Guild Wars 2 - PC

Guild Wars 2: The Best MMO I've Played In Years

2012-09-25T20:22:00Z

Guild Wars 2 is the best MMO I’ve played in years. It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t turn genre convention on its ear as much as the pre-release rhetoric from NCsoft and ArenaNet might have led you to believe, but this ambitious and well-executed MMORPG artfully marries the twin design tenets of rewarding same-faction cooperation and providing hardcore, skill-based PvP competition.

[Editor's Note: Game Informer does not assign traditional review scores to MMOs given their constantly updating and changing nature. This column examines the game with a critical eye, and takes the place of a standard review.]

This is cast in the mold of the EverQuest/World of Warcraft lineage of MMORPGs, but with several key innovations. Some parts of the game, like the big-ticket World vs. World combat, are leagues beyond anything available in competing titles. Others, like the leveling process, are familiar but so dramatically improved over genre standards that you’ll have a hard time going back. ArenaNet’s unusual take on players’ personal storylines, on the other hand, is a half-baked shell of a feature that functions poorly. On balance, though, Guild Wars 2 is an exceptional game worth every penny of its sticker price and more, despite its lack of an ongoing subscription fee (see sidebar).

The incredible scale of the world is striking. Capital cities stretch out to the horizon. Handcrafted adventuring zones are packed full of content, and are as gigantic as they are numerous. ArenaNet has almost entirely avoided the cut-and-paste trap that some MMOs fall into; every corner you turn brings an arresting new vista full of unique visuals. From the overall art direction to the tiniest animation, Guild Wars 2 is one of the best-looking games I’ve ever played.

After the initial buzz from the presentation fades, a deeper and more permanent love affair with the mechanics is clear to take root. Combat is still a matter of pressing hotbar buttons, but the need to aim most attacks instead of having them automatically seek their targets lends battle a dynamic edge lacking in similar MMOs, even newer ones like Rift and Star Wars: The Old Republic. All but the most basic fights ask more of players than other MMORPGs do, from dodging out of nasty charge-up attacks to adapting tactics and skill priorities to each encounter.

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The limited skill bar is the other key to the combat system. Unlike World of Warcraft and its brethren, where a high-level character often has upwards of three dozen skills and items that need to be fired off in particular sequences or situations to coax optimal output from your hero, you’re limited to 10 total skills plus a unique class feature or three. As in the original Guild Wars, you’re largely free to fill those 10 slots with the skills you like or need to fulfill your role in a group. Every one of the dozens of combinations I’ve tried across several classes is suited to a unique playstyle, and the design of each individual skill and overall class has thus far prevented anything approaching a “cookie-cutter” build from becoming dominant in any sphere.

The most impressive accomplishment of the combat and skill design is how it obviates the very idea of a “skill rotation” that is endemic to most other hotbar-combat MMOs. Picking the right time to hit your buttons is what makes a player skillful, rather than finding the “correct” build in an online guide and burning the optimal ability rotation into your muscle memory. Along with the ever-present emphasis on ground-targeted effects, positioning, and dodging, the combat and skill design invites players to keep their eyes on the battle instead of playing the interface.

I wasn’t sold on the idea of removing the traditional tanking and healing roles, especially as someone whose favorite content is difficult group dungeons and raids, but so far my earlier skepticism is proving unfounded. The concept of giving every player a heal skill and making everyone responsible for their own health bar is working out brilliantly. Having a decent mix of damage- and support-focused characters in a PvE or PvP group is still helpful, but the line is pleasantly blurry. I’m not convinced that dungeon-style content is plentiful or good enough to hold my interest in the long-term, but Guild Wars 2 makes up for that in many other ways.

How content is structured is as important to an MMO as good fundamental mechanics are. Guild Wars 2 follows the same blueprint in this regard: Determine the core goal that this style of MMORPGs have been chasing since their inception, and come up with a new, better approach. The results are excellent.

Guild Wars 2’s leveling experience is unparalleled. The dynamic event system takes the place of questing, and holds several advantages over traditional designs. The window dressing of a quasi-living world falls apart about halfway to level cap as you realize that the game effectively trades static spawns for longer, more scripted spawn cycles, but it’s still a superior system. More importantly, combining the dynamic missions with the ability to meaningfully engage in content without having to find a quest-giver is a wonderful change.

