Eric Flannum on the Guild Wars 2 G-Star Demo
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This is a big week for us here at ArenaNet—we’re showing off a brand new demo build of Guild Wars 2 at G-Star, Korea’s premier game show. Since we’re constantly adding to and refining the game, this latest demo build contains some improvements over what we’ve shown publicly in the past.
Since most of our Western fans are unlikely able to attend G-Star—and may even have trouble finding Western media sources covering G-Star—we thought we would give you a blog post about the demo and some of the new and improved features that it shows off.
G-Star Demo Creation
When we found out that we had an opportunity to be featured by NCsoft at this year’s G-Star, we knew that it was an opportunity we couldn’t pass on.
The very first thing we had to consider was that the demo would need to be in Korean. This meant adding Korean text and voice to the game as well as overcoming some of the technical issues inherent in displaying the Korean alphabet. Due to these challenges—and the fact that Korean players haven’t had an opportunity to play the game yet—we decided to focus on preparing the human starting experience for the demo. Aiming for this narrower experience allowed us to do the translations and voice recordings that we needed for the demo—and make certain that they were done well.
We also wanted to show off our giant boss monsters, and for each demo to end with an exciting encounter. Because of this, the demo also includes the boss fights against Tequatl the Sunless (seen below), the Shadow Behemoth, and the Shatterer. When they reach the last ten minutes of the demo, players are prompted with a “special demo opportunity” and can go fight one of these three boss monsters.
That’s a brief breakdown of how the demo is structured, but there are a lot of new and improved features in the demo as well.
The very first thing you’ll notice is that we’ve changed some things about character creation and customization. I’ll let Character Artist Team Lead Aaron Coberly tell you about that.
— Eric Flannum
Character Creation and Customization
With Guild Wars 2, we are giving our players many different ways to customize their characters, and we’ve revamped a number of the systems involved: armor dye, hair style and color, skin color, and face style. We’ve also added a physique or body-type feature and a face-customization system. With face customization, we will give players the ability to change the size and shape of major facial features: eyes, nose, mouth, chin, and jaw. With all of our customization options, every player will be able to differentiate themselves from the crowd.
Check out the video below for a closer look at the customization options that will be available in Guild Wars 2. This video just scratches the surface of the range of character customization in the game.
But the updated character customization isn’t the only improvement we’ve made in the G-Star demo build. I’ll let Lead UI Artist Vicki Ebberts fill you in on the updated user interface players at G-Star will be experiencing.
— Aaron Coberly
UI Improvements
Something new that we’re excited to show at G-Star is what we are internally calling our “Big Beefy” UI.
As we progressed further with UI development, we discovered that we really needed more room to effectively display important information, so we came up with a system that allowed for bigger UI elements. A great example of this is in our new Hero panel, which is now a bit larger than it was before.
Preparing for the demo was also a great opportunity for the UI team to go in and refine a few things that help new players learn how to play our game. For example, we updated our hints to stand out from the background a bit more and we added an animated “New Mail” alert that pops on-screen to help guide players when story-related messages land in their inbox.
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— Vicki Ebberts
Learning New Skills
When we first started showing the game, skills were acquired by speaking to a trainer and purchasing them. This method followed a fairly standard MMO convention, and while there isn’t anything inherently terrible about it, we felt that we could come up with something better for Guild Wars 2. We wanted a system that would better teach how our skills worked and bring back the skill collection aspect that was very much a part of the original Guild Wars. With that in mind, we started to our skill-acquisition system.
The first step for us was recognizing that we have two very different types of skills in the game. First, we have weapon skills, which are tied to a specific category of weapon and based on the profession of the character. Then we have the healing, utility, and elite skills, which make up the right side of the skill bar. These skills are all slotted by the player and can be based either on profession or race.
For weapon skills, like the ones you see below, we wanted to teach that they were tied to the weapon being used. Because of this, we have gone to a method in which killing enemies with a weapon unlocks the skills for that weapon. This also helps teach how the weapon works since the player unlocks the skills in a particular order and learns to incorporate the new skills into their play style. The one thing that we knew we didn’t want to do is to make it feel like a grind—which is always a danger with a system like this. The skills unlock quickly, and once unlocked, they become more powerful as the player levels. At its core, this system is designed to teach the skills and not make the player feel like they are grinding.
The healing, utility, and elite skills (seen below) are now unlocked with skill points. Each skill may cost a variable number of skill points to unlock, but once the player is able to slot a particular type of skill, they may unlock the skills in any order that they choose. For example, if I *unlocked my elite skill slot as a norn warrior, I may choose to spend my skill points to unlock Norn Bear Form (a norn racial elite skill) or Rampage (a warrior elite skill).
Skill points can be acquired by undertaking what we call a skill challenge. There are 200 skill challenges in the game, and they range from defeating tough opponents, to answering riddles, to drinking a particularly potent drink.
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Some of our players may recognize “skill challenges” as being similar to a system we spoke about a while back called “profession challenges.” These two systems are one and the same. In the past, profession challenges were specific to a particular profession and were used to acquire traits. In playing these challenges, we found that they tended to split up people who were trying to play together. One player would want to go to one spot on the map to find their profession challenge, while their friend would want to go somewhere else to find a different profession challenge. Because this had an adverse affect on players being able to play together, we decided that it was better suited to skill acquisition than something as profession specific as traits.
This, of course, meant that we needed a new way to acquire traits, and since we were in the middle of revamping our trait system, it felt like a good time to make the change. We’ll talk about our new trait system in an upcoming blog post, so until then, I hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about the G-Star demo and all of the exciting new things going into the game.
Stay tuned, because tomorrow cinematics artist Chuck Jackman is going to show off the improved cinematic conversation cut scenes that we’ve included in the G-Star demo. We’ll see you then!
— Eric Flannum
UPDATE: Check out the incredibly busy G-Star booth! We’ve had incredible response from Korean players so far, who have been packing our largest ever tradeshow booth waiting to play the new Guild Wars 2 demo. For more photos, visit our Flickr stream!
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