Q:
Hello everyone,
since this is gonna be a long text, I’d like to point out just a few things right at the beginning. I’m not a native english speaking person, I’d rather have formulated this text in german (since I am german) but I realize that only in english devs at ArenaNet would be able to read this if they’d like to. That said, if anything is left unclear due to my just-not-so-perfect-english, please just ask me to clarify the parts that are not understood. As for the content of my post: It is not a copy-other-game thing but a vision of an expanded use of what GW2 already does, so please do not refer me to other games. Guild Wars 2 is a great game in almost every way.
But let’s get to the point now, shall we? Before launch, I was reading quite a lot of stuff about Guild Wars 2. That includes some interviews where devs explained PvE “endgame” (please do not nail me down on the term “endgame”, I’m just trying to explain it as simple as possible) which sounded quite interesting (huge event chains triggering new bosses etc). Maybe I was interpreting too much out of it, but it sounded to me, that the public event system would actually be used to an extend, where players have to control multiple checkpoints on a map to ultimately unleash huge bossfights. What I see now, after being 80 for about 10 days, are some events including cool (but minor) dragon fights or those “clear this event to access the dungeon” thingy.
I do realize the interviews I red were describing what I see now ingame, just not so epic after all as I imagined it to be. I loved the lvl 80 dragon fight in the snowy Norn region (Claw of Jormag) but it is not connected to a huge effort.
What I mainly wonder is [story spoiler alert]: Why did you let us kill Zaithan in a 5 player Dungeon, when you had the chance to pull of something sooooo much more epic with your event-chain-system? We didn’t even fight the Dragon, but only minions on an airship, watching how he gets one-shot by NPC cannon (the part afterwards, where you have tokittenyour “2” button while he does not move, didn’t really help).
And that’s the core of my post. I’ll try to descripe, how I personally imagined the PvE to be at 80 by interpreting said interviews.
Basically I imagined a whole (war-)zone for Zaithan and his minions. Just to put it into an example: Players start in the south where they have to fight their way through the zone (to the north), capturing and holding objectives. The more objectives they get, the harder it is to keep control against the invading undead hordes of Zaithan. While holding objectives, a point-based system counts your points (just like WvW does) and at some point, the system sends in the “End Boss” for the battle of the round (which can take a day, a week or whatever), one of the huge Dragons we all love (…to slay). If you manage to cover the map to a certain degree, you get Zaithan. And this one would be extremely hard to take down. You could throw anything at players here (require them to secure supply routes, coordination of different point attacks, use of catapults/golems/rams etc etc smiliar to what we do in WvW) so that only well organized servers manage to be able to kill the ultimate evil kitten dragon in the end. Killing him would be an epic, greatly rewarding accomplishment for a whole server (it could even be used for crafting. Like Zaithan is dropping some legendary ingredients).
You got everything that would be required to do something like that. You already implemented cool PvE mechanics (I loved that Robot boss that died a terminator’s death), your engine allows large scale battles. You have the event system that makes it easy to understand what to do. You got the point counting system, you even managed to bond strangers together, teaming up all the time. You got a great world and a great game.
I just wonder why you did not push world PvE one step further. Did you not want it to be or did you just not have enough time to make it as epic as WvW is? I mean, it would have been a great addition to the game for PvE focused players since there is not much of a long term PvE right now (even explorable modes seem to be relativly easy farm stuff).
