conclusion that the mystery gun based class is engineer-y and perhaps that it will be released before the mesmer.
OhtheVogonity on
Oh freddled gruntbuggly...thy micturations are to me/ As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee
well at least the tough bosses are big. WAR's public bosses were usually the same size as the other mobs around it, always making it hard to believe it took a million more hits than its softer compatriots
How on earth are they going to pull off 100v100v100 fights
Even WAR, which looks like shit in comparison and was designed for it all along couldn't handle that many players fighting
The original Guild Wars engine looked way prettier than it should have for how much system resources it consumed. They've got great artists and developers at ANet.
Also remember that Tribes 2 featured 64-player battles on much slower computers over much slower connections ten years ago. This is not a technical impossibility.
Did you watch the video? They spent about 8 minutes wailing away on a normal-sized charr pirate first mate guy.
They commented on the video that they were underleveled for the encounter and were expected to wipe. I'm assuming this is the same demo they showed at GDC where they did wipe on that quest.
I think it will be possible to make a suitably vicious looking Asura when we actually get to the character-creator. ANet seems to like showing off the dopey looking ones though. They should have kept the head-to-ear ratio smaller as in GW1.
I hope there's options to make an asura with dark irises rather than these blue-eyed guys. Part of the asura's charm in GW1 was their rat-like faces with those big glistening black eyes. Giving them more human-like irises has really turned them from creepy rodent into terrifying mutant baby.
I think the hardest thing for me is going to be deciding what class to play in this game. I'm typically a tank type, but it doesn't seem like that's a real focus in this game, and the guardian class has some things I like and some I don't so far.
It seems Necro will be one of the toughest classes. It may be with their control and life-force abilities they will feel somewhat like a tank, albeit in a different way from your typical WoW Warrior, etc. Of course there's no taunt on any class so we have to be a bit more creative in GW2.
Got to play first thing on the first day of PAX (well, 2 hours in line, and then I got to play, but yeah). Tried out a Norn Ranger, as those 2 hours were spent watching Guardian and Thief players (and 1 Warrior). Also wanted to test out a melee focused Ranger, which worked and was so... so very much fun.
The first sword skill alone, which was a slash, followed by a dropkick (with knockback/down possibilities) and finished by a flying, spinning strike, made you feel like a badass. At any point it could be interrupted.
Positioning and movement, which they've always said is "important", really is important! The second skill, which was the roll to behind your opponent, if timed right, meant you could go a long time in tough combat without actually getting hit.
The last skill I got to play around with was a spinning swipe into a long roll backwards. Save for the one time I managed to hit it and roll straight off a cliff to my death (always look behind you), it was best used to then switch to a bow and hit your poison and rapid fire bow abilities before switching back as your opponent catches up to you.
A lot of fun and really felt different (and better) than the now-lifeless feeling combat of other MMOs.
I was at the panel as well (the line for which filled up a full hour before it started). We all wished for a different final question.
Bloodsheed on
Xbox Live, Steam, PSN: Eclibull
0
CorehealerThe ApothecaryThe softer edge of the universe.Registered Userregular
edited March 2011
Been very busy and still very busy, just quickly came in here to say I'll update the OP as soon as I can this week and to thank Enig for continuing to provide us all with fantastic PAX East info on GW2. I look forward to watching the Panel videos as soon as I've finished banging my head against the end of term essays.
I'm also planning on building a computer from scratch (using aid from the Tech section of the forum thread on building computers) for GW2. Any suggestions from those who saw the demo at PAX and have any info on the game's specs would be appreciated, although I can assume that a standard rig would serve me well.
Corehealer on
0
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
edited March 2011
Originally Posted by Martin Kerstein
We had the same discussion on these boards when we went to gamescom, so I re-iterate what I said back then:
Engine optimization is amongst the last steps in the development cycle, so the hardware the demo is running on is completely irrelevant for guessing which hardware would be needed when we launch.
