Guild Wars 2

Yeah, I’m one of those guys. The guy that comes in and tries to tell everyone how it is. Well, I’m a little different from them actually. I’m not looking to be right. I’m looking to help the game. My experiences is with Guardian; my only character. I’ve played almost everything except the last mission with my group of friends. Also, let me preface everything by saying I like the game. I enjoy it a lot and it’s one of the best buys out there. OK? I. Like. Guild. Wars. T(w)o. But, I’m also a designer, and we love to improve things.

Contents:
1. Story
2. Combat & Skills (behavior in the context of action oriented combat)
3. Heart Quests

-Story-
First, I’m not a writer, but I’ve seen enough stories to know a few things. Also, I thought the Guild Wars 1 lore was pretty cool. I enjoyed it, and overall, the second game is still awesome. However, there’s an unneeded notion of this “personal story”. Hear me out:

MMOs are not single player games, and contrary to popular belief, we’re not special in this story. In the first Guild Wars, the player was more of a bystander and offered his opinion and the main characters were all NPC. In terms of storytelling, that is, if you want to tell a good story, that’s totally fine. You don’t have to make the players pivotal characters in an MMO, in fact, it’s a mistake to try to.

The problem lies with trying to have all kinds of decisions for (human) characters, trying to make everyone unique, while trying to tell an epic tale. This is storytelling 101: Don’t have too many characters because it’s impossible to make them all interesting. What we need is a good story, not a story that tries to please everyone, because then it just becomes bland. I paid attention to the story, but I don’t remember anything me or my friends did in their storylines, because everything we did had no effect on the actual main characters: Destiny’s Edge, Traherenrnrn… or however you spell the plant guy, and whoever else was involved. In MMOs, the players are the armies and the NPCs should be the main characters. Trying to reverse this creates an impossible barrier for good story telling. You’re not going to please everyone so don’t try. You’re better off making a strong story. Period.

This is the story Guild Wars needs, not the story players want!

-Combat & Skills- (This is a long section.)
Now then, I’m not particularly a story kind of guy, but I do enjoy good stories. I tend to focus on mechanics. I’m more of a designer, so here we go.

My first complaint is that monster have too much HP, in general. This is not always true, but it’s a concern. Consider the following. My friends and I are in a dungeon. We’re not dying but it takes a handful of minutes to best each enemy engagement. This is delaying us for no good reason and quite frankly, it gets boring to drill through high health enemies engaging us with the same patterns of attacks. This is especially true when you fight gold and purple star enemies. (around their portraits near their health bar) More on this later…

I want to draw attention to GW2 being an “action oriented” combat game, or whatever catch phrase they made for it. (which is good and all) Monsters, skills and the combat concept all tie in to one another. We’ll need to look at what made Guild Wars 1 successful with its skills before we go to combat. Stay with me here…

Continued on next post…

In Guild Wars 1, it used the ever famous trinity that is now under oppression. The tune goes something like this: “We’ve all seen the trinity and we’re tired of it! Check out our new game where anyone can be any class and you can participate with any other person. No healer! Everyone is special!” At first, we welcome the idea of something new, however, I quickly realized the way Arena Net implemented this system blurs everyone. Here’s why.

Lets say we have a 5 man party. We have 2 Tanks, 1 Healer, 1 DPS and a DPS/healer hybrid. Fairly well rounded. We all know the roles of each of those class types well. The key element here is each person’s ROLE. If we were to remove one of those people, a key ROLE would be missing. Lets say you’re the DPS guy. We take you out, and now the team doesn’t have enough DPS to move around as smoothly or just plain dies. There’s a clear gap now, we NEED more damage. We can’t add in another Tank nor a Healer to replace his effect. That’s because his ROLE was clearly identified. That kind of game play structure is what makes you feel like you’re part of the team. If you do your role well, your team congratulates you (or they should!). It makes us feel important because we know without someone like YOU, the team is missing part of its foundation. Compare this with Guild Wars 2. Arena Net said anyone can be anything and it doesn’t matter. You can bring any class combination into dungeons and still win. That also means we can replace any class with any class and it wouldn’t matter? Well, technically it wouldn’t if any class combination can survive. That means roles are muddy.

