Guild Wars 2 MMO News, Guides, and Features at Ten Ton Hammer

This week Guild Wars 2 devs Eric Flannum and Jon Peters came together to offer an end of the year update on what the team has been working on. The three topics hit on in the update are the Guild Wars 2 achievement system, changes to the Thief class and fine tuning combat.

The achievements of Guild Wars 2 have short-term (Daily) and long-term (Monthly) achievements. Monthly achievements reset each month and changes to include different achievements. Players can earn new titles by completing certain achievements and can also earn bonus chests containing items and gold.

The pair also touched on changes to the Thief class such as the changing of the Backstab and Steal skills. Along with the Thief changes, the combat has gotten some extra work and polish to give it a more action feel.

Making these improvements has been really interesting and fun because it has shown us how our game can feel appropriately action oriented without taking away the familiarity of the MMO genre. We talk a lot about bringing dynamic combat to MMOs, and we have learned that the best way to do that is to retain a very traditional control scheme while letting the skills and their interactions define the combat. We wanted a player’s first impression to be, “I know how this works: I use ‘WASD’ to move, target with tab, and hit skill buttons.” But the more you play, the more you can see how the physics of the world and the nature of the skills create a totally different experience.

Source: Guild Wars 2 Year End Development Update