Guild Wars 2: BWE#1

There are some games that are over-ambitious, some games that flop, some games that never quite live up to expectation.

Guild Wars 2 is not one of those games.

We'd been waiting eagerly for this beta event ever since ArenaNet announced that they would have an open beta, just over a year ago. The 27th finally came along. However, beta is beta, so connecting was   difficult, as any participant will tell you.

After getting a stable connection in the early hours of Saturday morning, my pals and I blitzed through our personal stories with each other's help. Though the personal story is good, its not what makes the game special.

This... Is what makes the game special.

The world. It's picturesque, infinitely explorable and astoundingly detailed. It's a labour of love without equal. I used to think World of Warcraft had a well-crafted space to level up in, but Tyria is now in a league of its own. If I had to pick a place to stick around and play the auction house all day (Let's hope that never happens), I'd want to do it in one of the game's architecturally phenomenal cities. Hoelbrak, The Black Citadel, Divinity's Reach and Lion's Arch (see above). We haven't seen the cities of Rata Sum and The Grove yet, but as soon as they release them for the beta client, I'll be busy exploring and cataloguing every nook and cranny, every floating science-cube and every sentient seed-pod I can cram into my screenshot folder.

I played this beta as a Norn warrior. The Norn start in the Wayfarer Foothills, in which they commune with the animal spirits and try to maintain the balance of nature... while cracking the skulls of the Sons of Svanir, the servants of the ice dragon, Jormag. I was constantly switching weapons to learn all of the skills, incase I needed to switch tactics later on. With a sword and shield, I could charge into a pack of enemies, apply bleed effects, immobilise and I could activate my shield wall to prevent all incoming damage. I wasn't a 'tank' per se, but I was the designated mob-gatherer, to allow my elementalist team mate to clean up with a meteor shower. Our engineer would also slow them by shooting a massive globule of glue at their feet.

That's the great thing about the combat: the combo system. Certain spells have in their descriptions the words 'combo field', or 'combo finisher'. By charging for a shield bash onto a foe within a fire caused by another player, I gained a fire-shield that burned nearby foes, allowing my shield block to yield some damage potential, despite being a defensive spell. This also works with all projectiles, which take on the effects of all allied combo fields they pass through, eventually leading in some cases to a archer-line style of play, lighting their arrows as they send them flying. There are also some other key things to note that may not at first seem of much importance. Harking back to WoW, you had to learn the spell icons for every single spell of every single class in the entire game to have a clue what was going on in PvP, or PvE for that matter. Instead of this saturation-of-the-spell-effect-icon syndrome of the past, the only icons that are displayed are the effects of the spells. I.E, if an engineer applies three stacks of his kind of bleed effect, and I as a warrior apply three of my own to the same target, six stacks of the 'bleed' condition are displayed, which saves a great deal of time, brain power and precious U.I space. It's in these small, convenient details that I think Guild Wars 2 really sets itself apart. The dynamic event system is compelling and; funnily enough, dynamic, but it's when I notice details like the rate at which you craft large amount of items rapidly increasing, or the elimination of mounts via the use of 'way-points', I constantly think,
'Why didn't anyone think of this before?'

The dynamic event system is not to be overlooked, either. The pace of the game is exactly what you want it to be, and you're not limited by having to travel back to some druid's holiday retreat at the northernmost point of the continent just to pick up and hand in quests. Besides, why would you? Your rewards are sent to you through the mail system, and you don't even need to go to a mailbox to open it! Fantastic. I wish they'd do away with item durability in PvE though. That has never been   and still isn't fun. Shortly after I started playing, I found myself picking up fish from traps by the river and feeding them to bear cubs. I suddenly felt like I had lost man-points, but I didn't care. Forty other people were doing it, too.

As an MMO, you would expect the game to have a large amount of Player-versus-Environment content, but you wouldn't expect it so literally, as it can often appear in Guild Wars 2 in the form of platforming puzzles. We completed just two of them during our time on the game, but each one took about twenty minutes to hop, skip and jump our way through. The rewards range from achievements (which I don't really care about) to skill points. Boy, do I care about those. Your character is not simply given a skill point to spend each level, he only gets a trait point to spend on passive bonuses. Instead, you have to find the places in the world shown on the map, and complete the challenges to acquire all the skill points you'll need to max-out. Of course, this only increases your versatility rather than your power, as you can only have five utility skills equipped at any one time, but it makes the RPG completionist in me want to get out and explore the world enough to get every single one.

A Pose after a tough climb.

I said earlier that it's the world that makes this game special, didn't I? Change that to *worlds*. The world versus world versus world (WvWvW) content could be released on its own and still be a great game. There are four zones or 'shards' within the Mists (the seperate WvWvW map), three of which belong to a particular server at the start of each week, and the middle one is contested. Everything except a server's spawn location for each shard can be captured, upgraded, destroyed, intercepted and besieged. You see guild groups of around fifty players roaming around with siege golems when invading enemy territory, which will get ambushed by arrow carts and ballistas, and the battles kick off. They can last for twenty minutes or so even without walls or static defences. If you're a small group, you'll never stand a chance against a massive, coordinated army like that, but you can go around and intercept enemy supply caravans towed by creatures called Dolyaks, which are Guild Wars 2's resident work horses. There is always something for you to be doing, and the matchmaking system for the servers means that if you're getting dominated by one server, you won't have to deal with them next week. It's this, and the structured PvP that has me most excited for the final release of the game.

I suppose I should shamelessly plug our guild here.

