Skill capturing NO thx. it may fit gw1 style but not gw2, for simple reason it was a prohibitive system, it made my life hell until I could get specific skills that made it so much easier to do a certain task.
It did increase the longevity of the game, along with the profession-specific armors. You couldn’t simply “max out” a character that easily. A feeling of progression was always there, and the Elite Skill Tomes fixed the unavailability issue later.
In Guild Wars 2 you get to have literally all your skills long before you hit 80, and even after that, you still end up with over 150 skill points by the time you hit 80.
The old skill system was infinitely superior in terms of functionality because (along with other things) it substituted level progression after lvl20. You never felt like that you had a 100% complete character.
Much agreed I think the biggest issue I’ve had with moving over to gw2 was the level progression I’m not gonna lie I hate high level caps, they force you to not spend money for most of the game and then drag hours out of you just trying to max gear, i personally agreed and loved the gw1 philosophy of low level cap, cheap max armor and then grinding for appearance the more of a bamf you were the more you looked like a bamf.
That was my main idea too when I heard that the game will have 80 levels. Especially after that for a while – if I recall – the idea was “no levels at all”.
Guild Wars was revolutionary with the double-profession system, the max 8 skill slots build game, the 20 levels where the game practically started at 20, the single player story told in cooperative missions, the maximum armor and weapon value, the untradeable and only-craftable soulbound armor (Which makes sense because it was crafted with your body proportions. Duh!), the small and understandable numbers (500 hp? kittenage?) and later the hero system which basically destroyed the only bad thing about the Holy Trinity.
So what do we have here out of that? Generic “Look mommy I just dealt 1,000,000,000 damage!” numbers, uncertain and unprofessional skill descriptions, tradable armor for everyone, fix skill bars, and a heavily lucky-drop based income, resulting in general poverty from repairing and waypoint costs while rich people are already running around with legendaries thanks to the gem shop (effectively transforming the item into a negative status symbol), and so on and on.
I don’t know how to phrase this in a non-offensive manner… because the entire thing feels offensive to me…. It’s like the franchise was sacrificed to revolutionize a genre that should have been executed, not revolutionized, because it was always the coffee/cigarette/drug of gaming, designed to addict and rip off people, not entertain them. And Guild Wars was an awesome game, a very elaborate game, a game full of love, and they just reused the fame of it for this thing.
Sure some parts of the game is done well, I think the story is up to GW quality and some of the funny dialogues too and the concept arts too. But those are just the artistic parts, the art and the writing. It’s two different parts of the team. How the game actually plays… I am not satisfied in the least.
They should go back to the roots and realize that they did a lot of things right in the first game, and just because they failed at making a “PvP only game” and the game just kind ended up being good, that doesn’t mean that they cannot take credit for it and build on the things that they did right. It should be part of their “vision” if they ever had any at all, because that’s where it all started. It started with Guild Wars.
So that’s it.
Right now it feels a little bit like the transition between Fallout II and Fallout 3. It took the devs a failed game to realize what was wrong and make New Vegas feel like Fallout again. But here we cannot have that luxury because it’s an mmorpg.
