Man I am exhausted. 5 days of early mornings, late nights, lots of walking, excitement and fun. While I’m not complaining about how long the days were, I think I need a holiday to get over my “holiday”! This year’s gamescom was the best yet, with more to do and see than before so I’ll be breaking up what happened over a few blog posts. This one is mostly focused on Wednesday and PvP.
Wednesday was trade and media day so the halls were relatively quiet and getting to play games was easy. My friends, who go by the handles Zeflakey, Sevenforce and TeamFuzzock, husband Somnium and I got to gamescom early in the morning heading to the NCSoft stand right away. We caught a presentation on Wildstar, the new MMO from Carbine Studios. I really like the style of the game and what they’re trying to do with it, even though I didn’t see anything in it that was overly unique, other than the order that established MMO characteristics were arranged in. One of my friends, TeamFuzzock, was playing the game and got talking with one of the Wildstar devs. For a long time. A really really long time. More about this later.
Karasu from TalkTyria
I wasn’t expecting to get to see any PvP on Wednesday but we heard a rumour some was going on and were taken to the ESL stand by a member of the ArenaNet IT department. We stood and watched what was going on for a while and then Sevenforce and Somnium jumped on and started playing a few matches. Their verdict: its good and they enjoyed it which I consider high praise from Somnium who takes an active interest in watching and playing esports. I noticed a player in their match called “Karasu” and eventually found him standing around with his TalkTyria press pass.
After chatting to him and his cameraman, Mewulf for a bit, I decided to give PvP a go and rolled a Norn guardian. I herped a bit with my skills as to be expected, but mostly I found guardian to be a very dynamic class. Using a sword I had some single target damage skills, could blind and generally kick butt. With a greatsword I had aoe attacks, a long range energy orb, could put down protective lines and more. I found myself flicking around between using offensive and protective skills very naturally, using some of the protective skills to prevent enemies from escaping. I stand by my earlier statements about guardian being a highly skilled class, but I don’t think we’ll see such terrible failures as we did with assassins. They are fun and ideal for those who want to do a bit of everything, rather than dominating the battlefield. Sadly I think we’ll see guardian as being a staple in formal Conquest – the holy trinity isn’t 100% dead and buried.
There’s a more in depth description of my thoughts on PvP on Guild Wars 2 PvP, but in summary – its like alliance battles and an FPS had a baby, it was raised by GvG and is now friends with Guild Wars 2.
The Battle for Khylo
I love it. GvG was always hard to get into by the sheer number of people involved and the hassle in organising everyone to the point they were ready and even then the matches would drag on for 40 mins. If you didn’t have 3 hours minimum, you were screwed. Conquest though is the opposite – if taking down bosses, doing dungeons and similar is getting a bit old, I can just roll whatever I feel like playing, jump into a hot join match and pwn to my heart’s content. Or take it a bit more seriously, get 4 friends and make up a build. Either way, I can get into it if I only have half an hour which means more people playing, more vibrant PvP community and more of a chance of Guild Wars 2 being an esport. Winning all round then.
Somehow TeamFuzzock managed to blag me into the Ubisoft roundtable which was discussing the effect of the internet on how people create games. If you are at all interested in the games industry in a professional context or in esports, I suggest you take a watch. If you like, skip to 20 minutes in where the discussion gets more interesting but I recommend watching the entire thing. It covers how different developers are targeting different portions of your gaming time from the 5 minutes during your breaks to the 2 hours after dinner, improvements that are being made to matchmaking, the importance of esports and a lot lot more. First class stuff.
After grabbing some lunch, the 5 of us wandered the halls taking in the sights. Activision Blizzard seemed to have bought half of hall 6 as usual and the line for Diablo 3 was long. Bethesda’s line for Skyrim beat it though by some way. Right at the back, EA had claimed its patch and I hopped on Need for Speed: The Run which I’ve had my eye on since E3. The controls were a little bit too light for my liking, but it seems a fun enough game even if I was terrible at it.
Somewhere in Hall 7, I lost my husband. Dota 2 will make a widow out of me but I can hardly complain. We all have our hobbies, and his is esports. There are Starcraft 2 and Heroes of Newerth replays going constantly in our house which will become Starcraft 2 and Dota 2 (and Guild Wars 2?) replays in the future. We watched some of the competitors playing for a while and then continued wandering around the halls and heading back to the NCSoft stand.
Sevenforce and TeamFuzzock play Wildstar
While heading back to the PvP area to see if I could grab a few minutes with Izzy or Jon Peters (who were elsewhere it turned out), the others played Wildstar again because there was no queue. And TeamFuzzock got chatting to/started flirting with the same Wildstar developer he was earlier in the day, who promised us tickets to the VIP party Thursday night if we got to the stand early in the morning. Not a problem said we and headed back to the hotel where we were joined by friends Master_Chill, Jareth and his girlfriend.
What follows then is the liberal application of pizza and wine in a pizzeria near Rudolfplatz. And who did we see whilst eating? Izzy going to the pub next door for a meal.