Back from PAX East. I'll go ahead and throw my observations in the ring too. I played the demo three times and attended the panel.
First time, I played as a Norn Guardian in the starting area. I was around the eighth person or so in the PAX expo queue line, so I was playing at the stations as the were doing the thief "announcement" at 10:30am, as I woke up at an ungodly hour to make sure this was so. Anyways, I got started and went through the basic personal storyline for my character. Coming from playing a lot of GW1, it's a bit jarring. I'm not sure how I feel about the Guardian either - part of my apprehension is that I only played a low level one, not a higher level one so it was difficult to get a good feel of the Guardian. But it was certainly fun, if not a bit overwhelming at first with knowing I only had 40 minutes.
The Norn starter area is very nice, nice atmosphere and all that jazz. I played around with a few of the events out in the area. One that was interesting was an event that featured 10 or so different raven statues. Each raven statue had a different riddle to solve, so there was no combat for this one. But it was still quite interesting, as I hadn't run into anything similar in other MMOs, particularly at a starter area. Another event I had was I and some players had to run into a cave with mobs(Grawl maybe?) and retrieve bags of food and then bring them back out to give to an NPC. Once you got so many, the event succeeded. Later in the event chain a demon harpy thing spawned, which killed everyone in the area - the two events were connected somehow, but I had gone to check out Hoelbrak so I'm not entirely sure how. Hoelbrak is huge, I got ridiculously lost.
Second playthrough was at the NCSoft Meet and Greet. Let's be honest, most people were there for GW2 and not Aion or City of Heroes. We started lining about about an hour and a half before it started and were still about 20 people back. Anyways, for this demo I played a mid level human Thief (I seriously just typed Assassin, then remembered). I enjoyed the thief more than the Guardian, but I attribute this more to the fact that I had more skills and abilities unlocked at this level (27). This is the area that most people would have seen in the thief videos. With the centaurs attacking the town - kill them, then go destroy their catapults, etc. There was also another town nearby where we fought against a certain amount of guys - once they were done a War Beast spawned for another event. He was cool looking, but ridiculously tough. He one or two shotted us quite often. The thief was very cool, particularly the dodging aspect and pistols. I did have various issues with not having enough energy, since dodging drained it, so I had to learn to be judicious with it. I switched between double pistols and double daggers when I felt the need, but I loved pistols more. The demo ended with me dying to the War Beast.
I meet plenty of the devs at the Meet and Greet, they were all very cool. Especially Jeff Grubbs, that dude knows so much about the lore, it's really entertaining to just listen to him. Talked to one of the tech guys too, and tried to get more information about server shards, but couldn't get much out of him as to be expected. One thing to note if any of you go to this type of thing again - they will let you take screenshots of the game, and put them on a USB drive and take home with you as long as you ask. Someone asked while there and they said that was fine as long as an ANet employee moved the images over.
Third playthrough was on Sunday, the last day of the show. I again showed up stupid early to the expo, and was first on at the Logitech booth for another round. Having played the demo twice already, I felt this was the best feel that I got for the demo. I played a mid level Charr Elementalist, which went to the same Krytan area as mid level humans. This time though, I ventured into the swampy area near there. I played with a friend who was a Charr thief. We were joined by some ANet dev for the majority of the time. As we ventured into the swamp, we also found an event where we had to kill some undead - pretty simple, just a certain amount of them. The cooler thing was that I started seeing more nodes for gathering. For whatever reason, they were everywhere in the swamp. Mushrooms, trees, etc. Gathering is "instanced" to you - you gather and then the node disappears, though the art asset (like an iron node) would still be visible to you, just not active. A node would also show up on the minimap and you could hover over it to tell you what node it was. The nodes for gathering are seeded in various places, so there's no telling where and when a node might come back. I gathered a few things, and looked at the crafting area. No real surprises. I would have liked to do some crafting, but I realized that I could only do it in Hoelbrak in the Norn Starter area as there were no crafting stations in the mid level Human area according to the ANet employee.
