I 'm thinking of ditching WoW to play GW2 but I have some questions.
1. If the game is Free to Play...where is the catch? They won't make enough money from just selling the game and/or expansions?
2. What is the level cap?
3. How much is it going to cost?
4. I read somewhere that there won't be any mounts, correct?
5. Are there going to be like WoW proffs (Tailor,letherworker etc.?) or it is just going to be NPC crafter?
I think thats all.|||1. No catch on free to play. GW1 is free to play, and ANet doesn't seem to have gone broke using that economic model for the last six years. The cash shop looks like it will be a little more important to GW2 than it is in GW1, but they primarily sell optional cosmetic items (such as costumes). Unlike games that depend heavily on the cash shop, it will not sell gear that will make us more competitive than what is available in-game.
2. Level cap is 80, with little or no grind. The leveling curve is smooth and flat.
3. No idea yet on the cost. I would guess similar to GW1 or many standalone games. $60, maybe?
4. Correct. No mounts are present or needed. They have a great map-travel system for getting around using teleport gates and waypoints.
5. Unlike GW1, they have added player crafting professions for GW2. One for each armor class (light, medium, heavy), three types of weapon crafters, jeweler, and cook. Players can have two professions at a time and can switch to new professions at minimal cost without losing leveling progress in their old professions. There are NO gathering professions. All players can gather.|||Not all the info has been released yet for GW2 so it's hard to give you absolute certainties for answers but here's what I remember reading/hearing.
1. You have to buy the game itself, the exact price has not be released but my guess would be $49-$59 US dollars (no monthly fees). After that you never need to pay for anything else unless you choose to. There will most likely be optional things that you can buy but are not required. For example in GW1 the come out with costumes every few months.
2. Level cap I believe I heard will be 80
3. See above for my guess on game price.
4. I've seen that in some cutscene videos that there are Golems and the charr have some war wagon type vehicles but as far as I know there has been no info released yet how they work or even if you can get into them.
5. I do remember a quick message saying that if you wanted to, that you never need to fight and can just be a crafter if you choose but I don't remember specifics of what types of things you can craft being mentioned.
Hope this helps,
Necrotic Doomsday|||Awesome, thanks for the feedback.|||Actually, I'm pretty sure they said that servers aren't that expensive to run, so the monthly fees that other games have are relatively unnecessary. So I think they do make enough money for everything. They just have to manage it more. Having a cash shop that doesn't offer any game play advantages will help give them a relatively constant flow of cash.
Yesterday, during the Gamescom livestream, they specifically said there will be no mounts in the game...at initial release. To me, that sounds like there will be some at some point, but they will probably not function the same way as other games mounts. With the instant map travel that we'll have, they may just be a secondary way to traverse the world.
But, until we know more, we can only speculate.|||Quote:
Yesterday, during the Gamescom livestream, they specifically said there will be no mounts in the game...at initial release. To me, that sounds like there will be some at some point, but they will probably not function the same way as other games mounts. With the instant map travel that we'll have, they may just be a secondary way to traverse the world.
But, until we know more, we can only speculate.
I believe they've also stated that they thought about mounts in the past but decided they weren't necessary due to the teleportation system and how the maps were designed. The initial release comment might just be someone from the developer side thinking "well, the live team may decide differently" in the same way that they declined to comment on holiday festivals (other than that they would exist) as that was a live team thing.
Anyway, I've always seen mounts as a patch for the issue that the maps in games are just made too large, and have too much land that is barren of life. Watching the videos for gw2 leads me to believe that this won't be quite as much of an issue for gw2 (we shall see though). The only other real reason to use them is to get to a point of interest that you were at before and want to go back to, but for that gw2 has the teleportation system so I don't know if I'd be using a mount even if they were in the game. Again, I can only hope that this works well.
Ok, so back to the other questions:
1. There is a cash shop as others have mentioned and costumes are a big part of that. The worst item of gw1 competitively would probably be the pvp unlock packs, which unlock all the skills of gw1 for pvp characters. It was something that some pvp'ers complained about if I'm not mistaken (but I could be as I'm not big into gw1's pvp). However, it didn't take long at all to get enough skills in gw1 to be competitive. In fact, when I got a new account I rolled up a pvp rit immediately to unlock some skills and no one called me a noob for using the automatically assigned skills that they give you without you needing to unlock them first. In gw2, pvp players will all have access to all skills so that won't happen this time. They have talked about dungeons being added in the cash shop though, still we'd be paying for those anyway as separate chapters if they didn't do this, it would just take longer as they'd have to do multiple ones before they would feel a chapter is ready.
So basically the cash shop is the catch, but they do a good job to not make it mandatory or a pay-to-win fiasco.
