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

Norn week continues strong over at the official ArenaNet blog and the latest update is a pretty hefty one. Instead of focusing so much on the Norn, it focuses more into the design process behind dynamic events. Dynamic Events is the most important feature in Guild Wars 2 in my honest opinion since it’s one of the biggest features that separate it from every other MMO and one of the most exciting things to read about.

Norn housing looks rather impressive.

ArenaNet is known for its obscene amounts of testing and quality control. Guild Wars is one of the least buggy games I’ve played and I don’t particularly remember any huge problems to come about, outside of seasonal events. With GW2 we can be pretty confident that not only will the dynamic events work really well but they’ll be really fun and in-depth.

So does their scenary.

The best and clearest example is in this article, where you see something common in most games. There are four shrines and the original plan was for you to defend all four of them while they came under attack. That seemed a bit bland and repetitive during testing, so in turn ArenaNet spiced it up a bit while keeping the basic idea around. One shrine is a puzzle shrine with almost no combat, one shrine is a defense shrine, one is an assault shrine (you go on the attack), and the last one you transform into a snow leopard and attempt to find hidden dredge.

The Norn are big and bulky and ready for combat.

As you can see, their design process is very solid and brings about a lot when it comes to quality. We all have done a series of quests where you’ve had to suffer through the same quests over and over that require you to do repetitive tasks that you’ve seen a million times. ArenaNet on the other hand is taking it into a different direction by making sure players find an interesting and different experience.

The Sons of Svanir look drastically different than regular Norn.

As for the events themselves, they seem to be a lot of fun. The two plain combat ones are to be expected, but the adventure puzzle type shrine sounds amazing and brings a bit of thought to the game while the snow leopard one seems like a fun minigame to play.

Norn Week is becoming more and more impressive with the reveals and I can’t wait to see what’s coming up next. Come speculate on the Ten Ton Hammer community forums.