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Cant find an answer to this, question about grouping.
Roche7
Member Posts: 89
in Guild Wars 2
I have ignored GW2 until today and I think that was foolish. This game looks like exactly what I have been looking for but there is one thing I can't figure out.
Can I level with a friend from start to finish?
The only thing I enjoy more than a good RPG is a good RPG I can play with my wife. We love to level together but I can't figure out if this is actually possible. The description of the game makes it sound like much of our time will be spent in our own story but I dont fully understand.
Comments
Yes, you can. You don't need to do your personal story if you don't want to.
Holy cow that was fast. Thanks that is awesome news. Now I just need to figure out if my computer can play it or if I need new systems.
BOOO, in my excitment I forgot to ask the other question I had. Is the PvE seperate from the PvP? It sounds like it is and from what I remember of GW it was. This also makes me wonder if there is enough pve content to keep my wife busy for long but I think she would enjoy the PvP system in GW2.
And you can play your personal story with other people too, they even get karma for it.
Bud, not only can you play with your wife or a friend, but if you happen to level too far above him or her, no problem. The game scales you down if you are doing early content and are a high level. And it will scale your friend up if you guys are running higher level stuff.
So not only can you play with your wife, but your levels wont really even matter for the purposes of playing together.
Personal story is a part of the gameplay but a small part compared to the 1000's of dynamic events in the game... yes you and your wife can level start to finish together. You can also invite someone to participate in your own personal story quests... so if you wanted to you could have her help you do some of your story quests and then do some of hers and inbetween you can partcicpate in dynamic event together, or level up by doing the WvWvW pvp or the arena type pvp. I assume that you can form parties in the game although its not neccessary, anything you do together or with anyone else in the game you recieve full xp and rewards for.
"Don't mistake a fun game for a good game... Checkers is fun to play but its not exactly the highest point of gaming design... and definatly not worth $60 plus $15 a month"
Yeah that was part of what I have been looking for. I wanted a game where I could always play with her no matter our level. I have more time for games than she does and I like playing them more so I always end up ahead of her.
The other big thing was I wanted a game with a good community. Because of the world vs world thing I expect the community to be much more like the old MMOs. Everyone helps everyone and is very friendly. Some people wont but they will get ignored by everyone.
Hello again Roche. I hope my FFXI information wasn't too harsh. Glad to see you are showing an interest in GW2. It's the only title me and my wife are playing from day 1.
RIP Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan and Paul Gray.
Cross realm ques for BGs and parties are what destroy community in games
Uh having my question answered should not be something I get upset about but I guess I could see people being mad for not getting the answer they wanted.
Happens a lot on these forums when people don't hear what they wanted. I usually chalk it up to lost in translation. The GW2 followers are pretty quick to answer your questions so be sure to ask about anything that is unclear.
RIP Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan and Paul Gray.
GW2 is designed exactly for people in your predicament. You can totally work on your personal story during your extra game time; then when your wife is ready to play, leave that part of the city, meet up with her and head out into the world at relatively the same level again. You will both gain exp and progress accordingly by doing whatever events you come across in your journey together. This leads to the other design aspect of GW2 that makes it conducive for leveling with a friend: no longer will you get stuck on different parts or phases of a quest chain, forcing one of you to wait while the other catches up. Stuff happens in the world, and you all experience it together. The quests come at you together wherever you happen to be at whatever time you happen to be there.
Kinda. Splitting up the community and reward people for selfishness is the real problem.
GW2 will have some battlegrounds as well as the more open "The mists", it seems like the battlegrounds there are closer to E-sport than what MMOs usually are.
It might be that GW2s ideas about rewarding people for working together without ninja looting might actually better the community. The game surely have instances and dungeons but most of the game is still open and hopefully will the community feel at least a little bit more like tha games of old.
The more co operation the better for the community and the way GW2 handles it's dynamic eventsmight be the right way to go. The less focus on items might also help.
But that is not something we can really know now, we have to wait until the community truly formed a couple of months after launch. But it seems like GW2 will be a great game to duo, OP. In fact is the first GW2 perfect for duo as well even though you get 5 minutes alone tutorial in the 2 later campaigns, after that you can play together 100% of the time.
The answer is yes!
Also, even if you don't for some reason (say one of you can't get home that night, and the other still wants to play) You don't really have to worry about being the same lvl. One of you can sidekick the other one up or down in lvl to be in the same bracket and experience the same content.
