Request for an official reply RE:- Rit & Sin Support in Nightfall

Hello there, any chance we could get an official word on whether Ritualist and Assassins will continue to be supported in Nightfall?

So much speculation, rumour and gossip floating about that I don't know who or what to believe anymore. A simple "Yes they will be supported" or "No they won't be supported" would be helpful. Thanks!

I would love to know as well. I wouldnt be mad really either way (cuz i believe each individual dev team will work on their own characters, ala, chapter 4 will have sin and rit updates ), but it would be nice to know.

What do you mean by "supported"?

If you own Factions and Nightfall you can take a Canthan born toon to Nightfall, just like you can take them to Prophecies.

If you are asking if there will be skills, armor, etc for them there, then no, don't expect to find those things there.

Hmmm .. well I'd hope that's not the case. If the game is supposedly progressive chapters/campaigns then to not provide new armour, weapons or skills for anything other than the original 'core' classes seems a bit of a gip to me. After all these are only called 'core' because they're the primary professions available in the original Prophecies campaign. Any class that comes after that should still be considered a 'core' class if it's available as a primary profession - particularly given Anet's insistence that these are stand-alone games rather than expansion packs. Any Canthan born character should be able to progress forwards from that point in the same way that Tyrian characters can now move through Cantha, picking up weapons / armour / skills etc.

Presumably they're sharing the same core technology (they're certainly recylcing enough of it as it is anyway), and any games company worth it's salt would maximise it's productivity by asset-sharing. Having teams develop art and code concurrently the way they are makes sense from a commercial POV but that doesn't mean they have to work in a vaccuum. Models and texures aside, the codebase should be flexible enough to add more items and skills and really they should, in my opinion budget to develop these new classes if they're going to throw them out in the first place. Making primary professions / classes disposable after one chapter is just lazy, frankly.

If I want to play through the campaigns, and keep a character (which I like doing, I didn't ditch my ele as soon as I bought Factions) I'm not going to bother rolling a character that'll become (semi) obsolete after I've finished that particular campaign.

But that's just me..

They've spoken on this before.

The six core professions (W/R/Mo/Me/E/N) will have new skills, armor, etc. in every expansion. And you'll be able to create them in every expansion, with training quests and so on.

The regional professions in each chapter will only be fully supported in that chapter. You'll be able to visit other chapters, but you won't find new skills or armor there, or train up a new character. This makes sense to me: the amount of work required to fully support every profession, coding new quests and character models, would get ridiculous very quickly as the number increased. And it gives you something 'special' about each expansion, too.

The problem with that is that they will have more and more stuff to do for each chapter. If they do have new items for Rits and Sins, that means making armors and weapons and skills for 10 professions, in chapter 4, they will be woking on 12 professions, chapter 5 will have 14 professions, and so on. Then say that there are an average of 6 new armor appearances per existing profession and 10 per new profession (factions has close to that amount I think), that is 160 sets of armor for chapter 5, then take into account the number of weapons, new skills, rebalance with old skills, etc. Also, if you have weapons dropping for 14 professions, that is going to make getting a specific profession's weapon pretty difficult.

I think they will only have Armor and Skills for the Core Classes + the 2 new ones. But thats going to be a huge problem with balancing the proffesions since the core classes have much more different armor and lots of skills. Thats going to be a real problem.

Here is a thought experiment for you.

Fast forward three years. Anet has just released its eighth chapter, "Guild Wars Galaxies." This is the first Guild Wars game you've ever bought. You're very excited to open it up and start playing this thing everyone's been talking about for years.

You install it from the two DVDs included (gw.dat is 11 gigabytes!) and get to the new character screen. Now picture this: you have the option to create, not just six core classes + two new ones, but every profession from every expansion. There are twenty pictures on that screen. How long will it take you to decide between twenty classes for your very first character?

