-
Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!
Guild Wars 2 Launch Date announced: August 28th, 2012
- Thread starter Mr. Luchador
- Start date
Whenever I hear about companies promising free content and on the other hand hear jaded gamers claiming ArenaNet won't release any legit free content of their own for GW2, the words "Sorrow's Furance" erupt blazingly into mind along with a rush of nostalgic ecstasy.
I'll never forget it, Sept 7, 2005 (no, I don't have the date memorized, I just looked it up). It was just a Wednesday, logging on as I always would've done... I had heard vaguely about a patch but had no idea it was being released then or what it entailed. As soon as I got in I had people freaking out, offering me "runs to Forge" for free and to try quests with them. Cue 4 hours of playing completely new content, collecting a pile of unique weapons (which hadn't existed in the game before then), chuckling more than once at the inside jokes (Kilroy Stonekin's team shout really got me), and just generally playiing the shit out of a game I had already poured hundreds of hours into by that point. It wasn't until weeks later I learned that that patch had also added the Titan Quests, some of the coolest quests in the game in my humble opinion.
Oh, and just for good measure the patch also added a complete overhaul of how chests work in the gameworld, a ton of UI changes, and the ability to reassign your attribute points for free in any town. They endeared themselves as a company forever that day.
I still have not beaten the hard mode versions of the Titan quests (the ones that get you Gold Zaishen coins). They were damn tough normally!
I still remember The Titan Source. We ended up with only 3 people having to take down the Titans at the end. Super tough. Super fun.
My only fear with this game; if a typical MMO community develops in response to the MMO environment, will changing so many fundamental things about the MMO experience have a negative impact on the community?
To elaborate, I think in some respects MMO communities grow strong through shared suffering. I think things like forced grouping, having to seek out groups for dungeons and story missions, having to rely on this assistance of friends and guild members to pass gated content, and helping them with their content in return, being unable to find a group and instead sitting in town for 3 hours in guild chat, and even commiserating over not being able to play on patch day, as well many other MMO annoyances help to establish and strengthen bonds in the community. Also, the subscription model creates an obligation to play the game everyday, so that end up spending time with largely the same group of people every day. To be clear, I don't want these things back; they ruin the game itself.
But I can't help but feel that now that people are able to play whatever they want, whenever they want, and always make progress even if you only play for a half an hour, and not needing to really rely on other players to progress, as well as never feeling obligated to continue playing after it gets boring, that forming strong communities and close knit groups might take a back seat. I think looking at the GAF community for this game helps to assuage my doubts, as a great community has formed here just on the promise of a great game (though its a bit more than that now that we've played the game first hand). But I wonder how the community will be like 6 months to a year from now.
Only time will tell, but it would be a real shame if a good game and a good community were mutually exclusive, so I hope my fears are baseless.
I've managed to beat the missions and dungeons on hard mode. As well as the hard mode "Beyond" quests for the Rit Hero and also The Villiany of Galrath. The Titan ones are just on another level.
Stick around www.gafguild.com, make it the community you want to be a part of! You've only posted 6 times!
Is it a new character? Don't forget to represent. REPRESENT!So is there a bug, or was I kicked from the guild? Says I don't belong to any, but I still have the GAF specific chat channel I made.
Not that I mind, but I wanted to ask a couple of questions
If not, bug
cripterion
Member
Unable to login so far, stuck on loading screen
serotonina
Member
Anyone else having an issue after creating a new character and watching the intro scene, getting stuck at the loading screen?
No problem with characters created in the other stress tests tho.
No problem with characters created in the other stress tests tho.
The game's crashed on me twice now during character creation. Probably a minute or two after the game launches. Anyone else experiencing similar issues? edit: That's thrice. Not going to bother with it for a while.
Also I heard Necromancer described as a sort of MTG-style, which raised my interest tenfold; is Elementalist similar to that as well?
Also I heard Necromancer described as a sort of MTG-style, which raised my interest tenfold; is Elementalist similar to that as well?
cripterion
Member
Stuck on loading screen for Wayfarer Foothills and can't login with other character cause it was left in the hunger games event :/
Meh, now it tells me my password is incorrect :/
Is it a new character? Don't forget to represent. REPRESENT!
