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[Ulphus]

Even conventionnal MMOs are unplayable with latency. I do not see much of a difference personnally. When your countdowns and specials start to activate 2-5 sec after you ordered them, when half of them get lost in the void between the client and the server due to lag, well...

Everyone has latency. It's a measure. Whether you have good latency or bad latency depends not only on your network, but also a bit on the game style and the net code in the game.

I know people who play say, world of tanks, and who give up playing when it gets to 200ms because that's too laggy.

I never have less than 200ms.

Red Orchestra 2 is quite playable at 250ms, but you do lose a few more reflex-fights at close range.

Day Z is pretty terrible for pvp at those sorts of pings, but has code that puts the zombies under control of your client when they're close to you (so ping is irrelevant for pve). Luckily, there are NZ servers, so I'm usually well under 100ms, but that does mean I can't play well with friends in the UK.

Eve is pretty fantastic for most fights, because 250ms doesn't make that much difference. You don't need to aim, you just lock your target and tell your guns to fire, and when they reload, tell them again.

Eve was my only MMO.

Looking over a friends shoulder at WoW, it seemed that there were game play designed to not be latency critical.

If you actually have to react to monsters/other players to avoid being stomped, to aim your attacks against someone who might already have moved sideways for the last quarter of a second, that seems less likely to be playable on servers that aren't close by.

[Lyn Farel]

I really doubt that 200 ms of latency is an issue for TERA. Above 1s, probably. Like in any conventionnal MMO.

[Rin Kaelestria]

If anyone is interesting in the last Beta Event Weekend for GW2 (and thus trying out the game), some places on the web out there are offering beta keys. Alienware Arena is giving away some for the next few days.

Also, their is a small list of sites holding various contests for keys as well. The list is on the GW2 Facebook page.

[Lyn Farel]

If anyone is interesting

You dirty mysanthropist 

[Victoria Stecker]

http://www.cad-comic.com/sillies/20090820

Relevant. And apparently three years old. How long has this game been in the works?

[Rin Kaelestria]

If anyone is interesting

You dirty mysanthropist 

Harhar, Lyn.   If I was on my phone typing that out, I'd blame it. Though I wasn't, so oops. You caught me with bad spelling. 

Vic: The making of Guild Wars 2 was announced shortly after they announced the last Guild Wars expansion, which was Eye of the North. EotN was released in August of 2007, and based on that date along, anyone can tell that GW2 has been long in the making. IMO, it's been well worth the wait.

Edit: *had another beta key link up, but seems they're out of them. Took it down for that.*

[Ulphus]

One question for those who've played the beta. How big is the download? I'm considering buying the digital edition, which would be cheaper than the deal being offered by my local retailer, but the specs suggest that the disk-space required is 25GB and that would be a bit steep for my poor data cap to cope with, and thus it might be worth buying the physical media just to avoid the bandwidth cap limits.

Any suggestions? (and "move to another country with a better Internet" is not helpful

[Kohiko Sun]

For me, it's 15.6 gigs right now. People who started later in the beta have ~13-14 gigs, since they have a cleaner version. All beta versions will patch and clean-up into the release version, which will be ~25 gigs, without needing to redownload it all from scratch.

This weekend will be the end of the beta-testing with a three-day event. After that, the servers are closed until the launch date(s). So, if you don't want to use up your bandwidth or don't think you can have it installed by the end of the beta, you wouldn't be missing anything but the three-day headstart by waiting for the physical copy to go on sale.

[Ulphus]

Thanks for the info, Kohiko.

I could download it, but then Mata would have to not update sisi before 15th August...

I suspect I'm about to embark on my second MMORPG

[Ulphus]

So, I played in the Beta Weekend 3. My first reaction is that it was kind of fun, and very pretty in places. My second reaction was that Eve has spoiled me for other games.

