Guild Wars 2 Healing and Death Q&A
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 788
Q: Many people enjoyed playing a healer/support class in Guild Wars. Many people who played Monks are really disappointed by the news that there will be no healing or protection class in Guild Wars 2. In what way will Guild Wars 2 fulfill a former Monk's desire to have those same roles in the sequel?At the end of the Q&A, you'll discover that they've also released the "healing and death" artwork as a wallpaper in various resolutions up to 1920x1200.
A: We think that monk and healer players don't really care about the exact mechanics of their profession, but rather care about how that profession feels. Is it more important that the monk sit in the backline and watch health bars go up and down? Or is it more important that they feel like they are supporting their teammates and can occasionally save the day through judicious application of their skills and abilities? We wanted Guild Wars 2 to be a more active game, and therefore we made the support characters in the game a lot more active as well. This really goes beyond healers. Everyone in Guild Wars 2 takes a more active role in combat, and this goes a long way towards providing memorable combat experiences to everyone, as often as we can. Tactics are determined by choices you make in combat, not choices you make at character creation.
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Q: Death penalties in MMO games provide incentive to players to learn their class and work better in groups. With no death penalty, won't this lead to less incentive to learn how to play their class and group properly?
A: In most games both single and multiplayer the penalty for failure is to simply return to a saved position or state. The penalty, in this case, is simply time. MMOs can't return someone to a saved position, and so they have developed many other penalties over the years to simulate this. We penalize the player by taking a small amount of money, but more importantly, by setting him back to the waypoint of his choosing.
Death penalties even simple return to save systems can, of course, vary in their harshness. When deciding on the degree of severity, you need to look at what you are trying to accomplish overall with the game. Is your game a hardcore simulation, meant to test the skill of the player under extreme stress? In this case, a more severe death penalty would be warranted. With Guild Wars 2, however, one of our main goals is to encourage experimentation and risk-taking on the part of the player. Because of this, we firmly believe that a milder penalty upon defeat is in order. We have found that our emphasis on risk-taking, along with this milder penalty, has resulted in a game where players try daring and heroic things, where they will go into grave situations to help out a stranger, and that overall increases the number of epic and heroic moments that the average player encounters.
We have found that this ability to experiment with your character and throw yourself into more dangerous experiences has resulted in players gaining more opportunity to really test the limits of what their characters can do. Players consequently learn how to play their professions just as quickly (if not more so) than they do in many other games.