If not, bug
Nah, not new. No option to represent shows up. Oh well... game crashed when I tried to travel to The Grove.
Just reposting since the previous one wasn't an url http://www.twitch.tv/kayos90
Liferebooted
Banned
I can't decide necro or ele =\
Why don't you ever stream our raging LoL games?
Bouncy hair physics confirm it's GOTY status.
flyinpiranha
Member
Yeah, I don't know why I haven't posted more. I've been in kind of a funk lately; chalk it up to post beta depression.
Anyway, I didn't mean to sound so skeptical about this community. You guys are great, and we are going to have tons of fun in the game, of that I have no doubt.
But when you look at a game like WoW, and see that people have stuck with that game for 8 years (some intermittently), more so because of the community than the quality of the game itself, it makes you think about what causes a truly strong community to develop. Based on my own experiences with FFXI, I can say that a lot of what made that community so strong was because they had to be, in order to deal with the more punishing aspects of that game. There were so many roadblocks that intentionally gated content (sub-job quest, missions to unlock airship pass, multiple quests to raise the level cap), which required teamwork (and a large time investment) to complete, and so many of my friendships in game formed around these events. The punishing death penalty and forced grouping caused a lot of problems, but they also lead to a situation where you remember the players who are good at their jobs, and you formed friendships based on group synergy. My fondest memories of the game were of course the other players I interacted with, but so much of those interactions were caused (or at least influenced) by the punishing game design.
I know WoW is a slightly different situation, being more user friendly, but its still steeped in all of the MMO trappings that have kept me away from the genre for so long. I just wonder if the community would have ended up the same, if the game design wasn't so centered on keeping people paying sub fees month after month.
Mr. Luchador
Member
DNS failure!
This should work, kinda long though:
http://gafguild.com/index.php?threads/guild-wars-2-mass-info-for-the-uninitiated-read-me.16/
Names aren't tied to a server. So someone takes a name on one server... it's taken on all.
Definitely a problem IMO.
This is the only reason I'm going to try to be on right away, I'll create 5 random race/classes quickly, and go back through and change them later. Pretty sure there is a timer in place so that if a character is deleted, there is time to recreate it before anyone else can use the name.
NuclearWinter
Member
Same here. Not experienced this problem in any previous builds.
Also random freezes when loading new areas.
Want me to? I could. lol.
Edit: BAH EVERYTHING BREAKS IT.
Mr. Luchador
Member
WvWvW as Guardian - amazing.
If i go to town or go into instance story quests I get DNS error every time. Started happening around the last day of BWE 2. I was willing to over look it while it was just beta but now we're days away it's concerning, restarting the game after switching maps gets old. So far the only advice in the forums was turn off anti virus and firewall which hasn't worked. Hope this gets cleared up it's a fun game otherwise.
Shhh... we don't want any more guardians now do we
Crashed again, can't log back in. I hope they are testing super heavy duty stuff and they have this under control, because the game had been working fine for long. It'd be a shame if the login/crashing experience was indicative of how launch will be.
Mr. Luchador
Member
Yep I was underleveled for it.. (12), barely made it past it. At the top is a lvl 14 elite boss... so good luck.
I gave up, second area has some lighting bs that kills me on 1 hit.
Nostalgic Nightmare
Member
Really tempted to buy this but never played the first and the only MMO I played was WoW.
Would someone be able to answer these for me?
1. What if you don't have many friends that play these types of games, can you still "solo" play your way through? Is the community much more forgiving than WoW in things like raids etc?
2. If I went to say Gamestop to go buy it, would I then be able to install and play? (I'm in US) is there some kind of preview going on right now? I happen to be off this week so that would be nice!
Thanks!
Would someone be able to answer these for me?
1. What if you don't have many friends that play these types of games, can you still "solo" play your way through? Is the community much more forgiving than WoW in things like raids etc?
2. If I went to say Gamestop to go buy it, would I then be able to install and play? (I'm in US) is there some kind of preview going on right now? I happen to be off this week so that would be nice!
Thanks!