Slightly more considered. I only played most characters for less than ten levels, and only tried PVE:
It took me a day to figure out that the little numbers in brackets after quest descriptions (11) were recommended levels, and that if you didn't have that level it was going to be difficult. There are obviously a bunch of character options that don't become available before level 10, and more that don't become available till level 20. It looks like there's quite a lot of tactical depth (though not as much as Eve), and a lot of people on the forums are theorycrafting pvp builds (and complaining because their over-powered build in the last beta has been nerfed!).

You get weapon skills (by using the weapons) skills (by going up levels, or winning skill challenges) and traits (which I think you only get 1 every 10 levels or so, or you don't get them before level 10). You can spend coins on books that allow you to reallocate a bunch of those trait points at a later date, so if you've specialised your character for a particular build, and then decide you want to change, you don't need to throw away your character and start again.

I got the crap kicked out of me so badly on one storyline mission, and each time you get defeated your armour gets damaged, and once it's all damaged, it starts getting destroyed. I didn't figure this out entirely until my character appeared naked apart from some boxer-shorts in his run back to the fight... (cue short stop at the armourer to buy another set of armour) but despite being several levels lower than I should have been, I finally beat it by managing to kill one bad guy of the group per respawn...

Someone invited me into a group! but I couldn't figure out how to talk to them. By the second day I figured out that the chat window could have new tabs, and that right-clicking on a tab revealed check-boxes to set what shows up in that tab (so you can have a fleetgroup chat tab.

Norn women look like amazonians, and Norn men look like Hyper-muscled mutant brick shithouses. I managed to make a norn female fighter who looks like she's actually wearing armour. Although, my female armoured fighter prances everywhere when she runs. (Perhaps they used someone for the motion capture who hasn't ever run carrying a heavy load... [mental image: motion capture people wearing loads of armour, get characters who waddle when they run...] - on the upside, Susan Ivanova is my voice actor! and she does a better job than she did in Skyrim.

The Charr Engineer was surprisingly fun. I didn't really expect to enjoy them as characters, but they have a solidity to the animations and sounds, as well as the semi-automatic muskets of DOOM! that sound really good over my headphones. I'm also enjoying the PVE storyline for the Charr quite a lot.

The Asura (once you get past the fact that they look like evil smurfs) remind me of the snarkiest, least socially adjusted geniuses I ever met at university.

The human thief I started with hasn't been able to nick anything yet, and I'm not sure I ever had the option of not dobbing in the thief gang to the cops. Apparently I'm a hero, whether I want to be or not. I'm enjoying the combat styles though. The armour he's wearing is a quite reasonable quilted jacket, and he's carrying a pair of pistols and a pair of daggers, and I'm quite enjoying the combat possibilities.

I tried a mage briefly, and it looks like there are lots of options, lots of room for choosing your tactics, and getting gear that buffs your chosen role.

Some of the world events are stupidly hard unless you have lots of people helping. I spent 15 minutes trying to kill a shaman with about 20 other players helping. I spent a reasonable amount of time doing first aid on fallen players so they could get back up and back into the fight. I also went down several times and was revived by other players. The level of co-operation in the game was very nice. Finally the bad-guy went down and there was much rejoicing.

As far as I can tell, the looting is instanced per user, so you have a chance to get loot off anything you helped kill, and nobody can steal your loot before you get to it, so a lot of the drivers for player v player conflict isn't there.

When you go to a storyline mission it instances you off so other players have no influence on it. I'm not sure but it might drag your group along with you, or you might have to do the storyline missions on your own.

It looks like a third of the human characters have as their biggest regret that they didn't run away with the circus when they were a child...

The game gives you experience for exploring. Visiting new places, seeing new vistas. I also got a bonus for having visited 100% of the human city.

For the beta, after each world event or storyline mission it would pop-up a questionnaire asking how much fun you had, was it too easy/too hard, did you like the characters... I hope they're getting some good data, and aren't too out off by me whining about things being too easy or too hard before I figured out the thing about the recommended levels for missions

I didn't explore any of the PVP or World v World stuff, so I can't really comment on that.

