Curse

Lawnmower · Nov 03, 2006, 01:19 AM // 01:19

Quote:

Originally Posted by HawkofStorms

Sounds like you want Guild Wars 2 (not like Chapter 2, but a real sequel with a whole new engine/system).

Give it time.

Didnt Jeff once said, in a friday feature back in 2004 or something that the GW engine is very scaleable?

I heard it was something like this: the gw rendering engine actually treats objects, players and so on as boxes that are tied to a big plane. this is why there is no Y-axis and why we cant jump.

so its like that our characters and everything in the world is squares with their own skins.

because of this there apparently is no stopping them for making the game looking as good as they want to in 10 years, even though, maybe then there technology will be old if they do not want to upgrade it.

Personally I dont want to see a GW2. I can't imagine that. I hope Anet will do something else. I hope they will look at GW as a child... as something that can not be surpassed, but as something they will continue to support as long as they want to, and then start working on other things unrelated to GW.

I think the game could really benefit from a new paint of coat. perhaps a new loot rarity system, or better running animations, or better enviorment pathing, or improving the many "invisible walls" in GWP!...

Maybe do some things to add reason to do small side quests? perhaps adding some more social structures, or trade skills?

there are so many things that can be done with the game. I feel like the amount of classes is perfect right now. The only thing I miss is a shapeshifter class, and perhaps a stealth based class, but besides that, GW seems to have everything covered.

perhaps it is time to add two-handed swords and axes, and 1 handed hammers? maybe dual wielding swords/axes/hammers for assassins? maybe halberds and two handed spears for deverish? or crossbow for ranger?

or pet armor?

or spirit/minion/pet customization?

there are alot of great stuff and ideas from many players. I hope Anet will want to improve their past games to keep interest. they might fight for getting as many accounts as possible, but they should also worry about getting so many campaigns per account as possible, for their added revenue

?

Sidra · Nov 03, 2006, 01:44 AM // 01:44

^^ wholeheartedly agreed with everything typed. All of these ideas. Amazing.

Lol- before my scythe skin fully loaded, it showed up as a character-sized huge box. It was hilarious.

Tozen · Nov 03, 2006, 03:07 AM // 03:07

While I agree with most of your ideas (except that ANet should STOP GW), I personally think that these changes should be gradually rolled in with new campaigns.

This time around we got skill templates and a whole other slew of features we've been requesting. By chapter 4, I'm strongly hoping that an auction house will be in place.

Chieftain Heavyhand · Nov 03, 2006, 12:51 PM // 12:51

What is all this talk about starting over with a GW2. I think that the idea of creating a world to explore and being able to take the charter you created in the first game all the way through to the last game is a really great concept. As I see it Anet is creating a world with each new game release. As of now we have three parts to a huge puzzle. After they have finished creating the world via chapters every 6 months they can work on creating new up dates for each chapter that use some of the ideas from this post. Like creating quest that cross chapters and adding more content to each chapter like Sorrows Furnace.

Because after they have finished with there chapters what then? What will they do to keep making money and keep the game alive will they start charging a monthly fee or will they start digging into the older versions and tuning them up via expansion packs?

I have played a lot of role playing type games and this one is by far my favorite one. I have to say great job to all the guys and galls at Anet. There is so much to do and so many different things to do I don’t see this games popularity trailing off anytime soon. Like a lot of people have said Diablo II is still going strong. I loved that game but after you beat it what more is there to do? After I got the armor and weapons I liked I was throwing piles of gold on the ground and just letting it all go to waste because there was nothing to do with it. In this game I’ll never have enough gold to do everything I want to do or buy every thing I want to have. Maybe after a while but right now trying to keep 11 characters armed and armored is extremely expensive. Not to mention that after all of the chapters are released I’ll have up to 20 something characters to keep up. So back to the point what will Anet do to keep making money and keep the game alive after they have finished with the last chapter?

EternalTempest · Nov 03, 2006, 01:35 PM // 13:35

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lawnmower

I heard it was something like this: the gw rendering engine actually treats objects, players and so on as boxes that are tied to a big plane. this is why there is no Y-axis and why we cant jump.

In one of the radio interviews (the VGM Daily radio pods) right before/around Factions release, he mentioned something about jumping.. as in a future feature if I remember correctly.

I'm not looking for GW2 myself, I'm looking at C4 for new worlds, npc's, maybe new gods/realms?

beanerman_99 · Nov 03, 2006, 01:47 PM // 13:47

Quote:

Originally Posted by EternalTempest

In one of the radio interviews (the VGM Daily radio pods) right before/around Factions release, he mentioned something about jumping.. as in a future feature if I remember correctly.

