July 23, 2012

So after a month-long self-imposed sab­bat­i­cal from blog­ging, I’m here again to talk about the final Guild Wars 2 Beta Week­end Event, a.k.a. BWE3.

This time, Are­naNet decided to finally give us a glimpse on the final two races, Syl­vari and Asura. Since I had pretty much decided my com­plete char­ac­ter plan for release, with the other three races set to become host of my first char­ac­ters, play­ing these two addi­tional races would be a nice dis­trac­tion from the con­tent I was really intent on play­ing, and a good chance to test the only two pro­fes­sions I never touched, just for kicks. Of course, things didn’t end up being so simple.

The Syl­vari

Expec­ta­tion: a nice look­ing elven-like race. Real­ity: an awesome-looking, but still elven-like race.

Oth­ers went into more detail on why it’s hard to com­pletely sep­a­rate the Syl­vari from the elven stereo­type, and I agree with that assess­ment. The lore might be dif­fer­ent and unique in its own way, but in essence they are still a bunch of holier-than-thou tree-huggers (they hug each other, right?) just like every­thing else this side of Lothlórien.

That said, I really enjoyed their visu­als and cus­tomiza­tion options, and I’m now look­ing for­ward to play­ing one. Their envi­ron­ments are not my favorite, but are surely pretty.

By the way, right before the beta finale event started, me and Mrs. K found our­selves in the Syl­vari area with our Asura char­ac­ters, and doing the big meta-event there. Here is how that boss looks (the voice on the video is all Mrs. K’s, I didn’t have time to con­fig­ure Bandicam cor­rectly before record­ing so it didn’t cap­ture mine).

The Asura

Dis­claimer: I hate, and have always hated short races in MMOs. I would refuse to play with Gnomes and Dwarves on World of War­craft, and I only played with the Green­skin on Warham­mer Online because the class I wanted (the Shaman) was only avail­able with that race.

Oh, the Asura. I was so sure it would be my least favorite race of all. How could I be proved so wrong? I absolutely love these silly lit­tle grem­lins. Their look, atti­tude, ani­ma­tions, struc­tures, every­thing is absolutely spot-on. It is def­i­nitely on my top two favorite races on the game (it’s hard to beat the Charr).

At first I thought the weird ani­ma­tions would get old fast, but I never get tired of watch­ing them strug­gle with the weight of their huge heads. This race is a love let­ter to 3D char­ac­ter ani­ma­tion; every game devel­oper I ever crit­i­cized (ahem… The Secret World) for hav­ing poor or stiff char­ac­ter ani­ma­tions: please, go play Guild Wars 2 with the Asura. You’ll learn a trick or two.

Hav­ing tested these two final races makes me very pleased to say that there isn’t a sin­gle race on the game that I dis­like. I have my pref­er­ences (Charr > Asura > Norn > Syl­vari > Human), but even my least favorite has its charms. That in itself is a major sell­ing point to this game.

There is one aside on  the Asura ini­tial area I should mention. Don’t read if you don’t want spoilers.

War­rior and Engineer

Since I only had two pro­fes­sions yet to give any time to, play­ing a Syl­vari War­rior and an Asura Engi­neer was my plan for this BWE.

The War­rior is… fine, I sup­pose. It was pretty much what I expected of it: sim­ple to play, very flex­i­ble with all the weapon choices, and… kinda bor­ing. To me it feels like it lacks any com­plex­ity to make play­ing it inter­est­ing. If I was to rec­om­mend a good melee class, I would stick with the Ranger for agile and fun com­bat, or the Guardian for more deep array of sup­port options.

I expected to find micro-management hell, and instead got to a fire and explosions heaven!

The Engi­neer was another happy sur­prise, and by happy I mean it’s a blast. I expected to find micro-management hell, and instead got to a fire and explo­sions heaven! The lack of weapon choices can be wor­ry­ing at first, but just makes the pro­fes­sion focused; once you start unlock­ing kits a large array of options opens up, and this gad­get spe­cial­ist shines bright. I really had a lot of fun with the engi­neer, and not only did it now replace the Mes­mer on my top-5 list of pro­fes­sions to play on release, but it is on my top-3.

When I look at all my options now, con­sid­er­ing that I really enjoyed all races and so many pro­fes­sions held my inter­est, I’m no longer plan­ning to pick sim­ply my favorite race/class combo for the main char­ac­ter, but I will select from the five pro­fes­sions I enjoyed the most, and pick the race I feel fits bet­ter with each. That will stop me from cre­at­ing a Charr Ele­men­tal­ist, a com­bi­na­tion I always felt slightly uncomfortable about.

My cur­rent char­ac­ter plan looks like this:

1. Charr Ranger
2. Syl­vari Elementalist
3. Asura Engi­neer
4. Norn Guardian
5. Human Necro­mancer

Hunger Royale

The clos­ing event was a very faith­ful and inter­est­ing par­ody of The Hunger Games. All play­ers were sent to instanced ver­sions of the Asura’s Met­rica Province, dressed up the same, given the same weapons and a very lim­ited sup­ply of ammu­ni­tion and food, and a “hunger” debuff that would con­stantly tick down our health. Both ammu­ni­tion and food could be found around the word, but it was very rare.

Not my video, because my record­ing didn’t turn out really good.

What made the event unique is that every­one was sep­a­rated into four large groups, and we could kill other play­ers, and loot all the ammu­ni­tion and food they had on them. Ini­tially you would be respaw­ing back at your cor­ner home base. After an ini­tial 10 min­utes prac­tice round, and 40 min­utes into the actual event, death penalty kicked in. That means: you die, you’re out. Well, not exactly out, but you would get turned into a small robot that could help your team by drop­ping ammu­ni­tion and ping­ing the loca­tion of ene­mies. It’s the ulti­mate coop­er­a­tive last-man-standing game.

The com­plex­ity of the event, the huge arena and large num­ber of play­ers per­haps made the event run a lit­tle less than ideal, with a few com­plain­ing on how hard it was to find ene­mies, but that is sec­ondary. What is really worth not­ing is how intri­cate are the events the game is capa­ble of imple­ment. I have never, ever done any­thing on such a large-scale on any game ever, and I’m very excited for what could be com­ing next.

Are­naNet has promised to keep new events com­ing after release on all areas and for all lev­els. Their abil­ity to cre­ate this event to close this last BWE tells me this is not just an empty promise, it’s some­thing they can truly deliver in a scale never seen in any MMO. It should be mak­ing every penny I spent on the Collector’s Edi­tion worth.

Tags: animation, ArenaNet, Asura, beta, black comedy, class, combat, events, Guild Wars 2, spoiler, Sylvari