Guild Wars 2 Looks At Healing And Death

After the success of their first game the Guild Wars team has been working on its successor, Guild Wars 2. This highly anticipated game seems to want to break with tradition, and innovate, rather than follow the masses.

Jon Peters, one of the game designers on Guild Wars 2 takes us into deeper into how death and resurrection will work in Guild Wars 2.

The first interesting quote from Jon is “Defeat in Guild Wars 2 is intended to be an experience, not a punishment.” He follows this up by adding “Let’s face it: dying never feels great, even without a death penalty. As weird as it might sound, we decided to look into what would make dying a more enjoyable and memorable play experience.”

The secret to how the Guild Wars 2 team will be addressing this pressing question is a new feature called ‘Downed mode’.

“Rather than being presented with immediate failure, when a player loses all of their health in Guild Wars 2, they are put into ‘downed mode’. In this mode, the player has a number of downed skills they can use to target enemies and fight for a chance to survive. A downed player can still be attacked, which will send them into a defeated state, leaving them to either wait for an ally to resurrect them or to resurrect at a waypoint.”

While down a player can still use special ‘Downed Skills’:
“Downed skills are less-powerful skills that a player can use in a last-ditch effort to turn the tide. A warrior might daze an enemy by throwing a rock. An elementalist might lock down their foe with Grasping Earth.”

And it even adds the possibility to get back into the fight:

“While you are downed, if you manage to kill an enemy, you will rally, returning to life to fight again. When you rally, you are thrust right back in the action. This potential to rally from the edge of defeat adds greater drama to combat and gives a player some tactical control while in a state where they normally have none.”

And to make sure the act of dying isn’t an unpleasant one the death penalty in Guild Wars 2 has been diminished to almost nothing:
 “If no one revives you, you can spend a small amount of gold to come back at a waypoint. It’s as simple as that, and why not? Why should we debuff you, take away experience, or make you run around for five minutes as a ghost instead of letting you actually play the game? We couldn’t think of a reason. Well, we did actually think of a reason–it just wasn’t a good one. Death penalties make death in-game a more tense experience. It just isn’t fun. We want to get you back into the action (fun) as quickly as possible. Defeat is the penalty; we don’t have to penalize you a second time.”

Read more about this interesting new mechanic on this developers blog.