I'm not looking for GW2 myself, I'm looking at C4 for new worlds, npc's, maybe new gods/realms?

Agreed. I think that Tyria and Cantha have a lot of room for additions, tweaks, improvements and maybe new areas like Sorrow's Furnace (even though I think I read that Jeff said they would no longer do this type of addition).

I think Guild Wars is still too 'new' to be already be thinking about its next generation. I never played EQ, but did EQ2 do as well as the original? Just saying that sometimes, when a company hits upon a good formula, like Guild Wars, well, why mess with a good thing? Its still way to early in the game to go and change everything and change how we play the game

Sophitia Leafblade · Nov 03, 2006, 01:59 PM // 13:59

the big question is weither there will be a Campaign 4 or will it go straight to Guild Wars 2, this would allow them to add alot of missing features in without messing things up. They could then return there attention to more actual Guild wars cause as it is story wise its had very very little to do with warring of guilds otehr than the mentions of the "guild Wars" in Tryia, set before all teh current games. Dont get my wrong the saga so far has been very good and NF is def a step in the right direction gameplay wise but story wise i think they need to look back a bit there, leaving huge great big gaps in the places theve already made

Muse of Shadows · Nov 03, 2006, 01:59 PM // 13:59

Well, I have several ideas regarding most of the topics I have read here, and some that I have not seen brought up just yet (although I did skip a significant portion of the posts, so sorry if I repeat something that has already been said).

First, would be the problem with updating the older chapters. My solution to this would be to create another team, although smaller than those for the game production's themselves, that will work solely on updating previous chapters and adding new content to keep the fanbase from feeling that everything is loosing its flavor and/or getting far to repetitive/old.

Their job would be to add new features, such as the god realms, new item skins, and perhapse explorable areas, to the older chapters, to cover skill updates/balances, and to take new features from more recent chapters, that are currently chapter-exclusive, and implement them into the older chapters (inscriptions, for example).

Second, would be the concern about having a chapter every 6 months. Some people think this is fine, others think the time should be 1 year, for various reasons. I say that the time between chapters should in fact be increased, but NOT to 1 year per chapter. This ammount of time will, for even casual players, begin to feal dragged out. My ideal time-frame for chapter release would have to be 8-9 months.

Reasons - this gives people time to fully experiance the game without it being dragged out for to long of a time, and give the developers more time to place finishing touches on new (and preferbly more in-depth, although Nightfall is exelent) releases, while hopefully not loosing revenue.

Third would be my idea for a solution to the problem of having to many classes by adding additional chapters (I do NOT believe they should create a new trilogy/series for Guild Wars - keep it all one massive world please), would be to re-use already existing classes in future chapters. Example would be for chapter 5, instead of adding yet 2 more new classes, or not adding any classes, would be to have, say, assassin and dervish available.

Unfortuantly, that does not solve the problem with additional skills becoming repetitive and overwhelming, but it at least gets through part of the problem of connecting every future chapter to Prophecies.

Fourth and last, some of my ideas for improving gameplay, and additional ideas for future chapters.

Change Hall of Heroes back to 8-player, and more importantly, although not by much, allow ONLY ONE HERO PER PLAYER, and only in PvP arena's where henchmen are allowed.

Remove town-control from Factions entirely. This feature sevearly hampers access to areas of the game for the casual player, and greatly promotes "grinding" for faction. This (in my oppinion, and I am shure that of many others) was a horrible idea. In its place, add some other benefit for increasing faction for your guild/aliance. Perhaps something such as a greater ability to customise your character.

To promote GvG even further (this is what the game was made for, was it not), offer a new reward to those guilds that reach the top16 (or maby top32) to design a guild emblem, if they wish, that is exclusive for their guild. Of course, it would probably have to follow the same rules as all the other "design-an-emblem" contests that have been hosted. The details would be for NCSoft/ArenaNet to work out.

Remove locked gates, and instead implement something similar to the story/exploration used in Nightfall to both Factions and Prophecies. Make the Prophecies mission maps explorable areas as well, similar to Nightfall, and populate the explorable aspect of Factions mission maps with creatures.

Possable skill and class ideas for future chapters:

Shapeshifter: the design for this class should be obvious - the ability to change into other creatures, and use skills associated with what you shift into.