2. The level cap is 80, but taking a character into organized pvp (not world vs world) will bump you to max and unlock all the skills. You'll have the ability to save pvp and pve templates so that you'll be able to switch back and forth easily. There will also be sidekicking up in pve so if you travel with higher level friends that will make it easier if I recall correctly, you won't have any skills unlocked though so you won't be affecting fights as much as other players. Dungeons will always be available to you no matter what level they are intended for, you'll just get your level kicked down to the highest they technically allow for it (but not lock any skills you've earned or change your equipment). There's also some level adjustment downwards for persistent areas if I remember correctly, but you'll still feel like you're a bit stronger than what the content was designed for (unless they changed their minds).
So yeah, there's a cap of 80 but you probably won't feel as limited by them as other mmos, and you'll be able to go back and do any content you want really without feeling dumb.
3. I agree, probably $49-59 for the first few years. Maybe a bit less during black Friday or the Monday following it after more than one year has passed, but that'll probably depend on popularity so don't count on it.
4. See my above rant.
5. BrettM covered this pretty well, I do want to mention that there will be nodes for say ores/flowers and idk what else, but that they are not something you have to share with other people. If someone else picks up that rare mythril, (ok, that probably wouldn't be in the game, but you get my point) you'll still be able to pick it up as well. This fits their philosophy of "why waste a players time?" which you can see in the fact that everyone that does a dungeon and helps kill the end boss is guaranteed to get an end boss item. No rolling on 2-4 pieces of equipment in a group of 6+ when there might not even be a single item for your entire group, the item WILL match your class, as will the item for all of your buddies. This is also the case in dynamic events, you aren't graded against the other players, just graded on how much you participated. If you went in and swung at an enemy once and moved on you won't be getting the best items from that event, but if you and 10-30 others go in and fight as hard as you can throughout the entire thing you'll all be getting gold, and events scale up so you can bet it won't just be a rofflestomp if you bring 30 friends with you. I found that to be a pain in warhammer online as I was either with too few people, or too many. Being a tank, I almost never got gold rewards unless it was designed for 1-2 people (as I could very easily do those alone).
So yeah, there's going to be a crafting/gathering system. From what little I've seen of it, it actually looks a bit like minecraft's system, if you're familiar with that.|||Keep in mind that MMORPGs are pretty much the only online games that have sub fees. There's plenty of MMOs that live off other economic models, and there's plenty of online games that don't charge beyond the box.
ANet is very against forcing us to pay for stuff, we should buy their games only because we want to play them. So from what we know of GW1, the cash shop doesn't give a gameplay advantage (or a tiny one if even), only cosmetic variety.
They're designing GW2 so that they can make a healthy profit off of the boxes and cosmetic stuff only.|||Eh, personally I'm a little sad that someone from anet recently stated that there would only be five slots per account from the start, that's not enough for me so the cash shop already feels like a necessity. Stephane did say it wasn't official, but that's probably what they are planning on letting us have atm, and people in gw2guru forums are certainly happy with that amount, because it "allows them to help support anet by buying more".
Yeah, it won't be a big issue for some people, but it's a bit of an issue for me. The amount of slots was always an annoyance for me in gw1 and now they're going to be giving us less compared to how many professions there are. *Sigh* (This is the biggest problem I've ever had with anet's cash shop and it'll probably never have anything worse than this, you can be the judge for yourself if this is a big deal)|||Quote:
Eh, personally I'm a little sad that someone from anet recently stated that there would only be five slots per account from the start, that's not enough for me so the cash shop already feels like a necessity. Stephane did say it wasn't official, but that's probably what they are planning on letting us have atm, and people in gw2guru forums are certainly happy with that amount, because it "allows them to help support anet by buying more".
Yeah, it won't be a big issue for some people, but it's a bit of an issue for me. The amount of slots was always an annoyance for me in gw1 and now they're going to be giving us less compared to how many professions there are. *Sigh* (This is the biggest problem I've ever had with anet's cash shop and it'll probably never have anything worse than this, you can be the judge for yourself if this is a big deal)
So, you want 5x8 slots?
I want to start with one character first, anyway. And if I find the replay value enough, why not value it with real money?|||Quote:
So, you want 5x8 slots?
I want to start with one character first, anyway. And if I find the replay value enough, why not value it with real money?
Ugh, that was so not my point, see my next post to see my clarification. Sorry if you read this before the edit as I got a bit too upset with not enough reason. I kept the part that wasn't a rant though:
At least it looks like we'll possibly be getting 100 slots of storage this time around (in the crafting video I saw a starter backpack with 20 slots, and there were 5 different slots for backpacks, not that they're all going to be 20 or more, but if it's a starter backpack there are probably larger sizes as well.
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