TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY
Hello! I'm Tom. I'm a game designer, writer, and programmer on Gunpoint, Heat Signature, and Tactical Breach Wizards. Here's some more info on all the games I've worked on, here are the videos I make on YouTube, and here are two short stories I wrote for the Machine of Death collections.
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By me. Uses Adaptive Images by Matt Wilcox.
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What I Like About Guild Wars 2
As I mentioned on the last PC Gamer podcast, I’m really getting into Guild Wars 2. It’s the first MMO to do anything for me since World of Warcraft, and the best since City of Heroes. And it’s mostly because of one attitude behind it:
“Yikes, that sounds like a lot of design work. Oh well, let’s do it.”
The craziest example is the weapons: every class has a completely different set of skills for every weapon they can use. So even if you stick with one class, you can change sub-class by finding a new weapon, thwacking a few things to learn all the skills for it, decide what other weapon to combine it with, and then pick your favourite two weapon sets and switch between them in combat.
With 8 classes and 18 weapon types, just the process of finding out what the combinations are has been more exciting than most RPG quests. And now that I have a handle on the basics of a few classes, it also gives me vastly more scope for personal choice.
I’ve ended up using a Ranger with a Longbow, Sword and Torch. She has an amazing hail-of-arrows skill with the bow that chews up whole crowds, and a rapid fire volley for softening up the strongest target.
Then she switches. She throws the torch at the nearest enemy, setting fire to them, then starts a bonfire around herself, burning everything that gets close. When something does, she waits for it to attack and then does Flanking Strike with the sword, which makes her zip around her opponent, dodging the attack and stabbing them in the back, making them bleed.
When they turn and fight, she uses another sword skill to backflip away, and can then decide: if they’re low on health, she’ll use the same skill again to jump back to them, to finish them off. Otherwise, she can switch back to the bow or throw another torch.
It also looks nice.
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- My cat is a recent acquisition.
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- I am thinking of naming him Pentacat.
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- My tree-lady Thief: Special Branch.
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- Your first time in Lion’s Arch is pretty goddamn magical.
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- You get given some diving goggles before you jump off this – equpping them strips you down to your underwear, which in my case is mostly petals.
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- Seeing someone do that purple beam thing with a sword was what made me start a Mesmer. I like them, but eventually went back to the more physical classes.
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- Every class has a different set of skills with every type of underwater weapon. I love my Ranger’s harpoon gun skill that summons a swarm of piranhas.
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- I’m the… other one. My human Warrior, Catherine the Glib, is the first character I really enjoyed – I needed my class to be simple to get to grips with all the weird structure/instance/event/story stuff.
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- I didn’t want to have to pretend to care about a family member, so the backstory I chose is that I always wanted to join the circus. So I spent the whole circus mission dancing on stage, pausing only to rifle-butt a worm thing that erupted next to me.
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