G-star is upon us and in case you do not know what that is, it’s one of the biggest gaming conventions in Korea. This year marks the first time Guild Wars 2 has made an appearance for Korean audience. For the rest of us, we have been treated to so far two blog posts detailing additional game improvements. Eric Flannum pens the first blog post talking about character creation, UI improvements, and changes the skill acquisition system. Feel free to glance over the blog for all the juicy bits, but what I want to talk about is the way some of the skills in Guild Wars 2 are learned.

Utility, Healing and Elite Skills

We’ve known for a while that skills associated with weapons are unlocked with use, but now it has been revealed that acquiring additional healing, utility and elite skills will require skill points. Re-tooling the profession quests system for skill quests and rewarding skill points, players will have to explore and complete challenges to earn these points to unlock the other skills.

Skills cost vary between skills and once a player unlocks a slot, they will be able to choose from any of the skills to unlock instead of facing a tiered progression. Many people may find faults in the system by requiring players to go through another “grind”, but as to what my opinion is however, I’m going to need more input. As long as the skill challenges are easy to find, plentiful and doable, I have no problem racking up points to unlock additional skills; that kind of what a MMO is all about, steady progression. I’ll have to put my faith in ArenaNet for the time being in hopes that it doesn’t feel like I’m dragging my head in the mud when I unlock only s quarter of the skills.

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Anticipating the exclusive announcement from Bioware about Mass Effect 3 I tuned in to the Bioware livestream to see Casey Hudson and Jennifer Hale address the crowd. He start taking about how they received a lot feedback about showcasing more of the female version of Commander Shepard in some of the promotion materials. “We’re going to some really cool things with female Commander Shepard with the run up to Mass Effect 3,” says Hudson. So now I’m thinking they are finally going to give more details about what they are going to do with her since we already know she’s getting a trailer of her own as well sharing Box time with male Shepard on the Collector’s Edition.

To my surprise however is that Bioware is asking the playerbase to help decide what the iconic female Shepard should look like. They have a gallery on their Facebook page where players can view six different concepts and ‘like’ the one they think should be the iconic Shepard. I personally choose #3 because in my eyes that look suites Jennifer Hale’s voice the most. I should also mention that it also looks a lot like Cindy, my good follow video blogging friend. No idea what they are going to do after perhaps some further tweaking of the concept.

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Its been confirmed that in Mass Effect 3 we will be able to revisit the physical features of our Shepard along with changing our class and re-specing the existing class he/she was. Good thing we get to take another stab at because at the moment I think my Femshep still has one of the hidden hairstyles in the game and hopefully it still works when imported into the sequel. One of the issues I had with character creation was making a proper face and above all the hair styles. I never really liked the choices we had and hopefully with the redesign on Ashley Williams we might have some more to work with. Also I talked to Manveer a designer at Bioware about when he was asking for suggestions about my favorite classs the Infiltrator and wanted to know about some of the suggestions he recieved but in the end I was teased I had to play it on March 6, 2012 to find out — Can’t win them all. By the way what do you guys want to see when you revisit your shepard in ME3?

.@Hawkinsa1 @cendres Yes, in #ME3 you can revisit your character's facial features and hair etc, as well as re-spec your class and skills.

June 11, 2011 9:40 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@CaseyDHudson

Casey Hudson