Recently I’ve been getting into the video series “Jimquisition” over on The Escapist. While I don’t agree with everything Jim Sterling says (or always care for his sense of humor…) I’ve been impressed with his ability to cut to the heart of an issue. One video I watched recently was this one: www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/5743-You-Should-Be-Mad-at-Diablo-IIIs-Always-Online-DRM
While the video focuses primarily on Diablo III’s always-online status and the problems it creates, it also touches on several other issues. One of the ones that struck close to home with me in particular was this one: many gamers want to complain about problems a given game has, but they’re afraid to because they believe, and rightly so, that the community at large will yell at them and shout them down, call them self-entitled and say they should take whatever they’re handed and be thankful for it, all the mistakes and problems in the world be kitten ed. But if you love a game or a game series, you -should- be willing to point out the faults and mistakes because nothing will ever get better if nobody acknowledges there’s room for improvement.
With that concept in mind, I’m wondering if we, the players, could level a bit of constructive criticism at Guild Wars 2. While I still think that it’s, hands down, the best fantasy MMO I’ve played to date, I do feel there is room for improvement. And I’m wondering if anyone else is interested in chiming in with their own two cents. So, with this goal, I would offer the following criticisms myself:
1. The game needs more roleplaying mechanics. When this game was being advertised, the interactive nature of the environment was something that really caught my interest. So far, we’ve seen the environmental weapons; the fallen branches and broken boards we can pick up to wack enemies with. However, we haven’t seen much else. For the roleplayers, we can definitely use more things like chairs that can be sat in, player housing that can be decorated and furnished, more emotes, perhaps animations for eating and drinking when not in combat that would play when sitting at special tables found in bars and in houses. Arenanet seems to be working on expanding flavor content, such as with its dancing book in the gem shop. I think we need to encourage (and see) more of that.
2. Where are the entertainment mini-games? Another feature that sounded neat when I first heard about it in dev interviews and articles were the mini-games like the bar fight, Asuran chess, Charr drag racing (I think), the human shooting gallery, and so on. But so far, I haven’t noticed any of those mini-games available. When I go to the shooting gallery in Divinity’s Reach, for example, I’m -still- told that it’s being hogged by a private party of NPC’s. Maybe I’m just missing something here, but if this content that was talked about before release still isn’t available, I think it should be made part of a content update, and soon.
3. Downed skills may need some tweaking. I will give the game credit that it actually poses a challenge, even in PvE when fighting enemies that are the same level as you. Grouping up is definitely something I’d encourage. However, I don’t think solo should be impossible, and there’s one particular mechanic I think makes it harder than it should be: the less-health penalty after you get downed. While I can see where the developer’s thinking was, wanting to discourage players from being reckless, when you have opponents who can down you in a 1-3 attacks, even without the penalty, it starts becoming less of a challenge and more of an annoyance.
I posted this topic on my guild website as well and got several responses from guild mates, each with their own thoughts and suggestions. Without dropping names for the sake of privacy, here are their thoughts as well: