Its stuck to my fingers
Community Commentary
Articles that comment on MMO or other gaming communities
Year of the Dragon
21 month ago
So I’m guessing you’ve heard the news, wooped some, pinched yourself and wanted to hug Mike O’Brien until his eyes pop. I’m right there with you. Although I had to hold in the excitement for 8 hours or so as I had demo’s of my own to give.
I could do what many commentators will do and speculate on what this means on where they are in the development schedule & what’s left, but really, there’s no point. Other than knowing we’re on the home straight and that Guild Wars 2 will be in our hands in 99 days at a minimum or 342 days at a maximum, there’s nothing else I wish to try to infer from this news.
I’m excited. I’m also looking at the checklist of stuff I wanted to do before launch and wincing. GW Templates is still in development, and I’m hoping to get it out of test in the next month. All the features are in, its a question of entering the masses of information about Guild Wars skills. Then there’s the additional features I want for the guild’s website. And then seeing what stuff can be offered for Guild Wars 2.
99 days is enough right?
Pricing Halfway House
13 months ago
If like me, you’re an MMO lover, you’ve probably got a few (virtual) boxes sitting on your shelf of titles you’ve tried. Chances are you didn’t fall in love with all of them, but you’ve probably had the odd withdrawl pang a few months (or years) after you cancelled your subscription. And on a dark, lonely night, your eye has wandered over to the shelf and you wonder what’s going on in the world you left behind. Did they finally fix that overpowered class? Are your old guild still playing?
It’s at these moments that MMO business models tend to shoot themselves in the foot. If your game was or has gone free to play then there’s nothing to stop you picking up the game and seeing what’s happened. But if it’s pay to play, there’s a psychological barrier to you getting back in game – will you play it enough to warrant buying a whole month’s extra gaming time?
I’m sure this has been suggested before by someone else, but I think pay to play games need a level between not playing and buying a month’s sub. In the East, players pay for MMOs on the number of hours they play in internet cafes and a similar idea could be very popular in the West. In the situation above it’s going to be far more tempting to pay an amount less than a monthly sub, for a few hours of gametime that expires over a few months than to pay the subscription fee. Priced correctly, it would entice players to give a game another go while still being profitable for a business.
For example, lets say an average subscribed MMO player spends 3 evenings a week in their game, at 2 hours a time, making 24 hours a month in game for £10 (42p an hour). A company could also offer an option to buy 12 hours of game for £6 (50p an hour) that expires 3 months after purchase. An avid player will still buy the subscription as the best cost option for them. Those who want to try the game again or don’t play a lot could buy game time. I have a feeling this option may also be better for parents monitoring how much time their children spend in game. Course there’d have to be some way of stopping players entering long content if there’s only 15 mins left on their clock.
There’s quite a few ways forward with this system, like added value with subscriptions (veteran rewards), but I think it’s something that is missing from the gaming landscape. Getting players to try your game again is something a lot of developers do in the hope of translating that into purchases or subscriptions. Why wait to run another free weekend when you can offer a halfway house between the two that runs all year round?
This blog post was brought to you by the desire to play Aion again.
Guilds in Guild Wars 2: If You Make It, They Will Come
65 months ago
This post was submitted to be part of Guild Mag’s Blog Carnival 2. To see other posts that were entered, check their site from September 25th.
It’s no surprise that any information about guilds in Guild Wars 2 is very highly scrutinised. It’d be like Star Trek Online not being picked over for its adherence to canon set by the TV show, or World of Warcrack not being forever cited as the addiction-inducing widow-maker that the mainstream media like to portray it as. With a word that is inherently social in the game’s title and a plot line that involves drama so heavily, guilds are an important aspect of Guild Wars 2. Since guilds are the only player-made content to be announced so far, its important that players are not hindered from creating the organisations they want to.
The biggest bone of contention around is the decision to let one account join multiple guilds, and the most common objection is that as guilds won’t have the full attention of a player, there won’t be a sense of loyalty and cohesion amongst its members. However looking at other games in the MMO genre, its common to find a single character to single guild relationship. In these games (WoW, Rift, Aion to highlight a few), guilds fare just fine. Some of them are massive, some small, some loosely coherent, some tightly knit. So why the concern?