Conclusion:

It seems to be a quite interesting blend between multiplayer and single player game. I'm probably going to play it a bit when it goes live. I'm not sure about the long-term viability, but given the lack of subscription fee, I won't have to decide month-to-month.

I have a couple of questions though.

I chose a server at random from the list of US servers which wasn't full when I started. I can't even remember which one. I'm hoping this choice is just for the beta, and I can choose again for the live roll out. Are there any distinguishing features between them? Does anyone have a recommendation for making an informed choice?

I suspect longevity will be enhanced by finding a guild once I've got to a reasonable level. What do guilds do in GW? I mean, Eve is a sandbox, so you can charge off and do what you want. GW feels like a lot less of a sandbox, so I'm not sure how the system is supposed to work exactly. Any hints?

[Esna Pitoojee]

Ulphus: All beta information (server choices, characters, achievements [individual and account-wide] are erased at the end of the beta.

Also, full review will be coming soon, as I was on the beta as well.

[Ulphus]

Maybe I could end up finally RPing with Esna 

I look forward to a review from someone with a wider MMORPG experience than I have.

[Esna Pitoojee]

DISCLAIMER: I only played the Charr Engineer, and only got to level 13. So, I've hardly experienced most of the game and my review will reflect only that.

So, let's start with something simple:

UI and controls: 8/10
The UI is fairly well developed, with helpful tips for interaction appearing on screen (and not just a 'hey press this' message either - the bottom of your screen has splashes of water appear when you are entering water, for instance). NPC interaction is fairly rote, though one thing I did like is that the icons for NPCs change depending on how you carry on the conversation with them - for instance, insulting a Charr NPC resulting in them appearing teeth bared and ears back, even the next time I spoke to them. Another nice thing is that the map displays a trail of where your character has been, and I understand from chatter with others in game it is possible to do the same for your party members.
I will criticize two things: First, you enter the game with a tremendous number of keymaps already in place, many of which are bound to single letter keys (not ctrl or shift + whatever); accidentally pressing the wrong keys can result in your screen being overwhelmed with windows popping up. Second, I had an issue a couple of times where skills would appear fully recharged, but attempting to use them still produced a 'skill recharging' message.


Combat (overall): 10/10
GW2 is unusual among the MMOS I've played in that it doesn't  simply give you a few more skills to layer on ever few levels, eventually leaving you with a huge block of skills to use at any time. Instead, you only get 5 primary skills at any given point - for my engineer the default broke down to a rapid-fire DPS skill, a couple of DOT skills including a flamethrower that did more damage the closer I was, a skill that slowed targets down but did no damage, and a skill that chained damage between nearby targets. However, as you progress you can purchase new skill packs which override these 5 default skills and replace them with other, entirely different ones (you cannot swap which secondary skills you might use mid-combat). For instance, part way through the beta I picked up a grenade pack that took away all my guns and replaced them with varying types of grenades that all did AOE at a good distance, but had to be manually aimed, essentially turning my character into a kind of squishy walking artillery platform. Later on, I acquired a flamethrower skillpack that could do AoE DOT to anything I could touch with it; relatively short range, however, meant I had to walk right into the middle of a fight - particularly hazardous when wielding an AOE weapon. Despite this, I had great fun with the flamethrower, especially once I discovered I could effectively use it to manually clear traps (all weapons and skills can be fire 'un aimed' without a target).

I personally liked this skill-swap mechanic a great deal, as it felt very EVE-ish to me - I had my default skills, and then a specialization of some kind. If I rode into combat and found myself in the wrong kind of situation - for instance, that above-mentioned grenade pack was largely useless against single, large bosses - I'd have to fall back and wait a bit before I could swap out to something more useful - say, the ability to deploy a healing turret to support my allies. Speaking of healing, it as refreshing not to have to rely on either dedicated healers or mounds of potions to keep my health up; instead I either had a skill that healed myself for a great amount over the short term, a skill to do the same to an ally, or I could drop a healing turret at a choke point for AOE healing to everyone around me.