This does NOT mean that Guild Wars 2 has no role identification, something that’s critical for class variation and interest. What I’m saying is it’s weaker than it should be. Now you may be thinking that they want to get rid of these kinds of roles. That’s partly true. What they want to get rid of is arbitrary roles set up by circumstances. In other words, you NEED a healer because the game is balanced that way. They want to replace it with skill based combat, but you need roles within this change. What they want is behavior based roles. More on this later… Let’s continue.

I’m going to expand further on this point with skills. It hits a similar vibe. In Guild Wars 1, you can roll strong and specific builds with just a handful of skills. If I had a Mesmer, I can cause considerable frustration with just 3 skills against an Elementalist. At the same time, I could use just a handful of skills with an Elementalist to cause super high damage, something no other class could do like the Ele. If you were a Monk and you brought a single skill, Guardian (Guild Wars 1 skill), you could avert potentially 50% of all attacks, which was a very powerful ability. For the most part (although arguably classes got muddied in Guild Wars 1), skills in each class had a noticeable and powerful effect given the proper circumstances. It’s what made customizing your skill bar so much fun and it’s what made Guild Wars 1 such a strong PvP game. It won two years in a row as the best PvP game if I’m not mistaken.

There’s a reason why Guild Wars 2 skills are not as powerful as Guild Wars 1 skills. It’s because there is no healer and they’ve put strong limitations on healing. After all, a fight cannot last forever and you don’t want to die in 2 seconds. This is an action based game where people are diving and hopping about, and this brings me to my final point about combat:

Behavior versus Numbers in the context of action oriented combat:
When they showed off the combat in Guild Wars 2, they had all kinds of diving and dodging and talked about how you can avoid any attack, which is true, but where are all the behavioral based counters? What is a behavioral based counter you ask? Well, lets have a little game design lesson:

Lets say you are a Fire Mage and you’re fighting an Assassin. You hit him with a couple of fire spells and kill him. You just countered him because you killed him with damage. Easy, right? That part is clear.

Now lets say he uses a +damageVsMage attack. He counters you because he had a modifier against you. This is true for all kinds of stuff, like Holy vs Undead, Physical vs Ice, Water vs Fire, or whatever. But this is old school and boring. It’s all a shortcut in truly skill based combat design (there’s a little room for this kind of stuff, but not a lot), which is what Guild Wars 2 is going for.

Continued on next post…

So, a behavioral based counter system would work like this: Lets say you and your friend are Warrior and you’re fighting 50 little monsters. There’s only two of you, but you can dispatch these monsters quickly individually. Alas, there are simply too many of them. You die fighting heroically.

You try again, but this time around you bring an Elementalist with you. He spams a powerful single hit spell, but you died again, so it’s not necessarily about how many people you have. The third and final time he brings a powerful AoE spell. He uses the spell and kills half the group in a few seconds and your group takes care of the rest. You won the engagement not due to a damage type inflicting bonus damage, but due to a behavior of the spell, that behavior being that it covered a wide area. Now let’s reverse the situation.

Your next foes are just 5 in number, but they have really high armor and HP. The fast ticking damage of the AoE does very little damage against a high armored target, so this time around the Warrior’s ability to sunder high armored individual targets is critical for your success. The Elementalist pulls out that single target spell that does significantly more damage than an AoE spell to the single targets, ensuring that most points of damage are not blocked by their high armor rating as his own counter.

Other examples:
-An attack that fires a large, slow moving orb that damages multiple enemies in a row. Strong in choke points.
-A shield that blocks damage in 180 degree area.
-An attack that auto-targets 1 or more targets, splitting its damage among foes. Strong only when there are less foes; situational and no dependent on environment. (or could be)
-An area on the ground that snares enemies to allow kiting.
-Chain lightning.

Some of these kinds of things are in the game but with fairly weak effects. These examples are fairly straightforward, but hopefully illustrate my point. So what is the context of all of this in Guild Wars 2? Well, in Guild Wars 2 we have A LOT of monsters who are melee, but there are very few unique behaviors. We have quite a few who are ranged, but few behavior differences. Why?

Where is the boss that fires multiple beams of energy that spin around room making players move with the beams or rolling under them while attacking on the go? Where is the monster that you can jump on its head to stun it? Where are the monsters that are super fast that require snares to beat? Where are the damage patterns that we dodge? Where are the swarm of small monsters? Where are the behaviors that are anti-mage or anti-armor? Where are the skill and class behaviors to counter them? They’re only kind of there…

So, lets review the combat section:
-Monsters have too much health and usually have boring attack patterns.
-Class role identification is weak.
-Behavioral based countering is ideal for action oriented combat, but is lacking.

