Guild Wars 2

Spoiler warning! This post contains a lot of possible spoilers about the end game content.

This is a lengthy public letter mostly aimed for Arenanet developers, including my suggestions how to fix these problems. I wish both Anet and the players would comment. Please try to avoid flame wars, stick to constructive comments or just support some other person’s ideas

I don’t have any statistics on this topic, but I can pretty safely guess that majority of players who have bought GW2 will never ever finish personal story. In fact my hunch and guess is that most of them get bored of the game before level 50. Arenanet can debuff or verify my claims.

The beginning of the game is great, especially the Asura’s Explosive Intellect and Sylvari’s Fighting the Nightmare. Epic stuff at level 1-2! In fact the Guild Wars 2 beginning is so great that I have used it as an example in one of my game design lessons how to make it right. Many other MMORPGs do it wrong by sending the player to deliver messages or items from location A to B and squish low level monsters like rats, skeletons or spiders (= boring). Congratulations Anet!

BUT the 48-80 level content of the game feels totally different and like it has been designed by people with completely different mindset. Most of the missions involve fighting against the undead, aka Risen. While the first few encounters, like the Claw Island are a climax and the “dream” (Light in the Darkness) are memorable and worth replaying, most of these missions are boring, dull, repetitive and overly long. Fighting against an almost neverending Risen horde, feels a bit like the dreadful “Library” level in Halo 1 and that is not a compliment.

The game’s real hero is a Sylvari called Trahearne. The player character is just a side kick, doing all the dirty work, while Trahearne gets the cool sword Caladbolg and the player is left with crappy green and blue items. Trahearne is wooden, his voice acting is dry, his dialogue is overly long and boring. He doesn’t feel like a real leader and many things he does are without good explanation e.g. why he fights against the undead, yet can summon them. And why does he know so much about Orr, more than any others? There is a separate thread about people’s complaints about Trahearne, so I won’t refer it further.

Many of the end game missions (levels 70-80) are bugged. Events which were supposed to trigger, don’t trigger. Or then there are collisions bugs, especially underwater, which can prevent player progression especially underwater. Any skill which causes knockback lead to the hero’s NPC ally or the boss monster ending up inside the stone. In my case when me and Apatia were approaching the Krait cave the boss monster always spawned inside the cave’s ceiling even though I didn’t use any weapon skill to cause knockback. I had to restart the mission 3 times to finally get the boss appear in the cave.

It seems the developers tried to make the game a bit too big compared to available resources. The end game content doesn’t need that much variety and length, as so few players reach there, compared to the fact that it should be bug free and high quality.
Many players struggle to travel in the 3 Orr maps: Straits of Devastation , Malchor’s Leap and Cursed Shore. Most of the map teleport locations are contested way too often.

The end mission is overly long and almost nobody wants to replay it. I made another topic of it as this forum doesn’t allow more than 5000 characters in a message (sighs).

Solutions:

Remove 1/2 or 2/3 of the personal story on levels 70-80. Now there seems to be at least one personal story mission per level. A better progression speed would be 1 personal story mission/2 levels. Most of the end content missions are not memorable nor fun. They are just tedious, not that difficult, but overly long. The end of the game should feel like an epic battle, not just a long “click click… one more enemy down” marathon. The end game has some “jewels”, which should be kept there e.g. Temple of the Forgotten God (I think the only big problem of this mission is players getting lost in the temple, thus maybe remove the 2nd orb thing, 2 orbs, not three, should be enough). Some others like Close the Eye are just dull. You could combine it with

Temple of Forgotten God so the eye gets defeated already there. Remember, often less is more. The longer the game is doesn’t equal how good it is.

Thank you for listening! Sorry if my English wasn’t perfect. English is not my native language.

Deniara

Added stuff missing from above post: The Ruins of Orr maps are problematic especially on low player base areas, because most map locations can be contested and there is no easy way to solo the group events (especially events like Cathedral of Eternal Radiance are very difficult, if not impossible, to solo. This problem exits on high load servers as well, because some players have a real life, work, family and kids are forced to play on such hours when other players are either sleeping or doing other things.

Simple fix: reduce the amount of spawning Risen based on the number of players active on that map. If the map is almost empty of players the risen should respawn very slowly. The group events should scale better to suit solo players. And solo players should get much better rewards after completing level 70-80 group events alone.