Attribute System

All the way back, GW2 had a very different attribute system than what we see today. There were six attributes only:

• Strength - increases melee power.
• Agility - increases ranged power.
• Intelligence - increases magic power.
• Vitality - increases maximum health.
• Perception - increases chance for a critical hit.
• Willpower - increases maximum energy.

Here's what the attribute window looked like:

Most attribute points were distributed automatically when levelling up, but some could be manually distributed by players. There was a table categorizing attributes in three categories - "recommended", "useful" and "not recommended" for each profession. You can see a written down version of it, as well as some math on the system, in this old GW2G topic.

Soon, the attributes were changed to something more similar to what we have today, only a lot simpler:

Notice how there were only four primary stats, and four derived stats. Power used to control all kinds of damage, critical hits always dealt the same percentage of damage, and condition and boon duration still wouldn't exist for a very long time.

Energy System

Did you notice how the old attribute Willpower would increase "maximum energy"? All skills used to cost energy back them. Here's what the user interface looked like:

See the icon to the left of the energy bar? That was an energy potion (!!!).

Energy would regenerate VERY slowly, both in combat and out of combat. It would also be spent differently for different skills - offensive skills cost a little energy, while defensive skills, including healing, would take a lot of energy. In order to recover a significant amount of energy, around 60% of it, players could use energy potions. Those had a recharge, which was longer in combat than out of combat, and they had to be bought - they were meant to be a gold sink in PvE, and in PvP caches of energy potions were secondary objectives players had to control.

You can read more about the old energy system in this old post by developer Eric Flannum and in this interview about early GW2.

Players reacted VERY negatively to the idea of enery potions. Soon the entire concept of using energy was removed, and the game moved on to the current system, mostly based on skill recharge. The energy bar would still look a bit differently from what it does today, even if it was only about "energy" used for dodging:

Cutscenes

A short one: the cutscenes we see in the core GW2 personal storyline originally had a very big tag saying "Work in Progress", with a nice maintenance golem. You can see an example here:

They kind of were never changed, and the cutscenes in the original GW2 release were mostly like that.

Do you remember anything interesting about the early GW2?

Weren't those beta content, or before? I don't remember that being in the released game; but, of course it was a looong time ago.

I do remember snakes as ambient creatures...in the beta weekends.

at first we could chose the skills we liked, then they made a god awful tier system and now we are even worse off.....

Sadly I was never chosen for one of the closed betas (even though I applied for every single one), so I didn't get to see any of this. The open beta was already pretty much what the game was at launch.

@Erasculio.2914 said:

Attribute System

All the way back, GW2 had a very different attribute system than what we see today. There were six attributes only:

• Strength - increases melee power.
• Agility - increases ranged power.
• Intelligence - increases magic power.
• Vitality - increases maximum health.
• Perception - increases chance for a critical hit.
• Willpower - increases maximum energy.

No, this never existed in the game.

@"Inculpatus cedo.9234" said:Weren't those beta content, or before? I don't remember that being in the released game; but, of course it was a looong time ago.

Before. The attributes based on Strength and etc were from before release, as seen on the 2010 demo; same with the energy potions. The second set of attributes (just the four, with Power and etc) and the energy bar just for dodge were during the beta. The "work in progress" for the cinematics was during beta too.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:No, this never existed in the game.

It did. Before release, but it did. What, do you think that was a photoshopped picture?

my god this is old. I remember very first beta weekend having the 4 attributes system. and your character had a sliver of personality.

weren't the attributes alpha phase? same with the energy system?

@Erasculio.2914 said:

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:No, this never existed in the game.

It was never in this game. There is no such thing as "GW2 before release" except in the memories of devs and play testers.(I apologize if I implied that I didn't beleive the image; I do. My point is that none of that was in the game as it has actually existed. For whatever reasons, ANet decided to go a different route with attributes.

It's okay to say that ANet was considering this for GW2; it's not accurate to represent it as having been part of GW2.

During betas ranger pets could still die, and had a ressable corpse (though you could also use a pet switch for that). In some of the events it created a pile of corpses that made ressing players really hard.