Last note on the combat thing: Remember the old games where you died in a hit or two? Contra 3, Super Mario world? They didn’t use damage systems, they used behavior systems. Enemies and attacks/powerups had differing behaviors, radically different actually, that changed the gameplay. I firmly believe Guild Wars 2 could benefit from researching these kinds of games. Stand on the shoulder of giants!

On to the last topic.

-Heart Quests-
There are too many Heart Quests. You can’t make them interesting because there are just too many. There are about 10-15 per area and I don’t look forward to doing them. I think 2-4 per area that are more thought out, larger, bigger rewards, longer completion requirements and more ways of completing them would be much better. Then you can really write in why they are there and what we’re doing to help the effort of the Heart Quest holder. That’s all I have to say in this area. (Aren’t you glad?!)

Again, I’m not saying these areas of Guild Wars 2 are terrible or even bad, but I think these are the areas where Guild Wars 2 can improve. This game would be GOD TIER if they worked on these areas, you hear me? FIT FOR THE GODS! … of Tyria. OK, open let the floodgates be opened.

Well written and i agree on all points, especially in regards to combat. Upvote for developer response!

Fantastic post, I agree with everything you’ve said.

I think that Arena Net is just trying to mix too many different types of games together. They say they’re an action-oriented game, but they’re also an MMO. They want to be like an RPG, but it’s not single-player. Just way too many conflicting ideas.

The story for Guild Wars is a good one, but, like most gaming companies are doing these days, they are getting a bit lazy. Most people in society today do not have much patience, and want things now, and they want to feel like they’ve achieved something. Guild Wars (the first one) had a very interesting story, but it was written for the gamers of the last generation. The new generation just does not have the same values, the same patience, that the older ones did. In Guild Wars 2, we get attacked by undead, we go kill Zhaitan. That’s it. In Guild Wars 1, we have a mysterious race of super-powerful beings causing all kinds of trouble, and they inspire a human to create a cult to further their own ends. At the same time, they are prophesied to fail, and enact measures to attempt to stop this. You wake up in a war, and your entire homeland sinks. Then you discover what caused this to happen, and you set out to stop it. You kill the being leading the enemies, but he’s not really dead. He’s just waiting, plotting his next move. There is room for further story. People these days just don’t want that kind of involvement though, they want to feel like they are the most important person in the world, and they want something to happen and be done, now. I think that gaming companies need to stop appeasing the whiney little kids, and really focus on making a good story, a good game all around. If they could do that, they would definitely be placed among the stars.

Combat is a little dull. If you look at the weapon skills, they all follow the same pattern. Every class is doing the same thing, albeit in a slightly different manner. It just doesn’t feel very action-y when you follow the same fighting pattern over and over. Monsters attack you, you do this, you win. Even the bosses are the same. I do agree with the ideas for bosses, I really liked World of Warcraft’s raiding encounters and boss encounters in general. You didn’t just kite the boss around and kill him, you had to actively evade his killer blows, mitigate against certain things, perform certain actions. You were actually fighting something that seemed somewhat intelligent, rather than just a dumb brute who wants to smack you with a stick. I think that Guild Wars could benefit from making the players more involved in combat. Rather than standing around mashing 1 or 2 buttons, the encounters should make players want to switch weapons, switch strategies. In short, players should have to react. I really hope they put more involved material in the future.

As for the heart quests, I think they do alright. They are a bit lacking in the story though. They don’t really tell you how you’re saving the Tengu by researching Destroyers. They don’t tell you that Shaemoore would just explode without the Moa farm. The heart quests just seem like busy work. They don’t really involve you in the game at all. Say you had a heart quest near an enemy prison. The prison hold important people to whomever the good guys are, and they couldn’t operate without them. So for that heart quest, you go in and bust the guys free, and harass the camp. Blamo, you’ve become more involved, and it’s still something that could fit under a heart quest.

You’ve got great suggestions, and I hope this post goes all the way to the development team! I just wish that companies would stop trying to appease everyone, and write a good game for the sake of being a good game.

I partially agree with you, and would like to share my thoughts.

