Massively's interview with ArenaNet: Let's talk Guild Wars 2

Reader Comments (3)

The server model is.. odd, but a bigger issue is the lack of heroes. The best thing about GuildWars is at any time I can log on, and if friends are not online I can just put together my AI team and still accomplish nearly anything I want without being subjected to people and personalities I wouldn't give the time of day.

My personal PUG experiences are pretty horrific. FFXI PUGs were so bad when I quit the game it would take nearly 6 months before I would play a healer again, but I vowed never to play a healer in a PUG ever again. In WoW after 4 years of play, I've never once been in a PUG that completed a single instance, they all fall apart due to two people bickering over stupid crap and it just goes to pieces when one of them leaves.

Running content with friends has never posed issues, with friends we've 3 manned Doan back in the day (and no we were not over-level for the instance) and duo'ed a metric ton of non-instance 5-man content (typically with me as healer).

Reply

Heroes and the ability to form groups on the fly was one of the very best things about GW1, imo. From what I have read of GW2, players will get one sort of "super"-Hero which they can use of not, and the game is supposed to be mostly accessible either solo or scaled for you and your NPC. Two players could thus form a party of 4 perhaps (2 players and 2 Heroes).

I greatly enjoyed the AI party dynamic in GW1 and will kinda miss that but as long as GW2 scales or adjusts content to party size -- solo, solo/Hero, 2+ players and their Heroes, etc. -- I'll be happy.

I am very eager to learn more about the NPCs/Heroes in GW2 and how they function, and I appreciated Shawn's asking about this in the interview.

Reply

Oh noc, i am really glad that they want to kill the heroes.
i dont know if you two have been in GW from the start on... but GW was much better, before they introduced these Hereo-mechanics.
sure, it's nice to start whereever you want, and whenever you want, you could easily invite your heroes and everything was set up, but this killed teamplay in GW. first thing you asked a new one, during set up of a group, was his build, if it was nothing not the exact thing you looked for, he got kicked, and soon after, a a heroe was invited (due to the maximum group size of 8 people, 2 real players are enough to fill a group with heroes).

the henchmen, on the other hand, have been a nice idea, 'cause you could fill one or two positions with them. But more of them could cause a wipe, they've been to dumb to go out of an AoE attack.
so you had to take human players, most of them would go out of a flame rain or something like that ^^

Reply