Guild Wars 2

Dragons. All three have something in common (and I don’t mean crappy loot), and that’s the complete lack of fear when facing them. They just stand there and cast some crap, you just stand there and cast some crap back. Then they die and you get some RNG loot.

The animations of the scripted moves are AMAZING. When Claw of Jormag bounces of the mountain and takes chunks out with him it looks incredible. More please.

*Please, make the dragons move around! Make them target in on players! Make them claw swipe people! Make them breathe directly into the mob! Dragons are supposed to be smart, but they just stand there and get beat on! Make those big kittens EAT players alive and cough out the bones as an AoE! *

its not so much the fact that they don’t move around much, although this does make them less life-like and threatening. It’s that for each dragon there are some spots where you can stand and pew pew them without taking any/little damage. The first phase of jormag for example; you just stand on the edges of the ramp and nothing will hit you while you take down the wall with charrzookas. This phase would be a lot more fun if you actually had to dodge his attacks.

I think the dragon champions are definitely evolving in difficulty as the game goes on. If you look at the range of stuff you have to deal with between The Shatterer – Tequatl – Claw of Jormag you’ll see that these scale up in difficulty quite a bit. I believe much of it is just ArenaNet giving us a bit of a learning curve when it comes to the difficulty in taking on a Dragon Champion. And I can see things getting much more difficult as the games progresses even further into other ED’s territories.

I think they’re pretty fun, but kitten if the drops aren’t horrible. If there weren’t some (amazingly small) chance of a precursor, I wouldn’t do them ever.

Any future dragons that move around more need to be smaller. Like 1/2 the size they are now. Then Anet could do more with them, like fighting 3 dragons at the same time.

yeah to be honest I think the whole system should change, how about a treasure trail, dragons flying across the whole of Tyria and there are clues to spot where the dragon is, or headed, like how fast the wind is travelling or the direction of the wind.( I have already done a whole post about this) and as you said there should be things like the dragon gobbles people up and then spits them back out! XD

There’s really nothing you can do to make them dangerous to a zerg of 40+ people that doesn’t make them basically impossible for groups smaller than that, though.

The biggest reason the dragons don’t roam the countryside is a technical limitation:

Traditionally, developers “lock” their rendering code to a minimum frame rate (let’s say 33 frames/sec) to guarantee that everyone gets the same play experience with different machines. This is why large characters and monsters seem to animate slower than small ones; they have to use a predetermined formula that adjusts the rendering speed based on the size of the object, so that they always “know” the minimum frame rate.

To achieve this, a particular frame can be discarded from your graphics card’s renderer if your machine is falling behind the server’s instruction to render the next frame. Fast machines will do “extra” processing, or process an additional frame making it look smoother. This is how different machines see the same minimum frame rate.

Now the problem. The most expensive operations for a graphics card in terms of time and memory usage, is the culling and removal of hidden surfaces as well as the management of the textures used to display a player’s gear while they run around. This is because every player has different gear and textures that have to be stored and moved in memory from one place called a back-buffer to another place called a rendering surface. If everyone had 1 piece of gear with 1 texture then that would be great. Then the renderer only needs to keep 1 copy of the mesh and texture in memory and simply spit out transformed copies to the correct x,y, and z locations.

If something as massive as Claw of Jormag suddenly moved and there were 50 people on the other side of him, your machine would have to suddenly retrieve and render meshes and textures for all of these new objects and your frame rate would drop to something stupid, like 1 frame/sec, because the card has to get the list of textures and meshes, their x,y and z coordinates, then present that to the rendering surface, wait for the CPU to check the state of the other variables tracked during the game, then, push all of that location data out to everyone in real time.

This is compounded by the fact that those 50 people are moving in front of, and behind one another too, making more instructions to cull unseen surfaces. Remember, the server also has to continually talk with the client to update the data about the game and send updates back to everyone in real time. This has to be done on top of rendering what you see. Graphics data is not sent across the Internet, just the instruction to render it, but it is still a very resource intensive process when one server has to do this for everyone on the server in real time.

Sorry for the long explanation, but that is why you aren’t going to see a big dragon running around, unless they are in an instance, like personal story mode, because then the game only has to account for a handful of people.

One final observation. I have noticed that parts of the dragons move as I described, like the main body, but that the wings move fast. I believe they are animating the smaller parts of the dragons as separate objects so that they appear to move quickly, which is quite clever. If you pay close attention to Claw of Jormag when he is shot down, the wingless blob that flies through the air is not the same blob he turns into when he gets up; they are using a low-polygon mesh to send him through the air and presenting a detailed one for the final stage of the fight.

Jormag is the worst event in history (aside from the dragon crashing from the sky).

You’re not actually fighting a dragon, you’re fighting an ice wall… the second part is better, but only marginally. I reckon The Sunless is the best dragon event in game.

The loot is horrendous as well – trash mobs drop much better stuff.