Story:
GW2 tells quite the story, but it lacks much in the way of plot twists.
There are large global arcs, right at the start of the arc it is already clear where it is going, your character sets out to do something, there is some struggle and then they succeed and move on to the next thing.
A good story should have something called the ‘yes, but’ or a ‘no, and’ where nothing is really ever over, each completed arc adds a layer of consequences to the rest of the story that your carries along.
That is actually very difficult to do in a game, because you cannot force the player to learn from what has happened in previous arcs, but it is not impossible.
You can use a recurring cast of side characters to demonstrate this. Traherne Fits the bill for this, but does not really carry the role well. I feel he already had superpowers, and lacked only self confidence, my character helps him a little gaining more self confidence, but mostly he’s doing it on his own, unaffected by my actions.
What would work as a story is tagging more characters onto yours, most races get a friend/colleague that is important in the starting missions. After a while they are written out of the story, don’t do that! That NPC is a reflection of the player’s origins. They should grow with the story, either becoming wise and capable or bitter and hateful; Most memorable would be if they could betray the player joining an opposing faction.
When the great tree asks you what your greatest fear is and Zaiten somehow finds out it should not be some pact NPC you just met that suffers through it with you, it should be a character you’ve gotten to know well over your career. Add onto that a new character for each arc, like the replacement ‘story buddies’ you already bet, but have them follow and grow to constantly remind the player of how his story is affecting the world those ‘story buddies’ live in.

You say you remember no moments of the story, I do remember several moments, though I doubt they are the moments Anet wanted me to remember.
On my necromancer, when you are trapped and cornered with Traherne and he basically says 'I am a necromancer, so this is no biggy for me' then he activates 5 elites and 1 utility at the same time and proceeds storm out from between the rock and the hard place. Especially as a necromancer this kitten me off, I don't get to use greatswords and I don't even have 6 skillslots to put minions in, let alone 5 elite minions! How is this 'well within a necromancer's power'?
I chose the 'fear of failure' face your fears quest arc. And it was good, after some build up the quest actually had me doubting whether what I saw in quest instances was real or not. And then just when it was starting to get actually frightening and intriguing as to what is real or not the arc was already over and respolved.
In the battle at fort trinity, there are several risen giants coming, and you are fighting outside. You are told to rush in and close the gates. I saw a whole bunch of pact members still fighting the undead outside, I waited for them to retreat back inside, but they didn't. So I got swarmed went down and used escape skills to retreat back inside and close the gate. I felt really bad for leaving them to die like that, but the game just ignores their sacrifice.
Why does Tibbalt love apples so much? While I was doing hearts to reach the level I needed to survive the next story quest it got into my head that the most obvious reason was that the last thing his wife/son gave him was an apple. Since hearts are not that engaging I mused on that train of taught and came up with the following: "but Tibbalt did not eat the apple his wife/son gave him, because he did not like the taste of apples. When his wife/son died x days later and he still had the apple he convinced himself that he loved apples as much as he loved his whive/son because they reminded him of them. Then eating a stale brown apple, tears ran down his face knowing he would never eat something as good as this again." It was a really sappy explanation that would have given the cheerful Tibbalt a lot more depth, showing he has more sides to him than his good sense of humor. Then in the next quest Tibbalt died and I never found out why he likes apples, they just didn't bother putting that much depth into what could be the basis of some really cool characters.
But that said, for an MMO GW2 had great story, there are goals and the story has direction. You are doing stuff and while there is little surprise and intrigue there is also no padding or quests purely for having an extra quest in there.

Combat:
You say, class roles are unclear. I say classes should not have roles, players should have roles. It is something that was awesome about GW1, you had dozens of skills to chose from, going into hundreds when combining them with the others in your team.
At one point I had a GW1 team of 4 elementalists, 1 of them was a tank 2 others with 2 different builds filling roles that were a combination of healer/buffer and another was a DPS/Debuffer.
And it was highly effective, even in Eye of the North hardmode. And you could do something similar with most of the classes, with the odd one out.
When I heard GW2 was doing away with the healer role; I expected, in GW2 I would be completely free to mix and match my skills to turn a caster into a rolling melee fortress and a warrior into a ranged nuker.
And you can… kind of. But for some reason the devs designed each class with a particular direction in mind, instead of having them free to fill any role like they promised.

When I played in the beta and saw the number of skills and elites available, I assumed only half of the skills where in the game yet, or that there would be a lot more of the traits that modify the way your skills behave.