As other people have said most of this never made it into the actual game, or even as far as the first open beta. One of my big regrets about the betas is that I didn't take more screenshots, but here's one I took during the first public beta (on 29th April 2012 according to the image data), mainly to show the whale but it also shows the UI:https://i.imgur.com/IbfgdC5l.jpg

You can see the energy bar is already gone, converted to the dodge bar, which worked exactly like the system we have now, the only difference is the position. The rest of the attribute bar is basically identical to what we have now as well. The main difference I can see is buffs were shown above the health orb, and the WvW buffs were included (I don't think those even exist any more - your home world's performance giving you bonuses in PvE) and there's no pet toggle for rangers - your pet was always out. (They also used to be revivable when they died, which was really annoying because they'd stand on top of you and basically block any other use of the F button.)

I don't have a screenshot of the Hero panel from the betas, but as far as I remember it was pretty similar to what we have now. The main difference is the Equipment tab didn't have all the different sub-menus for the Wardrobe, minis, finishers etc. because all that hadn't been added. There were buttons at the top for the dye menu and town clothes (which were converted to outfits), miniatures and finishers had to be carried in your inventory, we couldn't customise mail carriers and gliders and mounts didn't exist.

One thing which some newer players might find interesting is the old skill and trait system, which was in the game for a long time (pretty much right up until HoT was released.) You can see the skills here: .

Instead of being grouped by type skills used to be in 'tiers' based on how powerful they were and how easy they were to use. You had to unlock 5 of the first tier to unlock the 2nd and 5 of the 2nd tier to unlock the 3rd tier. If I remember correctly higher tiers cost more points to unlock as well.

Traits were very different. This is the old trait menu:

At first glance it's pretty much the same - you have the 5 core traits to choose from and each one gives 3 minor and 3 major bonuses. The big difference (IMO) is that they also gave you bonuses to your attributes, which meant designing builds was often about compromise - did you pick the attributes you wanted and then try to find traits that were useful within those lines, or pick traits you wanted and deal with 'lost' attribute points because they were going to things you'd never use? It also made true min-maxing impossible because you had enough trait points to fill 2 lines and 1/2 fill a 3rd, but then you'd have points going into 6 attributes while your equipment could only give bonuses to 3 (assuming you picked the same stats for each piece) and chances are you only wanted 3-4 anyway.

On the other hand it allowed a lot more flexibility. For example in this screenshot they've stopped at 25 points in the first 2 traitlines, skipping the 'grandmaster' slot in order to put more points into the 3rd trait line and get another master trait. You could also put any lower trait into a higher slot, so if you wanted to you could have 3 'adept' traits in one line, but no master or grandmaster ones.

I'm still not sure which one I prefer. The system we have now is much easier to use, and I'm glad we don't have to compromise on traits vs. attributes any more, but sometimes I do miss the level of customisation we had with the old system.

I always found the old trait line overly complicated because the traits were hidden behind select lists (of sorts) and there wasn't anything to visually tell you what a trait actually was. Trait VI... cool. Plus the trait books were a silly waste of money.

That system is in a much better place today.

Transmutation stones

before the trait update i could use wells without target so they were perfect for D/D necro's, now they are forced targets and became useless, making D/D necro's significantly weaker.

@Chickenooble.5014 said:I always found the old trait line overly complicated because the traits were hidden behind select lists (of sorts) and there wasn't anything to visually tell you what a trait actually was. Trait VI... cool. Plus the trait books were a silly waste of money.

That system is in a much better place today.

Oh yeah, I forgot about the trait books. I didn't like that because it always put me off unlocking traits until I was absolutely sure I wanted to keep the character. If I wasn't sure or I knew it was only going to be a temporary character it felt like a waste of money, but then the lack of traits and attribute points could make them much more difficult to play.

I can only remember one thing, beta tests before release were actually fun. Then massive nerf to all enemies happend, which made everything too easy.

@"Carlin Sanders.3587" said:my god this is old. I remember very first beta weekend having the 4 attributes system. and your character had a sliver of personality.

