The days of reading eloquently written quest dialogues and straining your eyes to spot text bubbles from random NPCs are done according to lead writer for Guild Wars 2, Bobby Stein. When taking a stroll through a city in Guild Wars 2, players will be bombarded with background noise of a bustling city, including conversations between NPCs as they go about their daily business. And those dreadful walls of texts describing new quests are to be replaced with characters strolling up to the player with their requests or coming shouting down the streets of danger and despair.
And that’s not all, because ArenaNet have also assembled a captivating concept art slide show that demonstrates some never before seen pieces of Guild Wars 2 art and is accompanied by actual pieces of in-game music. This video is embedded below along with an overview of Bobby Stein’s newly revealed bits of dialogue information. But this is supplemented by yet more information revealed in a recent in-depth interview over at Univers Virtuels that covers a few interesting gameplay bits such as the ability to draw on the mini map and easily switch between racial capital cities from the get-go!
So read on for a concise overview of all these latest bits of Guild Wars 2 information! And stay tuned to GameDrone for constant updates on Guild Wars 2, but also be sure to keep an eye on the on the official Guild Wars 2 website and ArenaNet company blog for the latest information and media.
Dialogue
- Dialogue pop-up boxes for NPC interaction have been replaced with full voice overs.
- Cities are lively and filled with conversation as NPCs go about their own routines and engage in fully-voiced dialogue with each other.
- Guild Wars 2 will contain voice work the equivalent of more than 60 feature-length films (over 600,000 spoken words).
- There is a sound throttling system in place which ensures that you won’t be bombarded with the same one-liners over and over again during combat.
- Most dialogue in Guild Wars 2 will be presented in a modern format and with an active voice in order to engage players.
- A few characters and races speak in more formal manner with more archaic phrasing and passive language.
- The ArenaNet blog contains a sample audio clip of city and countryside background noise, as well as an audio clip that demonstrates how archaic phrasing and passive language is generally not a good thing.
Cities promise to be not nearly the static gathering places that they are in other MMORPGs
Skills and PvP
- Skill chains are incorporated into a few professions, but not all of them. Elementalists known no such thing as prerequisite skills, for example.
- The difference between a warrior’s banner and shout skills is that a banner acts as an offhand area-of-effect item that can be carried around and remains active until it is destroyed. Shouts on the other hand only affect the immediate surroundings and last for a particular duration.
- Stackable conditions are handled as a stack, so any condition removal that removes that particular condition, e.g.: bleeding, removes the entire stack.
- Most environmental weapons are destructible, so while they offer interesting gameplay and potentially powerful attacks, this is balanced out by their temporary nature.
- Environmental weapons are not reusable, so a thrown rock cannot be picked up for reuse, for example.
- Some monsters can use their own environmental weapons or even generate them. For instance, a jotun can throw his sword at the player, which allows the player to pick it up as an environmental weapon, if they can grab it before the jotun does.
- PvP mode is accessible right after character creation. This is the balanced and competitive PvP mode, not to be confused with large-scale World vs World PvP in the area called the Mists.
- Entering PvP mode will prompt a new character creation screen that allows the player to equip their PvP mode character and create their build by selecting skills and traits.
- The Mists is all about a large-scale World vs World conflict between three servers that regularly rotates servers into different match ups. During these conflicts players can only fight for the server their character is on.
- It will be possible to transfer a character to a different server, but given the nature of World vs World conflict there will be restrictions in place to prevent abuse.
Some professions, such as the Elementalist, don't have chain skills
General
- Guild Wars 2 will feature in-game books for your perusal.
- Cinematics will play a big role in Guild Wars 2 much as they did in the original game.
- The first playable public demo will be available at gamescom in Cologne, Germany next week followed by a showing at PAX Prime in Seattle, United States of America two weeks later.
- This playable demo allows play as a level 1 human character and a level 47 charr character. The former demonstrates the personal storyline system and introduces the basic gameplay, whereas the latter offers some epic battles and higher level abilities, but not much in the way of story in order not to spoil the story that far into the game.
- It will be possible to click & draw on the map to sketch out strategies with your party.
- There will be some way to easily switch languages on the fly.
- Race selection doesn’t matter for players who want to stick together right from the start, because the first asura gate opens up after a quick tutorial segment and allows for teleporting to any of the major racial cities.
- Ghosts of Ascalon was the first book in the currently planned trilogy of Guild Wars books to be released. Edge of Destiny will follow up at the end of this year, to be followed by a third book sometime next year. These books cover some of the 250-year gap between Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2.
- There may be more Guild Wars books if the trilogy does well in stores, which given the current reviews of Ghosts of Ascalon does seem likely.
Artwork and Music Video
ArenaNet has also released a new video containing tons of new artwork that wasn’t presented in the Guild Wars 2 artbook, accompanied by several samples of the musical score for Guild Wars 2! I’ve embedded the YouTube video below, but you’ll probably want to click through to YouTube to watch it in its full 1080p glory!
Should you have missed out on the wealth of Guild Wars 2 information that’s been made public already, then you may wish to read up on the design manifesto, combat system and elementalist profession, the warrior profession and traits system #1 & #2, the ranger profession #1 & #2 & #3, dynamic events system #1 & #2, the personal story system, player personalities, death and healing, leveling, non-combat activities #1 and #2 and activities and travel in Tyria.
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