Okay, so you've picked. You're gonna play a Hornet, originally introduced in the fifth expansion, "Guild Wars Bug's Life." You customize everything, and the opening cutscene loads. You start at the space station. What's the first thing you've gotta do? Find your profession trainer. Easy enough -- he's standing in a room with nineteen other profession trainers. He gives you one of the 20 starting quests, and off you go.

Eventually you come back. Need to pick a second profession? Hey, easy! You've got 19 choices! That's a mere 380 combinations, and the Guild Wars development team has carefully balanced all of them with extensive testing on every combination. You decide to play a Hornet/Startrooper, after reading all the analysis of every combination on GuildWiki (which now occupies its own data center).

You have a lot of fun in Guild Wars Galaxies, fighting alien monsters and battling evil. Of course everything is dropping weapons for 20 different classes, so it takes an extremely long time before anything drops that's useful to you, but you can always trade in the in-game economy. (Black dye has recently dropped to a mere 100K + 795 ectos.) Eventually you decide to get all the previous expansions. It'd be cool to get some armor from an earlier set, say from Chapter 4...

Oh wait! You can't! Because the Hornet was introduced in Chapter 5. And everything's been forward-ported but not back-ported. So there are four chapters' worth of options for the Hornet, and seven for the Assassin, and only one for the Startrooper... Wait. Why would anyone want to play a Startrooper again? Assassins by now have about four hundred skills and about fifty sets of armor to choose from! Startroopers are brand new, and they only get 150 skills and maybe six sets of armor. Booooring.

This game sucks, you decide. The new stuff is so lame. Maybe you'll drop it for a while, and pick it back up around the 15th expansion. With 1,260 class combinations to pick, things can only get better, right?

And how hard could it be for a couple of dozen developers to code all that? Not hard at all!


(...And before anyone objects: Yes, I know these "inflation" problems will exist for the six core classes no matter what. No, I don't know how they'll deal with that. But I submit that it's still easier to develop for and balance a constant number of professions -- eight per chapter -- than to try to balance an ever-increasing number each time. And more fun for the players, too. If there's always more content for every single class, we'll end up drowning in a sea of chaos.)

Short answer?

Don't introduce two new classes for every campaign !

First off, were asking for an official, if at all possible if they see this, to respond.

Because honestly, I know its about fun of each expansion, but it really is not that fair to promote new skills for only the original six and leave the rest in teh dust.

And to SFEley, im not sure if you remember, but each expansion, you can only start the characters that are allowed in it. In factions, that was all 8, in prophecies, you CANNOT start a factions char there. Im quite sure that in Nightfall, you will not be able to start an assasin or a rit in the new world, just like you wont be able to create one of the nightfall characters in the previous two to start off with.

Although I WOULD like to see further armors and weapons for sins/rits in Nightfall, they are not neccesary to me. What is are skills. I would like to see new, fresh skills for my Factions chars. A sprinkling of them would be good, since each of the core only get a few new ones, plus new elites, as well (a lot of repeats remember to balance Factions only people im assuming). Hell, just new elites for Rits or Sins would be fine in my book. Just to give a reason to give a damn about the expansion characters.

What I was saying earlier is that though i dont expect it for Nightfall (dev team 2), I would expect it for Chapter 4, since its Dev 1 working on it and their familiarity with the two profesions would help, and they could add more skills blah blah whatever for them while adding new content. THAT in itself is a challange, yes, but instead of every 6 months developing new skills that would be extremely hard communicatiing across the two dev teams to make said skills, you have one dev team work on it for each of their expansions across a year of development.

EDIT: And also: Ever imagine that it is possible that each profession developed has had a rather large amount of other skills that will be set aside for later expansions and pending metagame shifts? Its what Magic does, why not Guild Wars, since they do say they base their model of gameplay similar to its mechanics.

That's exactly what he said. He even gave an example as to why it's not practical to have new skills/weapons/armors for every class in every new expansion. -_-;

Honestly, I want to see new skills for my Sin as well, but I can live without them because I understand the strain that would put on the developers and coders. Eventually, they'd need to start putting out new games once a year due to the imense number of new skills they'd need to add for every chapter. Skills that not every player would actually be able to use, because you can only make those classes in certain specific chapters.