As for the elementalist I played, nothing really too surprising. I liked him quite a lot, particular the air attunement. I did think it was interesting that you could have any element slotted in the last ~5 slots. So you can mix and match the elements that way, it just didn't occur to me for whatever reason that you could do that. Anyways, we headed for village outside of the swamps that Undead were attacking. We had to defeat the undead, and also clean up rubble that used to be the town's walls. Once we had achieved this, another event spawned to repair the walls. So we headed into a mine and picked up stones, and brought them back to an NPC. Once we had enough, the NPC took the stones back to the town (like actually walked over there), and went to each damaged area, and they shimmered and were repaired. It was quite a neat little effect. Also in the swamps were some Sylvari - looked like the old ones. I asked the ANet employee manning the both and couldn't get much out of him about the Sylvari. The ANet dev that ran with us around the swamps was also a Guardian. I didn't die once in this content - the buffs the Guardian gave out helped out a lot, and made me feel a lot more favorable about the Guardian after trying it out in the starter area. If I had another chance I would have played a mid level Guardian to see how they were, as I had intended for the Guardian to be my main.
Every time I played the demo, they were all very fun. That fun only increased as I learned what the heck I was doing
I also went to the GW2 panel. This thing filled up really quickly, with like an hour left the line was already full. I got there two hours early so I was fine, but it just shows how popular GW2 was at PAX. Anyways, nothing too substantial to come out of the panel. I found it interesting that a high level character that went down to low level areas would be brought down to that level and low level characters in high level areas could be brought up to a higher level by a player. And yes, that last question sucked. What you gonna do. I'll post if I think of anything else that was interesting.
Did they show how the level balancing actually worked? I mean if you can simply walk into the final area and be bump up to max level, that kinda makes leveling moot. Or maybe they are doing the warhammer way of only buffing your stats, so that you are only less useless.
Posts
I will try to contain my envy.
Steam (Ansatz) || GW2 officer (Ansatz.6498)
i'm jelly.
Tell whoever is in charge that Necros need Dual Pistols.
Steam: YOU FACE JARAXXUS| Twitch.tv: CainLoveless
Because a stylish, gunslinger, mesmer would be the coolest thing ever. Yes.
Jesus tap-dancing Christ
That would be awesome.
I do think it can be done well as long as it follows a really "keep it simple" approach, which is something FF14 didn't do... at all. If 1 ingot always makes an axe head, 1 plank always makes a handle, and you can throw in rare reagents for "seasoning" to add stats, I would more than welcome this kind of system.
ANet have explicitly said they designed it so that people could play with it if they want to, or go visit the wiki if they'd rather skip that bit of tinkering and just craft something specific.
Steam (Ansatz) || GW2 officer (Ansatz.6498)
Gameplay starts at 14mins and ends around 45 mins.
edit: Also, they move quite a distance in the latter part of that demo. The zones are definitely bigger than the ones in GW1. Not that they were small or anything, but some people have been worried about how often you walk into load screens.
Wow, very nice video. Some of the info is nice, too. Stuff like the catapults out in the field having an effect on the state of the town. I particularly liked that when they "rescue the prisoners" I was thinking ok, that's pretty normal sort of MMO quest, then he mentions that those prisoners are actual NPC characters who will then return to town as merchants, etc. Those are minor things but they will make the world much more impressive.
Steam (Ansatz) || GW2 officer (Ansatz.6498)
Rogue looks like a lot of fun, but with so much based on maneuverability it seems like it would have a rough learning curve. The look of the thief in action actually reminds me a bit of when Batman starts racking up the combo in Arkham Asylum. All leaping all over the place and kicking ass.
And a stray thought: It seems to me that the order for the class releases is roughly in order complexity/difficulty (which I am deriving in part from one of those linked interviews above). Which makes sense given that it takes more time to make sure a more complex class is functioning as it should and is ready to show the world.
