I don’t know about you but I’m quite fed up with the way ArenaNet has been making their decisions. Here are some examples.
When ArenaNet decided to remove the camera smoothing, they didn’t seem put much thought on it. Only a small group was complaining about the smoothing, but ArenaNet still removed it. What about the people who liked it and who were already used to it? No option was left to enable it. ArenaNet did a favour to one group of players but turned their back to the other players. This isn’t how decisions should be made.
Another great example is the narrow field of view. At it’s current state, the game is almost unplayable for many players because the low field of view can make people feel very uncomfortable. I’ve seen Jon Peters, a game developer, say that increasing field of view would cause performance issues, texture tiling and fish-eye effect. He also told that feeling nauseous is caused by the camera smoothing and not because of the narrow field of view, which is ABSOLUTELY NOT TRUE. If you are watching your monitor from a small distance (like most people do when they play with a PC), the field of view should be higher than if you were further away from the monitor. Otherwise you might even get a headache. Also I can’t imagine why the developers decided to have such a narrow field of view in the first place: all the amazing sceneries and art goes to waste when you can’t see it properly. There is an easy solution to this whole problem: make a field of view slider, like every single modern 1st/3rd person game should ALWAYS have. This way people who have low-end machines would have the ability to get better performance by lowering the field of view if needed, while people who feel uncomfortable playing with low field of view would be able to increase it for a much, much better game experience.
And one more thing. In some situations the increased field of view is actually present in the game. In boss fights like The Shadow Behemoth, the field of view increases automatically. I didn’t see any texture tiling or performance issues there. Instead the game looked amazing during the fight. Since it has already been proven that the higher field of view works perfectly in the game, why not make it an option for those who can’t even play the game otherwise?
Personally I will not play Guild Wars 2 at all before these two mentioned issues are fixed. The game is simply unplayble for me right now, and I’m not the only one. Once the issues are fixed, I will come back and enjoy the hell out of the game.
Here’s a video that Jon Peters should watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPDq_qvsKUA