A thought on GW1 and it's future...

Well said my friend, well put indeed.

hmm what happenned to the first post? this thread was started by A.Noid but his post is missing.

Holy disappearing posts!

Oddly enough, I just happened to save this post (ol right click and save) and had not overwritten it.

If this was an intentional wipe (not sure why) then my appologies for reposting.




Just sitting around and thinking about the new GW2 and it occurs to me that these ANet guys have learned alot about game design and are sure to put what they learned from GW1 into GW2.
Well, that leads me to think that the mechanics behind GW1 will most certainly be (in-part) integrated into GW2.
OK- so if I follow this train of thought, why then, wouldn't GW2 tech be introduced into GW1 as a 'test-bed' of sorts.
Why not use GW1 as an alpha test bed?

Could we see auction house tech introduced into GW1 as a 'test-bed' to make certain GW2 launches with soild AH tech?
How about stylists?
Mounts?

How far do you think (if at all) ANet would tinker with GW1 to provide invaluable info to make GW2 launch smoother?

I really am not certain they would try any of this at all. The down side would be to irritate many loyal fans and possibly chase them away before GW2 launches.
It has to be somewhat tempting to the designers to try this, don't you think? Anyway, the thought occurred to me and I was hoping for input.

Thoughts?

-ANoid

Just to keep in mind, the current game engine may have limitations so that it cannot reasonably accommodate the design and programming of certain new features, hence, part of the reasoning to move forward with a new game engine which might not have the same limitations. For many desired features, it may not be a question of whether ANet wants to implement them, but whether they can reasonably implement them.

Sure, green, but as I read the articles, it seemed more and more like the limitations were with the enviornement, but- it's all just best guess right now.

I would think that the party search would be a good example. Right now, it just doesn't work. Poor implementation? Bad timing? Probably a combination, but, I'm sure they learned something from the time they spent on it. Not just the tech, but the fundamentals of the project as well.

I know personally, I'd be real tempted to try this stuff out in GW1. But, it really needs to be thought through carefully. It's such a nice game. But, one could certainly justify free additions through this type system.

Again, just random stuff floating between my ears.

ANoid

World vs World pvp would be interesting to test out....

Personally I don't think its a viable solution. Simply because there might be alot of differences between the two games in terms of engine, coding, mechanics, etc. Thus, making GW1 as a test bed for GW2 would be more work than it should.

Theres another matter I want to talk about but for some reason I can't put it in words properly :P. So I'll just end it here.

Whats really funny, is i thought there wasn't supposed to be a post. I thought you were being REALLY sarcastic, saying, A Thought on GW1 and its future....And then proceeded to say nothing.

I over thunk it.

That would have been hilarious. lmao.

Most likely

Many many reasons. For one (and the most important) - who is to say that it is an evolution of the code base and not mostly a re-write? Just because your car has a steering wheel, gas pedal, and brake pedal doesn't mean it is easy to change to something new under the hood. They both "feel" the same, and in fact with a car they interface *exactly* the same, but that doesn't mean you can interchange all the parts you do not see. The structure of the frame, how it steers, how it translates the pedal to speed, etc can be radically different from car to car - even when changing from model year to model year when it's external form remains fairly consistent. Then again it may be some fairly minor internal changes with massive external or interface changes.

I would say depends. As a test of the User Interface and balance issues - quite possibly. It may very well be worth implementing if they have been working on it and want to test it first, especially with an auction house. I doubt a stylist or mount would fit that and would depend on many other factors.

Can not say. If it is a re-write then very little. If it is an evolution then probably quite a bit.

I know in the last project I administrated it had absolutely no temptation - we had to re-write from scratch in a totally different environment (with respect to the software engineering aspect - users saw no change other than speed and reliability). Other than the UI there was almost nothing to carry over (and it didn't change at much at all - just added options) - we also greatly expanded what it would work on so even much of the past development went to nothing more than "experience" of the team (of course, that counted for a WHOLE lot from our point of view, not so much from the user).

The user interface and the "guts" are somewhat separate from each other. Look no further than how different one users interface can differ from another's with even the current limited customization options. Just because GW2 may not be *that* much of a change from our point of view doesn't mean that it isn't much of a change from the developers point of view, nor does a radical change in UI mean there is a radical change in what is udnerneath.

Savage- you give me way too much credit.

Strcpy- I understand where you are coming from. I was not thinking they could port the code over per se, but rather implement code- see how things 'shake-out' and learn from it. Thereby placing stable code into GW2.
Like you were suggesting, had you had to write the code from scratch- you may have run into the same issues you had before. But, because you had it in place, you had a head start on getting it better this time.

Very few things port over cleanly. However, the jist of the code and the errors one makes during first attempts teach us alot about which direction the code should go.

ANoid

One idea could be to test non-instanced areas in gwen ? (of course, i don't have in mind eventual technical problems with actual engine)

Considering they still want GW1 to be a game that people can play and enjoy for years to come, I doubt they'd "tinker" with it too much. It's a real game, not an alpha server.

Not to mention, they don't want to "spoil" GW2 by giving features like an Auction House to Guild Wars 1.

I don't think we'll see many radical changes in Guild Wars 1, although "Sorrow's Furnance" updates would be cool.

My mouth waters at the though of skills behaving differently depending on the action.

* the wammo jumps and uses earthshaker in mid-air, doing a crater and gets killed by the debris of his own attack* (mending didn't save him, sorry)

As long as people still play GW1 it will continue to be supported.

Writing code doesn't really work that way very often, the more complex the project the more so. I've done a few re-writes on small projects and even on them there isn't *that* much to carry over.

A re-write is more like saying "We will learn how steel re-enforced concrete works by building it out of thin glass tubes" - the two are so different (even though they are, in the end, doing the same thing) there is little to learn and mostly a waste of time. Better, faster, and cheaper to just go ahead with the alpha/beta and work it out from there.

It may be beneficial to try an auction house to get the user interface and how it affects the economy down (assuming that the economy works mostly the same), that may very well not change at all with a re-rwite. But more than likely the other "wants" are different enough that it will not happen - or if it does happen they are probably not doing it for that reason. They may very well decide to add a hair dresser and other cosmetic things anyway.

Then again, who knows if they are not doing a re-write and instead plan on a gradual change from GW1 to GW2? Without being on the dev team pure speculation.