I’m of the opinion that many leaders in Guild Wars have become lazy at best and arrogant at worst, as they have been able to demand the full attention of their members by the construction of the guild system. Its hard for players to accurately judge the suitability of a guild in a couple of days, so sampling a variety of guilds and finding the right one takes a lot of time. After you’ve been a member for a few weeks, leaving a guild becomes a big deal. This all conspires to make leaders think they’re offering something better than they actually are. I’ve been guilty of it myself.
Cake or cookie? You must choose.
Unfortunately, this isn’t how organisation membership works in real life. Joining a book club doesn’t exclude you from joining a movie club if you have an interest in both and ArenaNet has chosen to change their guild model to echo this. Relating it back in game, the new system really does makes sense. An individual player may have a variety of interests but conversely most guilds are focused on an aspect of game play in order to offer quality with their limited time resources. In Guild Wars when a member wanted to focus on something their current guild didn’t offer, they would have no choice but to leave and find one that did. In Guild Wars 2, they can simply join a guild that helps them fulfil their new focus and need only leave their current one when it stops being relevant to them. This also applies when a player’s playing hours change. The change in the system should mean that fewer people leave a guild because they change jobs or want to take up a niche gaming activity.
However, there’s also nothing to stop players deciding that a guild just isn’t for them and that’s just fine. It’s a good point to look at the concept of loyalty and how it relates to leading a guild. Josiah Royce in his 1908 book The Philosophy of Loyalty gave the short definition of “the willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause”. This makes little sense from the player’s point of view from joining a guild. Loyalty may be what an authoritarian leader desires from their members, but no player joins a guild because they want to be loyal.
The truth is no matter how much time and effort people sink into making a guild, for most members they will be nothing more than organisations of convenience. While the reasons why some players choose to seek guilds are wide and varied, but usually it is because they wish to accomplish something more efficiently and/or require more people to tackle content. This rarely changes no matter what game you are playing, from an FPS to an RTS to an MMO. If you’re a guild leader, let the following horribly mutilated Wayne’s World 2 quote be your mantra – if you make it, they will come. Achieving this is mostly common sense as you’ve been participating in and contributing to communities since the day you were born. For those who like a more formal approach, there’s an ever growing body of literature to help you navigate the pitfalls. If coherence is a concern, draw comfort from the knowledge that people make close communities in the real world even though there are barely any rules about how many communities people can join.
Yup, this is a bucket of awesome - sadly not all the guild stuff is
Let’s talk a bit about drama, because the picture being painted here is not one of Mr Johanson riding a horse and repeatedly swinging his sword. There is the possibility for inter-guild drama, but this will happen no matter what organisational structure ArenaNet choose. Since connections between guilds by virtue of player memberships are likely to be a horribly messy affair, the best that anyone can do is look after what they can (their guild) and inform who they can. Because guilds will be more interconnected, there will be more pressure on the individual to manage their own image as tales of their behaviour will spread.
The flip side to the drama coin comes in the form of splinter groups within guilds – or rather groups of members making their own guilds for private conversations. Rather like gangs in the school playground, this has the potential to make a tough or hostile environment to newcomers. Likewise it may create suspicion amongst guild members excluded from the splinter guild. But again, this isn’t a new problem. It was possible to do this in Guild Wars, just outside the game using instant messengers and IRC. If this is of interest to you, please get in touch as it’s a subject I’m really interested in discussing with people.
With respect to guild reputation, chances are people won’t know that nutter screaming profanities in the middle of the city is a member of a particular guild, as it’s going to be really hard to neatly display all a player’s allegiances on their character’s model. And most won’t pay attention to which guild they are in unless they repeatedly cause a problem.
