After a day of walking through the Eurogamer Expo show floor, the visually and sonically confusing barrage of FPS games, blinding spotlights and Just Dance caused everything to merge into one generic blur of ‘seen it all before’ games and technology. Thinking back now while I nurse a hangover caused by attending the Rock, Paper, Shotgun booze up after the show, one AAA game in particular stood out more than any other.

*Just to make it clear from the start, I’ve hated every single fantasy based MMORPG that I have ever played.

Following on from watching an unfortunately very buggy developer session on Guild Wars 2, Arena Net kindly gave two of us 40 minuets of play time on the show floor. This article is about the developer presentation, the next is about our play session. The presentation concentrated on the ‘personal story’ of your individual character and also demoed how dynamic events happen within the game world.

The personal story behaves almost like a single player RPG like Mass Effect or Witcher 2, during character set-up you are asked a series of questions which determines your characters back story and aligns it with certain factions within your chosen race. As you play through the game completing quests and levelling, more story is added to your journal which seems to read a little like the journal Dandelion writes in Witcher 2. In the session they were saying how that this story element continues with you throughout your entire play. This is an attempt at making the player a little more individual from your average ‘avatar’ in which having a story that will likely differ in places from most people you meet in the game, attaches your character to the world a bit more and adds a sense of history and place.

The dynamic events are essentially group quests,  you could enter an area and notice that say a dragon was attacking a village. It’s up to you to choose to participate in trying to save the village and the same goes for other players around you. The more players join in, the harder the event becomes – more or different enimies, different special attacks, larger health bars etc. These events also have many stages so if all the players failed to kill the dragon then the village may become destroyed, locking out all its resources and quests until it is repaired. In one example, Arena Net said that these events can branch off a ripple into whole other areas and districts based on how the players acted in them.

It all sounds a bit mad really and it’s unclear how frequently these events will repeat or how often they occur in the world. One thing that’s for sure is that the way the game gives quests to you is utterly seamless. We were told that you will never have to click on a stationary NPC with an exclamation mark on its head to receive a quest. Quests are given to you through what is happening and via voiced dialogue. In the gameplay we saw, there was never a moment where the world paused, that all too familiar ‘interact with NPC’ camera swoop never occurred. Interaction was as simple as walking up to someone and being talked at, we didn’t even see a ‘do you accept?’ choice.

This poses interesting design questions, if you were to ignore a character similar to one instance we saw where an NPC said something akin to ‘Follow me! We have to go do something’ and then ran off. Would you be able to return to the area and actually do the quest? It’d be a bit odd if you have someone saying ‘Quick! This way, they’re breaching the walls!’ And two months later you return and it’s the same guy standing there saying the same thing.

Regardless, it’s an interesting system and the whole presentation of how story and quest content is delivered to the player is leaps ahead of anything else I’ve seen in the MMO space, it looks real, dynamic, cinematic…it’s a game that seems to live up to today’s expectations of design, it does not make compromises simply because it’s an MMO. Let’s wait and see if it actually works.

So that’s what the talk was about, during our ‘hands on’ session we found even more surprises with how the game plays, but before I close off this article to enthusiastically write about our 40 minutes of play time with the game I want to just quickly say that the graphics are incredible. The art style is wondrous and environments feel new and fresh, it’s a world I cannot wait to just explore and marvel at it’s architecture and fantastical landscapes. I said at the start how I hate classic fantasy RPG’s but this game looks different, it’s not derivative of World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings, it feels like its own thing, almost painterly in style with the broad strokes of magic effects combined with subtle details like the customisable fur patterns on the cat like Charr race. The art, expressive animations, heavy, responsive sound design and emotive soundtrack all combine to create what I love most about videogames; an interesting and unique world worth exploring.

Continue to ‘Playing Guild Wars 2’

About the author

Michael Manning

Michael is a sound designer and composer working in the games industry. His portfolio can be found at www.manningaudio.com