The latter allowed us to conjure up a section of stone brick road ahead of us, slowing enemies, which was actually much cooler than it sounds. One was a demon, Mallyx the Undying (self-denial? Irony?), the other a dwarven king called Jalis Ironhammer. How many more? We weren’t told, and I suspect even ArenaNet may not know for sure yet. We had access to two spirits, both of whom are plucked from the considerable lore that has built up over both Guild Wars games, but were assured more were in the works. You will be able to pick two at a time from a pool, and switch back and forth to change your role. Revenants have a connection to ‘the Mists’ and channel long dead spirits to gain unique abilities. On the other, it has a pretty unusual identity. On the one hand, it’s a familiar trope – the anti-paladin or dark knight, menacing spikes and all. The Revenant finally redresses this imbalance. Three wear light armour, three medium, but only two heavy. Right now, pre-Thorns, there are eight professions.
The more interesting bit, however, was the profession that we were all playing. A necessary element of an MMO expansion? Absolutely. Once the little slice of story was over we were spat out into the world, where we could engage in more open world activities, and end with a group battle against a flame-spewing wyvern for shiny loot. Side with this NPC, or the other? Unfortunately, one of the options was disabled for the demo, so it wasn’t clear how impactful the decision actually was. We played a brief story instance in this verdant new setting, which almost immediately featured a binary narrative choice. It has a vertical emphasis, and continues GW2’s interesting/aggravating love affair with exploration and jumping puzzles. The zone is a huge, lush jungle called Maguuma. All of these are significant, for different reasons, so let’s get our teeth into the details. The two mantras, oft-repeated, were “it’s about the journey, not the destination” and “defying convention”. We certainly didn’t see absolutely everything the expansion will offer. The focus of the day was largely on a handful of bullet points that ArenaNet considered the juiciest, or at least the ones that were most ready to be shown off. (Please do leave a comment if you disagree (or agree (and, frankly, I’m only doing another one of these for the indulgent joy of conjuring up the rare triple closing parenthesis))).
People fiddle with the formula all the time, but arguably we’ve yet to see something that represents a genuine and widely embraced evolution. 'Innovation' is a crowd-pleasing word, especially in a genre dominated by the unignorably huge, powerful, but creaky mastodon that is WoW. When every character can heal themselves, it tends to undermine the social and mechanical benefits of that traditional three-way relationship.ĭespite these challenges, it’s clear from the brief presentation we get at the start of the day that innovation is still a top priority. A bold move that ruffled more than a few feathers. However, they also blurred the lines of the Golden Triangle, or Holy Trinity, or whatever you want to call it. ArenaNet instanced resource nodes, so no more fruitless loops around a map just behind some irritating elf with Boots of Walking Ever So Slightly Faster Than You. When you see another player in GW2, you’d have to be a raisin-hearted miser to resent their presence. We were among the first to play the expansion and all of the details are below. The mission met with mixed results, as lead designer Isaiah Cartwright admitted to me when we spoke in Brighton during a hands-on with the game's first expansion, Heart of Thorns.
Strident, attention-grabbing, patently doomed schtick that was nevertheless suffused with just enough gosh-shucks-darn-it-I-want-to-see-them-try zest to make it a journey worth tracking. Guild Wars 2 launched with a promise – to fix MMOs.
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