Overall then, it should be business as usual for guilds and those who run them. Allowing players to join more than one guild doesn’t present leaders with any new problems to overcome. Rather it becomes up to leaders as to how involved they want their members to be with each other. If you’re simply looking to create a pool of people interested in an aspect of the game, your life will be easy. If you’re wanting a group of players with diverse interests that play various aspects of the game together, your life won’t be any more difficult than it would have been in any other game. You may have slightly different challenges, but they are nothing new. In fact, people are more likely to be forgiving of any flaws and hang around longer. This extends to newly formed guilds too, who have a short straw no matter what guild system is used.
The proposed guild system in Guild Wars 2 doesn’t restrict players from creating any type of guild they want to. Making a fun, successful and coherent community starts with an approachable leader, so relax and enjoy yourself – gaming is meant to be fun after all! Make something worth being a part of and people will be part of it.
Eurogamer Expo 2011: Preview
05 months ago
Yup I’m at it again. This Friday I’ll be down in London attending the Eurogamer Expo 2011, meeting lots of familiar and new faces and playing a few games. I didn’t plan on going to this convention at all, but seeing as how our plans for this time of year changed it seems silly not to go to one that’s less than 2 hours drive from my front door.
I’ll be armed with my trusty (and fully charged this time) camera again, and will be sliding my pictures the direction of Will and Talk Tyria. Of course, the pictures will also go up on the gallery linked at the top of my blog in due time and I’ll let you know when they’re there.
Mystic Spiral will be representing again, with 7 of us attending over the course of the 4 days. I’ll also be bringing my Dad along to his first gaming event, who is very nerd friendly after reading “Fantasy Freaks and Gamer Geeks” a couple of years ago (I recommend it by the way). He’s also been an avid gamer as long as I can remember – he taught me to play Lemmings at a really early age and I stole his original Game Boy console at every opportunity. He was quite a serious Civilization 3/4 player at one point and although his gaming now consists of Tiger Woods and alike, It feels like coming full circle. We’ll make a proper gamer of him again!
Keep an eye out over the next week or so for my impressions of the Expo, and how our offering fares next to the German’s. If you spot me at the expo, feel free to come over and say hi. I don’t bite and love putting faces to handles! Likewise, if you fancy going out for a drink Friday or Saturday, tweet or email me (tasha.darke <at> googlemail.com).
Gamescom 2011: Sunday, Ree Soesbee and the Yogscast
25 months ago
This post is a continuation from Gamescom 2011: Saturday’s dash of culture. You may also wish to read Gamescom 2011: Friday and the thief.
To Sunday then and our last day in Cologne. Our flights weren’t until early evening so we all left our hotel and headed back to gamescom to tidy up any loose ends and pass the time. On Friday I’d gotten hands on time with Guild Wars 2 and the thief and had a few questions that wanted answering. Somnium and Jareth wanted to watch the final of the DotA 2 competition and others wanted to play various other games so we all split up.
Heading to the NCSoft stand with Zeflakey, our first port of call was to find Katya and Zerk who were queuing up to have a go on the game. After saying hello and having a quick chat I went looking for Ree, which wasn’t hard as she was only a few paces behind us. I introduced myself and started by asking her about Aleem’s Penance and who Aleem was.
“You know I’m not sure, but you’re right the name does sound familiar.” She paused. “I really don’t know if I can answer that one. Eric Flannum named the areas in Sparkfly Fen.” Smiling she added, “our fans come up with the best questions. One of them asked me earlier how many fingers asura have. There’s 4 on the drawing up there but I thought there were only 3 in game.” Turns out there are only 3 fingers on the in game models. And male asura wear the cutest boxers with little carrots on them.
I asked her why dungeons were being limited to 5 players and started explaining why that was tough as a guild leader wanting to take my guild through dungeons. Ree shook her head. “Don’t do dungeons,” she replied. “Do the big world bosses instead. Some of them take 4 to 5 dynamic events to be completed before they’ll spawn and having numbers will help you a lot. The reason we don’t allow more than 5 in a dungeon is because any more than that and the performance of the game starts to suffer with all the animations. But in the open world we deal with it slightly differently and can cope with the numbers.” That’s laid to rest any possibility of scaling dungeons, but I am quite disappointed with dynamic events (even epic ones) being the only thing to do for large parties of near max level players. With a finite number of bosses I fear the options will get old fast. Enough of that for now though, I have a piece on guilds in Guild Wars 2 coming up in the next few weeks.