Since this is all speculation anyway, I may as well make the leap to come to the conclusion that the mystery gun based class is engineer-y and perhaps that it will be released before the mesmer.
Even WAR, which looks like shit in comparison and was designed for it all along couldn't handle that many players fighting
The original Guild Wars engine looked way prettier than it should have for how much system resources it consumed. They've got great artists and developers at ANet.
Also remember that Tribes 2 featured 64-player battles on much slower computers over much slower connections ten years ago. This is not a technical impossibility.
They commented on the video that they were underleveled for the encounter and were expected to wipe. I'm assuming this is the same demo they showed at GDC where they did wipe on that quest.
Old PA forum lookalike style for the new forums | My ko-fi donation thing.
This pic hints at better options: http://www.arena.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/A_Thief1.jpg
Steam (Ansatz) || GW2 officer (Ansatz.6498)
I'd rather play as one of those rat things than an asura.
Though you're right Enig, that doesn't look so bad.
Some guardian footage from PAX. Human, uses a staff. Switches to sword+torch about halfway through.
Guardian torch skill: blow the fire on the enemy.
Here's the video if you want to have a look:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgPS1jHUMbw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lctnKVlj-Zs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMFqmxXP71c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSfuEqtHse8
Steam (Ansatz) || GW2 officer (Ansatz.6498)
And yeah that last guy was a dick.
Steam (Ansatz) || GW2 officer (Ansatz.6498)
The first sword skill alone, which was a slash, followed by a dropkick (with knockback/down possibilities) and finished by a flying, spinning strike, made you feel like a badass. At any point it could be interrupted.
Positioning and movement, which they've always said is "important", really is important! The second skill, which was the roll to behind your opponent, if timed right, meant you could go a long time in tough combat without actually getting hit.
The last skill I got to play around with was a spinning swipe into a long roll backwards. Save for the one time I managed to hit it and roll straight off a cliff to my death (always look behind you), it was best used to then switch to a bow and hit your poison and rapid fire bow abilities before switching back as your opponent catches up to you.
A lot of fun and really felt different (and better) than the now-lifeless feeling combat of other MMOs.
I was at the panel as well (the line for which filled up a full hour before it started). We all wished for a different final question.
I'm also planning on building a computer from scratch (using aid from the Tech section of the forum thread on building computers) for GW2. Any suggestions from those who saw the demo at PAX and have any info on the game's specs would be appreciated, although I can assume that a standard rig would serve me well.
First time, I played as a Norn Guardian in the starting area. I was around the eighth person or so in the PAX expo queue line, so I was playing at the stations as the were doing the thief "announcement" at 10:30am, as I woke up at an ungodly hour to make sure this was so. Anyways, I got started and went through the basic personal storyline for my character. Coming from playing a lot of GW1, it's a bit jarring. I'm not sure how I feel about the Guardian either - part of my apprehension is that I only played a low level one, not a higher level one so it was difficult to get a good feel of the Guardian. But it was certainly fun, if not a bit overwhelming at first with knowing I only had 40 minutes.
The Norn starter area is very nice, nice atmosphere and all that jazz. I played around with a few of the events out in the area. One that was interesting was an event that featured 10 or so different raven statues. Each raven statue had a different riddle to solve, so there was no combat for this one. But it was still quite interesting, as I hadn't run into anything similar in other MMOs, particularly at a starter area. Another event I had was I and some players had to run into a cave with mobs(Grawl maybe?) and retrieve bags of food and then bring them back out to give to an NPC. Once you got so many, the event succeeded. Later in the event chain a demon harpy thing spawned, which killed everyone in the area - the two events were connected somehow, but I had gone to check out Hoelbrak so I'm not entirely sure how. Hoelbrak is huge, I got ridiculously lost.
