Quake3World

dammit.

What's the system reqs on this?

Damnit, that sounds really fun.
My nerdheart aches :/

They're not too high; there were some people complaining of poor performance over the weekend, but that's because the beta code is currently CPU bound and not optimised for GPUs yet. But neither me nor my friend with a rig 2 years older than mine had any problems running it at ultra quality.

The problem now is that it really has made all other games look dull and lifeless. I've been mainlining the good stuff all weekend and have had my supply yanked away from me

That above post was overly technical explaining systems and such, but it's incredibly hard to portray exactly how fucking awesome it is to play. The cities are incredible, being massive, glorious constructions fill with NPCs whittering away to each-other, bringing an incredible feeling of life to surroundings. I've never experienced cities in any game, let alone another MMO, that feel so vividly realised. They're remarkable testaments to the skill of the ArenaNet world-builders.
Sure, they need to work on tutorials for certain things, and being a completely new system (it really has no relation to how the original game worked at all), the stats are all currently rather opaque, but it doesn't matter; they'll fix all this stuff, and it's exactly why they're running betas.
What we're going to end up with is a paradigm shift in modern MMOs, something brave and refreshing.
I just hope more MMO makers follow ArenaNet's lead and realise that there's ways to make MMOs other than from under the shadow of WoW.

I'm glad to hear cities aren't lifeless. That's always been a complaint of mine with MMOs; aside form the starting town, the other cities are always a bit sparse. It makes the worlds feel empty.

When the hell do the Beta servers go up for the weekend? I wanna play.

ur kiddin' rite?

It was last weekend and it doesn't happen every weekend. They haven't announced the next one yet.

Oh, I thought it was every weekend until release. Oh well, back to ME3.

Just in case you miss the announcement, they're hosting a server stress test for pre-orders only on Monday, from 2pm EDT (7pm BST) until 9pm EDT (2am BST).

I really need to start paying attention to GW2 news...

I'd DL the client and get downloading now if I were you Trans; the install is about 15GB.

Mat Linnett wrote:I'd DL the client and get downloading now if I were you Trans; the install is about 15GB.

Are you kidding? Until U4EA informed me of my ignorance, I was clicking the Login button like a fiend last weekend.

Transient will be happy to know the next beta event has been announced recently.

Thanks! I totally forgot all about GW2, I've been so busy.

lol massive nerds, etc.

Another beta gone, and yet again, all the other games have lost their lustre.
They've got this thing so damn right it hurts.

I think the levelling curve may need adjustment, although it could just be because of the way I was playing. If you simply follow hearts sequentially in the map [even whilst partaking in any and all random events], you'll soon end up way behind. I was level 20 on the level 24 hearts in my race's 15-25 zone.

I suspect that if you supplement PvE with PvP, crafting etc. it will be better. It's one way to "encourage" participation in all aspects of the game, but seems kind of forced at the moment if all you want to do is PvE without having to grind.

Memphis wrote:I found myself in lvl 18 territory at 12 and was getting my arse kicked, so I went back

That's a problem. If you are playing normally and then find yourself underlevelled and have to go back and repeat something you've already done, it's essentially grinding. Not fun.

Memphis wrote:and then found another, more managable way out of the previous area.

What did you do? I ended up moving from my race's 15-25 to a different race's zone to find new content.

The fact is, doing all the hearts [and POIs, skill points and waypoints] in my zone didn't get me enough XP to be able to keep going. My options were: go back and grind mobs closer to my level and repeat random events until I gained a few levels. PvP. Crafting. Anything else?

Forcing alternate methods of levelling on players is bad design. Having optional alternate methods of levelling is great and adds to variety.

Memphis wrote:I think if you're also actively working trade skills (which I wasn't) you gain XP through that.

Yep, a friend of mine gained almost a whole level using all the materials he had gathered. I didn't bother with crafting as I saw it as a waste of the limited time during which the beta was open.

I managed to play for a whopping 2 hours while not at work. It was fun while it lasted. Can't wait for release!

I had no problems being the level I should have been when moving on to new areas, which is weird. Did you guys do many of the events that popped up?
Also, I didn't really seriously look at crafting until the last day of this beta. I went up 2-3 levels crafting alone, but I was already over 40 by the time I looked into it.
I honestly think I'm going to be able to hit top level in a week, maybe a little over.
By the end of the beta, I was 45.

Of course, there's a lot of people coming to Guild Wars 2 having never played the first, and I think their WoW-oriented sensibilities are going to be somewhat offended by that fact that levelling doesn't take months, and end game won't be about grinding out gear with better stats, just more aesthetic differences.

Personally, I absolutely love that
I spent ages arguing with people in AoC that as long as PvP was more reliant on gear than player skill, it couldn't be considered anywhere near fair, yet they always, ALWAYS argued that getting said gear, even if it took months, was the sign of a better player.

It's another variant of Stockholm Syndrome; companies in traditional MMOs abuse their userbase so badly that eventually, any sign of compassion is seen as a massive display of generosity from the point of view of the abused.
They're also paying a monthly subscription, and if they're paying for it, they're going to defend it any way they can, even if it's plainly complete shit.

Every now and then I forget that this is how traditional MMOs work and I log back in to either AoC or DCUO, only to be confronted by the expectation that I should be happy grinding the same old, limited content over and over again in the hopes that one piece of slightly better gear.

Guild Wars 2 breaks this HARD.
At top level, I'll be able to go ANYWHERE in Tyria and have a rewarding experience, be that open world or dungeon.
And the Karma system means I won't be constrained to repeating the same content in order to get interesting rewards; Karma earned anywhere can be spent on any reward available from any Karma vendor.
Brilliant.

Edit:
Oh, and once you get into it, the crafting is brilliant.
I hit the cooking tree hard on Sunday, and had a great time with it. It's intuitive and the Experimentation side is really rewarding. Putting different ingredients together and getting a result is really cool.
And while you can only have 2 crafting professions active at a time, if you decide to disable one in order to experiment with another, you don't lose the levels or recipes in the disabled profession.
I always thought that taking away your experience in a crafting skill if you wanted to try another was a particularly vicious way of punishing players, so I'm really happy with this little change.

Do I understand correctly that Guild Wars 2 plays out roughly in the same geographical area as the original Guild Wars Prophecies?

Yup, and there's really cool moments of recognition as you come across scenery from the original game that's been affected by 200 years of history.
Lion's Arch for example; the city itself is barely recognisable, until you go for a swim. That's when you realise the original LA has been submerged because of the rising sea level, and you can swim around amongst the ruins.
Similarly, the Temple of the Ages is now underwater in the swamp, yet portals from the Underworld regularly appear on the surface, leading to Aatxe invasions, and the Shadow Behemoth I posted about from last beta.

Sounds good. I'm wondering if I should invest in this, considering there's a good chance none of my friends will be playing this at a normal pace (with which I mean they're not playing it 20 hours a day, storming through the entire game in less than a week)

Mat Linnett secretly works for ArenaNet.

Will there be another beta before release?