The content is good enough and so intertwined that it’s not uncommon to wander into an event (which the interface makes dead simple to do), be pulled into a series of further encounters and scenarios, and not notice until an hour later that you’ve trekked across most of the zone and gained a level and a half. The generous cooperation mechanics – you always get full credit for killing an enemy or completing a task, no matter if you started, finished, or helped a bit in the middle of other players also participating – mean that you’re always glad to see and work with other players. Larger events are basically pick-up raids, though like most leveling content they are tuned such that any old group of players can complete it without any meaningful communication.

Crafting, exploring, questing, and plain old fighting are all rewarded with copious amounts of loot and experience. Whatever activity strikes your mood or playstyle, you can make meaningful progress by engaging in it. Taken all together, leveling is a silky-smooth, enjoyable experience full of opportunities to scratch most MMO player itches from fighting tough one-on-one battles to exploring treacherous jumping puzzles.

The one black mark on Guild Wars 2 is the poorly written, shoddily executed, badly conceived personal story solo-instance adventures that sprinkle your journey from level 1 to 80. Having some control over the course of the tale is neat, but ultimately pointless when the story itself is this bad. I could forgive the middle-school D&D campaign dialogue and narrative if the missions were cool. Rather than helping storied heroes save the world, though, I have thus far found myself either cursing buggy scripting that makes it difficult or impossible to complete objectives, or bored to tears slogging through generic waves of enemies. In every case, I’ve done a lot of eye-rolling while fast-forwarding painful dialogue. The decision to include terrible single-player RPG bits in this otherwise brilliant MMO is a baffling one.

PvP is the final piece of the Guild Wars 2 puzzle, and it’s a big one. The ambitious World vs. World design is amazing. Servers battle each other on gigantic, persistent, open-world zones built specifically for large group combat complete with towering fortifications and powerful siege engines. WvW can be a bit of a crapshoot, as hooking up with a group doing something interesting is dependent on your server, the day of the week, and even time of day. When you do find a group (or even better, organize a crew of your own), the excellent combat mechanics make it some of the best PvP in the genre. Like everything else, engaging in WvW is amply rewarded with loot, experience (though everyone’s base stats are boosted to level-cap values in WvW), and achievements.

Structured PvP is a separate, e-sports flavored option where everyone has every skill unlocked and wears gear with equivalent stats on it. Matches are objective-based and take place on servers akin to the way a competitive shooter like Battlefield works. The progression hook is much weaker here, though, as the only rewards are cosmetic items for use in more structured PvP. And, of course, the all-important achievements and bragging rights that dedicated PvPers do it for.

Guild Wars 2 is a shining, impressive achievement that will shape the MMORPG space for years to come. The personal story is bad, yes, but that’s a tiny sliver of the overall package. The execution of the rest of the game is nearly flawless on a level that only a handful of studios have ever achieved, much less in a massively multiplayer setting. The ambitious and unique retooling of genre conventions reveals a level of thoughtfulness on ArenaNet’s behalf that only the top tier of game developers can aspire to. We’re going to be playing and talking about this one for a long time.

A Respectful Business Model

In lieu of a monthly subscription fee, Guild Wars 2 has an in-game shop where items are sold for real-world currency to supplement the income provided by sixty-dollar box sales. Out of all the cash shops I’ve seen in online games, I like this one the best. Not only is it almost entirely avoidable if you don’t want to spend money (bank slots and bag slots are the only things I’d consider de-facto required), but the real-money currency is available for purchase with in-game currency. The exchange rate is dependent on the game-wide economy, but so far the effective gold prices for items and services have been comparable to the investment required for similar items in MMOs that lack cash shops entirely. Until and unless ArenaNet has a dramatic change of heart with regard to how it runs the cash shop, its inclusion is way more than a fair trade for the lack of a monthly fee.

30-Minute Video Preview

2012-04-13T17:01:00Z

ArenaNet designer Jonathan Sharp walks us through Guild Wars 2's innovative dynamic questing system and shows off a never-before-seen PvP map.

The video below touches on a few of Guild Wars 2's most important elements. Curious about how the game eschews traditional MMO leveling content, or how the combat system works, or what the scoop on the massive "world vs. world" open-world PvP battles is? Sharp narrates all those answers and more over raw gameplay footage recorded at the Game Informer offices.

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More Guild Wars 2 content awaits you in the six-page feature in the May issue of Game Informer as well as the podcast that Sharp recorded with us while he was in town.

Which aspect of Guild Wars 2 is most exciting or most concerning to you as a potential player?

