Character Panorama

Just a bit of eye candy (click for bigger version):

That's all my current characters from Guild Wars, excepting the neglected and unplayed PvP-only character, who serves right now as a mule. Maybe next time I do a panorama (which will probably be after I get more folks in elite armors), I'll include her. Ryn is a multipurpose mule; he's also placeholding a name for Guild Wars 2 for me. (A "mule", for those who don't know, is a character made principally to hold excess items. There's storage in GW but even with all the paid add-ons, not enough for a packrat like me.) He's been played a bit, too, but probably won't get much more play time overall.

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.

Bartle Test

The Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology is a short quiz that breaks people down into several categories of game playing style. It's basically the Meyers-Brigg of gaming. The results are expressed in percentages, with a total of 200% through the four categories: Explorer, Socializer, Achiever, Killer. They mean more or less what they sound like: explorers like to learn about the world, socializers like to interact with others, achievers are goal-oriented (sometimes self-imposed), and killers enjoy the combat most (both in PvE and PvP).

Guild Wars Glossary (Appendices)

The main glossary was already large, and this is pretty word-filled as well, so I split the two up.

Last edited: 22 Feb 2011

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.