Guild Wars: Prophecies - The "Spellcaster Races"

There are two races in Guild Wars: Prophecies that are strangely similar in structure. These two races are presented as spellcasters, rather than physical attackers.

But let me back up and go over some of the simple structure of the game, for those who are unfamiliar with it.

The very first Guild Wars game, later subtitled "Prophecies," was released in 2005 and is a sort of online RPG. It has six classes, called "professions," because why not. Of these six, four were spellcasters: Mesmer (a sort of disruptive caster), Necromancer, Monk (the healing class—analogous to priests in other games), and Elementalists (basically a black mage). The other two professions were physically oriented professions: Rangers (bow users) and Warriors (could use swords, hammers, and axes).

Every character in the game has a profession. You can technically use two at once, a primary profession and a secondary profession, but in the base game, this wasn't really used much on enemies. In general, each major race of enemies (dwarves and humans, for example) would have a type of enemy of each profession. For example, a Stone Summit Sage would be a Dwarven Mesmer.

Anyway, the Forgotten and Mursaat are two ancient races that follow this sort of model. Except they're both spellcaster races, rather than physical attackers. So what do they do for the two physical professions of Ranger and Warrior?

Simple. They make enchanted constructs to fight for them!

The Forgotten enchant armor, while the Mursaat make and animate jade constructs.

I love this approach, because it allows these two races to indeed be strictly spellcasters, while also having physical attackers associated with them, and in a way that reinforces their prowess as spellcasters! I like this sort of approach, and I think it's very useful to keep in mind for my own world building in the future.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tutorial: Making an RPG Maker MV Plugin

Image
So there I was, thinking about things that I wish were a bit different in RPG Maker MV, when I started thinking about the drop table system. You know, the thing that looks like this: I personally find this to be entirely insufficient for three reasons. One, I can only have three items in the list; two, I can only have an item quantity of one drop per thing; and three, the drop probabilities are in the form 1/N (where N is a whole number). This last one is notably annoying because it means I can't have drop chances between 100% and 50%. So, like I said, I got to thinking about this, and that's when it hit me: I could easily write a plugin to solve these problems! Well, to easily solve two of these problems, anyway...changing the number of entries in the list is not so easy. So I'll do just that: write a plugin to change how drop chances work and to enable drop quantities of more than one. I decided I wanted to share this process, primarily my methodology and how I approach f
Read more

Seeking Tension's Source

Image
I have long suffered from tension headaches, and for just as long, I've prayed, asking for God to heal them. But when I do, I hear a firm "no," and now I think I know why: the tension that causes the headaches is a symptom of an underlying problem, and I think God wants to address that deeper issue. To explore what I think is going on, I want to first establish my tension symptoms and their history. Feeling Tense The tension I experience is primarily in my neck, shoulders, upper back, and head. I also suspect I experience some tension around my chest, though this is harder to observe. With conscious effort and intent, I can relax these muscles, and it does feel like they are tense most of the time; indeed, that seems to be the default state. This tension at minimum contributes to a sense of fatigue, which impacts concentration and tiredness. It can escalate into a full headache, which can be fairly debilitating. I have found that keeping well-hydrated helps manage the sev
Read more

Perfect Love

Image
I once had a dream, and in this dream I was walking around a city. The initial details are vague, of course; remembering dreams is a tricky business. But there was an element of video-gameness to this situation, as I, like a game creator, was some sort of godlike being. Now, I don’t mean the pathetic gods we see in movies. No, I mean like the powerful gods the player inhabits in games like The Sims or the even more powerful godlike position of creating a video game, where you’re responsible for designing the rules of the universe. In this case, I was positioning NPCs—that’s “non-player characters,” an entity that the player doesn’t directly control. I was figuring out how the game engine worked: specifically, what would happen to NPCs on the street if I went into a building? Would their position reset (that is, was the outside reloaded into its default state when entering and then exiting a building?), or would they continue doing what they’d been doing? After all, computers (including
Read more