Guild Wars 2 Is The Real MMO Revolution

2012-02-21T01:50:00Z

In the lead-up to the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare and EA increased the hype by pushing the idea that their game was revolutionary. I always cringed when I heard it. The Old Republic wrapped together a lot of things I already loved about MMOs and proved that adding a real story to that formula is a meaningful change. It was enough to draw me in and keep me hooked for a few months, but calling it "revolutionary" is an exaggeration.

ArenaNet is no BioWare. It is a relatively small Seattle-area company that many non-PC gamers haven’t even heard of, and it’s is preparing to release what appears to be the slickest, most smartly developed MMO I’ve ever seen. Oh, and there’s no subscription fee. ArenaNet has been quietly working away for years now and hasn’t used the weighty words that EA threw around so freely, so allow me to do so for them: Guild Wars 2 does everything The Old Republic promised and then some. This is the actual MMO revolution we’ve been waiting for.

I started my most recent journey to Tyria as a female norn guardian. Norn are a race of rustic, nature-loving northerners who have been driven from their homeland by a giant frost dragon named Jormag. The norn storyline begins in the makeshift capital of Hoelbrak, a giant city where they are preparing for the Great Hunt.

Guild Wars 2 continues the recent MMO trend of attempting to make story meaningful and important in an online setting, but there’s at least one thing ArenaNet is doing immediately better than The Old Republic. Your personal story is based entirely on your choice of race rather than class, and classes are not race-restricted. This means players won’t find themselves stuck with certain gameplay mechanics that they might not enjoy just because they’ve heard one class has the best storyline.

Part of that approach to storytelling comes in character creation. Unlike other games, you aren’t just tweaking your character’s visuals at the start. You’ll also make several personality choices that affect dialogue options and, eventually, the direction of your story altogether.

For example, I was able to choose whether my norn wore a helm identifying her as a truth seeker or some pauldrons showing her stripes as a religious fanatic. After that, I was asked what happened at a recent norn party. Did my character black out? Did she get into a fight with a rival? I wasn’t able to get far enough in the norn storyline in one weekend to see how these decisions actually affect things, but a coworker informed me that you'll begin seeing some of the differences before you hit level 20.

After finishing character creation, I was tossed into a tutorial area where I needed to prove my worth by hunting down one of several possible huge creatures. I went after a minotaur bull who was protected by its cubs. After gathering my trophy kills, I returned to Knut Whitebear, a higher-ranking norn who informed me that for the final event of this Great Hunt, he had lured a giant wurm to the area and was inviting all heroes to fight it.

Every race’s tutorial area ends with a similar boss encounter meant to teach how the open-world group events work. In this case, I was joined by three or four other level one characters in a small mountain enclosure where we encountered a ton of tiny wurms. After taking out enough of these burrowing menaces, the giant wurm that Whitebear spoke of burst from the ground. In the huge encounter that ensued, we had to avoid giant swipes of the wurm’s body by watching for tells and dodging. We also had to contend with smaller enemies as he summoned more of the tiny wurms to his aid.

Guild Wars 2’s event system scales dynamically based on how many players are in the area, but regardless of group size, encounters like this are immediately challenging. Even at level one, even in the prologue area, ArenaNet isn’t afraid to throw players into a situation where they need to pay attention, learn patterns, and use skills smartly. A massive creature like this should involve more than just hacking away at its torso for a minute or two. It should be a battle of attrition, and that’s what it felt like – albeit a very fun battle of attrition.

Lifting The Veil On Guild Wars 2's Mysterious Mesmer

2011-12-14T14:00:00Z

News that the mesmer would be returning as the eighth and final class in Guild Wars 2 leaked earlier this week, but you may not yet understand the complex mechanics that make this such an interesting addition to the GW 2 roster. I spoke with ArenaNet game designer Jon Peters and system designer Jonathan Sharp to get a better sense what makes the mesmer special.

Why don't we start with a rundown of what exactly the mesmer is?

Jon Peters: So, the mesmer. This is the super-best-kept secret, eighth and last profession for Guild Wars 2. He is a scholar which means light cloth armor like the elementalist and necromancer. It’s kind of a hybrid of magic and melee – a fencing, dueling, finesse, mind game profession. We’re trying to keep a lot of what was there with the first mesmer in Guild Wars 1. We felt it was a pretty iconic profession for us.

The big things that he does to carry over that tradition – the Guild Wars 1 mesmer controlled the resources of the game. There was energy, skill interrupting, and all that stuff. The mesmer manipulated and controlled those resources. That was how he fit into the puzzle.