Gamescom 2011: Wednesday and PvP
Man I am exhausted. 5 days of early mornings, late nights, lots of walking, excitement and fun. While I’m not complaining about how long the days were, I think I need a holiday to get over my “holiday”! This year’s gamescom was the best yet, with more to do and see than before so I’ll be breaking up what happened over a few blog posts. This one is mostly focused on Wednesday and PvP.
Wednesday was trade and media day so the halls were relatively quiet and getting to play games was easy. My friends, who go by the handles Zeflakey, Sevenforce and TeamFuzzock, husband Somnium and I got to gamescom early in the morning heading to the NCSoft stand right away. We caught a presentation on Wildstar, the new MMO from Carbine Studios. I really like the style of the game and what they’re trying to do with it, even though I didn’t see anything in it that was overly unique, other than the order that established MMO characteristics were arranged in. One of my friends, TeamFuzzock, was playing the game and got talking with one of the Wildstar devs. For a long time. A really really long time. More about this later.
Karasu from TalkTyria
I wasn’t expecting to get to see any PvP on Wednesday but we heard a rumour some was going on and were taken to the ESL stand by a member of the ArenaNet IT department. We stood and watched what was going on for a while and then Sevenforce and Somnium jumped on and started playing a few matches. Their verdict: its good and they enjoyed it which I consider high praise from Somnium who takes an active interest in watching and playing esports. I noticed a player in their match called “Karasu” and eventually found him standing around with his TalkTyria press pass.
After chatting to him and his cameraman, Mewulf for a bit, I decided to give PvP a go and rolled a Norn guardian. I herped a bit with my skills as to be expected, but mostly I found guardian to be a very dynamic class. Using a sword I had some single target damage skills, could blind and generally kick butt. With a greatsword I had aoe attacks, a long range energy orb, could put down protective lines and more. I found myself flicking around between using offensive and protective skills very naturally, using some of the protective skills to prevent enemies from escaping. I stand by my earlier statements about guardian being a highly skilled class, but I don’t think we’ll see such terrible failures as we did with assassins. They are fun and ideal for those who want to do a bit of everything, rather than dominating the battlefield. Sadly I think we’ll see guardian as being a staple in formal Conquest – the holy trinity isn’t 100% dead and buried.
There’s a more in depth description of my thoughts on PvP on Guild Wars 2 PvP, but in summary – its like alliance battles and an FPS had a baby, it was raised by GvG and is now friends with Guild Wars 2.
The Battle for Khylo
I love it. GvG was always hard to get into by the sheer number of people involved and the hassle in organising everyone to the point they were ready and even then the matches would drag on for 40 mins. If you didn’t have 3 hours minimum, you were screwed. Conquest though is the opposite – if taking down bosses, doing dungeons and similar is getting a bit old, I can just roll whatever I feel like playing, jump into a hot join match and pwn to my heart’s content. Or take it a bit more seriously, get 4 friends and make up a build. Either way, I can get into it if I only have half an hour which means more people playing, more vibrant PvP community and more of a chance of Guild Wars 2 being an esport. Winning all round then.
Somehow TeamFuzzock managed to blag me into the Ubisoft roundtable which was discussing the effect of the internet on how people create games. If you are at all interested in the games industry in a professional context or in esports, I suggest you take a watch. If you like, skip to 20 minutes in where the discussion gets more interesting but I recommend watching the entire thing. It covers how different developers are targeting different portions of your gaming time from the 5 minutes during your breaks to the 2 hours after dinner, improvements that are being made to matchmaking, the importance of esports and a lot lot more. First class stuff.
After grabbing some lunch, the 5 of us wandered the halls taking in the sights. Activision Blizzard seemed to have bought half of hall 6 as usual and the line for Diablo 3 was long. Bethesda’s line for Skyrim beat it though by some way. Right at the back, EA had claimed its patch and I hopped on Need for Speed: The Run which I’ve had my eye on since E3. The controls were a little bit too light for my liking, but it seems a fun enough game even if I was terrible at it.
Somewhere in Hall 7, I lost my husband. Dota 2 will make a widow out of me but I can hardly complain. We all have our hobbies, and his is esports. There are Starcraft 2 and Heroes of Newerth replays going constantly in our house which will become Starcraft 2 and Dota 2 (and Guild Wars 2?) replays in the future. We watched some of the competitors playing for a while and then continued wandering around the halls and heading back to the NCSoft stand.
Sevenforce and TeamFuzzock play Wildstar
While heading back to the PvP area to see if I could grab a few minutes with Izzy or Jon Peters (who were elsewhere it turned out), the others played Wildstar again because there was no queue. And TeamFuzzock got chatting to/started flirting with the same Wildstar developer he was earlier in the day, who promised us tickets to the VIP party Thursday night if we got to the stand early in the morning. Not a problem said we and headed back to the hotel where we were joined by friends Master_Chill, Jareth and his girlfriend.
What follows then is the liberal application of pizza and wine in a pizzeria near Rudolfplatz. And who did we see whilst eating? Izzy going to the pub next door for a meal.
This entry was posted by Tasha on August 22, 2011 at 3:15 pm, and is filed under Community Commentary, Conventions, Guild Wars, MMO Gaming. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0.Both comments and pings are currently closed.