We are 'Vi Et Armis', a guild full of experienced MMO players that want to deal with all of the challenges Guild Wars 2 has to offer, and it can be challenging, believe me. We will be frequently running both PvE and PvP groups and eventually getting a larger group together for some serious WvWvW action. You can find us at http://vi-et-armis.enjin.com/

See you next beta.

RPGs: Games with character

Nothing quite beats a good role-playing name for an immersive role playing game. It safely puts you outside the boundaries of conventional reality and helps you to define who your character is, most often literally. For the past decade I've seen very few names for characters in fantasy RPG's that aren't labels for tanks, healers and DPS (damage per second) roles. The earliest example I can think of is Orgrim Doomhammer from the Warcraft series. What kind of weapon does he use, and what happens to the guy on the receiving end of it? A more recent example is Ember Doomforge from the Ghosts of Ascalon novel set in the Guild Wars universe, yet again playing on the theme of doom. Sylvanas Windrunner, Kael'thas Sunstrider, Ardenor Crush, Thaulid Hammerspur. Hell, even Lomo Kettlemaker. The list goes on. It's a convenient way to categorise avatars and NPC's so that you're never wondering what it is they actually do. It's a fantasy yellow-pages made easy.

'Chief Nounverb of the Badass clan addresses you, weakling.'

The formula is foolproof. This isn't being written out of hate, but of my appreciation of the essential cheesiness that underpins all game-worthy fantasy IP's. The Forgotten Realms, Kryta, Azeroth and all the other RPG kingpins. They thrive on this stuff. Mannoroth's death at the end of the Orc campaign in Warcraft III would have been nothing if Grom Hellscream's name was Derek Bingley. A toast... to Chief Nounverb.

Mount & Blade: Take the money and run...

Dundush Noyan, you fool!


I had been in service to a lord of the Khergit Khanate faction, and he asked me to collect some taxes from Dashbiga. It would upset the locals, sure, but my reputation with the aristocracy would be shining. I immediately went to extort some peasants.


8000 Denars.


I got giddy at the thought of being rich   for once   in this game. After a very brief period of moral deliberation, I decided to hoof it to Veluca, belonging to the Kingdom of Rhodoks. I set up an olive oil press in the town, and began to sow the seeds of my business empire.
Roaming about the land of Cal-trade-ia, comparing prices and taking advantage of resource shortages caused by the warring factions, I was soon rolling in it. I was able to keep mercenaries as the whole of my force of twenty men. These brutes were at the top of the badassery scale, and didn't ask questions or lose morale if you attacked a village or two. The only real snag with trading in the game is that there's no way to store data within the game itself. When you spend a night comparing prices, once you hit continue that information is gone, so a pen and paper are essential.
Eventually, once I had saved up enough money by performing tasks for locals, killing bandits and generally pretending to be a good person, I had purchased shops in most of the towns on the map save for the three cities in my home, the Khergit Khanate. It also seems that these guys were the most aggressive faction. Eventually, they even attacked Veluca and captured it.


My oil press!


They say loyalty can't be bought, but I had become so attached to that income town that I immediately began a campaign of boot-licking in service to Sanjar Khan, leader of the Khergits.

"You there, with the 50 man strong force of elite mercenaries that can eliminate armies three times it size... Deliver this letter, would you?"    Sanjar Khan on employment in Mount & Blade: Warband.

 Well, as luck would have it, delivering enough letters gets you the influence to become a vassal of the realm (any more of those errands and I'd have gone postal). My gracious leader gave me this honour and bestowed upon me a fife (town) for me to control. I was given Uhhun, which just so happened to be right on the edge of the Khergit territory, and was a stone's throw from the towns of two hostile factions. I thought that this might have been more effort than it was worth.

Ignore the smoke and flames. Those villages are fine, I'm sure.

After the relentless attacks I had to thwart from the Rhodoks and the Sarranids, I wanted to get my own back. I found a once-Rhodok, Sarranid occupied  castle, and besieged it, knowing they only had a few more men than I did. I used my engineering skill to create a siege tower.


Siege towers are slow.


By the time I reached the walls, I had lost a quarter of my men and broke three shields from incoming arrows. My forces and I killed most of the defenders, only to be greeted by a new wave from the inner castle. My enemies took me prisoner, making me watch them move around the map in super-fast motion, begging to be accompanied by the Benny Hill theme. After escaping, I moved to recruit some proper Khergit troops, and stopped relying on mercenaries.
It soon came to the point that I was so loved by my village of Uhhun, that 35 recruits were joining me at a time, and sometimes I'd get some trained units joining me. Once again dealing with the bandit problem, I had a fearsome, cost effective army now.

The cavalry charges are oh-so-satisfying

From defending my fife and selling my prisoners into slavery, I was now sitting on 55000 denars. This money gets spent on troops, food, books and the ladies of the realm. The system set in place for courtship seems more akin to a bribing system, putting the game half-way between medieval simulator and a piece of social commentary.
I wasn't going to go through with it though. The last thing I want to do in an RPG focussed on large-scale combat is attend aristocratic parties to the end of landing myself a virtual, text-only woman.


Mount & Blade: Warband's single player experience is awesome, and its great value for money, particularly when there's a steam sale on. But the multi-player feels dated. On release, it looks as though it was fresh to be fighting players hand-to hand with a group of 30 or more teammates, but it's not good enough now to warrant buying the game purely for its sake, in my opinion.
Saying that, the new Mount & Blade is in the works (we're going to pretend that With Fire and Sword didn't come out), War of the Roses, which looks promising, graphically at least. It'd be fun to have a reboot of the old castle siege multiplayer mode with a modern engine.


I've thoroughly enjoyed Warband over the past few weeks. If you've got plenty of time you want to do away with, you can't go wrong with this one.