Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend April 2012
Purpose:
I played the first public beta for
Guild Wars 2. I went into this as an avid WoW player. Specifically
I went in as blind as I could. No attempt was made to learn about
the abilities, and the only thing that I knew about the classes came
from the official Guild Wars 2 site. The only thing I knew about
combat was that you can dodge and that abilities changed based on the
equipped weapons. I knew there was a downed state, but didn't know
anything about the abilities in that state.
I could only really do this once.
Since after I have some experience in the game I cannot ever go back.
I tried to avoid looking into what the abilities specifically did
and avoided any analysis of what I should be doing with the
abilities. The purpose was two-fold.
First – To get an idea of how a new
player with primarily WoW experience will view the game.
Second – To have a poor starting
point to assist in writing my “How to improve” article.
Events of the Beta Weekend:
I recorded everything that I did in the
game. There are some poor recorded frame rates in the beginning (PvE
experience levels 1-12) which I didn't fix until over halfway through
my PvP experience. I understand that the game is not optimized for
graphics cards yet, but my last few videos recorded fine at max
settings with some slight downgrade by recording at ½ frame. I took
notes on paper when various experiences came up that would not be
obvious in video form.
Projects:
1.
Show the experience of playing Guild Wars 2
- This will play out a bit like a diary of things that occurred during the game play
- I'll indicate various problems with the game flow for the public portion of my feedback
- The videos and notes will guide this process chronologically
2. Do
a detailed comparison between WoW and GW2
- So much to go over here, several things have already been covered by other players
- This will be relatively detailed and cover topics from subscription to core design scheme
3.
Show mistakes in PvP and the initial plan on how to fix some of these
- This is how I intend to leverage a fresh game experience to go over improvement stages
4.
Give some analysis on what I expect to occur as GW2 enters the
market.
However:
I'm
still working on other projects and this hasn't been at the top of
the list for awhile. This article is intended to show what I
collected and give a view of future projects in this category.
