Guild Wars 2

I’ve played the new content after waiting for it like most of the players now, and I’m finally able to critize the new episode:

- The city is well done. It has been reduced to a huge warzone where there is pure chaos. The feeling of being in the middle of a war and a siege, surrounded by enemies, forced to find your way in a chaotic miasma, with events popping out all around you with almost no clue to what is going to happen and where, contributes to the atmosphere that this assault created. Obscuring the entire map with the red fog, makes players concerned only on the map and the situation once inside.

- Little curiosities and transformations about the city are good indeed. The player feels kinda nostalgic to see the central plaza reduced to ashes where the day before he was quietly using the bank, the forge, and walking like any day. At a first impact, it gives you a small chill, reserved for those who really enjoy full immersion in a game. A good job has been done in characterizing specific areas in LA, like the house covered by an impenetrable shield, belonging to an asura who was ready with security systems, or the Tengu gate, where you can see Tengus inside the walls shooting arrows and killing without mercy whatever approaches (with 100% efficiency, would have liked a better participation from them, but it looks like they’re still neutral).

- Fighting all these enemies together means that players have to be careful about their particular attacks. Versus Aetherblades you have to be careful about the control effects, while the Moltens launch fire fields that really hurts. Even if after learning the mechanics you can simply do this automatically, at first there’s still this little glance of attention demanded from the players that need to know what they are doing. Overall, it’s surely harder than fighting only one kind of enemy, and many fall because they don’t pay attention to the particular attack of that alliance.

- The different events going on, despite what anybody could say, are enancing this feeling of chaos and disaster. Some of them are strange, like children who run too slowly, but overall they are good to go, and they are involving what there was in LA before. Again, feels good on a lore side.

- Lore here isn’t really well explained, apart for the cinematic, but it was because the devs wanted to skip long parts, immersing the player into action almost immediately. This could be a way to also make you wonder the quickness of the attack. Something different, more immersive instead of a cutscene that explains what has already happened, would feel better.

- Gameplay: since this is an episode fully dedicated to a siege war, we can’t really complain about it being a full zerg fight. Never like now blaming the devs for creating an episode where zergs proliferate has been more wrong. It seems that lately they have tried to share different kinds of content, and infact the last few episodes wheren’t exactly a zerg fest. Of course there’s much to say about this, but at least we have seen a little improvement in the LS, even if the damage has been already done. Now, only because they decide to dedicate a full episode to a massive “prelude battle” which will bring hopefully to a massive “final battle”, we can’t blame them. Just enjoy this massive scale of battles for what it is, until the next episode. In wvw and pvp you may be accostumed to this kind of battles, but pvers see this only on world bosses, and even then, it’s only about one enemy.

- News: the introduction of a new back item is well welcomed, since the game lacks them, and even the TP doesn’t have a dedicated filter for them. The look is robotic, but the overall style of this LS is some kind of cyber-steam-dark punk. (Can’t help but feel that the game has adopted more and more technological staff as we go on, and I personally miss the ancient and original beauty of the fantasy world of Tyria, where technology wasn’t present in this quantities. Made the world feel purer and more enjoyable). Introducing a back item that can be upgraded at our wish using different tiers of materials is a good idea. A less good idea is to create this receipes without considering the ongoing economy in the game and the prices of the materials, so it ends up being more expensive with one crafting than with the other. To preserve neutrality, this should be avoided at all, and to preserve the possibility for every player, even casuals, to craft this items, you should not ask for rare or expensive materials, nor for huge quantities. Overall it’s a good choice, and we can expect more items that we can upgrade at our will.

- Gemstore: Here I’ll be hard and criticize hard. Aestethically speaking, the new zodiac skin is ugly. It’s not a subjective matter, though: the skin is ugly itself. The shape of azure used shows no light effects on it, making it look blank. The visual effect of the stellar skin is barely visible, and the rest of the armor has shapes, in particular the shoulders, the helm and the boots, that from an artistic point of view are not well balanced or armonic with the rest of the set. The effect of the metal parts of the armor looks like toy plastic when dyed. I understand that the armor has been created to give a particular godlike / aethereal being look, but overall, it should be reskinned with better effects and design. I’m sure you could have done better without using too much particles effects. Also every addition to the gemstore is a less addition to the game, and we can’t be happy about it. Players want content obtainable by playing ingame, without struggling for grind or anything as negative as this. This said, I hope the majority of players will not encourage Arenanet to go into this direction by buying every item they add in the gemstore from time to time, because everytime it happens, it’s a bad thing for the game.