Non-event PvE: 7/10

Non-event PvE is fairly standard for an MMO. Thankfully, there's little of it; lurk in an area long enough, and an event will probably show up. One thing I will note is that there are definite advantages to exploring an area before you start fighting: After a good 15 minutes of hamming away on ogres, I discovered a nearby hill had a camp set up on it that included sniper rifle turrets I could use much to more quickly deal with my targets.


Event PvE: 9/10

Here is where things really became fun. Events come in three classes: normal, group, and world. Normal are grind-ey but possible if done alone; group require you to form up with other players, and world are large battles against fairly significant numbers of NPCs. I quickly found myself gravitating towards the second and third, as they tended to be far more chaotic fun than the "normal" events, which often tended to be "run around, kill X number of NPC".

Nonetheless, there was a refreshing degree of randomness in some of the events: At one point, I was walking down a dirt road going nowhere in particular when suddenly bombs started falling all around me. Turns out I had blundered into a human separatist roadblock that had appeared as an event.

Conversely, even by the end of the weekend other events were already becoming repetative, or even worse: Farmable. In an interaction that reminded me of the EVE incursion community, a group of players had discovered that it was actually more profitable to allow one group of NPCs to sack one of our bases in order to cause the appearance of a much larger group of secondary NPCs, who could then be farmed for their drops. These players then ran about yelling this as loud as they could and clustering angrily around anyone who persisted in fighting off the first group of NPCs.


Graphics: 8/10

There's no denying it: GW2 is a beautiful game. I spent great portions of the beta simply wandering around, enjoying the sights (especially when I got transformed into a hovering robot for a little while - more on that later). Particularly beautiful were collapsed and dilapidated sections of the humans' former city, tiny portions of which the Charr had begun to finally build on, mixing midevil-esque human stone structures with gleaming, but sharp-edged Charr engineering.

I will note that this beauty comes with a cost: My (admittedly terribad) video card was quickly overwhelmed at higher quality levels, producing widespread graphical glitching. Turning down the settings to minimum produced similar glitching by default; I eventually found a sort of middle 'sweet spot', but particularly complex environments still produced glitching.

Audio: 6/10

Maybe the area in which GW2 really feels unfinished to me. There are some nice touches - when scrabbling up or down a rock, my Charr's claws actually scritched across the stone rather than the default walking noise being used; similarly, treading on metal plating produced a soft tick-tick-tick-tick noise - but there were also several things which annoyed me heavily. First among these was a glitch in which audio would repeat over itself a few dozen times, something particularly frustrating when an NPC explaining something would get their speech repeating over itself; again from chatting with other people ingame, I gathered this was not limited to my client or computer. Second, the game uses audio as well as UI cues to tell you about nearby events beginning or ending; however, there's no decrease in volume for range so long as you're within hearing distance of the cue at all. This resulting in me looking around confusedly to try to find the NPC warning of an impending bad guy attack, only to realise that they were actually a good 50 feet away behind a wall. Finally - and this is probably nitpicky of me, but - for cities actually populated with goodly numbers of NPC simply wandering about and making their day, there was very little background hubbub or noise you'd expect of such a crowded environment.


World Building: 10/10

GW2 is - I think - unique in that it is an MMO sequel to an MMO. This allows worldbuilding in a way that isn't possible in other games, as the planet is already there fully explored from the last game. Instead, you get to see how it has been changed, and this was visible even to someone like me who hadn't played GW1. As above, the Charr starting area is built nearby - and sometimes on - the ruins of a former human city, and there are hints and signs all around at this, from human wine bottles and weapons scattered randomly about the field to ghosts who sometimes would appear to play out their final flight from the invading Charr forces.
The current world is quite complex as well: The three Charr legions scheme against each other, and if you lurk in the Legions' various bases you can hear them plot and crack jokes to their fellows about the other legions. Of course, all three gang up to tell jokes at the expense of the humans. At one point, a Charr cub approached my character and pointed out a Sylvari (tree person) NPC nearby I hadn't noticed, then commented on how strange they were.

