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persistant world.
xeniar
Member UncommonPosts: 805
Oke i have to say GW2 altho im not a fan of GW itself (the entire skillsystem was bullshit imo) is looking pretty good.
i have a couple of things im wondering about tho.
How is the skillsystem running? Is it like guildwars 1 where you magicly forget all your abilitys and are left with 8 skills to get around. or is it like a normal MMO where u can use the full extent of your ability's?
And second the persistant world thing. Can someone explain it to me abit? What i got from videos is that evry action made by players affect the outside world so if i save a vilage the people will love me. if i destroy it (is that posible) it stays destroyed.
If that is possible whats stopping complete asshats from destroying evrything around?
thanks Xen
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The personal storyline effects are permanent, but the dynamic events are persistant (they stay fixed until something changes it), if a village is destroyed, players can help it be rebuilt for example. Asshats can't physically destroy buildings themselves, they can only ignore it being under attack (but others likely won't ignore it).
Also, no, you're not allowed every skill ever carried around all at once, because that is known as a crutch. Learn to play the game, not spam every skill you have. Having every skill on you at once is like having every gun in the game on you at once in a first person shooter. Having fewer guns adds more tactical depth, same as skills
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
its more like the way the campaigns worked actually.
Also you should note that the GW2 skill bar is allot more robust. Weapons and off hand items effect what your first 5 skills will be (not all professions can use all weapons), Each profession's skills are different, so even though as a ranger your using a sword like a warrior, your skills will be ranger skills that use the sword. (skills are per profession and some less powerfull are per race) also you are given 3 utility skills, 1 dedicated healing skill slot, and 1 elite skill slot.
You should stop thinking of the system as hampering your abilitys by limiting skills, it really does the opposite. By limiting the skills your alowed it increases the amount of strategy that goes into setting up your charactor "ok do I want to take this sheild that adds to my defensive abilitys or do I want to take a war horn that buffs me and my team mates?" "do I want to take a defensive utility skill, or an buffing utility skill?"
Also they have weapon swaping on some classes such as the warrior and ranger, which allows you to easily swap out one weapon combo for another that will also change up your first 5 skills. So imagine being able to switch between a damage dealing double axe weilder, to a defensive sword and sheild wielder on the fly.
Also the elementalist has attunements (water, fire, earth, air) instead of weapon swaping, the elementalist can change attunements changing his first 5 skills into a different magic type that has different properties. (water is more of a healing attunement, and earth is more defensive)
Its all about the strategy
you sir get +10 and a batch of cookies
!!! its as accurate as a direct quote so far as i can tell 
anyways what he said
If you thought the skill system was "bullshit" in GW1, then you're not going to like GW2. You still learn skills individually, and you still have a limited skillbar of 10 skills at any one time (though you can swap weapons and attunements to increase the number of skills you have available in combat to 15 or more, for certain classes). Personally, I think the way other MMOs do it is a crock; if you never have to make tough decisions about which skills you want to bring, then you can never have interesting situations where you need to weigh pros and cons of bringing skill X for more damage vs. skill Y for more defense vs. skill Z to remove enchantments....
I don't know if other MMOs do this as well, but WoW's policy of having every player of every class at the same level being EXACTLY THE SAME skill-wise is hilariously stupid. My lvl23 mage is exactly the same as the guy next to me, barring gear (which only ever really starts to matter in the late game). GW's (and GW2's) system is actually interesting...but hey, if you thought it was BS in GW1, I doubt anything I say will change your mind.
As for your second question: you completely misunderstood dynamic events. You are the hero, period. You will always be tasked with saving the village from destruction; you can't choose to destroy it yourself. You can let it be destroyed, in which case it will stay destroyed until some event happens (and is successful) to rebuild it. You can save it, in which case it will stay saved (and the villagers will love you)...until another event comes along and it's in danger again. In your personal storyline, you may come across decisions where you have to sacrifice one interest for another, but those are personal decisions that won't affect anyone else.
Just to try to maybe expand on what other people have said...