Finally I asked her why there’s so much time between the Guild Wars 2 novels being released in the US and Europe. “We don’t have anything to do with that. Its all the publisher. I send them the manuscript and in a few weeks it appears in the book store – we don’t have any more control over it than that. Maybe you can preorder?” she asked.
“Its still a 3-5 week wait for it to be shipped. The first book I was able to buy electronically on Amazon but for the second book they’d blocked UK buyers from the US store.” Ree looked shocked at my reply. “In the end I did order it to be shipped from the States, but it meant I pretty much had to stay off all fansites in the meantime.”
She looked apologetic. “Well I can’t promise anything, like I said its out of my hands but I can bring it up at the next meeting.” I thanked her for her effort on this and the rest of the world she’s helping to make, wished her a good convention and safe trip home.
Entry for the case modding competition
Zeflakey and I wandered around for a while before meeting up with the others for lunch, after which we went to check out the case modding competition. There were some amazing entries; a 1u chassis that had been burnt that housed a computer, a pc that had water pouring over it, buildings and a stunning perspex case that had been etched all over. Jareth had a go on Sonic Generations which actually looks like a surprisingly good game (you can toggle 3d and 2d views), and a few of the others played Zombies Must Die, a party game where players must make their way out of the town while mowing down zombies as best as possible. Check it out – its a perfect game for when you have mates over.
Minecraft house on the fridge
Sadly that was our time up at gamescom. On the way out we stopped by one of the merchandise stalls to get some t-shirts & other bits and bobs. Somnium and I picked up the last pack of Minecraft fridge magnets from the stall. There was one more foam pick axe there which a lady next to us wanted to buy, but the merchant wouldn’t sell, saying they were going to be auctioning off later in the day. She was distraught at the news saying she really wanted to get the pick axe so she could get it signed by Simon and Lewis of the Yogscast who were at the convention. We’d looked for them lots and hadn’t found them, or gotten one of the cardboard hats that were being given out. Thinking she had an impossible task ahead of us we headed to the airport.
As we were going through border control to get on the airport, Somnium tapped me on the arm and whispered to me, “Hun, you see those guys in front of us, isn’t that Simon and Lewis?” I looked and sure enough it was. After following them through passport control we saw that yup they were getting on the same flight as us.
I managed to control myself until we got to passport control in the UK when someone in the party noticed that Lewis had his bag open. The inner fangurl couldn’t be contained any longer and blurted out “Um Lewis your bag is open.” Creepy stalker or excited fan? There’s a fine line. Maybe I crossed it but we all have our heroes and I’ll probably never get another chance to meet them.
So the verdict of the entire trip? Gamescom may have gotten too big to be enjoyable. The length of the queues for the big games is too much for anyone to consider going in unless you have all week or that is the only thing you want to play. As for Guild Wars 2 itself, I’m very impressed with the improvements in PvE, pleasantly surprised at how fluid the thief is compared to my less than awesome experience with the ranger last year.
My concerns for the game have mostly boiled down to the lack of observer mode or replays for pvp, what guilds are going to do as a group and what will the ranger be like once all the tinkering is done.
Bring on Eurogamer Expo!
Gamescom 2011: Thursday, more PvP and parties.
26 months ago
This post is a continuation from Gamescom 2011: Wednesday and PvP
Cosplayers
The next morning we sent TeamFuzzock for another flirt with his favourite Wildstar developer and got the tickets for the party. I should point out that TeamFuzzock and I dated through university, spending 4 years together and breaking up around 3 years ago. We remaining close friends afterwards and he was an usher at my wedding. Zeflakey and TeamFuzzock dated for a few months earlier this year (and no its not weird). So both Zeflakey and I were constantly teasing TeamFuzzock the entire trip about all those flaws you only find out about someone when you’ve dated them and the new woman he apparently had his eye on. To top it off he didn’t really like Wildstar as a game, but the developer was so enthusiastic about it he didn’t have the heart to tell her what he really thought. This would come back to bite him.
