Curse

sLiceR · Aug 10, 2006, 03:54 PM // 15:54

I’m a gamer coming on Guild Wars after a rather long FPS experience: for this reason I really missed a lot the ability to make gameplay demos, a feature which is always present in competitive games.

Demos have some really big advantages above recorded videos:
- The player recording the demo does not usually experience performance losses in his gameplay
- Demos usually take really a low amount of space when compared to video (even if the latter are well compressed)
- When a demo is played you have the same visual quality as if you were actually playing in that situations

The only negative aspect of demos is that you need the game client in order to play them.

I would really like to see the ability to play and record with the game client, that would bring a lot of new content for the community: top guilds pvp players could record their games, from their point of view, without a performance loss and give further insights on the matches played. High end farmers could record long farming trips, and every single user could record and watch himself playing (this really helps to understand your errors

).

For those who never played an FPS or don’t know what a demo is: a demo is a gameplay video, which is recorded and played directly from the game client. The reason for which demos take really few resources to record and to store is that the client doesn’t record the actual video, but it records things like: player X moving from (X1,Y1,Z1) to (X2,Y2,Z2) or players X uses skill Z on player Y.

This is what the demo panel would look like: (yay time to show off my photoshop skills!

)

When a demo is played you would see the HUD customized with the recorder settings, by pushing [J] (or any other hotkey) the playback would be interrupted by a dialog coming up giving you the option to switch to your usual HUD, moving in the demo timeline or to stop playing it.

The recording panel in my screenshot would give you the ability to set hotkeys for demo recording, as well as adding titles/descriptions to the demos stored on the hard disk.
A further feature would be the one to share demos with your friends in an automated way taking advantage of the GW streaming technology, but I recognise that would be too server-side intense, thus not possible. Just the ability to record and upload to a third-party site is enough for me.

What do you guys think about this? I admit a big part of this feature would become useless if they improved a lot the Observer Mode (so that you can see the player HUD and who he/she is targeting), but it would be still a big addition to the game features

Thank you for reading and I hope this was not suggested before, as I did not find anything similar in the index of ideas

Terra Xin · Aug 10, 2006, 05:04 PM // 17:04

I wish I could use photoshop that well...

seems like a good idea, I'm mostly in agreement because it doesn't take up much space as you say, so yeah.

Dumbassturtle · Aug 10, 2006, 05:49 PM // 17:49

Ouuu that'd be spiffy! It would help a lot of players of different levels of skill learn things they didn’t know!