My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. The January patch has landed and we’re discussing all the changes (not all of which have appeared in game yet). There’s also a World-versus-World reset happening later today, and ArenaNet is requiring all users to change passwords by February 7th for security purposes. All that plus the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
February 1, 2013
January 25, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. The January patch is just around the corner, along with the introduction of guesting and the end of free server transfers. All that plus the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
January 18, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. We had a lot of new information from ArenaNet this week, which has sparked lots of discussion/analysis/angst/whining. All that, plus the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
January 17, 2013
MMO armour: not just fantasy, but total nonsense
At Massively, Justin Olivetti has a quiet little rant about how ridiculous most MMO game armour really is:
This is probably a rant best saved for another day, but I want to know when it became completely acceptable not to demand that MMO studios explain the building blocks of their game universes. The devs know that we’ll just draw on tropes (usually fantasy) to fill in the gap, so most of the explanations they give for in-game reasoning have to do with a weak backstory of a class instead of why, say, a liquid potion binds together bones and allows you resurrect completely after being chopped into 60 pieces.
I get why tropes are depended on so much, but in my opinion, they rob these games of the potential to be more immersive and lifelike. Pretty much most elements of MMO games break down even when you apply the game’s own internal logic (what little has been revealed) to it. Chief among these borked elements? Armor.
MMO armor just doesn’t make sense, nor does it hold up to even a light level of scrutiny. Today we’re going to cast aside the “it’s just fantasy, go with it” excuses to investigate why your gear is completely ridiculous from a common sense standpoint. Heck, I wasn’t even breathing hard by the time I counted to 10 on this one.
Related: “Why do you hate the shape of breasts in plate armor so much?”
January 11, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. What seems to be transfixing the community commentariat is pinning down the exact meaning of the word “expansion” plus the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
January 9, 2013
Will Defiance channel its inner Firefly?
Massively looks at the new trailer for MMO-and-TV-show Defiance and senses some Firefly DNA:
As you’re probably aware, the company’s Defiance MMO shooter is entering beta later this month. As you’re also probably aware, the game is being developed in concert with the TV show of the same name, both of which will debut in April.
Yesterday, Syfy released a slick new teaser for the show, and while it doesn’t feature any game footage or really mention the MMO at all other than in the closing tag line, we squeed a bit at the Firefly-esque music and the general awesomeness on display.
January 4, 2013
This week in Guild Wars 2
My regular Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. With Wintersday coming to a close, ArenaNet brought down the banhammer on players using a crafting exploit with one of the new seasonal items. There’s also lots of discussion about the next few months’ announced content additions, plus the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
December 28, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. With Wintersday still ongoing (and the real-world holiday season at the halfway point), there aren’t quite as many blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community (but enough to keep you busy for a while if you want to get caught up).
December 21, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. With Wintersday in full swing, there are lots of guides and commentaries about the new content for the event, and ArenaNet is gathering a swath of end-of-year awards from various gaming sites. All that, plus the usual blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
December 14, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. With a big event — Wintersday — about to kick off this afternoon, I doubt many folks will be looking for links after today.
December 7, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This is the 52nd edition of the column, and I’m still confident that it’s the most comprehensive regular link collection for Guild Wars 2 fans. We’re in waiting mode now for the next big event (Wintersday) beginning next week.
December 2, 2012
GamingBolt.com interviews ArenaNet’s Colin Johanson
George Reith of GamingBolt.com talked to the director of Guild Wars 2, Colin Johanson:
With Guild Wars 2, the initial reception was pretty stellar, with some great sales figures and a pretty high Metacritic average. How did you feel about that? Are you happy with how the game is performing?
I’m thrilled. To be honest, I think the predictions of how we thought the game would do, at each step along the way, it always was bigger, and more popular than we had ever expected it could be. And it’s been really humbling, honestly. Every step of the way, there’s been more people that showed up for all our betas and more people who signed up to play it on day 1 and more people who purchased the game so far since it came out than any of the numbers we expected. Our last big November weekend — at the high point in the weekend, we were using about 90% of our total server bandwidth for the demand of all the players logging in. And that was just awesome to see. It’s not something that we necessarily expected to be quite so big and we’re continuing to grow. And it’s just really humbling and really exciting to see how much people are falling in love with the game over a short period of time.
Do you have any kind of regrets regarding the development? I mean, obviously you can’t have that many regrets because, well, you’ve released a pretty good game. But if there anything, personally, that you think you would differently if you got the chance to do it again?
You know, there’s always the time element. We spent five years on the game and that’s a really long time to spend on any project. In the game industry, that is eons to be working on anything. You know, the game came out, and I play it everyday, and I everyday I see something in it. There’s always the little detail that sticks out to me- ‘Oh, we could have done that better!’ If we just had one more fix we could make, to make it more spectacular. There’s always a little detail that stands out to me, something we could have done if we had a little more time. But you know, honestly, we could sit on it for ten years and we could keep working on it, never put it out, and we probably still wouldn’t be happy. [Laughs] So it’s hard to say.
At the end of the day, I think that we’ve done a really good job, getting a really solid game out the door. There are certainly some areas that we know we need to grow in, and add more features. PvP is a big one for me. We know that there are some features that we need to have to get the PvP up to where we want it to be. Those were not included in release, and those are all things that we have either already added since the game came out or we have a team of people building right now. So it’s one of the big ones for me, really, growing that competitive PvP feature-base.
November 30, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My regular Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. The big talking point for a lot of sites was all of the information we got from Chris Whiteside’s exhaustive session at Reddit, which went on for several hours. That, plus all the usual blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction.
November 23, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. There was a very wide range of reactions on the Lost Shores event and the new content that was released last weekend, plus all the usual blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction.
November 16, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My usual Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. This week is all about the upcoming Lost Shores event, plus all the usual blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction.