Guild Wars 2 Looks At Healing And Death (07/14/2010)

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 Wars2 Gold 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."