And... I'm a bit irritated again

[Edited/Updated 25 Feb]

Okay, so, this week is Guild Wars 2 norn week. The Monday article is basically about a) norn aren't just big humans and b) here's some things that might make you want to play one.

The picture included was, of course, full of boob:

Oh, right, Guild Wars 2

So, I realized the other day I haven't posted for a couple months.

Part of this is I really haven't had much to talk about. Until a few weeks ago, there wasn't anything new coming out of ANet about Guild Wars 2, so that topic sort of exhausted itself. It's not that I'm not still looking forward to the game, but there wasn't much to comment on. I could've mentioned going through Dark Cloud II (aka Dark Chronicle outside the U.S.) or my progress in Guild Wars, but, er, I didn't.

Let's rectify that with a long, rambling post about Guild Wars 2.

"Samus is a Girl"

I was skimming through TV Tropes list of tropes and came across Samus is a Girl (warning: link clicking can lead to sudden loss of time). It's one I knew about already, but I was already thinking about gender issues thanks to a book I was reading that was set in the 50s-70s time period following the career of a woman, which had a lot of focus on how hard it was for her to convince people she was competent and/or should be promoted, simply because she didn't have a Y chromosone. (Yes, this is related to gaming.... read on.)

GW2: What I don't like to hear

[Edited 22 Oct.]
It occurred to me today, as I looked at the latest PC Gamer article, that GW2 had until recently only released news I was either felt fully positive to, or neutrally to with a "let's see how they actually do this" sort of feel. Now it feels like it's going downhill.

I've already mentioned how much I don't like the inflexibility of dungeon team sizes despite the flexibility of other places and the already included robust scaling system. What I forgot to mention is that I also don't like the way you'd have to run the same dungeon 7 times to get a full armor set out of it (first time in 'story mode' gives you a weapon, then one armor per run, which feels like it's tilting to WoW repetitiveness).

Now I'm starting to feel really uneasy about the microtransactions.

Or.... not (GW2)

Before I get bitchy, I should note that PC Gamer did a pretty good cover story on GW2 in their latest issue, which they've now put online. For the rest of this week, they're publishing supplementary material online as well. Which is where today's quote comes from:

From the roles you’ll assume, to the dungeons you’ll brave, to the NPCs you’ll interact with, ArenaNet’s flexible design diminishes barriers in an effort to empower players to play how they want to play.

Unless, of course, you want to play dungeons with anything less than a full group (or, Heaven forbid, solo). Then the barrier is still there.

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).

Guild Wars 2: Wishlist, further comments

Some more post-demo thoughts:

Guild Wars 2: Info from gamescom demos

I'm gonna summarize what I've learned from the official GW2 demos (both what tiny amount I can understand in German and what I saw in the demos visually) and the vast wealth of info from fans and media alike. Many props to the fine people at Guild Wars 2 Guru who have provided a great deal of the info and pointers to info sources that I'm basing this post on. I also will be, of course, putting in my opinions on what I've learned.

Guild Wars 2: The Ranger

[ETA new info x3; shoulda waited before posting, but, well, Ranger is usually my favorite profession, so...]

So, I'm a little surprised; the ranger doesn't have access to guns. However, they have access to more hand-to-hand and/or thrown weapons than I would've guessed. So there's that.

The article could use a bit more detail (it feels a little rushed, frankly) on how pets work, but it sounds as if basically by being a ranger, you can have a pet without compromising your other skills, having access to up to three pets and those pets having access to skills of their own. I hope that's truly the case; one of the more frustrating parts of playing a ranger in GW1 is trying to put together an effective skill bar that makes it worth taking the pet but still allows you personally to do much of anything except shoot things. I've got a bar I like with a couple variations on Xylia, especially now that I've got Heal as One (which gives a self+pet heal and lets the pet steal health with attacks for a while), but having more freedom is something I'm looking forward to.

I'm less happy about this:

Guild Wars 2: Combat Isn't Everything

With the introduction of the branching personal storyline and the existence of world events—some of which can be triggered by non-combat activities—the quest and goal system for Guild Wars 2 seems to have been covered fairly well, however much I might want for a lot more details that I imagine I'm simply going to have to wait until the game is released to find out. But most games, Guild Wars included (where I'm currently standing on a ring trying to increase my Lucky and Unlucky points), have a non-combat feature or two. Guild Wars 2 is planning on having a few more than usual.

Guild Wars 2: Profession Speculation (Part 3: Non-Scholars)

I've got several possibilities for medium-armor types, but I actually only have one solid idea for the second soldier class, so I'm going to combine them into one note.

Guild Wars 2: Profession Speculation (Part 2: Scholars)

Now for the fun part: pure speculation. The speculation is based on four things: profession-related concept art, the silhouetted place-markers on the official site's profession page, some additional art and information in the art book (which I, alas, do not have, but have seen a few pictures from online and read discussion of), and a healthy smattering of wishful thinking.

This post will feature speculation about the "scholar" type professions. I've included more than two (the remaining unknown ones) here as possibilities, because narrowing it down further than that is hard, though I'll try to narrow it down to two.

Guild Wars 2: Profession Speculation (Part 1: Intro)

♫ Anticipation... anticipation... it's making me wait. ♫

One of the unfortunate side-effects of following a game's development is that it can take a very long time for confirmed information to start being released by the developers. And those wily bastards, knowing it will keep people paying attention, often release things such as concept art, or little dribs and drabs of information with no details. Naturally, this leads to a great deal of speculation in the community about the game, which is just what they want. I've seen a fair amount of this, and have my own to boreentertain you with.