The wiki has a nice article about Personality. They even had multiple icons, one for each combination of Charm, Dignity and Ferocity. I remember an old interview about how the personality system would change how a few ambient NPCs would react to us (a group of children would run from a character with high Ferocity, for example), but I think that was never implemented in the game.

@Danikat.8537 said:Traits were very different. This is the old trait menu:

I really miss the old trait system. It looked a lot uglier than what we have today, and many traits were worse, too (I think many of the current traits are combinations of old ones). But it did give us more customization options. 99% of my builds are VERY bad, but I liked an Elementalist build using 15 points in each elemental trait line, just enough to get the "changing to this element will trigger effect X" minor traits. It made it very fun to quickly change attributes over and over.

Impressive! It looks like another game and I think a lot of the old Guild Wars 2 features might "come back", including the pet battle system and several other RPG elements.

@Carlin Sanders.3587 said:your character had a sliver of personality.

Yes, I miss being able to punch people

Celebration hats

Dye seeds.. That is all.

Another "curiosity" that never made it into the game was an April's Fools - all the way back in 2011.

The Commando was announced in April 1st 2011, in the middle of the profession reveals. The wiki still has an article about the Commando, but the really great thing about them weren't as much their design, rather the skill videos. Those can still be seen here:

I strongly suggest watching from the 02:10 mark for the "Aerial Support" skill.

As an fan of GW1 I observed the development of GW2 extensively. Remember the time when Legendary Weapons were only PVT (Power, Vitality, Toughtness) only? Also they were souldbound and it was rather annoying to transmute them with transmutation crystals to give it to another character. I made my first legendary in 2012 and it took me weeks of Plinx farm and other Cursed shore farms to get enough karma and 200 skill points (they were used to buy the legendary stuff like Eldrich scroll etc. and character bound).

Also there was a huge outrage when they introduced Ascended rings and people thought the game is dead since it is a grind to get them etc. I also remember during the beta the one champ in the charr starter area which killed dozens of players cuz it was so OP. And I remember during beta seeing Kessex Hills for the first time and it blew me away (was before the tower of nightmare stuff).

@"Inculpatus cedo.9234" said:Weren't those beta content, or before? I don't remember that being in the released game; but, of course it was a looong time ago.

I do remember snakes as ambient creatures...in the beta weekends.

They should find the snake model again and make it a minihttp://i.imgur.com/PPG8X.jpg

@ProtoGunner.4953 said:Also there was a huge outrage when they introduced Ascended rings and people thought the game is dead since it is a grind to get them etc. I also remember during the beta the one champ in the charr starter area which killed dozens of players cuz it was so OP. And I remember during beta seeing Kessex Hills for the first time and it blew me away (was before the tower of nightmare stuff).

I definitely remember walking into Plains of Ashford and seeing hundreds of revive symbols on the map because of all of the dead people in that champion event. And Kessex was so beautiful! When I go there currently I feel a pang of sadness for what the region used to be. I also remember having to pay to repair your armor, and if I was doing something that had the risk of damaging armor without needing it (jumping puzzles) I would run them naked so I didn't have to pay repair costs.

Something else people might find amusing. One of the pre-purchase bonuses for GW2 was the Hero's Band - a celestial ring that gives +2 to all stats. When this was announced it was hugely controversial in some parts of the community with people declaring it pay-to-win and an unfair advantage that went against Anet's promise that you wouldn't be able to buy anything that gave you better stats than other people. There were even some people talking about boycotting the game because of it, or because of that and the Mistfire Wolf elite skill.

And yes, you read that right - it gives +2 to each stat.

(To be fair this was mainly being discussed by GW1 players and in that game the maximum rank for any attribute was 12, and the best equipment in the game could only add +3 to that, so a +2 bonus to every single attribute would be huge in GW1. I guess people hadn't realised how different it was in GW2 yet.)

@Vayne.8563 said:Dye seeds.. That is all.

Urgh, yeah I remember them. I'm so glad that system got changed.

(Short version: instead of finding Unidentified dyes in the game you found dye seeds, took them to your home instance and had to wait 24 hours for it to turn into a dye, or you could buy plant food (from the gem store I think) to grow it instantly.)