11-04-2004, 12:51 AM
My Guild Wars (GW) World Preview Event Experience (1)
Disclaimer: everything is just my personal take and based on what I gathered in the four days of play time, while I try my best not to misinform, I am basically a clueless newbie playing the game for the first time. Also, English is my third language so forgive my grammar, spelling, typos, et cetera.
Thursday evening, just had a major meeting with my research project sponsors, had been slaving away preparing for the meeting for a few weeks now, so I was pleasently surprised to find that GW World Preview Event has begun a day earlier. While I was sleep-deprived, I was even more game-deprived, so this couldn't have been a better timing. Yay!
Created my account and was brought to the character creation screen. Hmm... well, melee is my least favorite so Warrior was out, magic and spell are my favorite, so my choices were Elementalist, Mesmer, Necromancer and Monk. From past MMORPG experience, I know healers are in great demand so I created a Monk/Mesmer, named Soul Edge The First (for the person who took the name Soul Edge, I hate you! :P).
I was taken to the tutorial, with those pop up messages that informed me what to do. Before I made a move, I checked the menus, looked at the skills descriptions, and toyed with the user interface. I was worried my graphic card won't cut it, since I have a GeForce2 and the minimum stated was GeForce3, but everything seemed alright. I used the auto-detect in the advance graphic option menu and was glad it didn't set everything to the lowest quality. I also remapped the "log off" key to "End" (default is F10), and assigned F5 to F12 for selecting party members, I like to have a quick way to select party members since past experience has teached me healing and buffing are very involving matters. I suppose the maximum party size will be 8 since there were only 8 keys.
After I am reasonably comfortable with the menus and had a rough idea about the initial skills I was given, I went on to meet the person who had something to say, he had an exclaimation mark above his head. He gave me a weapon and sent me to find another person, I was more than eager to start my adventure.
The enemies in the tutorial were easy, so even given mostly healing and defensive skills, I had no problem with the tutorial. I am a curious person and I like to explore, so I found Oink and the piggy tagged along when I moved. I was expecting it to do something but it was quiet content just to follow me around and yelp "oink" once in a while, so I thought it was just a cute pet (I found out what to do with Oink when I created my second character). Soon I found the other person with exclaimation mark on his head and was given passage into Lion's Arch.
From the tutorial and looking at the keyboard setup, I found out the available shortkeys, that "space bar" will engage and use default attack on selected enemy, and the use of the world map ("M"). The mini map at the lower right hand corner, while handy with the red dot showing enemy location, was not sufficient for the directionally-challenged yours truely, since I was not used to 3D view and the camera changing angle of view, I was pretty disoriented and had to use the world map frequently. Marking the passage one has gone through with red dots is really a nice feature, I also found out we can zoom in and out of the world map by left clicking, and drag it around while zoomed in using the right mouse button.
So, I concluded the tutorial and noticed there were two "shields" but only the left one lighted up, I tugged this observation away so I could find out about what it meant (which I did later). Game loaded and I was in Lion's Arch, for a while I was
rather overwhelmed by the amount of chatting going on and the amount of people moving around. There were many questions and few answers, after reading the chat for a while I gathered almost everyone was new and that I won't get much help by asking the players (blind leading the blind). I was trying to shut off the chat messages but I could not find that option in the chat menu, perhaps ArenaNet can implement a filter system of some sort? Two things I learned from the chat were the use of "ctrl" and "alt" keys, the former to show players' names and the later to show the NPCs' and signs.
That's all I needed to get started, using the "alt" key and left click on the name that showed up (which results in auto-running towards the selected NPC/sign) I explored Lion's Arch and found out what NPCs were available, where they were and what they do. I talked to all the NPCs and found out where to obtain more skills, where to craft armour, where to get material, dye, et cetera. Firstwatch Sergio (or maybe it was someone else) asked me to report to someone, which led to the first mission staging area, I was not used to the controls and wanted to rub off some newbie-ism before I do coop mission, I don't like to be a burden or to let the team down, so I headed back to Lion's Arch and went out the other exit to the
Northern Kryta Province, an explorable area.
So off I went hunting and exploring, using "C" to select the nearest enemy and space bar to engage and do combat, I soon found out that monk/mesmer was given too little offensive skill to start with, and I was not really enjoying attacking with my default attack. I headed back to Lion's Arch and got myself a warrior henchman, I thought I would have to pay for the service but it was free of charge. So out I went again to explore with the warrior henchman, healing him when necessary but mainly to get myself familiar with the controls and get used to the camera. I consulted the world map a lot, and I noticed that the pointer changed when I hover over the Lion's Arch town icon, so I clicked it and found myself back in Lion's Arch, however, I was not able to go back to where I left using this method. Ops. Well, better to find out about this now rather then to find out while in coop mission and be accused of a quiter.
I ended up using this instant teleporting quite a lot, I would normally play solo (with henchmen) since I am in a different time zone with most of my gaming buddies, and also because Battle.net experience had left a bad taste about playing with random gamers. When my gaming buddies were online and ready for coop mission, I finished the battle I was in, and used the map to instantly teleport to the mission staging area to meet up with them, I find that really handy. I have never tried to teleport to town in the middle of a battle, so I am not sure whether that will work, if it does, it will be an easy escape, but one does lost all the progress and has to start from the beginning. I hope it doesn't work in battle though, I don't like the idea of an easy escape, if the battle was really that bad, the worst that could happen is a whole party wipe, which would mean losing the progress, just like teleporting to town. So might as well die fighting, might even pull through!
Anyway, I found myself back in Lion's Arch and learned about this instant teleporting usage of the world map. I took a break for dinner.