I would re-read my post and then his, and realise I said nothing of the sort. He (and yourself apparently) are running on the assumption that with every expansion you can start every profession there. Thats not the case. In Nightfall, there will be 8 professions (Core + Paragon + Dervish) to choose from should you choose to start there. It is not progressive. The representative professions of each expansion will HAVE to start in their own expansion.

How they do secondary professions I must assume that you may only take secondaries of the professions available within the expansion you started the character in. If that is the case, which well have to see, then the character combinations are lower. Well see what they do. Perhaps you can create an assasin in factions and then travel to Nightfall and switch secondaries there. I have not tried that in the case of a Tyria born character changing secondary in Cantha. I assume its possible. So to get an A/Dervish, itd be possible, just mildly annoying. We shall see. Nightfall is very crucial to the development of the Guild Wars world, well see what they do.

Izzy addressed this in his very good Interview on WoC internet radio show (yall should listen to it if you have the chance).

The same question was posed, and even though he couldn't give an official answer he said this is something that the team is looking at for future chapters and largely depends on the how the classes are liked - but he wouldn't say that there WOULD or WOULD NOT be support either way.

But then he laid in a very obvious hint something along the lines of: Seeing how people use the the new classes, It wouldn't be that bad of an idea to add some stuff for them in future chapters (Not a quote, but thats basically the sum of what he said)

So..You see..Time will basically tell.

I'll have a look for that, thanks.

Loads of good points in this thread, enough for me to say I'd have to retract my 'lazy' comment....

I do still think it's a real shame that the 6 core classes have to be so entrenched as to prevent development of newer classes, particularly as there's only one true melee core class. And also, it has to be said that tying in Collectors Edition specials like the Rit and 'Sin backup dancers is a bit of a shame as well... I already relegated my Rit to Mule and probably won't bother taking my 'Sin any further than Factions.

Ho hum..

Hey! Brilliant and ambitious idea! Stop making new options completely! I know that'd make me put more money down!

I tell you, "Guild Wars Empty Box" is gonna sell like hotcakes...

And Aerian: You completely misunderstood the point I was trying to make, and why I was trying to make it. But I'm not going to waste any more time trying to explain it to you. ANet knows what will make people buy expansions and what will keep the game viable, and as far as I can tell they've been doing it.

You know you're going to buy Nightfall regardless of whether there are any skills in there for your ritualist. You'll do it for the same reason you bought Factions. New shinies. Not more stuff for old shinies. New shinies.

Again, a load of speculation either way.

None of you really have a clue, do you? ^_^

Noone can point me to a developer actually SAYING Rits and Sins wouldn't be supported. Noone can give me any EVIDENCE this is the case. All I hear is "Well they said X months ago...I heard they said this......It's been said that..." without any text or quotes to back it up.

Show me where they said that and I'll believe it. Don't just tell me you heard it from a source that you can't actually reference.

Conclusion?

I'm still asking for the OFFICIAL word on this from an OFFICIAL source. Because all future classes are going to be gimped and useless if their skill sets never improve.

I'm not interested in new armor for Rits and Sins. Not in the least. I'm not even that fussed about new weapons. But new skills? I don't believe they can fully compete with the core classes without them.

/official\ word please? Alex?

As some would mention, if you say you won't bother, it most likely means you can't. I dont want to be a flame, but I have read your post quite a few times to refrain from making the mistake of misunderstanding it, but what you presented, solely along your idea of character creation, is flawed.

Regardless, this is a thread putting together a petition, of sorts I guess, to see if we can get a developer to kindly give away industry secrets months before official release. Obviously doing this would not really benefit them one way or another since both camps will complain about the choice, but we just want some insight onto the mechanics of the future of this game.

AKA, this should not really turn into the 5 million other threads about what Anet should and shouldnt do, and I apologize for fueling some of the fire.

So, Gaile? Alex?