by Stacy Jones on May 06, 2010
Guild Wars 2 has been releasing a lot of new information of late. With last week's release of the MMO Design Manifesto, a new Lead Design feature, and Elementalist details, fans of the game were left with a lot of questions. Luckily, Guild Wars 2 Lead Designer Eric Flannum was ready to answer a few more questions about the game. Some players have expressed concerns about the limitation of a 10 slot hotbar, but Flannum explains that players will actually have access to 15 skills on the bar at any given time as 5 slots are predetermined by a players weapon type and another thing worth noting is that some professions can weave combination attacks between the two weapon types and that's where you can at times have access to 15 rather than 10.
One other big topic addressed by Flannum dealt with what some players are calling "anti-social" gaming in regards to some of the mechanics used in Guild Wars 2 that in some ways resemble the Public Quests found in games like Warhammer Online that rewards players for cooperating and defeating enemies or completing a goal even if they aren't grouped. However, Flannum believes that "anti social" is a mischaracterization and that Guild Wars 2 is designed to actually be more social.
Anti-social is a bit of a mischaracterization. The systems in Guild Wars 2 dont make the game less social; they actually make it more social. As Mike stated in his blog post, you can still group and join guilds, and you can still go off and play by yourself if you desire. However, Guild Wars 2 offers another social approach: you can just choose to play with the people who happen to be around you while youre out adventuring. This is made possible through shared goals, dynamic content scaling, and more forgiving rules on loot and XP distribution.