Guild Wars 2’s mesmer does a very similar thing but in a very different way, as the game is very different. The game is a lot about positioning and seeing things in the world and movement. The mesmer does that in a Guild Wars 2 way. The best way to describe that is through his main mechanic, which is these illusions that he summons. In Guild Wars 1, we had hexes. You just put them on guys, and they just sat on their interface. They didn’t know what it was unless they moused over it and read it.

In Guild Wars 2, you summon these illusions in the world. It’s stuff that you actually have to deal with. At the same time, it means that everyone can deal with it, and everyone can look around and see what the mesmer is doing, but they don’t necessarily know what it is. A lot of these illusions are just clones of the mesmer that look exactly like him, and you have to attack them to find out whether or not they’re real. Then you have ones that are a little bit more specific called phantasms. They do something special. For example, on the great sword there’s a phantasm that spins around with a big purple great sword in his hand and cripples guys. He forces you to deal with him. He creates a situation that you have to deal with.

So we already put creatures in the position of, "What am I fighting? Am I fighting an illusion? Is it the mesmer? What should I do?" As soon as they make the decision about what to do, you can destroy the illusions and do new things with them. There are four skills called "shatter." Each one will shatter all of your illusions that are out there and do something different. One of them does damage. One of them puts a debuff on your enemies called "confusion" that makes them take damage when they start casting skills. One of them will stun enemies. The fourth one will actually put this mirror around you that reflects attacks that come in on you. So you have access at all times to these different roles in combat. One of the ways the mesmer becomes as versatile as our other professions is through his shatters.

What would you say is the stand-out element that separates the mesmer from the previously announced seven classes?

Jonathan Sharp: A lot of the control, which Jon just talked about. The illusions are a unique mechanic that nobody else has. They’re not really minions like what the necromancer has. They’re not permanent like what the ranger has. A lot of times they’re one-offs, because as soon as they get hit once, they dispel. That’s his really unique mechanic, and he uses those to great effect. They play an integral part in all the things the mesmer does. The illusions and manipulating those illusions in the battlefield are really what he’s about.

JP: Yeah, I think to sum up, it’s all about using illusions to buy time and to confuse enemies. One of the things that sums up him best – on his main-hand sword, he has two skills: a skill called "leap" and a skill called "illusionary leap." If he presses leap, he creates a clone at his location that points toward the guy that he’s leaping at, and then he leaps in and stabs the guy. The clone looks exactly like him and has his name. If he uses illusionary leap, he points at the guy while simultaneously creating a clone that leaps at the target and stabs them.

That pretty much sums up a lot of what he’s about. It’s the only time where you don’t necessarily know what to do. The mesmer is the most proactive in enforcing his playstyle on other people.

Looking at these abilities and hearing this description, it sounds like a fairly cerebral class – like there will be a lot of strategy figuring out when you summon illusions, when you shatter them, whether you’re going to summon an illusion at your spot or send an illusion to their spot. How does that more thoughtful gameplay work with the more action-y pace of Guild Wars 2 compared to other MMOs?

JS: What’s cool about it is the way it’s set up so that very casual players can summon these illusions, and they’re still going to get great effect out of them. It’s really easy to jump in with the mesmer and see yourself as very effective very quickly. Having said that, like all of our classes, they’re very easy to pick up, and the core mechanics are easy, but there’s a lot of layers on top of that of all these cool tricks you can do. There’s a really high skill ceiling to this class – just like with, for example, the elementalist – a great player can actually have a matrix in their mind of all 20 skills they can use. They can bounce back and forth to the specific skill they need at the specific time. While you can be really good at the beginning, just like the other classes, there’s definitely a high skill ceiling.

It seems like a fairly complex class as far as the mechanics go. Will there be anything in the game to help teach people how to play it?

JP: We do this for all of the classes, and we’re always improving these things. These are the things we’re improving the most right now, in fact – the polish and making the game understandable in every way and teaching players the things that most particularly are in our game that aren’t in other games, like blocking projectiles and dodging out of the way of things and switching weapon sets. Those are the things we’re finding important to call out and just as important as these illusions are. We’re trying to do the same thing with the mesmer.

That being said, as Jon said, there’s absolutely a very high ceiling to this profession, but it’s a surprisingly low barrier of entry. We’ve been revealing the classes slowly as more and more complex. There’s a lot of complexity and subtlety here, but there’s also a lot that’s okay if you don’t know it. If I summon an illusionary pistol, it’s still going to shoot at a guy and kill them. We found that players that have a lot of expertise love manipulating those things, but players that are casual have really taken to the mesmer so far more than we thought they would.

