Monday, October 18, 2010

Guild Wars 2: Two good things, one less so

A few things from the Guild Wars 2 front: dye, dungeons, and the Hall of Monuments (which is also news on the Guild Wars 1 front).

Armor Customization


Armor dye is currently sitting at 256 colours, and the person in charge was given the okay to include more if she wants. That's a really good palette for game customization, especially with attention given to making sure there are colours that will look good on various materials ("realistic metals" was one of the things the designer was going for, which is nice). Add that to the fact that most armor pieces have three dyeable parts (smaller pieces may have fewer, and a few types of larger pieces may have four), and you've got a system with a lot of freedom in how you look. Some people may not care about that, but I think most gamers really like to indivdiualize their character.

Colors will be unlocked account-wide, and some may be via the cash shop (no word on if that means "only via the cash shop" or "also via the cash shop"; I'm hoping for the latter). Every race has its own subset of starting colours, so if you, like me, want to make one of every race anyhow, you'll unlock a fair variety just by making those characters. And as we saw in the demo, they'll be sortable in various ways when you're dying your armor, and you'll be able to mark certain colours as favorites (no idea if that's character- or account-based, though I hope in this case it's the former, since I will use different colours on different characters).

The default colours on armor is going to be based on material: cloth will be beige (like undyed linen), leather a darkish brown (raw calfskin), and metal steel grey, so even your base armor colours will be somewhat nicer than the old GW1 grey.

The only real problem is there's still no word on weapon dyeability. I'd like to think they'll extend this to weapons, but because they seem to be going with very specific looks for various types of weapons, I don't know.

Dungeons


It's been confirmed that dungeons are tuned to five people. Take in fewer, and it'll get harder, or possibly undoable. I am not happy with this.

Right now, the game is divided into three basic PvE arenas: your personal story, events (and related overworld things), and dungeons. Some people have noticed this breaks nicely into solo, flexible, and group areas. But there's a difference in the first two cases.

Personal stories are intentionally soloable, but you can take friends along, and the game will automatically scale to account for the extra bodies. Everyone who participates gets something out of it, even if only the team leader's story is actually advanced.

Events are ad-hoc group-ups that you can join whether solo, in a full group, or anything in between; everyone on the field works towards the same goal without worrying about formalized grouping. Some may be soloable, some may not be completable without other players present, but it's still flexible.

Dungeons, though? Dungeons have no such flexibility. Either you take in a full party, or you make it more and more likely with each "missing" player that you'll be unable to complete the dungeon.

Ostensibly this is because some players want a group challenge that requires coordination. That's fine... but you can let those people have that and make it possible for players to finish a dungeon without being in a full group. City of Heroes does this with their instanced missions, by using a difficulty setting—actually, of late, two difficulty settings. One controls how many enemies appear, and the other how difficult the enemies are. Since types of drops you get are based on types of enemies you face, people who opt for harder enemies end up with better rewards, while those who opt for more enemies just get more drops statistically.

There is no reason, in a game that already includes scalability—including boss complexity—to not implement a similar system for dungeons. The reason of "because some players want this kind of challenge" doesn't work here, because they can have that kind of challenge (including the attendant larger rewards) without in any way making it so that people who either don't want to or can't easily play in full groups are barred access to one entire type of PvE.

If this were PvP we were talking about I'd have no problem with it; organized PvP is best balanced by having set team sizes. Of course, in GW2's case, there's even an entire type of PvP that doesn't require you to be in full groups, that being World vs World (vs World), which just makes the decision about dungeons even more bewildering.

I wouldn't even mind if there were a small handful of dungeons where this wasn't possible. City of Heroes has a type of gameplay I mostly didn't do because of team size requirements... but eventually they made it possible to completely ignore that and still get similar rewards, albeit rather more slowly, which made that far more palatable to me. I don't mind having to take longer to get the rewards because I mainly play with only my SO, but I do mind not having the option to get them at all—particularly when they've also said that a lot of armor sets in the game are only available as dungeon rewards.

So I am not happy with them for doing it this way. It's the first thing about how they designed the game I've felt entirely negative about.

The Hall of Monuments


Guild Wars 1 players who own Eye of the North already know about the Hall of Monuments: a place you can display various collections and accomplishments. ANet said a while back that they would be linking the HoM with rewards in GW2, and now they've revealed what those rewards will be, and put up a calculator to help you figure out what you're eligible for, and what else you'd have to do to max out your rewards.

I think they handled this very well. They went with a system that rewards long-term loyalty, makes it possible for casual players to get most or all of the physical awards, and still gives hardcore players a few rare titles to shoot for. It's not quite perfect—I'd have preferred to see a bit more variety available—but it's pretty darn good despite that. I figure I'll top out the physical rewards in the next few months simply by doing what I was doing already, and I may even be able to get the top-end title at some point, although that will probably be post-GW2 release at the rate I'm going.

And yes, that means that if you have a Hall of Monuments, you can keep filling it even after GW2 comes out. Sure, you might be more interested in playing GW2 than going back to GW1 and working on your Drunkard title, but if you want some of the other rewards, you don't have a time limit.

And if you need some help figuring out how to fill the monument to the max, you can take a look at these articles on massively.com. I also intend to write up some thoughts on the various ways to work your way to 30 points (where you get the last physical reward) and 50 points (where you get the last title), so you can keep an eye out for that as well.

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