In a similar vein to my Gamescom post last year, here are a few things I’ve learned/observed about Guild Wars 2 from videos and coverage coming out of PAX East:
- You can cut down trees, and they actually fall down. I’m immediately reminded of Vanguard; I’m not sure what other MMOs use this visual representation of wood harvesting.
- Per the GW2 panel Q&A, when you kill players in WvWvW, they drop loot (I assume via loot table like Warhammer and Rift, and not actual items dropped by the player character).
- The Order of the Vigil’s keep outside of Lion’s Arch is enormous.
- ArenaNet has yet to take the brilliant idea of AOE looting from Rift and make it their own. Psst: do it, ANet. AOE looting. No excuse to leave this out.
- New dynamic events will be added on the fly after the game’s release, and not publicized, for explorers to discover on their own. I have no intention of wiki-ing these.
- “Floaty” character animations have been greatly improved for this demo; it was hardly noticeable, or only popped out at me in a couple of instances. Norn stair-climbing was particularly impressive; do their feet actually land on each step correctly? It seemed that way to me.
- Shimmery zone “portals” a la GW1 are most definitely in: what remains to be seen is if there is a loading screen when passing through each and every one of them (as opposed to only those between major zone barriers, or only when passing in/out of a major city).
Most of the intrepid fans who collected tons of footage still have to return to their homes, detox, and upload their cleaned-up, edited videos, so there will be more interesting tidbits to pick up, I’m sure. These are just the ones that jumped out at me (I’ll admit to being overly excited about the tree-cutting one). Now that we’ve already seen demos of the game in action, and there has been so much information coming out about it, it seems there are fewer large revelations to be had this time around.
Can’t wait until there is more video to pore over.
Oh I love that first bullet point! One of my pet peeves about darkfall is that you can clear cut half the map and the trees are still there! At least in GW2 I won’t waste time on trees that are already cut down!
Yeah, I was surprised to see they actually put that in!
Oh, and I just read the following on the GW2Guru forums:
“I found out [Ed. from speaking to devs] that different species of monsters show up at different times of the day…so the spawns vary depending on the time.”
(source)
Haha awesome 😀
[…] Randomessa pores over all the videos to discover clues to things that haven’t been directly discussed by ArenaNet. “New dynamic events will be added on the fly after the game’s release, and not publicized, for explorers to discover on their own. I have no intention of wiki-ing these.” […]