You have 10 skills at any time (well, sorta, Warriors also have an adrenaline skill, there's probably other exceptions/enhancements). The first 5 are determined by your weapon(s). All 5 for a 2H weapon, or 3 for MH and 2 for OH. Every warrior with every bow in the game is going to have those 5 skills. But a ranger with a bow will have a different 5. You can equip 2 weapons at a time and swap between them during combat with a short delay. You'll also have 5 additional skills. One will be a heal of some sort. Three are your choice, and then an elite skill which is your long cooldown game changer (not overpowering, just tide turning).
Each profession will have about 100 traits they can find in game which will allow them to customize their play. So even if you and someone else are using the same weapon, you might be doing things very differently. Different weapons probably will be very different though. Here is an incomplete skill calculator to show how they work.
http://www.gw2tools.12hp.de/index.php
You can change your weapons, skills and traits anytime out of combat. That right there is a huge difference between GW1 and GW2. I've been replaying GW1 and I'm definitely running into situations where I'm realizing a particular skill isn't really doing anything for me but I don't want to restart the mission. I agree with the above poster that it really does add a lot of strategy when you need to figure out what exactly you're going to need for a particular encounter.
As far as the persistent world goes. Primarily it means that it's not fully instanced like GW1 was. Dynamic events are in the world and they take place whether people are there or not. They aren't permanent, but instead they go along potentially very long chains. If centaurs are attacking a farm and you drive them off, that will lead to attacking the centaur camp. If you fail or nobody helps, the farm is destroyed and it will lead to an event to save it. If nobody saves it, it'll stay taken over forever. Participating in events can have an effect on the world. If the players don't defeat the broodmother, then fishermen can't fish and merchants can't sell fish. If you do save them, then those fishermen will probably remember you fondly next time you're in the area. Eventually the broodmother will come back though.
Regarding asshats, the game is designed from the ground up to be purely cooperative. There's no kill stealing, no ninja looting (everybody gets a shot at loot for an event based on their contribution), nobody can steal your resource node (everybody sees it and it disappears just for that person if they take it). Events scale based on participating. If someone wants to try to be an asshat and stop participating, the game stops counting them when determining difficulty. Players can't help the bandits/centaurs in any way. If they're designing an event and they realize that people can grief it and they can't fix it, then they scrap the event.
Here's a very long but very informative video about them.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013691/Designing-Guild-Wars-2-Dynamic
There is also an instanced personal storyline, and that will have permanent changes based on your decisions and will be affected by the choices you made when creating your character.
Please let us know if you have any further questions or would like some clarifications.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
Also go here:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/287180/Everything-We-Know-about-GW2.html
I was going to make a long post about how everything actualy works but.. follow the links and what people said here, got it pretty much summed up i think.
Thanks for the explenations guys.
Im getting more intrested into Gw2 now. altho im stil not too sure about the skillsystem. Ive played maney mmo's in wich you have all your skills usable some mmo's are just spammeable. others like WoW give you a choise on when to use what. acording to the situation.
But so basicly you have 5 weapon skills 1 heal 1 cooldown and 3 skills. Isnt that feeling very limited? And have you never been in a situation where your yelling at yourself for bringing the wrong skills? I just don't feel like spending half my playtime changing skills wich could be used smacking things up the head.
Well, first of anytime you are outside of combat you can change your skills. Secondly, while in combat most professions (all so far except for the elementalist) can change their weapon set and thus change their weapon skills. Further more every profession has it's own mechanic which gives the profession more abilities (attunements for the elementalist, death shroud for the necromancer, adrenaline for the warrior and the pet, which can be costomized with different skills etc, for the ranger). And then you have traits which change the way skills behave. For example, making a skill ranged while it's normally melee or giving a spell the ability to heal allies near the enemy you shoot the spell at, while it normally only dealt damage and things like that. Lastly of course, you can further costomize your character with equipment and attributes.
For a good source, see: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Main_Page
I think in most traditional MMOs, you're only pushing a few buttons anyway. It kind of ties back into the whole holy trinity thing. If you're a DPS and you have all the skills available, you're pretty much just doing a rotation, and it's going to be very similar for all encounters. You're gonna hit something like 1-2-3-4-4-4-5 or whatever. If it's a trash mob that dies quickly, you might skip 3.