Disclaimer: everything is just my personal take and based on what I gathered in the four days of play time, while I try my best not to misinform, I am basically a clueless newbie playing the game for the first time. Also, English is my third language so forgive my grammar, spelling, typos, et cetera.
Thursday evening, just had a major meeting with my research project sponsors, had been slaving away preparing for the meeting for a few weeks now, so I was pleasently surprised to find that GW World Preview Event has begun a day earlier. While I was sleep-deprived, I was even more game-deprived, so this couldn't have been a better timing. Yay!
Created my account and was brought to the character creation screen. Hmm... well, melee is my least favorite so Warrior was out, magic and spell are my favorite, so my choices were Elementalist, Mesmer, Necromancer and Monk. From past MMORPG experience, I know healers are in great demand so I created a Monk/Mesmer, named Soul Edge The First (for the person who took the name Soul Edge, I hate you! :P).
I was taken to the tutorial, with those pop up messages that informed me what to do. Before I made a move, I checked the menus, looked at the skills descriptions, and toyed with the user interface. I was worried my graphic card won't cut it, since I have a GeForce2 and the minimum stated was GeForce3, but everything seemed alright. I used the auto-detect in the advance graphic option menu and was glad it didn't set everything to the lowest quality. I also remapped the "log off" key to "End" (default is F10), and assigned F5 to F12 for selecting party members, I like to have a quick way to select party members since past experience has teached me healing and buffing are very involving matters. I suppose the maximum party size will be 8 since there were only 8 keys.
After I am reasonably comfortable with the menus and had a rough idea about the initial skills I was given, I went on to meet the person who had something to say, he had an exclaimation mark above his head. He gave me a weapon and sent me to find another person, I was more than eager to start my adventure.
The enemies in the tutorial were easy, so even given mostly healing and defensive skills, I had no problem with the tutorial. I am a curious person and I like to explore, so I found Oink and the piggy tagged along when I moved. I was expecting it to do something but it was quiet content just to follow me around and yelp "oink" once in a while, so I thought it was just a cute pet (I found out what to do with Oink when I created my second character). Soon I found the other person with exclaimation mark on his head and was given passage into Lion's Arch.
From the tutorial and looking at the keyboard setup, I found out the available shortkeys, that "space bar" will engage and use default attack on selected enemy, and the use of the world map ("M"). The mini map at the lower right hand corner, while handy with the red dot showing enemy location, was not sufficient for the directionally-challenged yours truely, since I was not used to 3D view and the camera changing angle of view, I was pretty disoriented and had to use the world map frequently. Marking the passage one has gone through with red dots is really a nice feature, I also found out we can zoom in and out of the world map by left clicking, and drag it around while zoomed in using the right mouse button.
So, I concluded the tutorial and noticed there were two "shields" but only the left one lighted up, I tugged this observation away so I could find out about what it meant (which I did later). Game loaded and I was in Lion's Arch, for a while I was
rather overwhelmed by the amount of chatting going on and the amount of people moving around. There were many questions and few answers, after reading the chat for a while I gathered almost everyone was new and that I won't get much help by asking the players (blind leading the blind). I was trying to shut off the chat messages but I could not find that option in the chat menu, perhaps ArenaNet can implement a filter system of some sort? Two things I learned from the chat were the use of "ctrl" and "alt" keys, the former to show players' names and the later to show the NPCs' and signs.
That's all I needed to get started, using the "alt" key and left click on the name that showed up (which results in auto-running towards the selected NPC/sign) I explored Lion's Arch and found out what NPCs were available, where they were and what they do. I talked to all the NPCs and found out where to obtain more skills, where to craft armour, where to get material, dye, et cetera. Firstwatch Sergio (or maybe it was someone else) asked me to report to someone, which led to the first mission staging area, I was not used to the controls and wanted to rub off some newbie-ism before I do coop mission, I don't like to be a burden or to let the team down, so I headed back to Lion's Arch and went out the other exit to the
Northern Kryta Province, an explorable area.
So off I went hunting and exploring, using "C" to select the nearest enemy and space bar to engage and do combat, I soon found out that monk/mesmer was given too little offensive skill to start with, and I was not really enjoying attacking with my default attack. I headed back to Lion's Arch and got myself a warrior henchman, I thought I would have to pay for the service but it was free of charge. So out I went again to explore with the warrior henchman, healing him when necessary but mainly to get myself familiar with the controls and get used to the camera. I consulted the world map a lot, and I noticed that the pointer changed when I hover over the Lion's Arch town icon, so I clicked it and found myself back in Lion's Arch, however, I was not able to go back to where I left using this method. Ops. Well, better to find out about this now rather then to find out while in coop mission and be accused of a quiter.
I ended up using this instant teleporting quite a lot, I would normally play solo (with henchmen) since I am in a different time zone with most of my gaming buddies, and also because Battle.net experience had left a bad taste about playing with random gamers. When my gaming buddies were online and ready for coop mission, I finished the battle I was in, and used the map to instantly teleport to the mission staging area to meet up with them, I find that really handy. I have never tried to teleport to town in the middle of a battle, so I am not sure whether that will work, if it does, it will be an easy escape, but one does lost all the progress and has to start from the beginning. I hope it doesn't work in battle though, I don't like the idea of an easy escape, if the battle was really that bad, the worst that could happen is a whole party wipe, which would mean losing the progress, just like teleporting to town. So might as well die fighting, might even pull through!
Anyway, I found myself back in Lion's Arch and learned about this instant teleporting usage of the world map. I took a break for dinner.
- SoulEdge -
"*burp* too many pots, I need to pee..."
"*burp* too many pots, I need to pee..."