Carton's Mind

So after the flood of new information about the Guild Wars 2 after the press beta this weekend, I thought I’d update my feelings about the game. First things first, here are some articles that I read about the game on IGN, Massively, and Kotaku. You may have seen me link one or more of those before.

Basically, I’m much more excited about the game than ever, especially with the glowing reviews most of the press gave the game. Sure, there were a few issues handling load and not all the races could be played, but hey, that’s part of the whole beta thing. (Also, I’m sure that the Sylvari and the Asura weren’t playable because ArenaNet wants to make the experience with them spectacular and flawless because of the newness of them). Most of the videos and screenshot that I’ve seen from the beta are very well done, and the graphics have been praised all around. However, I’m more excited about the reviews of the combat/”quest” system.

The biggest think that kept being repeated in the press reviews was how “natural” the combo-ing and teamwork was during the fights. Players would just join in and add their power to the fray, having neat effects and sometimes turning the tide of battle. The rally mechanic seemed to be a game changer too, allowing a domino effect of people being healed. In addition, the quests are more dynamic and automatically accepted, so no more hunting for quest NPCs and you just get to join in random fights with your buddies. Personally, I think this game is going to rock MMOs a lot like WoW did back in the day. I’m really looking forward to it.

Guild Wars 2 is the game I’m most excited for this year (Barring a miracle Half-Life 3 release). In fact, I haven’t been this excited about a game for ages.I’ve never really gotten into MMO’s, not long term anyways, but I think GW2 will change that. This game is really looking to be a game changer.

One of the biggest things I’m looking forward to in GW2 is the way that they are doing away with the typical Tank-Healer-DPS trinity in other MMO’s. Each character has its own heal and it has been mentioned that all the classes and races will be able to tank and deal damage to a decent degree. I’ve never really enjoyed the dynamic of having fixed roles, and I really think the new system will allow a good degree of personal freedom. 

Another cool think is the World vs. World system in place. The most recent article about it states that it’ll be three servers against each other in a sort of game of CTP, capturing points and increasing the server’s score. The coolest thing is that these will be going on nearly constantly, so you can always jump in if you get bored.

Finally, I always liked the feel of the first game, and the essence of that will probably remain. The mechanics will be new, but the game should feel very much like a Role-Playing experience, which I enjoy.

This is kind of an extension of my earlier Minecraft post, mainly the part about mods. Moding Minecraft is one of the biggest attractions to the game, and the custom server Bukkit is one of the easiest ways to have a different multiplayer experience, thanks to its API and the ease at which plugins can be installed to alter the game. These plugins can range from adding a PvP war element (like the Factions plugin for example) to adding signs that let you teleport to specific places. These add a ton possibilities and make each server just a little bit different.

In addition, Bukkit allows developers to easily reach a large audience with their ideas for multiplayer mods. Hopefully I’ll be writing about my own plugins soon, as I’ve decided to start coding in order to help make the Chrisandthemike Subscriber server more what we want it to be. Mostly I’ll be trying to make things that are compatible with Towny, but in the future I may branch out too. If you have any ideas, send me a message on any social service you can find me on, though Twitter would be best.

If you are like many people on the internet, you have multiple sites and actions that you keep up with everyday. Sometimes though, you wish that the information from one place would go to another service without you doing it yourself. Enter ifttt (if this then that). This site is helpful for doing things like automatically downloading pictures you’re tagged in on Facebook to Dropbox, or putting starred items in Google Reader to Instapaper to go directly to your Kindle. The site is full of possibilities and the library of premade recipes is also very nice. Also a note, my uploaded videos will be posted on this blog using that same service, so look forward to that!