As for the personal story instances, we haven't seen a whole lot on these. It looks like you can group up for these as well, but I haven't play tested that aspect of the game.
Would be nice to have a game that doesn't reward selfishness. The real world has enough of that, my fake world doesn't need it.
you will indeed be able to join others in their personal story. However you will neither be able to complete your personal story at the same time or be able to decide the path that the personal story will go in somebody elses personal story. This may sound like a problem to some, as it would seem to imply that players aren't encouraged to play together in there personal story, but this is not the case.
This is one of those cool little things that the sidekicking feature is so great for. Say for example that you have a character that you have already completed your personal story (at least until the next expansion comes out) and you are not one to role many alts. You can go with others to experience the different personal story branches of your own race as well as those of the other 4 races, and at no time will you be too high a level for the content to be fun. you could even experience the stories of those at a higher level than you if you are feeling adventurous.
I used to TL;DR, but then I took a bullet point to the footnote.
Arenanet have worked pretty hard on that part.
The" need or greed" mechanics really makes a community worse fast, I think it is the worst thing that ever happened to MMOs.
Of course, we will see how it works out in the end, greedy people are surprisingly innovative.
From what I was reading this sounded like what I wanted but that is why I asked... just to make sure. It sounded to me like you could keep playing in someone elses game and seeing a different story several times over while still playing the character you want. To me that sounds like a lot of fun. I love leveing as stupid as that may sound and love helping others level.
If the game is what it sounds like then I could be a very happy camper.
I haves another question. I saw this somewhere but I can't seem to find it again. I saw that it was possible to up the difficulty for solo content. So far the only scaling information I can find now is about when adding more players it will get harder which makes sense.
Scaling is when one person or a group of people are doing a dynamic event and then more people join them the difficulty of the event will go up so that the other people don't make the DE too easy.
It is not possible to purposely raise the difficutly if you are playing alone.
You can always take on areas and content a little above your level if you want more of a challenge. I would mention that the game is balanced to be challenging. There is no death penalty, when you hit zero HP you go into a downed state and can access a few special skills as you fight for life. While you are in the downed state, if you finish off a mob you will be revived. If you die, anyone can rez you. I mention death and dying because even though the game is meant to be challenging, if you do push your limits and die, death is a lot less frustrating than in other games.
You will always be scaled down when taking on lower level content, but higher level PVE content requires a higher level character to group with you to get side-kicked up in level.
As to the anti-greed thing, the game design is very promising. When more than one person, grouped or not, attacks the same mob, everyone who does a certain threshold of damage (roughly 5% - 10%) gets full xp and full loot! So, there is no need for mob tagging, no such thing as mob stealing and with content scaling up with more players, it gets more rewarding for everyone. So, you will always want to help and be helped.
There are also 5 man dungeons in the game. These will offer a story mode, which is easy to play with a pick up group and then unlocks Exploration mode for your caracter on completion. Exploration mode offers three paths to the end boss and each path will be through different areas of the dungeon, so it's pretty much like having four full dungeons for each dungeon setting. The Exploration Mode dungeons are very challenging and will require well organized 5-man groups that play well together. Dungeons reward tokens to everyone for completion that can be spent on gear, so no one competes with other to role for the big items or gets left out if the boss fails to drop something you need or can use.
The personal story mode content is instanced, unlike the rest of the game (except Dungeons, which are also instanced). These combine really cool 2D animated cut scenes with full voice acting, as well as fully interactive story related PVE game content. You can invite others into your personal story. Content will scale up accordingly. Also, you can't outlevel your personal story content, the level will always be adjusted for you. During character creation, there are some background questions that you answer, which along with race and class choice determine how your personal story can proceed. It's a branching, rather than linear storyline and there are thousands of possible combinations of individual story elements, so there is much replayability. If another character invited into your personal story does happen to have that same story element, they can chose to accept your story line choices, or reserve the right to play through again and make their own choice.
As far as side-kicking, I'd just mention that the power scaling curve of armor and weapons in the game is much more shallow than in other games, so even though the higher level character in a side-kicked duo will have some power advantage over the lower level character, it won't be a huge disparity. Whether you are scaling your wife up, or scaling down to join her for lower level content, it should still be challenging and fun either way.
With the world populated by Dynamic Event Chains, rather than static Quest content, if you chose to scale down so she can progress through zones you have already played through, you will encounter a lot of events you didn't catch the first time through and the zone itself will likely be in a different state, with some villages that were friendly for you now controlled by enemy NPCs, new defensive structures built, or old ones destroyed, etc...
