Guild Wars 2: that ding ding ding

Posted by on February 21, 2012 in Features

One of my favorite things about the original Guild Wars is it never turned into that typical late-game MMO interface of rows of hotbars framing the screen, each festooned with tiny icons of impenetrable meaning. In Guild Wars, whatever level you were, however many hours you’d been playing, you only ever had eight skills. Before an adventure, you picked any eight skills you wanted. Your character was always a flexible thing. You could freely rejigger Guild Wars’ equivalent of a talent tree, which tweaked your eight skills in unique ways. But playing Guild Wars was always and only a matter of pressing one of eight buttons.

Guild Wars 2 is both simpler and more complicated. But I’m convinced it’s better for a few reasons, including one reason that means I absolutely, positively, no-question-about-it must go into that swamp pictured up there.

Find out what’s in the swamp after the jump

During the Guild Wars 2 beta, the developers at ArenaNet hung out on Ventrillo channels to answer questions while we played. At one point, after routing a huge enemy force during one of the pitched world vs. world battles, we were charging forward and picking off the stragglers. Someone asked, “What’s a good class for ganking someone? You know, for killing them while they’re trying to run away?”

The ensuing conversation wasn’t about classes. It was, instead, about combinations of classes and weapons. Because when you talk about characters and character builds in Guild Wars 2, those are the fundamental bits of information. Pointing out that you’re a ranger isn’t going to do much good. What is your ranger using?

Unlike Guild Wars 1, you don’t arrange your skills in Guild Wars 2. They’re prearranged into categories, with default positions on the interface and default hotkeys. Keys 1-3 fire off abilities based on your main weapon and how it interacts with your class. For instance, a mesmer’s sword will do different things than a warrior’s sword. Keys 4 and 5 fire off abilities based on your offhand weapon. If you’re wielding a two-handed weapon, it will have five different skills. Furthermore, once you reach a certain level, you unlock a second weapon slot, so you can basically swap out the function of the 1-5 keys.

Key 6 is always your healing skill. Since there are no priests or clerics in Guid Wars 2, every class has its own set of healing skills. You slot here whichever one you choose. Then keys 7-9 are your class abilities, which gradually unlock as you level up. As you accumulate more class abilities, you can slot whichever ones you like, much like the original Guild Wars. You can rearrange these freely any time you’re not in combat. Finally, every class will have some unique mechanics attached to the F1-F4 keys, such as the type of magic an elementalist is using, or how a ranger will command his pet.

So a warrior with a greatsword is going to be a very different build from a warrior with a mace and shield. And a warrior with a greatsword is going to use his greatsword in a very different way than a mesmer with a greatsword. In fact, the primary ability of a mesmer’s greatsword is shooting out long range beams of energy that do damage proportionate to the range to the target. The other four skills are mostly based on maintaining that range. So you can’t just talk about how greatswords work. You have to take into account who’s wielding it. And similarly, you can’t just talk about mesmers. You have to take into account what they’re wielding.

Getting a new weapon is trivially easy. Just buy one for eight copper or whatever. Getting skills to slot into the 6-9 slots isn’t. Basically, you earn a skill point whenever you level up. You spend these to unlock your class skills so you can slot them. Some skills are more expensive than others, so it’s never a one skill point = one skill equation. You have to consider whether to spend your skill points now or save them up for something really juicy. However, ArenaNet does something even more insidious with skill points than making you decide whether to save them: they leave them lying around on the map.

For instance, here you can see I’ve come to the Delanian Foothills.

To the east, in the unexplored areas, there are two blue chevrons. Each of those it a skill point. If I go there, I’ll find some challenge that will give me a skill point. It doesn’t matter what level I am. But it gets me the same reward as leveling up. And you cannot pass up skill points. It’s just not going to happen.

Which brings me to that swamp. I don’t really need to go in there. My storyline seems to be taking me around the swamp. But the map shows a skill point smack dab in the middle of the swamp. I must get it, as surely as I must get an orb in Crackdown, a twinkling artifact in Rift, or one of those infernal question marks in Arkham City. Actually, even more surely, because those things are all collectibles. These blue chevrons are instrumental to my character build!

It turns out that the skill point is out in a stretch of shallow water. Oh, wait, it’s not so shallow. Now I’m swimming, with the option to dive underwater and discover a whole new area, at which point I automatically equip my underwater weapon and therefore change the skills attached to my 1-5 keys. The skill point is at a serpent shrine, where I have to meditate unmolested long enough to fill a progress bar. Which means fighting off these gar/crocodile things circling around overhead.

Plenty of MMOs give you rewards for exploring new places. I can’t think of many that leave such rich treasure out out on the map. Those blue chevrons will directly develop my character, as sure as a pile of experience points that gets me to the next level.

Up next, when worlds collide
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  • Barac Wiley

    Skill point challenges as pseudo-collectibles sounds lovely. Having skills cost more than one point (and only getting one at level up)? Ugh. Hate this mechanic so much whereever I find it. One point should equal one skill or you should always, always get enough at level to be able to afford a new skill, one or the other. The alternative isn’t an interesting dilemma involving whether you save up or spend now, it’s a series of boring levels where you can’t afford the primary new treat that comes with levelling.