Chats with other NPCs produced a similar dynamic that I approved of: Although there is nominal peace between the 5 playable races, they're all supremely proud of themselves and all feel that they, are the rightful leaders/rulers/regulators of the world.

Main plot (Charr): 7/10

I'm hesitant to review the main plot as I got through very little of it; nonethless, I'll try and do fairness to what I did encounter.

On the downside, most of the main plot was very basic "kill these things. Now go gather these. Build a bigger weapon. kill more things." Perhaps more annoyingly, main plot missions take place in instances, meaning you can't combine them with events the way you can for secondary plot objectives.

On the upside, the story was actually quite good. By the end of the missions I got through, a couple of characters had appeared who I presume would eventually form a "warband" that would follow me in these missions. Despite only playing for 2 days, I found some slight amount of interest in seeing my little warband grow, and wondering who else I would recruit for it.

PvP: n/10

I haven't assigned a rating here because the only PvP we took part in was a special event in which all character stats, skills, and equipment were made identical except for what we could pick up in the field, turning it into something that felt more to me like fantasy counter-strike than what I've seen in videos online.

On a side note, towards the end of the event being killed resulted in us being turned into speedy little Asura robots who could search out enemies, drop ammunition for allies, or produce a temporary force field to block ranged fire. Most quickly realized that following the remaining living players would only lead the enemy to them; instead, we mostly zoomed off to explore the map, which was a slightly tweaked version of a normal world area.

Crafting and marketry

No rating here either, simply because I didn't get to do it. One thing I did approve of, though, was a mechanic to essentially reprocess loot items into intermediary materials which could then be recrafted into new stuff.

[Kohiko Sun]

I haven't assigned a rating here because the only PvP we took part in was a special event in which all character stats, skills, and equipment were made identical except for what we could pick up in the field, turning it into something that felt more to me like fantasy counter-strike than what I've seen in videos online.

"It's the Hunger Games!" There was much amusement.

[Misan]

I tried a bit of the PvP (both scenarios and WvW). Can't really give it a proper rating or anything with only a couple hours total of trying it though. Note: I played a Norn Thief.

The scenario stuff is definitely fun, small scale, and very quick to join. The maps seem to all revolve around capture and hold points from what I played. I like the amount of mobility you get in combat. So far everything feels pretty solid, though I hadn't played enough to get a good feel for the flow of combat. Needed more time to fully understand the abilities and be more tactical, rather than just pressing buttons (more problematic as a thief with the initiative resource management). Like the original GW you can do this out of the box too, so you can quickly get a feel for different classes and play with their abilities.

WvW is definitely DAoC influenced (hellz yeah I say). I only played that for ~1-2 hours total too, but from what I can tell of looking at the map and participating in a couple brief sieges it has the makings of a great system. I can see that they have the guild system tied into it too, as you can claim keeps for guilds. Best part is like WAR you can level through the WvW PvP. The main downside to WvW vs the scenario PvP is you only have access to the abilities you have acquired through leveling (traits too, I think), so at level 14 I hadn't yet unlocked the other two utility skill slots nor the elite skill slot. The three faction (worlds, really) system plus having maps for each of the factions is a recipe for some good world PvP. I'm not sure exactly how the mechanic works, but I think (someone confirm?) that the worlds that get paired up also change somewhat dynamically? I'm assuming this is based upon population levels or something similar, to keep any one server from getting zerged to hell, which was a problem in both DAoC and WAR on some servers.

As far as graphics my (underspec) laptop ran the thing without any noticeable glitches or FPS drops outside of 50+ person sieges. It ain't pretty at all, but it works. Now that I know I can actually play it well I'm definitely looking forward to it. Lots of content and the potential to play it fairly casually given my current (mostly self-imposed) time constraints.