Interviste

Interviste Esclusive Gw2Italia

Intervista al Product Manager Italiano di Guild Wars 2

Intervista a Eric Flannum, Lead Designer di Guild Wars 2

English Version: Eric Flannum, Lead Designer

  • Gw2Italia: What are you planning to do to discourage the spreading of bots?
  • EricFlannum: Discouraging the use of third party programs that exploit the game and negatively impact the experience of others is a top priority for us. As always, for security reasons, we cannot discuss the measures we are taking to combat botting, because such information could be in turn used by game exploiters to their advantage.
  • Gw2Italia: Will the Friendlist management be modified substantially?
  • EricFlannum: We aren’t quite ready to talk about the friends list and other social features, but yes, you can expect it will be modified substantially.
  • Gw2Italia: The Warrior general traits are power and tactics, then a line for every weapon the character can use; can you tell us what the lines of the “traits” are for the Elementalist?
  • EricFlannum: The Elementalist trait lines are Arcanum, Earth Mastery, Air Mastery, Water Mastery, Fire Mastery, plus one for each weapon. Arcanum focuses on general character improvements while each of the elemental and weapon masteries allow the player to choose how to specialize themselves in each of those areas.
  • Gw2Italia: Are weather conditions, like rain, being underwater, etc., going to affect the characters skills and the combat in PvE and PvP? If so, how? Can you give us an example?
  • EricFlannum: Being underwater definitely affects how you fight. It’s very difficult to fire a bow underwater, for example, let alone shoot a fireball at someone. We’ve got some very cool ideas on how to deal with underwater combat and we’ll be sharing specifics on them when we’re ready. Other weather effects don’t have an overt affect on combat.
  • Gw2Italia: From the information we have, you talked about conditions such as bleeding, we are going to have other conditions as the ones we had in GW1, can we have further details about this?
  • EricFlannum: The conditions currently in the game are: bleeding, blindness, burning, cripple, freeze, immobilize, poison, vulnerability, and weakness. What each condition does is I hope pretty explanatory when looking at the name of each of them.  In addition to conditions, we have replaced our enchantment system with a more general system called “boons”. Think of them as conditions that you want to have on you.
  • Gw2Italia: We assume that structured PvP is going to be instanced, can we expect to have bodyblocks in instances, or the persistent world system does not allow that even in instanced areas? And if it does, are you willing to introduce bodyblocks?
  • EricFlannum: There is currently no bodyblocking in the game, and we have no intention of re-introducing it at this time. That being said, we have a lot of systems in the game that we hope make up for the lack of bodyblocking. In PvP, for example, positioning is still very important. This is due not only to the fact that our basic combat strongly encourages and rewards smart positioning, but also because of our projectile system. In most MMOs, when you have a target selected and fire a projectile at that target (say an arrow or fireball), then that projectile is going to fly through anything in its way and hit the target. In Guild Wars 2, the projectile will hit whatever it encounters first along the way. This means that an elementalist can protect her ranged friends from fireballs simply by standing in the way. It also has the added tactical benefit of making the trajectory that certain projectiles use very important. The warrior skill Arcing Shot for example is great for shooting targets in an enemy’s backline.
  • Gw2Italia: In GW1, the PvP part depended much on interrupts which are obviously based on ping. Will latency be again a key element to be competitive? How do you think to solve this issue?
  • EricFlannum: There is less emphasis in Guild Wars 2 on super quick reaction (within less than a second) skills. Instead we tend to focus more on strategic positioning and proactive skill usage. That is not to say that we don’t have interrupts, but with our lowered emphasis on healing, it is much less important.