Guild Wars 2’s Roller Beetle Racing is here to stay, and its new Lakeside Loop embraces silliness

Roll up, roll up! That’s a pun - as you’ll soon see. Forgive the frivolity, but it’s entirely appropriate given that we’re revealing a new track for Guild Wars 2’s silliest pastime - Roller Beetle Racing. That’s right: somewhere deep inside ArenaNet, one of the most respected and innovative studios working in the MMO genre, team lead Joe Kimmes has been experimenting with bouncing beetles across lakes, the way you might skim a pebble on a family holiday. Think he’s wasting his time? That’s what they said about the inventor of the bouncing bomb. “I charted several test courses that went across lengthy stretches of water, but ultimately the skill required to not go underwater was a bit too high,” Kimmes tells us of his experiments. “There’s one small water section in Lakeside Loop - at high speeds, and the right angle of approach, the beetle will skip across water.” You can make that noble attempt yourself when Lakeside Loop joins Guild Wars 2 this time tomorrow, November 27. And it really will join Guild Wars 2. Where in many similar games these kind of events are treated as asides, more minigame than part of the game, Roller Beetle Racing is woven into the multi-coloured fabric of Tyria. So much so that Kimmes needed to reroute Lakeside Loop - it originally passed through local towns and garrisons that shut their doors to invading centaurs during defence events.

from PCGamesN https://ift.tt/2Rf7kY6