Guild Wars 2: Pew Pew Clang Boom

Now that they've released the second profession and some more combat-related information, I wanted to talk a bit about combat. I'll also be doing a post filled with guesses about the remaining professions, because wild guessing is fun!

Quick diversion first: for those of you non-existent readers who haven't checked it out yet: Guild Wars 2 Official Site, from which you can also get to their blog, which sometimes has extra details, and where they also do a link roundup of official interviews and write-ups by game and MMO sites.

Guild Wars 2: It's mmoRPG

The design of dynamic events are likely to put the "multiplayer" more strongly to the forefront of Guild Wars 2 than some MMOs achieve, particularly with persistent results. But that's not where they're stopping with trying to make things more dynamic and interesting all-around. They want to emphasize the RPG influence as well, through the use of a personal storyline.

Guild Wars 2: The 2nd M

One of the downsides of online gaming for someone like me is that, while I'm not really averse to grouping up with other people, for the most part I tend prefer to play with, well, just me and my SO, really. It's not that I won't play with others, certainly, but when one has an erratic gaming schedule (and even sometimes drops a game for several months at a time to do something else), it's very hard to get into and stay in any kind of guild... and even in the one case I have, the people involved were always moving much faster in various ways because they had more time in-game. So as you can imagine, I tend to prefer solo- (or, well, duo-) friendly MMOs.

However, there's one type of exception to this, and that's what you could call area or world events. The introduction of Rikti raids in City of Heroes, for instance, gave players a chance to temporarily group up to defeat a major menace, one that needed a fairly large number of players working together to take down. And I've always wished there would be more of that sort of casual, temporary grouping in MMOs.

Well, guess what? Guild Wars 2 appears to be planning on giving me that.

Guild Wars 2: Graphics

So. Guild Wars 2.

I'm still not happy with what I'm seeing of the human, norn, and sylvari female outfits, which are boobtastic and midriff-baring to an extent that just fricking annoys me (although at least in the case of the Norn, the guys seem to be getting a similar treatment, so I'll give 'em a pass on that race, at least), but let's put that aside for now to concentrate on the parts that I am decidedly not annoyed with.

Before I get into gameplay design things that are making me continue to be interested, let's tackle the other thing we've gotten a decent glimpse of: graphics.

I ought to be excited...

They've released more information on Guild Wars 2—some details on how combat is going to work, and some information on the first class. I ought to be excited, because I've been looking forward to this, but sadly, I'm not.

And it's for what I'm sure some people would consider a really stupid reason, which is this: the first class they released information on is a revamp of the Elementalist from the first game, and (much like the Elementalists in the first game), the human female is only wearing clothing by the loosest definition of the word "clothing".

And if that's what the human female soft armor is going to look like, I'm not going to be playing a human female soft-armor class. Especially when the male Elementalist shown is covered from head to toe, it irritates me when the woman's outfit is a bra and what from the back looks like a long skirt but from the front looks like a loin cloth.

I realize this is only one piece of armor, and I should wait and find out more, but it really, really taints the good information for me when the publicity for the game focuses on boobs. The human race stills show women in heavy armor that covers virtually nothing it ought to, and this is just more of the same, and it's really turning me off.

On comparisons to WoW

Because of World of Warcraft's extremely large player base and long-standing popularity, it's inevitable that any new MMO, particularly fantasy MMOs, will be compared to it. I'm not annoyed by that part, but I am annoyed at how the conversations frequently go.

There are a lot of people who basically say "[New Game X] has these features in common with WoW; why can't you do something original?" I hate to tell you this, but a lot of those features aren't original to WoW, either. Things like racial bonuses (D&D), weapons limited by class (D&D), auction houses (MUDs), the basic makeup of classes (D&D) and races (D&D), and even the concept of a talent tree (similar to skill/class PnP combos like Rolemaster) are things that have existed in fantasy gaming for a long, long time. WoW popularized many of these things but they did not invent them.

There are a number of things common to fantasy games and a number of things common to MMOs that WoW uses. That doesn't mean that other games using them are copying WoW; it means there's some fairly standard things people making fantasy games and MMOs do. WoW is unique not because of its general mechanics, but because of the specifics... and even games that use very similar mechanics can be vastly different because of that. So dismissing a game as being a "WoW clone" because they're using some really standard game and gameplay mechanics without at all even being willing to look into the details is... well, the word I want is probably "idiotic". Seriously.

I'm not saying there aren't games out there trying to capitalize on WoW's popularity by making a game that's similar in both mechanics and details, mind you. It's just that it seems like the only way to not get labeled a "WoW clone" by some people is to be in an entirely different genre (and even then...). And those people are really, really vocal, so I keep running across them, and it keeps being irritating. Luckily, I have a blog I can rant on about it, and just leave them to discuss their mistaken ideas by themselves.

Magical Skin

Here's something that makes my favorite hobby sometimes annoying: For the last 10-15 years, there have been hundreds of magazine articles, newsgroup posts, letters to the editor, and blog posts about how women who game are turned off by the way female characters are generally modeled, animated, and dressed. And yet there's been little to no change in this... and, in fact, in some ways, it's gotten worse. Better graphics and better physics brought us jiggle physics, which naturally were applied immediately to breasts. And it brought us more realistics body modeling, which led to increased breast focus and scoliosis swayed backs that emphasize the ass.