Second playthrough was at the NCSoft Meet and Greet. Let's be honest, most people were there for GW2 and not Aion or City of Heroes. We started lining about about an hour and a half before it started and were still about 20 people back. Anyways, for this demo I played a mid level human Thief (I seriously just typed Assassin, then remembered). I enjoyed the thief more than the Guardian, but I attribute this more to the fact that I had more skills and abilities unlocked at this level (27). This is the area that most people would have seen in the thief videos. With the centaurs attacking the town - kill them, then go destroy their catapults, etc. There was also another town nearby where we fought against a certain amount of guys - once they were done a War Beast spawned for another event. He was cool looking, but ridiculously tough. He one or two shotted us quite often. The thief was very cool, particularly the dodging aspect and pistols. I did have various issues with not having enough energy, since dodging drained it, so I had to learn to be judicious with it. I switched between double pistols and double daggers when I felt the need, but I loved pistols more. The demo ended with me dying to the War Beast.
I meet plenty of the devs at the Meet and Greet, they were all very cool. Especially Jeff Grubbs, that dude knows so much about the lore, it's really entertaining to just listen to him. Talked to one of the tech guys too, and tried to get more information about server shards, but couldn't get much out of him as to be expected. One thing to note if any of you go to this type of thing again - they will let you take screenshots of the game, and put them on a USB drive and take home with you as long as you ask. Someone asked while there and they said that was fine as long as an ANet employee moved the images over.
Third playthrough was on Sunday, the last day of the show. I again showed up stupid early to the expo, and was first on at the Logitech booth for another round. Having played the demo twice already, I felt this was the best feel that I got for the demo. I played a mid level Charr Elementalist, which went to the same Krytan area as mid level humans. This time though, I ventured into the swampy area near there. I played with a friend who was a Charr thief. We were joined by some ANet dev for the majority of the time. As we ventured into the swamp, we also found an event where we had to kill some undead - pretty simple, just a certain amount of them. The cooler thing was that I started seeing more nodes for gathering. For whatever reason, they were everywhere in the swamp. Mushrooms, trees, etc. Gathering is "instanced" to you - you gather and then the node disappears, though the art asset (like an iron node) would still be visible to you, just not active. A node would also show up on the minimap and you could hover over it to tell you what node it was. The nodes for gathering are seeded in various places, so there's no telling where and when a node might come back. I gathered a few things, and looked at the crafting area. No real surprises. I would have liked to do some crafting, but I realized that I could only do it in Hoelbrak in the Norn Starter area as there were no crafting stations in the mid level Human area according to the ANet employee.
As for the elementalist I played, nothing really too surprising. I liked him quite a lot, particular the air attunement. I did think it was interesting that you could have any element slotted in the last ~5 slots. So you can mix and match the elements that way, it just didn't occur to me for whatever reason that you could do that. Anyways, we headed for village outside of the swamps that Undead were attacking. We had to defeat the undead, and also clean up rubble that used to be the town's walls. Once we had achieved this, another event spawned to repair the walls. So we headed into a mine and picked up stones, and brought them back to an NPC. Once we had enough, the NPC took the stones back to the town (like actually walked over there), and went to each damaged area, and they shimmered and were repaired. It was quite a neat little effect. Also in the swamps were some Sylvari - looked like the old ones. I asked the ANet employee manning the both and couldn't get much out of him about the Sylvari. The ANet dev that ran with us around the swamps was also a Guardian. I didn't die once in this content - the buffs the Guardian gave out helped out a lot, and made me feel a lot more favorable about the Guardian after trying it out in the starter area. If I had another chance I would have played a mid level Guardian to see how they were, as I had intended for the Guardian to be my main.
Every time I played the demo, they were all very fun. That fun only increased as I learned what the heck I was doing
I also went to the GW2 panel. This thing filled up really quickly, with like an hour left the line was already full. I got there two hours early so I was fine, but it just shows how popular GW2 was at PAX. Anyways, nothing too substantial to come out of the panel. I found it interesting that a high level character that went down to low level areas would be brought down to that level and low level characters in high level areas could be brought up to a higher level by a player. And yes, that last question sucked. What you gonna do. I'll post if I think of anything else that was interesting.