In the original Guild Wars, the mesmer was more of a support class. What specific steps did you take when you decided to bring this class to Guild Wars 2 to move it away from being a support class?

JS: We did a few things. In our game, you can still do the support. You can call up a chaos storm with your staff that puts up random conditions on foes and random boons on allies. You can still support in that way. In Guild Wars 1, we found that while the class was great in PvP, a lot of times in PvE it had a really hard time. We designed the mechanics with the illusions so that the mesmer on their own in the world of PvE is still very effective.

They’re able to take care of themselves, deal out damage, and also support allies. And you’ve still got the control that you had from the first game. You’ve still got the stuns and the dazes. Those act as interrupts in our game. You can still interrupt key skills from opponents. You’ve still got all of those things that you had from the first game in addition to being able to do damage on your own if you need to.

Rabbits Versus Dragons In Guild Wars 2

2011-08-17T07:15:00Z

It was only a month ago at Comic-Con that I had my first hands-on time with Guild Wars 2 and walked away wildly impressed. Yesterday at Gamescom, I had the opportunity to sit down for two longer play sessions that showed off even more reasons to fall in love with this promising game.

Two major mechanics have changed about Guild War 2 since last time I saw it. First off, the fast dodging move, which lends the game a much more action-y feel, is now powered by a "dodge meter." Dodging before an attack hit virtually always guarantees that you'll avoid damage, but players will only be able to pull off three or four dodges in a row before needing to give the meter time to refill.

Developer ArenaNet has also tweaked the way skills are gained. To go along with the game's friendly attitude toward quickly and frequently swapping weapons, new skills now become available on your skill bar as you use a weapon. For example, after around 10 or 15 minutes of using a wand as a necromancer, I gained my second skill, which turned positive buffs on enemies into curses. By the time I was done with the 40-minute demo, I had switched to a sword and nearly reached my third skill on that tree.This system guarantees players will never need to waste time hunting down a trainer just to get the new abilities they need to progress.

For the first of my two play sessions, I tested out the Charr starting area by playing as a necromancer. During character creation, I was prompted to choose several story options in addition to visual customization. I chose what emotion my character stuck to most, which legion of the Charr he belonged to, and who his best friend was. These choices immediately affect the starting area's storyline and will help branch players' personal stories further from there.

The Charr begin the game in Ascalon, a major capital city that was at one point stolen from them by humans. Though the Charr now control Ascalon once again, the city is cursed and constantly under siege by ghostly remnants of the people who once lived here. I started with a mission to fight off the powerful spirit of one of the human barons.

As soon as I'm past character creation and story segments, I'm immediately reminded of why I loved Guild Wars 2 so much at Comic-Con. Characters move fast and can continue moving during combat. In fact, player location is a greater factor than almost any other MMO, because characters can continue moving while using skills or casting spells. My primary starting ability as a necromancer allowed me to throw bolts of poison at enemies, while I also had a healing ability that allowed me to summon a companion that I could then slaughter to regain my health.

Over the course of this first quest and the boss fight that ensued, most of my pack were wiped out, save for me and the character I had chosen as my best friend. Out of the tutorial instance, I was introduced to a wide open area that would be used for questing in a traditional MMO, but Guild Wars 2 doesn't have traditional quests. Beyond the personal story, players advance by completing dynamic events that are generated all over each area of the world.

Outside of Ascalon, I quickly discovered five or six dynamic events within walking distance, some more serious than others. For one, I was asked by a farmer to take up a cattle prod and help herd some cows into a fenced-off area. For another, I had to fight off relentless waves of Fire Legion Charr to win back an armory near the city. These events become active as soon as you enter the area in which they're happening, and they provide numerous levels of reward based on how much you participate, including experience and gold.

I continued my personal story by visiting the commander in charge of my pack, who wasted no time in blaming me for my group being wiped out. As an insult, he gave me a fetch quest as my next mission -- picking up some supplies from a nearby caravan. I headed over quickly, hoping to win back his support, but as you might expect, things went horribly wrong. The supply train was attacked by Fire Legion traitors, and I arrived just in time to see them destroy the supplies before I could stop them. Despite taking my revenge on the Fire Legion, my commander was not impressed. My Charr playthrough ended with him ordering me into an unbalanced arena fight to prove my worth.