    I’m also not wild about having weapons constitute the majority of the skill bar, even if they do differ in function between classes. It lowers the control you personally have by a fair amount.

  • Anonymous

    In the update on the ArenaNet blog today, there was mention of jumping puzzles in the environment.  Were the skill locations that you discovered stuff like the above or nightmares like jumping puzzles?

  • Anonymous

    No jumping puzzles that I saw, and the few skill point collectibles I grabbed were either mission based or involved securing a point from critters.

    Jumping puzzles, huh? That does sound vaguely terrible, though. One of the things I loved in Guild Wars 1 was the absolute lack of jumping.

  • Anonymous

    The varying skill points costs are definitely a matter of some skills being more powerful than others, or some relying more on synergies, or specific conditions. It would be pretty simplistic to boil it all down to each skill costing one point. Varying costs lead to tougher choices about what to get and when to get it.

    I’m not sure what you mean when you say weapon-related skills lower control. If anything, it gives you more control. I believe my mesmer had about at least a half dozen weapons to choose from. Being able to slot any two actually gives me an immense amount of control.

    By the way, there’s also a talent tree (called traits) that gives you even more control over how you build your character. These progress as a straight-up one/level rate once you hit level 11. And every five points, you unlock some pretty cool bonus abilities.

  • Barac Wiley

    Having varied costs for skills is one thing. That’s not bad in and of itself, and actually plays very well with having sources of skill points outside of levelling. It’s the combination of expensive skills with only earning a single point per level that drives me crazy when games do it (well, not -just- a single point per level. Any time the points work out where you can level and not be able to afford to actually buy anything with your points awarded for that level.).

    And weapon related skills lower control because they assign skills in blocks. In Guild Wars, I could put any skill in any of those eight slots (though, admittedly, only one elite skill at a time). Unless I’m vastly misunderstanding you, in Guild Wars 2, slots 1-5 come in blocks of a minimum of two skills (for the offhand weapon) and as great as 5 skills (for a two-hander). You may be able to easily swap those blocks around, but they’re still grouped together.

  • chequers

    Great articles on this game so far. Looking forward to reading more.

  • Anonymous

    Yep, that’s pretty much how it works. As I wrote, it’s more structured than Guild Wars 1. You’re right that this structure takes away a certain amount of control, but I don’t think that’s inherently a bad thing. It’ll certainly make Guild Wars 2 a much better game to ease into for new players. And you still have plenty of control with the class skills, your healing skill, your traits, and even the inventory item upgrades. And don’t forget how various class mechanics might interact with various skills.

    But, yes, I agree with you that you have less control than you did in Guild Wars 1. This is not having a huge pile of skills dumped into your lap and letting you just pick the eight you want.

  • Barac Wiley

    I’ll definitely have to see how it plays out. In principle I’m against ceding control, all other factors being equal…but there have clearly been plenty of other design changes that may well compensate.

  • Anonymous

    You’re not making me any less excited for this game :<

    Decoupling skill point rewards from the slow, tedious leveling process is one of the great ideas GW1 had, and I'm glad to see it in GW2. If you only do quests to get a level, and you only get levels to get skills, which is mostly the case in Diku-based MMOs, why not just skip the middleman?

    Thanks for writing the diaries!

  • Anonymous

    You have 1-5 as weapon skills, but you can have 2 weapons equipped and switchable at the time, so you actually have 1a-5a and 1b-5b.   

    So that brings the total to 15 (as opposed to 8 in the original Guild Wars).  

    You also have F1-F4, your class skills.  For Elementalists (and possibly other classes?) those skills change your 1-5 bar, so I think they can have 3-4 elemental variants of those 10 skills.  For the Rangers, for example, F1-F4 are your pet control skills, so they don’t use up your primary combat skill slots.  

    I was initially pretty down on the system for the same reasons you are, but the more I learn about it (and the more footage I see of people playing), the more it starts to make sense to me.

  • Anonymous

    Here’s what “Jumping Puzzle” means, apparently.  I can see why you would call it that, but it is more like extreme exploration, I think: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oYfi4cVbYM

  • Anonymous

    Ugh. Well, there’s one skill point I’m never getting. That looked horrible.

    However, I don’t mind at all if they want to put platform sequences like that in the game. Some people dig that stuff and it affords them a cool sense of discovery. So long as I don’t have to do it. There were about four times in that video that I’m sure I would have missed the jump and had to start the whole freakin’ thing over from the beginning.

  • http://twitter.com/CHGardiner Chris Gardiner

    I am *hungry* for this. Encouraging exploration and making interacting with the world a more important part of play is lovely.

    How different does the combat feel to traditional MMO combat – it looks faster and more reactive than WoW, but does you still sink into that MMO habit of clicking the same buttons in an optimal order? I loved the tactical challenge of GW1 combat, which typically pitted groups with diverse skills against each other rather than individual combatants. Depending on the group makeup you were fighting you might have to change tactics in each battle considerably.

  • Slabgar

    One thing to keep in mind is that the leveling rate is much higher, and the leveling curve is pretty flat.  That, combined with skill points out in the world, make leveling less monumental than simply adventuring, which I think I’m pretty happy with.