It really is just about perfect for a duo, or for any group of friends that like to play together, but level at different rates.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
Well for higher difficulty solo content there are the exploration mode dungeons which are designed to be difficult for experienced 5-man teams. You can always try to solo them and earn everlasting glory on the youtubes
In addition, there are elite dynamic events in the open world which are designed for a minimum number of players and theoretically are un-soloable... but you can try.
And finally you can solo in WvW and try to make a one-man army Rambo style.
(also just doing plain old conent several levels higher should be plenty difficult)
Imo there's plenty of difficult content you can attempt to solo, but there is nothing specifically designed as such. Maybe later on they'll add elite/explorable content for personal stories? Seems a logical course of action to me once the majority of players reach max lvl with at least one character.
The more I read the more I am interested in this game. From all the videos I have seen there is already more polish to this game then most have at release. I feel this is really the only big advantage WoW ever has, Blizzard makes sure everything plays well and it is one of the things I have not liked about other newer MMOs.
The fact the game looks this good while still being months away from release is a great sign to me. I have been looking for a fault and I just can't find one. I have had my hopes shattered by so many recent games that I can't help but try and pick it apart. So far I can't see any major flaws. Gear not being of value in GvG? I think... is great and something I had asked for a million times to fix WoWs pvp but I just got flamed for asking. No flying mounts is awesome and I hope they keep travle from being to fast as I have found this always seems to ruin MMOs for me as soon as near instant travel to everywhere becomes an option.
Warhammer was rushed. SWTOR characters look odd to me, the way they move and the game sounds like a glorified single player RPG. WoW is welll.. its wow and keeps getting closer to the sterotype it always had. FFXI has been dumbed down a bit to much and is getting really old. FFXIV looks nice but looks like it will never be fixed. Everything else tried to rip off WoW and didn't even do a very good job of it.
I like the reduced number of abilities(and the clean UI it creats). This is something that I liked about most FFXI jobs and EQ. Also something I started to hate about WoW, while some class/specs don't have or need many abilities some of them have an stupid amount of skills they need to function. Needlessly complicated imo.
The races seem cool, not human but I don't care I have never played a human in any RPG if I didn't have to.
Graphics are very nice looking but I hope I don't need a super computer to run the game. I am going to have to build new computers but I don't want and my wife wont like the idea of building an expensive computer for her. If I can't keep the price of hers down I don't think this will go over.
Sound looks like it will be good. This is a big one for me. The bland music of WoW I always found annoying. How much they reused music in the original game I found really annoying.
I think my biggest issue at this point is talking her into playing it with me. She has bascially given up on PC games but I think I may be able to talk her into this one. The fact she wont have to be a healer anymore will probably help sell her. She never wanted to be a healer before but because everytime she tried to let someone else do it they always sucked so she got tired of it.
Not sure what else might get her into the idea. How is the GW community? If it is anything like the community of EQ or FFXI that would probably help. She hates the WoW kiddies and probably would enjoy being away from that(They also invaded my FPS games which made her rather mad). Never being ninja looted again would be a plus I think.
Now I just get to sit back and hope they don't do something stupid to ruin it for me.
The graphics are nice but you wont need a powerful PC to view the beauty of art work. It's been designed in a way that even low end PC's can see and say "wow this area is beautiful!!!". That's my take on it anyway. Haha.
Everyone will have a self heal and dodging will play an important part of combat too.
Yeah, from what Arena Net has said, the game has been designed on some pretty outdated gaming PCs and still plays well on them, although there will be some graphics bells and whistles to reward someone with a better system.
They aren't close to determining final system specs, but I have a feeling that any new system you build with a some what decent video chipset will be more than up for the task. Many low end, current generation video cards notably outperform high end cards from three years ago. Some high end (though cheap for the price premium) integrated video chip sets today also perform fairly well.
The only caveat for someone who hasn't built a PC in a while is that today's video cards tend to require befier power supplies than in the past. Just don't skimp there and you should be able to put together new game systems that significantly outperform systems that are a few years old with out a high expense. There is a lot of mid range hardware that offers great "bang for the buck" today.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
There will be teleport travel. There will be waypoints spread out all over the world. You'll have to travel on foot to each waypoint one time to discover it. Then, for a fee, you'll be able to teleport instantly to any waypoint you've previously unlocked. I suppose those of us who enjoy slower travel and the immersion and exploration it allows can just choose to not use the teleports.