I was mostly on my own until lunch as JR had asked me to cover the PvP match and have a chat with Izzy about Conquest. He told me the Battle of Khylo map was the final result of around 30 or 40 iterations and designs which were made, played and discarded or altered. When I asked how many maps there would be in the game, he said as many as they felt would be fun to play, and they would probably make hundreds of maps in the process. In terms of preventing the stalemates we saw in GvG, he said they’d designed Conquest with this in mind. “Using capture points really helps us, because we can easily see when something was captured and count how many points that has earnt.” And of course, that can be communicated to the players easily too. When I asked about observer mode I was told that it was tricky and they were still deciding what to do about observer mode and replays. Fingers crossed my end for both as without them there’s no point releasing PvP at all.
The showcase match started late so I ended up talking to Katiechops and a few of the others from Boon Control who are all very friendly. Katiechops said they had had a few days to practice and were hoping for some really close matches. He recalled how the guild had reacted initially to the game, each rolling different characters to what they usually would have done as there wasn’t a holy trinity and then claiming that every profession they had rolled was the best. Where as the other members played a variety of professions during their matches, he preferred to play guardian. Asking him about the map and the feel of Conquest, he told me he felt the map was quite close and that it offered a lot of options in terms of strategy and line of sight – there were times he’d hidden in houses while waiting for enemy players to run past.
Karasu and Mewulf were also covering the match which was to a packed arena by the time it went on. Previously on Wednesday there were a handful of people around, and earlier that morning half the chairs were full. I estimated around 650 seats in the arena which were all full for the PvP match, people were 4 deep sitting on the floor in front of the stage and people standing several deep on all sides of the arena. Highly anticipated doesn’t cover it. I didn’t see much of the match itself as I was trying to take pictures, but it seemed to go down quite well. I understand looking at just what the elementalist was doing wasn’t overly interesting – and highlights the need for spectators/observers to the match.
From Dust
Afterwards, I met up with the other 7 and had some lunch. We had a quick wander around and snapped a few cosplayers but the volume of people was getting to our group so we agreed to leave early and split up to maximise our time. I jumped on From Dust and had 10-15 minutes on an early stage. I was reminded a lot of Black and White which I played extensively in my younger years. Its a must purchase for me. If you love god games, get it. While waiting for everyone to meet up at the entrance to the convention we snapped a rather good picture of Cologne’s cathedral while my husband played dead due to the muggy heat.
Cologne's cathedral
That night it poured it down. Thunder rolled and lightning lit up the sky as we half ran to Goldfinger’s for the NCSoft VIP Party. This was rain that was angry at the world and wanted to make you have a miserable time because of it. So we got determined not to. Cue the liberal application of vodka and beer. I got to talk to quite a few community members (hai jonny10, bsoltan and poke) and also hung out with Mewulf some more. The bad point of the party is that really most of the people there want to talk, but you can’t because the music is so loud. Still, I had a good night and dodged the hangover the next morning so I’m counting it as a plus.
The highlight of the night? The Wildstar dev coming up to TeamFuzzock to say hi, and he ignored her because he didn’t recognise her without her Wildstar shirt on. GG.
Gamescom 2011: Wednesday and PvP
06 months ago
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.
How to Make an MMO
211 months ago
Take the profession you liked from that MMO you played for 2 weeks, the levelling system from that game you hate but was really popular, the combat from the MMO you first fell in love with, half a dozen skills from last month’s release that looks like its gonna fold, a handful of half baked fresh ideas and a liberal number of plasters. Mix together in a bowl, bake for 4 years and hey presto! You have just released your new game.
This is pretty much the approach that all game studios are taking with their MMOs. ArenaNet included. Now I’m all for the “if is ain’t broke don’t fix it” approach but you wouldn’t add random food items you like to a dish in the hope you end up with a fantastic combination. Pizza, popcorn, lasagne, chocolate and blue cheese served together are unlikely to win Masterchef. Although I’m told chocolate and blue cheese ice cream is especially good.
Musings on the Necromancer
51 year ago
Note: this post has been entered into Guild Mag’s first Blog Carnival on professions.