But what it comes down to, is that where GW1 had attributes that contained skills and the skills for each attribute where designed with a role you could chose for your class to fill. And at any time a character had 8 attributes to chose from, so they had multiple roles they could mix and match between.

GW2 boasted how it is not supposed to have the traditional roles of the trinity, but instead they focused on making, ‘the guy that applies might/protection/regen/fury to his team when they need it’ and ‘the guy that applies weakness/chill/blindness/cripple to the foes that suffer most from it’ into different roles. You pick 2 from the boons/conditions and add damage and you have your role, keeping your assigned effects active while dealing as much damage as possible. In a way I suppose they succeeded on what they set out to do, but the choice of what boons/conditions you have to work with comes down to 1 choice.

What I miss most of all in that is variety, where previously your choice was which attributes to raise and which 8 skills to bring, now it is down to which boons/conditions you will sustain and weather to deal your damage with Power/Power&Precision/Condition Damage/Power&Condition Damage (a third attribute is present on gear, but unless you go pure power or pure condition damage, you do not have a lot of choice remaining over what that 3rd attribute will be)

GW2 offers lots of little choices, utility skills, traits, signets, mixed gear bonuses and even the mutually exclusive consumable effects will factor into your success rate. But the impact of these little choices pales in comparison to the choice of weapon(s) everything else is just a nice little extra, often pigeonholed into what works well with that weapon choice.

What I suggest is a significant revamp of how traits work.
Instead of unlocking major and minor traits in lines with global effects you unlock trait slots to apply to skills.
Instead of having 1 trait that reduces the recharge of all skills for a weapon, you can select 1 skill on the weapon and add a trait that reduces it recharge by 33%. Another skill on the same weapon can be traited with a trait that causes it to cripple for 3 seconds on top of that skill’s normal effects. Or you could select 1 skill on the weapon and add 3 traits to it, to completely modify the way it behaves. Turning a ‘quick single target direct damage attack’ into a ‘slow telegraphed AoE dealing condition damage’ or the other way around.

You would still be limited to the number of traits you can spend (14) and you could only use a maximum of 3 or 4 traits on a single skill. For balance reasons the devs would select what traits can be applied to a skill on a per skill basis. But the end result it that you can modify the way your weapon, utility, healing and elite skills function by a great deal.
As a result you can redefine your role in combat, you are no longer pigeon holed into what weapon/trait combination for your class applies the boons/conditions your team needs, you can now truly step away from predefined class roles and reshape yourself into a puzzle piece to fit into the hole presented by the challenge you are presented with.

Designing a number of traits that modify skill behavior can be done pretty quickly, figuring out which traits work well with what skills takes some balancing.

Wow, I spent waaaaaaaaaaay too much time writing this all out.

Zwets.3785:

You say, class roles are unclear. I say classes should not have roles, players should have roles.

I’m not sure what you mean by that. Could you elaborate?

Also, skills should have the depth, not necessarily traits because traits are really transparent and quite frankly overly complex for the sake of adding depth to your game. You don’t need a million choices, just strong ones that differ greatly from each other. That being said, traits are a fine idea. I’m not saying they are bad.

Flopjack.5314:

Zwets.3785:

You say, class roles are unclear. I say classes should not have roles, players should have roles.

I’m not sure what you mean by that. Could you elaborate?

I used the example of the 4 elementalist team in GW1.

Instead of the game designers deciding that class X has role Y, and can only do that role well. In GW1 designers allowed you to mix and match. I want that freedom again, instead of the designers deciding what the role for my class should be, I want the player to be able to decide he will make a thief that can tank and succeed.
The player chooses the role and the class can adapt to fill it, by becoming weaker in one area in order to gain strength in another.

Zwets.3785:

I used the example of the 4 elementalist team in GW1.

Instead of the game designers deciding that class X has role Y, and can only do that role well. In GW1 designers allowed you to mix and match. I want that freedom again, instead of the designers deciding what the role for my class should be, I want the player to be able to decide he will make a thief that can tank and succeed.
The player chooses the role and the class can adapt to fill it, by becoming weaker in one area in order to gain strength in another.

You’re right, but it should be within a class to begin with. Think of it like sub-roles. The role of an Elementalist is (primarily) a damage dealer. But what side attributes do you want? If you go water, you may have slowing and healing effects. If you go Earth you may have blinding and defense effects. If you go fire, you abandon most secondary effects in favor of more damage.