We are beta-testing GW2

"If I am a low level player, still, me going out there helps my team. And in fact, they can invite me and let me act as a higher level player."

Does this statement by O'Brian sound familiar to any of you.... like, maybe this 10 day (lvl up newbies so they can play too thing)?

Plus, I'd like to hear a few opinions on the new comments from the creators of GW2 from all of you.

KANE

Edit to add the link: http://www.gamersglobal.com/special/...anets-founders

i thought the same thing when i read about the update and the buff to lvl 20 stats....sounds like some unofficial GW2 beta testing to me

This has been brought up even earlier in another topic a couple weeks ago. I think it IS a pilot for the later GW2 idea, but I doubt this is final form (I hope not, uber-buffing <> making them equal).

I've noticed a handful of things that are clues to GW2 mechanics. The announcement of bosses, for example. Since they've used the example of the dragon attacking the bridge several times, I'd say the announcement of "Dragon attack" would be displayed similar to EoTN boss warnings. And when they mentioned the buff to low lvls for EoTN access, the similar buff mentioned for GW2 was the first thing that came to mind. Wouldn't surprise me if the book concept is a test as well.

Just as we were Beta Testing the BMP during Halloween in the Costume Brawl

Excellent post, I thought the same thing there too.

KANE

We have been beta testing it since the release of Nightfall then - remember the Consulate Docks mission? It is usually fairly easy to go back and figure out where many features came from when they were first new - a lot of that falls back to the idea of there being almost nothing new under the sun.

Not that I would say you aren't somewhat correct, I'm sure they are paying attention to how a wider ranged "buff" is going to affect things. However that is a far cry from a "beta test" - I doubt they are just doing to see how it works.

It is what good businesses do. Find something that works/people like and build on it. They found an excuse to use this extended weekend event to test how people would respond to the "buffing" of lower level characters (and not how they respond in posts but in the game) and will make changes how they deem necessary instead of having a system in place for GW2 testing and finding out that something doesn't work or the response to how it works is terribly negative.

At this point wouldn't it be more like pre-alpha-testing?

I'd use the term "concept-testing".

Technically, since they're writing a whole new engine based on the previous game and releasing it as a seperate product, we've been 'beta testing' GW2 since April 05.

That's not a knock against GW1. But it's more or less the case, or will be after GW2 launches.

But you're probably right that some of the new twists to gameplay we've been seeing are part of the big GW2 list somewhere.

I like the sound of the defending your "world"

Where he said something like "If 100 people are there thats good, if 200 are thats even better"

Huge epic battles like in BMP (the battle of Turai)

Nooooooo why does it have to be so far away :'(

Wrong. As I've quoted him before in other threads, Jeff "whatsisname" said specifically in PC Gamer that GW2 was built on the GW1 engine.

KANE

A modified engine. And when you think that idtech 5 is just another in a string of engines built from the Quake 3 engine, you can appreciate how far an engine can, if built properly in the first place, be modified.

Weird, I could swear that the whole reason they were making a sequel was because there were many things they wanted to implement that couldn't be done with the current engine.

Yea, if the game doesn't need a new engine why make a sequel

I thought the same thing, however in retrospect I can't be sure that is what I read. I would most likely have read "can't be done with out current model" to mean that when in fact it doesn't.

Take a jump button for instance - probably fairly easy to implement in GW1 from a pure engine perspective. However, how will this affect all the maps already done? How about the PvP maps? That is a whole lot of stuff to contend with even with something as simple a jumping. GW1 has little knowledge of a z-axis (it does have some) and that may very well require a massive amount of work to add in, however for a new game designed from the ground up with that in place should be no problem. Jumping is something simple, how about the more radical changes?

*shrug* If they had a really well designed engine from the beginning and focused on enforcing a "good" design then it wouldn't necessarily make sense to scrap it. But then, in my experience that is *really* hard to keep that clean a design over a multi-year project - in fact I generally find that near impossible. Of course, I also do not know exactly how radical the changes they are proposing are - both because we do not know all of them and we do not know the code base (heck, jumping may be the largest change in the whole engine for all we know).

This is especially true if the changes they are talking about were "seen" from the very beginning. I know I have written software in the past where I know it will eventually have a fairly radical change once I have tried enough different cases to know which way is the correct one. I just made sure that the options were all easy to change too and tried to make sure everything I did maintained a great amount of flexibility when it came time to make the "real" version (just in case none of the options I foresaw were correct), though the current version was very much a commercial piece of software and well worth the investment clients put into it.

strcpy - very good points. I suppose if the code for the original engine was written in such a way that allowed for a great amount of flexibility, and I don't doubt that, it could be re-worked for a next-gen game like GW2. The only things I am really concerned about are things like physics, lighting, armor/item clipping, better skill animations, etc. If the engine could be molded to include these things, then I'm all for it.

It will, everything points to it. Everyone complains about GW:EN being "incomplete" or "rushed out there." But look at how GW:EN looks. The water, fire, wind effects in it are astonishing. I remember the preview weekend when their servers were overloaded, I thought that GW:EN had overloaded my computer's ability to render such beauty (thank goodness it hasn't, I love GW on maxed settings).

Now if that's GW:EN, an expansion, just think how much more beautiful GW2 will be, when they've had around a year to modify/redesign the original engine.

As for the comment about older engines: Unreal 3's engine is a heavily modified version of the original Unreal's engine. You build it right (as said before), it can be modified to kingdom come.

Physics would be awesome. I just can't figure out how they can accomplish that in a massive multiplayer persistent environment.
But, yes physics would rock if they could pull it off.
Emergent game play is incredible when physics are involved. I really think an mmo fully exploring emergent game play possibilities is long overdue.