Rogue: the assassin was an exelent class in my oppinion, but does not promote stealth the way many people wished it would. Create a class that uses stealth-orrented skills to accomplish their goal. Perhaps even include an ability to locate ranger traps, disarm traps, and use traps themselves.

Summoner: this class would be similar to a beastmaster ranger, exept that they would have all their attribute's orrented around their "pets". These creatures should work similar to a ranger's pet in attack skills, and that they are always there when the skill is equipped. They should, however, work similar to a necromancer's minions to determine the level of the creature possessed by using the attribute levels. The primary difference between the necromancer or ranger, however, would be the limit on how many creatures you can have - one creature per skill.

Example: it would be possable to have 8 creatures helping you at all times, but you will have no other skills available to improve them, so their relative power would be based solely off your atribute levels, or alternativly, you could possess 1-2 creatures, with several support/attack skills for them, and effectivly have them all much more powerful than if you were using 8.

Sacrafice skills: a new idea for sacrafice-skills of the necromancer, is to have skills that require the health sacrafice WITHOUT costing energy in addition. Also, it should be possable to implement sacrafice skills with a fixed health cost, instead of a percentage (similar to Illusion of Weakness)

Hexes: perhaps include "maintained hexes" - hexes, that once cast, reduce the pips of energy regeneration while in effect, and remain in effect untill the caster dismisses, are removed, or the target leaves range, working similar to maintained enchantments. Such maintained skills could also possably include shouts and stances as well.

Maintained spells: Spells that are maintained currently always reduce your energy regeneration by 1pip for each one you maintain. Why not broaden this by including more powerful maintained spells that "cost" 2pips of energy regeneration, or even 3? Also, it could be expanded to loosing a fixed amount of energy, such as "while this spell is maintained, you loose x energy each second", or maby even include spells that are maintained through health degeneration or exaustion (1 energy point becomes exausted each second you maintain it). I am quite shure there are many more possabilities I have not listed here.

Edit Also perhapse include a hex that, while in effect, causes the target to maintain all the enchantments they have in effect.

Storage: the material storage was an exelent idea. This should be taken farther. Rune storage, dye storage, ect. Also, why not increase the cap on how much materials of a given type you can store as another gold sink? [for (previous cost + 50) gold, increase the max amount of materials you can store by 50 (150 (50+100) gold for 300 storage, 300 (50+100+150) gold for 350 storage, ect.]

And Finaly
Commonly asked for additions:
-Increased storage space
-Guild storage
-Auction system
-all others I cannot think of currently for some reason...

For those of you who acualy read through my long-a** post, I would like to see if you like these suggestions or not, and if not, WHY. Please do not respond declaring me or my ideas as retarded, noob, ect. without explaining why.

And yes, there are many more ideas where that came from, I'm just tired at the moment and cannot think of them.

Fox Reeveheart · Nov 03, 2006, 02:17 PM // 14:17

NO! NO! AND NO!

No postponing, I want my chapter IV now if I could have it, but all i want to weight is six months and it has ALREADY been in development for six months since the release of factions, so shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Don't ruin it for the rest of us.

as many people say.

If you don't like it then make like a tree and get out of here O.o

WasAGuest · Nov 03, 2006, 02:56 PM // 14:56

The solution to "too much too fast" is a simple shift in personal thinking; if you are not ready for Chapter IV, V, VI... then do not buy it on release day. Wait till you are ready, then buy it.
Everyone in GW seems to oddly think (myself prior to NF) that "gotta have now and first" is the way to play the game.
Like I said, shifting my thinking in the game to slowing down has actually increased my enjoyment of it ten fold.

There is also the option of buying the new chapters and going back and forth between them at your leisure.

The point here is keeping options rather than limiting them. Anet's release on 6 months keeps options available to players while keeping their money coming in.

My only gripe with their release schedule is when it is use as an excuse for missing "standard" features*... standard in that every other online game has the feature, yet GW is missing said feature... or when a feature is renamed or mislabeled as content (when anyone with half a brain can tell the difference) and spun into some marketing crud to sell a weak chapter /coughFactionsMaterialStoragecough

*The excuse of "with a 6 month turn around, resources are thin"... blah blah blah - If you can't meet the demand, hire more workers or as this post says "change strategy".

brokenmonkey · Nov 03, 2006, 04:41 PM // 16:41

There doing great as is, they have a year to work in it, its not like there building the game engine every chapter. They do a great job, but I do like the new team idea, to revisit older chapters. Enough new classes IMO, rather have more new PvE.

boxterduke · Nov 03, 2006, 05:05 PM // 17:05

I've always wanted all those fogged areas in the map to be explored.
Same as they added Surrows furnace and opened that part of the map.
There are huge areas in each map that can benefit from that.

