This weekend, after the E3 smoke clears, ArenaNet helps players and press wind down with the next Guild Wars 2 beta weekend event. This weekend’s festivities include plenty of new additions and tweaks, but the most intriguing has to be what designer Jon Peters calls “the sense of hitting.”
It’s all about impact. The feeling that you are hitting the thing you are swinging at. For ages massively multiplayer online games have been content to have player characters vaguely swinging in the direction of their enemies, the clash of weapon on armour portrayed by canned sound (if at all).
According to the big beta update post at the ArenaNet blog, this weekend’s beta test enhances that feeling. They use the word “visceral”.
I felt Guild Wars 2 handled the impact of combat pretty well myself, but there’s always room for improvement. Especially with a game like Tera out there with a combat system that puts a heavy emphasis on connecting with the enemy in painful ways. Is the tweak (and the emphasis of it) a reaction to En Masse Entertainment’s recently released MMO? Perhaps.
Players can expect many more interesting changes in this weekend’s beta test as well, including a new tiered skill system, replacing the original system (here are your skills, go play) with something that gives players more of a sense of progression.
You can check out all of the changes by hitting up the link below. Hopefully I’m not too exhausted from E3 to drop into Guild Wars 2 and give it another go.
The Big Beta Weekend Preview [ArenaNet]
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