The GW2 BWE Phase Five: Living (and Dying) In a World

The world itself is full of interesting little details - points of interest (go look at them), art, hints of the prior game and new features.  Vendors, repair and crafting are fairly standard but there are twists on things we've seen prior in other MMORPGs.  For example, you can now swim and battle fishes underwater.  As an Elementalist, my attacks totally changed for battle and even took into account that I was still fire attuned!  Finally, a game that doesn't expect that I will do the same thing underwater that I did while on land!



It looks like you need to unlock the underwater combat skills (2-5 - you start with 1) the same way as normal ones - by actually killing things underwater for the combat ones and by leveling to certain levels (the last one unlocks at 30) for the utility skills (7-0) the sixth is always a healing skill because there is no healing class, this game appears to be totally solo-able (I never grouped and made it to level 20+ areas just fine at level 15 and lower - you can solo and progress rapidly if you're a good sport about dying or really good at avoiding getting hit).  Dying will break your gear so be careful to watch for the shield icon above the "7" on the skill bar.

When you surface, it treats your screen like a camera lens and scatters droplets of water on it - I love the effect.  They'd dry off within seconds.

Compare this to FFXI, where if you're under water it's a glitch.  Compare this to WoW where they seem to think you'll fight the same under water as you will on land.  Compare this to GW1 where the only water you fight in is made of jade.

FFXI: Yeah, that's not exactly how underwater combat should work.  I actually fell through a floor and made a really fun GM call.

 The Jade Sea with all those petrified fish has nothing on this place in terms of graphical intensity.

Points of Interest

This is one of the points of interest - the little squares with dots in them on the mini-map and map signify that something is worth seeing just for aesthetic value.  There's an aquarium in Divinity's Reach.

See that?  It's a jellyfish that actually swims in the tanks.

When you discover new areas, waypoints (the diamonds with blue centres - they're teleportation points and places to resurrect if no one revives you), or points of interest you'll get experience.  You can level just by exploring like in some other games.  Areas and quests are all level capped - you will be confined to that level of stats while you are there and gain experience as the capped level.  I guess that means that I could hit 80 without ever leaving the starting area.

All classes appear to have an "auto attack" on their first attack key.  With Engineer, as shown, I just keep shooting it.  With Thief it appeared go through a whole chain of attacks.  Your attacks and weapons change when you submerge yourself automatically so it's very seamless.

Not a point of interest but of disinterest - when your character idles (you leave them in one place for a bit), they will look around, stretch and so on.

Death and Revival

When your health bar is empty, you still aren't quite dead.  You get a chance to throw things or other miscellany from a sprawled or seated position in hopes of doing just well enough (with or without help) to get back onto your feet.  I think that people can heal you while you're doing this - it looked like a couple people I healed were in that state.  If you fail, you "die" or are knocked totally out.

During the stress test I died a lot since I brought a newly rolled character with starter gear.  I got to have the survival screen up quite often.  Yes, that's a super-rat.

When you die, your gear degrades.  It will break and leave you both without armor and with woodland creatures teabagging your nude corpse during the server stress test (don't go looking for a "Great Critter Hunt" in the final release - that was the server stress test).  This is the only time I actually let my gear break so it's the only screen capture I actually have of it.

There's a good soul who just happened by reviving me by kneeling down and subjecting themselves to the drooling of the raccoon.  If you aren't as lucky, you would need to choose the waypoint option and probably pay some money for waypointing to where there's an armor repair NPC.