Hurricane · Nov 03, 2006, 05:33 PM // 17:33

I love this suggestion. Honestly, just add a little more things to keep us busy and slow down. How about for one thing, give us a reason to do all the quests besides experience.

How about, make recruiting and finding a guild easier. I quit GW he first time because a lot of things required a guild of atleast 6-8 people who wanted to cooperate with you in a mission or in PvP.

Catacombs?
Gwen mystery?

The ability to fight Shiro in UW?
A quest to take out the Am Fah or Jade Brotherhood leader? (Kinda like Ruby/Sapphire in Pokemon)

bushe · Nov 03, 2006, 05:38 PM // 17:38

I think there are some good suggestions for improvements and valid points brought up here. The one thing I haven't seem alot of is input on how to implement these improvements aside from the OP saying drop a chapter or go to 1 year cycles. I have a more radical approach: MOD. Have a very small team that is responsible for maintaining the code (which they already have) and allow users to mod the game. This is really scary on a MMO because then you have users changing things that other users liked/hate now in addition to the whole piracy issue.

I think that given a group that is responsible for dissemination and incorperation of the modders content a software house can get a ton of free work off the modding community so why not put it to use improving guild wars? I'm not suggesting that this would be an easy solution to roll out as the integration of a project of this size would be a TON. Also it would give users even more access to improve the game than the already impressive amount granted now.

Radu Deucalion · Nov 03, 2006, 05:45 PM // 17:45

You do realize that anet needs to make money, correct? You also realize that your one time purchase of $50 doesnt entitle you to constant, free upgrades, forever, when the company could be say....making a new chapter, so they can actually...earn income?

Yes I love free upgrades to old chapters as much as the next guy, but waiting a year between releases, while keeping up the work on already released material, cuts their yearly revenue in HALF.

Guild wars needs to make money, otherwise, you wont be able to play any chapter after awhile, because they wont be making enough money to justify keeping the servers running.

They do update the game with bug fixes/skill updates/holiday events, which apply to older chapters, this is great, and all that I think can realistically be expected. They also added specific heros for older chapters. They do little things. But taking half a year off, and cutting their revenue in half to focus on it? be realistic.

I love GW and want it to last for many many years, and in order to do that, and keep their no fee buisness model, they need to make money, and to make money means they sell new chapters

Loviatar · Nov 03, 2006, 05:59 PM // 17:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sophitia Leafblade

the big question is weither there will be a Campaign 4 or will it go straight to Guild Wars 2

it has already been confirmed that chapter 4 was started on the release of Factions and is well on its way for release at the end of April 07.

as Alex Weekes posted some time ago chapter 4 is already under way and is well in development.

there will not be a GW 2 as they would have to start over losing about 5 years of work

DutchGun · Nov 03, 2006, 07:04 PM // 19:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lawnmower

ok - But then let me ask you this mate. Do you think that the new additions like alliance battles and heroes, have been enough so far?

for a new set of feature of this scale for campaign 4 and 5, will it really be enough.

nothing wrong with the GW formula. its great. but perhaps its just time to be more ambitious.

GW still looks great today. but actually if we think about it, GWP is 1,5 years old now. the first one is beginning to show a bit of age. ?

Honestly, I tend to care more about the story development, new environments, and such than about the new features (however, the Heroes are my favorite new feature so far). The PvP is fun, but I don't play it quite as much as PvE. To me, I enjoy a persistant online world where I can jump in with friends and run around killing stuff - simple as that. The cooler that experience, the happier I am.

For me, I'm not tired of GW gameplay yet. So I guess the answer to your question is: yes, I'm happy so far. I think they'll probably have to pull out a few stops to keep me happy in future chapters, but I have a feeling we're going to see a lot of innovative things in the next few chapters. Keep in mind that this is still a young dev team still getting a handle on their own technology. I think Nightfall is more of an expression of what can be done when you are working with a more mature technological base, and have devs who really know how to squeeze the most out of it.

I think you're actually right on the money with your original idea Lawnmower, but I think you're probably about two to three chapters too early. I'm guessing somewhere around GW 5 or 6 we'll hear about some next gen development. Even if they already are thinking about their next products, they certainly wouldn't announce anything to the public, because that would draw attention away from their current products. I think this is also why we don't hear anything about the next GW game until well after the first one has been released.

