My breath was held for this BWE; the end result, how­ever, is quite pleas­ant. I finally joined the realease-the-game-now-dammit side of the fan base after see­ing the nice and smooth progress the devel­op­ers made after BWE #1.  BWE #1 wasn’t “readly”, but BWE #2, and the sub­se­quent builds of the game, is.

Details fol­low.

Changes from BWE 1

As a beta tester, I am more than happy to see some of our most requested fea­tures made into this build.  Prox­im­ity /say chat chan­nel, chat bub­ble, resiz­able and zoomable min­imaps, etc.  Some bal­anc­ing was done, some bugs were fixed, and some new stuff were avail­able for test­ing.  The biggest change of game mech­a­nism would be the tiered skills and traits.

Under the new sys­tem, skills now are tiered into three lev­els based on their SP cost.  Each char­ac­ter has to learn at least five skills within a tier to unlock the next tier of skills.  This is much bet­ter than the pre­vi­ous approach, which lacks any cat­e­go­riza­tion of the skill pool.  It may be con­ve­nient for a vet­eran to grab skills they know work for them with­out wast­ing points on any pre­req­ui­site skills, but such design also cre­ates a wall of con­fu­sion for new­bies first time play­ing a pro­fes­sion, as they will have no idea which skills to choose from.

The trait change is more con­tro­ver­sial.  Dis­sim­i­lar to eas­ily acquired skill points, trait lines are the real spe­cial­iza­tion of  char­ac­ters.  Trait points are basi­cally GW2’s ver­sion of “stat points” that has a per­ma­nent effect on char­ac­ters.  Play­ers choice of “major traits”–a spe­cial abil­ity to enhance a par­tic­u­lar style of play­ing their character–are now tiered like the skill sys­tem.  Most com­plaints come from this change.  Player pre­vi­ously can reap the ben­e­fit of major traits from mul­ti­ple trait lines are now forced to invest more points into one line to unlock the major trait that they want.

My per­sonal feel­ing is mixed: changes to the skills is def­i­nitely a step for­ward, but not much I can say the same about traits… I think Are­naNet is in the right direc­tion, but the cur­rent imple­men­ta­tion may not be the be the answer.

 

Client opti­miza­tion

The pre­vi­ous BWE was noto­ri­ous with its ghastly under­uti­lized CPU and GPU.  Luck­ily, the sit­u­a­tion was improved quite well dur­ing BWE 2.  Accord­ing to the devel­op­ers, the game client exe­cutable now uses more threads and offloads more works to the GPU.  I was able to raise my graph­ics set­tings and still get bet­ter frame rates than BWE 1.  With the excep­tion of Stone­mist Cas­tle in WvW’s Eter­nal Bat­tle­ground map, my entire beta week­end was smooth.

Are­naNet rec­og­nized that there are still much room for improve­ment.  I would be happy to see them work on game­play con­trol a bit more.  The cam­era and move­ment still feel some­what slug­gish and unfin­ished… though see­ing how much was fixed between BWE 1 and BWE 2, my bet is on ANet will have these issues fixed in a timely manner.

 

Dun­geon difficulty

Dun­geons in GW2 is like elite areas (such as Under­world, Fis­sure of Woe) in GW1.  They are meant to be dif­fi­cult… although the term is an under­state­ment as of now.  Ascalon­ian Cat­a­comb, a lv30 dun­geon, was made avail­able to BWE 2 testers.  The place has a rich his­tory in terms of the game’s lore.  Since most beta testers (aka those who pre-purchased the game) are more or less played Guild Wars 1 before… thumbs up for the devel­op­ers’ good choice.

The most reported prob­lem with the dun­geon is the dif­fi­culty.  Yes the dun­geons are meant to be among the hard­est PvE con­tent, but non-boss foes that can 2-hit kill a medium armor user and wipe the entire party more than once is cer­tainly too much.  The sheer amount of feed­back is not ignored: Are­naNet promised to look into dun­geon dif­fi­culty.  Hope­fully in the next BWE, the dun­geon will more about hav­ing fun, and less about masochis­ti­cally zom­bieing the over­pow­ered mobs.

The heart of the dun­geon dif­fi­culty is the lack of proper telegraph­ing.  The con­sen­sus has recently been heard by Are­naNet, who promises bet­ter telegraph­ing of the NPC in dun­geons.  Good thing for them to notice the inher­ited unbal­ance between melee and ranged com­bat in pve is also caused by lack of telegraph.

World vs World

This is the shit.

So I finally tried out WvW in this BWE… and just as I expected, this pvp for­mat is exactly what I want in an MMORPG.  I still remem­ber the days when sieges in Lin­eage 2, as it was a for­bid­den fruit for my low spec PC… Guild Wars 2’s WvW is every­thing good about L2’s sieges, plus much more.  I am a big fan of emer­gent game­play in PvP, where player teams of var­i­ous sizes strive to find the best pos­si­ble strat­egy in an uncon­trolled engage­ment envi­ron­ment.  It is the rea­son I went into worm­holes in Eve Online, and it will be the rea­son I immerse myself in WvW once the game is out.

A lit­tle side story: I started doing WvW on Sat­ur­day.  Unfor­tu­nately the server match up was a bit bugged; we had an enemy team that vastly out­num­bered the com­bined force of two oppo­site servers, which resulted into a lot of (enemy) zerg­ing and gen­eral unplaya­bil­ity.  The server pair­ing on Sun­day, how­ever, was very bal­anced.  All three servers had about equal num­ber of par­tic­i­pants, skills, and orga­ni­za­tion, which resulted in sim­i­lar scores and ter­ri­tory.  Accord­ing to the devel­op­ers, the phe­nom­e­non is caused by intro­duc­tion of new servers where the rank­ing of servers are too new to reflect their strength in PvP, hence the inequal­ity.  Need­less to say, it shouldn’t be a big issue after a week or two of the game goes live.

One incen­tive to go into WvW is that unlike gen­eral PvE, WvW con­tent that is acces­si­ble in BWE is pretty much the whole thing:  Four zones, three teams, two giant maps with vary­ing ter­rains and wildlife… Only so much can each player achieve in terms of power and skills, but the ceil­ing for orga­ni­za­tional dis­ci­pline for such ter­res­trial war­fare is lim­it­less.  I know for sure that I will be look­ing to for a large guild with con­sid­er­able inter­est orga­nized par­tic­i­pa­tion in WvW.

 

Release Date

The ubiq­ui­tous ques­tion revolv­ing this game since its announce­ment, and will remain so until the day when Are­naNet tells us when exactly they’ll release the damn thing.  The newest G2Guru poll shows the major­ity of fans believe the date is around August.  A more con­ser­v­a­tive (and arguably, more author­i­ta­tive) guess is that: before Thanks­giv­ing, while the “announce” date of the release date is “immi­nent”.  Many had an idea how “immi­nent” it will be when after see­ing this photo.

June 28, 2012.

That is one day after the upcom­ing stress test.  Soon we will find out for sure.