Gorani's Blog
Toothless Tiger, Hidden Game ? - Part 1
by , 15-02-2010 at 09:51 (1589 Views)
Hello GWO community members, just players of GuildWars or newcomers to either this site or the game.
This post marks my first blog entry in the upcoming series of GWO Bloggers, here on the new/revamped site. All bloggers will try to focus on certain aspects of the game as far as we can plan ahead now, so read all of them to get the full picture or chose your favorite.
Canthan new year has passed
Last week marked the appearance of the Celestial Animal at the Canthan new year festival - a Tiger.
(For the clueless and intrigued: Every year since 2007 the Canthan New Year is a special in-game event, hosted in and around the Shing Jae Monastery in the GuildWars campaign of Factions. People have to gather certain items to create a dish for the Celestial Animal. If they succeed, they are rewarded by one-shot items that create fireworks in your guildhall and a festival lion's mask)
Festivals and in-game events both mark assets and drawbacks of both the community of gamers and the game itself.
An asset certainly is the new stuff that gets created by a team of programmers (the "Live Team", headed by Linsey Murdock) for the events. This is something we should not take for granted, as GuildWars is not a pay-2-play game and ANet got our money a long time a go. This year the team gave us Summoning Stones, that conjures up a beast in form of a celestial animal.
Another asset is the tradition of "sponsored districts", which - at least what I could witness - was the strongest year since the beginning of the event. Guilds and alliances of players provide the ingredients for the dishes, so everybody in the instance can enjoy the benefit of the rewards.
There are drawbacks, too. The most prominent is the AFK'ing of the event in the boardwalk games. You buy lots of tickets for those games and leave your character standing there without really active play.
Why do people do this? Because losing and winning games contributes to two titles in the game, that can't be completed without either endless, mind numbing grind - or standing AFK in boardwalk games, if you can afford to burn your wealth that way.
Personally, I hope for more diverse methods of getting some titles in the future.
The waiting game for GuildWars 2
This is where GuildWars 2 comes in. GuildWars 2 is the follow-up to GuildWars and its current three campaigns and one expansion. ArenaNet, the developer of GuildWars has promised GuildWars 2 a long time ago. Initially there should have been a Beta version of the game by the end of 2009, but the release was delayed a lot since that first announcement.
Some people even began to whisper the words of "vaporware" (but not in Duke Nukem proportions), but ArenaNet released a trailer with in-game graphics in late 2009 and lifted up the spirits of waiting players, like me. Unlike Blizzard has done with Diablo 3, ArenaNet is very quiet about what will be in the game and what it will look like (with the exception of the pretty "The Art of GuildWars2" book). So there is much room for speculation and divination in the year 2010.
Next week I will take a look and talk about things I will do, to keep myself interested in GuildWars, so I can bridge the gap to new information about GuildWars 2 and to migrate to the new game without turning my back on the series and leave the world of Tyria forever.
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