After this entertaining starting experience, NCSoft wanted to show off some higher level content, so they loaded up a level 58 Asara character for me to play. The Asara are the tiny, bunny-esque creatures pictured in the screenshot at the top of this preview. One of the first things I noticed with my Asara warrior was the incredible amount of animation put into making this character. Dodges for the Asara look more like huge leaps, and when they are running while carrying large weapons, they'll hoist the blades onto their shoulders nonchalantly. An ArenaNet representative explained to me that they wanted to give this race a more light-hearted feel that comes across just by watching them, and they've certainly succeeded.

I jumped in as an Asara Warrior and made my way down to the coast line of this wooded region, where one of the craziest dynamic events I had seen was taking place. A large undead ship had emerged from the water and was slowly making its way to the coast, at which point it would begin pouring undead out into the zone. Luckily, there were a number of catapults set up along the beach, so I jumped into to one and started attacking the ship.

As soon as I started taking part in the event, a timer popped up in the corner letting me know that we had 15 minutes to take down the powerful ship before it arrived on shore and progressed to a different part of the event. An NCSoft representative explained that the event has several sections, and the undead could be stopped and driven back at any of them. If players aren't around or fail to stop it, the undead can take over nearby towns. If players need help, they can reach out to a nearby cave full of ghost pirates, who will agree to help drive the undead back if you help them -- an example of two entirely separate dynamic events that can overlap and intertwine if they happen at the right time.

I teamed up with a couple other players and focused on taking out the ship alone. It retaliated with giant poisonous projectiles that destroyed the catapults, forcing us to defend and revive NPCs who could repair them. After 10 minutes of struggle, we took out the ship and received a huge reward. Then NCSoft decided to show us one of the coolest encounters in the game so far.

We warped to a different area of the zone, a gray, dead land where off in the distance a huge dragon was immediately visible. According to ArenaNet, this giant beast is one of the smaller dragons in the game. For this encounter -- again, purely a dynamic event that anyone who wanders by can join in on -- players need to work together with a huge NPC army to fight off legions of undead, break down the dragons wall of bone armor, and attack the creature however possible. Numerous siege weapons dotted the landscape, including a catapult and lightning turrets. I also noticed a huge laser in the back. When enough power has built up into the laser, it will blast through the bone wall and bring the dragon down briefly, opening up a brief window for players to run up close and attack the creature.

I split my time between reviving NPCs to make sure the turrets stayed in top shape and manning them to more efficiently take out the swarming undead and to pick away at the bone wall. Despite being wildly outnumbered -- this fight is meant for at least 10 players, though it can scale larger, but we only had around 5 -- we fought hard and were able to keep alive and slowly tick down the dragon's health.

The fight highlighted another thing I enjoy about Guild Wars 2: The game provides players with an absurd amount of options in battle. Every class has its own healing abilities, every class can revive NPCs and other players, and there are many skills to help out in sticky combat situations. Using a mix of healing, a stomp ability that sent large groups scattering, and a whirlwind ability that allowed me to quickly move away from enemies, I managed to only die a single time in this difficult battle. When downed, I received a second chance to take down a single enemy before dying for good. I happened to take out a nearby undead monstrosity, and my character jumped back to his feet with a healthy chunk of his life restored.

We weren't able to take out the dragon in full -- that would have taken a lot longer, especially with our tiny group -- but this battle was one of the most thrilling dragon encounters I've experienced in any MMO. It was a true struggle instead of just a 20-minute stretch of slicing at some huge creatures knees. Yet again, I walked away from playing Guild Wars 2 with a huge grin on my face, eager to check out more as soon as possible.

ArenaNet Drops New Norn And Thief Details

2011-03-12T19:00:00Z

After introducing the Thief last week, ArenaNet is finally providing a look at the class in action. As a refresher, thieves are distinguishable by light armor, dual blades, and the obvious affinity for stealth tactics.

ArenaNet has additionally offered up a preview of the Norn, described as the most outgoing of the five races.

“A player should pick a Norn if they want to play a larger than life character,” says Lead Game Designer Eric Flannum. “Norn do everything to extremes and they live life to its fullest. To a Norn, the journey is more important than the destination and one should always live in the moment. In game terms, Norn player will have access to skills that draw upon their reverence for the spirits of the wild. This means that Norn will be able to call upon the spirits and take bear, raven, snow leopard, and wolf form. Beyond taking animal form, the Norn can use their affinity with nature in smaller ways as well. For example, a Norn can call upon the wurm spirit to summon a temporary pet wurm.”

If you’re lucky enough to be at PAX East this weekend, Guild Wars 2 is playable on the show floor. If not, the goods below are the next best thing.

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