I think having only a limited number of skills available, coupled with a lack of a strict holy trinity makes for more strategic gameplay. Sure, there's going to be a maximum DPS kind of build or rotation, but how often can you use that? You won't have a tank who is guaranteed to be holding aggro and if he dies you just wipe it up. Will you have to tank if he dies until someone rezzes him? Or does your group have a couple of cloth characters that make you want to equip some snares/knockdowns to make sure they're safe even if you're not the tank? Should you take a secondary healing skill or trait just in case?
When I think of WoW, I can think of situations where you might dust off a little used skill. Snake trap on the guy with the shadow bolt volley, or frost trap to enabling AOE of the spawns that come out, but for the most part it seems so incredibly rare that you would come up with something mid combat. I think 99% of the time it's something you discuss on the way back after a wipe that you could try on the next attempt. And if you're doing that, then it's pretty much the same as the GW2 system. Only instead of just dusting off that hotkey and adding it to what you're doing, you have to think about the tradeoff you're making. Maybe someone else needs to do something you had been doing because now you need to do something else. That's going to make teamwork and communication essential.
I kind of have a love/hate relationship with the GW1 system. On one hand, I loved searching for the elite skills because they did totally change my gameplay with each one I found. The problem was that it was too easy to settle on one set of skills because you couldn't switch it in mission and once you had all the skills for one weapon, there just wasn't enough incentive to try another weapon and hunt down all those skills and spend a bunch of money purchasing a whole other skillset from the vendor.
I think GW2 is going to be different though because of the way the weapons seem to lend themselves to totally different playstyles (GW1's did, but not enough for me to get into it). If you're a warrior and you want defensive skills, mace and shield. If you want damage and debilitation from behind the mob, MH axe and OH mace. If you want spray and pray AOE, longbow. I think it's pretty exciting to think about constantly picking up new skills and traits and changing up your bar based on what you just found as well as what kind of party you're in and what kind of encounter you're facing.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
While leveling in WoW, I use maybe 5 skills (most of which are simply different flavors of "do X damage"), and my chain for each enemy is almost always the same.
As for yelling at yourself for bringing the wrong skills / traits / weapons: free respecs, any time you're outside of combat, period. That's the POINT of the skill system (and the point of GW1, really); to experiment with your skills and find builds that work best for different areas.
That's kind of the whole point of the GW system. You probably never got into it, but just about anyone who got deep into the game really appreciated the skill system.
Their system took much more discipline. It wasn't just, use this skill if this happens, then spam this if this happens, and so on and so on. You had to first plan which role you wanted, and then specify that role even more. What GW2 offers is more robust and flexible though, because your character can adapt much better. There are cool downs, so you can not swap skill bar quick and easily, but the option is there.
The whole system basically is this - You are a warrior, but not the same as that warrior next to you. Because though you both have the same skills, you both choose different skills.
Also, looking back on your previous MMO experience, how many skills did you stop using after level 10. Even more after 20. And by the time you were capped, you basically had a few good skills, and the rest were just fillers.
If you didn't like the skill system in GW1 then the skill system in GW2 will probably be too hard for you too. I suggest looking at The OLd Republic or Rift. They are more standard MMO fare.
Sorry for the hostility of other repliers. There have been a fair few trolls who've taken the same angle you have simply for the sake of antagonising people who are actually interested in GW2 and/or are fans of GW1. You don't seem like a troll so much as someone who didn't really grasp why GW1's skill system appealled, which is fair enough.
GW2 builds on GW1's skill system but the foundation is the same and ultimately, you will have access to more skills than the ones on your bar - the ones you can actually use - at any given time. As others have said, having a limited skill bar encouraged character diversity and synergy. Two members of the same class might play completely differently despite being of the same class.
Personally, I like the limitation as GW1 was packed full of skills which would have been overpowered if you'd been able to bring more than one (Elites) but mostly because a limited skill bar encouraged me to think more strategically about what I wanted to acomplish in any given situation. In traditional MMOs, I found that I found a good rotation and stuck with that but in GW1 I needed to swtch things up depending on where I was and what the other members of my group were doing.
Oh and in addition to weapon/attunement switching, chain skills and unique mechanics that boost the number of skills you have access to in battle, GW2 has cross-class combos, enviromental weapons and dynamic positioning, which changes the effect of skills. ^.^
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