Oh, and don't forget that anet has been hinting that console development on xbox 360 is looking more promising (although they've said nothing specific, of course) now that MS has loosened up some of it's business model restrictions. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that anet is working on a console game - maybe their next game will be completely multi-platform. That's complete speculation on my part of course, but it's fun to think about.

Jizzy Jizztastic · Nov 03, 2006, 08:04 PM // 20:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clawdius_Talonious

Yes, because they certainly haven't added any new effects to the graphics engine, right? They certainly didn't implement DX9 support etc after release, why that would be impossible! Wait a second, they did update it, and they will continue to do so.

That's the beauty of Guild Wars, they can expand and upgrade the existing product as much as they want to, they'll continue making chapters as long as we keep buying them

Hey Claw. Oh, I'm perfectly aware of upgrade from DX8 to 9 in NF but you have to admit that's a pretty minor change.

Anet has a pretty solid streaming/upgrade infrastructure in place already and if they can continually keep GW up-to-date through successive generations of technology, then I suppose I have seriously underestimated their game engine.

Launching a full sequel (GW2) would definitely risk dividing the player base. But if they were to introduce a slew of new, fundamental gameplay changes (going far beyond heroes, AI tweaks, etc.), then it may make marketing sense to just label it a full sequel and just distinguish it from the "old" GW.

I find it hard to believe the engine driving GW currently will last forever with continual upgrades. There comes a time when you have to start from scratch and bring something completely new to the table. Look at the generational leaps in other games... Doom 2 to Doom 3, Morrowind to Oblivion... Look, even if the gameplay remains fundamentally the same (and let's face it: most sequels do not screw with a winning formula), making a true sequel will be inevitable because to the consumer, a sequel screams "new, improved, cutting-edge".

There will come a day whe Anet makes a new announcement and a lot of people will say, "Oh please, yet another GW expansion!"

Darkest Dawn · Nov 03, 2006, 08:47 PM // 20:47

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChaoticCoyote

As for Campaign 4: I'd like to see a return to lands north of Ascalon, and the rebuilding of the Kingdom. The King needs a new heir, the Charr still need their fannies kicked...

QFT - I would love to go back and finish the business with the Charr and those White Mantle bastages!

edit* I don't suppose they will overhaul the first two chapters, but it would be awesome if they did!

Cineris · Nov 03, 2006, 10:05 PM // 22:05

Quote:

Originally Posted by bushe

I think there are some good suggestions for improvements and valid points brought up here. The one thing I haven't seem alot of is input on how to implement these improvements aside from the OP saying drop a chapter or go to 1 year cycles. I have a more radical approach: MOD. Have a very small team that is responsible for maintaining the code (which they already have) and allow users to mod the game. This is really scary on a MMO because then you have users changing things that other users liked/hate now in addition to the whole piracy issue.

I think that given a group that is responsible for dissemination and incorperation of the modders content a software house can get a ton of free work off the modding community so why not put it to use improving guild wars? I'm not suggesting that this would be an easy solution to roll out as the integration of a project of this size would be a TON. Also it would give users even more access to improve the game than the already impressive amount granted now.

I'm not sure about the extent to which you are discussing modding -- I think if mods were limited to new models or textures it would be fairly simple to handle. An oversight team would naturally have to assess content for approval, but looking at new models and skins doesn't seem to me to be something that is going to be incredibly demanding on the GW team / ANet's finances. The benefits are, of course, quite high, with huge amounts of new content available for free. Other than losing the creative control of having themed armor for each campaign, I don't see a huge downfall to it. One could even have a checkbox to allow/disallow custom models/skins, and if one disallowed custom material (too much to download, etc.) a fallback option could be specified so that someone need not see your armor if they don't want to.

Having more substantial mods - Literally new items, new functionalities, new areas - Would be an order of magnitude tougher, particularly if anyone could submit their "Elementalist Farm Area #29" or "Obviously Broken Weapon" 9998-9999 dmg. I think if a real effort were made towards incorporating more substantial mod content like this you'd need a dedicated QC team and have to have some kind of reputation system whereby a modding team/individual would have to have so many quality releases under their belt before they could even submit more substantial content for review.

In any case, I agree with the general premise that producing expansion packs every 6 months is unlikely to be a serious long term strategy for Guild Wars. The core gameplay isn't changing, and the design decisions against grinding and for having a unified PvE and PvP environments limit the viable lifetime of the game. This isn't a MMORPG where buying the expansions raises your level cap and gives you access to a slew of higher powered gear to collect.