Dynamic Events
May
5
Written by:
5/5/2012 10:36 PM
By merging the Rift Events of... Rift and the Public Quests of Warhammer Online, Guild
Wars 2 arrives to bring us the open world Dynamic Events.
Dynamic Events replace today's arduous
and boring quests and introduce a dynamic element in the world of Tyria, making the
players accountable of what is happening to the environment. Furthermore, if you think
that by bringing your friends along you're going to steamroll your progress
through Guild Wars 2 you are heavily deceived.
I will try to present this mechanic to all of those people who are new to the world of Guild Wars 2, by employing only a few examples.
Imagine you are merrily strolling around the world, when you notice in the horizon a camp of humans under attack by Centaurs. The entire scenery is
chaotic with explosions, flames, damaged walls and burnt tends while lifeless bodies
lie everywhere.
In an ordinary MMO your opening move would be to approach the camp and look for an NPC, typically called Quest Givers, who would give you your next set of
quests: go kill some Centaurs or find some other way to drive them away. In Guild Wars 2
there is no such thing as 'quest givers' nor separate quests. When you’ll enter the area where the attack of the Centaurs is taking place an
event will trigger with the title “Push the Centaur horde back!”. Underneath the title you will notice a small
text describing what actions you can take in order to achieve said objective
- such as “Kill Centaurs, revive fallen fellow fighters, gather tools and lost
equipment and destroy Centaur’s supply crates”.
As you can easily understand, the game doesn’t force you to do any one thing in order to advance.
Each player can do as they like. Perhaps a player doesn’t feel like killing at the moment as much
as catering for some less bloodthirsty task, thus he can complete the event merely by collecting items from
the ground and/or destroying the supplies. Or maybe he likes to help his fallen
comrades and get through the event only by reviving them as they fall under the
blades of the Centaurs. And half way through the event he/she may very well choose to pick a different task to perform.
One of the Bosses that you are going to face, during a Dynamic Event.
Now, during
the initial attack of the Centaurs if more players join the fight, the entire event’s
difficulty will scale upwards making this whole siege vastly more epic and entertaining than it
was otherwise. You’ll see centaurs multiplying in numbers and gaining increased
power, vitality and even new skills.
In case you
do win the initial event (“Push the Centaur horde back!”), the camp will sort of
“unlock” for all the players in the region, providing a few vendors with unique items such as
equipment items and/or crafting materials for the player to buy, as well as a
waypoint where the player can teleport to or from that camp to other places.
Obviously, upon the completion of the event the player is granted automatically
with Experience Points, coins, karma points and items appropriate to your
profession. The rewards vary for each event.
Ending this,
I should point out that the days where a player could camp and farming certain
mobs, making the entire gameplay experience of the other players frustrating, are coming to an end as every action a player takes contributes towards not the quest itself but towards the event of a specific area.