Necromancers are strange creatures. Rather like real coroners, spending your time around the dead has to be lonely work at the best of times even if you do like the quiet. Minions in general don’t hang around long enough to answer back. Not to mention that awkward silence at parties when you mention your day job and wish you’d just said you were a lawyer instead. I’m of the opinion they’ve had piss poor PR and are quite misunderstood.
In preparing to write this blog post I ended up writing an essay comparing and contrasting the necromancer in both games. Bet you’re glad that didn’t get featured huh? The scientist inside me was rather proud of it – it used long words, had proper structure and formatting – which the inner entertainer shunned. The cliff noted version though is that with respect to versatility in the original game, necromancers are up there with the best of them and its bound to be much the same in the sequel, just in different ways.
Such as Fear.
In all aspects of the word, the necromancer is all over it. People fear death, the dead, the undead. They are enthralled by the mystery and the horror of it all. Not to mention the new necromancer only condition which has causes such a hubbub due to its namesake in the game-that-shall-not-be-named. The irony is that the version yet-to-come will in my eyes be one of the best things to happen to the game.
Got someone attacking a low ally? Fear them away. Someone you need in an even more vulnerable position? Fear them towards your elementalist lady friend who is smiling sweetly like chocolate-wouldn’t-melt whilst conjuring a fiery death. All whilst still allowing their friends to rescue them with condition removal. I see no imbalance here, just dynamic RTS style game play.
I’ll be honest in saying necromancer is far from my favourite Guild Wars profession. I only got a level 20 one in 2008 (3 years into the game) and she rarely gets any of my attention. Generally anything a necromancer can do, a hero can do equally well or better. There seems little point in playing one. Blood is lacklustre, hexes are slow to apply and minion are just better left to the AI. The redesign makes them very very appealing to me. Hell they even managed to make me feel sorry for exploding minions.
My biggest uncertainty with the necromancer, and the mesmer, is that hexes have been removed from the game in favour of new conditions. I agree wholeheartedly with the design decision as I’d hate to have to devote 2 skills to condition and hex removal in my 10 skill bar to be competent in a solo situation. It makes sense balance wise but there’s a real fine line to tread. On one side the conditions won’t be varied enough to mimic how hexes behave in Guild Wars and on the other there will be so many conditions that the average player won’t understand them all. As an example, we haven’t seen a condition that will mimic the effects of Spiteful Spirit or Clumsiness. I’m sure I wouldn’t be the only one who would miss the “stop hitting yourself” style of play if it disappeared from Tyria entirely.
All in all, I’m very happy with the way necromancers are shaping up and how they’re being portrayed in the novels. Fear promises to bring some interesting situations, Death Shroud looks like having a multitude of uses and yet the mystery and intrigue of the profession remains. They’re one of the few professions I am genuinely excited to get my hands on.
Now. Where can I get myself a real bone minion pet? I want to call him Adam for old time’s sake.
- Asuran necromancer. Now that’s a bad-ass.
Seriously…
6What happened yesterday with regards to the “news” about Guild Wars 2 maybe coming on a console was a load of crap. It seems to be a reoccurring theme of late – small piece of maybe news gets twisted in some person’s head, rabid population explodes, community manager has to put it in perspective.
I could write a big long piece here about how I’m disappointed in some people who call themselves “fans” (which isn’t a good word to call oneself in my opinion, look at the etymology for why) or journalists but what’s the point? The people who are causing the image of Guild Wars 2 harm and would benefit from having their actions examined won’t read this.
Thing is knowing these people are actively trashing a game I’ve willingly dedicated a lot of my spare time to doesn’t make me want to continue doing so. It is a given I will play the game for all the flaws I consider it to have and will support my friends and guild mates on their adventures through it. But when it comes to the wider community, trying to do something beneficial when I know it will get shit on just seems like a waste of time and unnecessary stress. Some people may not view that as a loss to the community but if I’m feeling it, how long till others start feeling it too? And more importantly, how long before those who are employed by ArenaNet to deal with the community get fed up of putting their real work on hold to put out fires and decide they’d be better off looking for new jobs?