Introduction
I did not expect I would ever make this argument, I honestly never cared for it, but life is funny that way.
I played GW2 from launch and while it has a fantastic single player experience, towards end game and lvl 80, I felt something was missing, and I couldn’t for the life of me put my finger on it.
It just seemed so dull, repetitive, and nothing worth striving for.
And so when FFXIV: ARR came out I took a break to give it a go, and it’s a great game that honestly takes a few ques from GW2, like FATES ie Dynamic Events, which has made the single player experience much more enjoyable then in most MMO’s I’ve played.
Bravo Arenanet, bravo.
The thing is with me, is that I have very little tolerance for pointless BS and grind, so before FFXIV I never got to end game in an MMO (besides GW1 and GW2) because the single player experience would make me want to tear my bloody eyes out.
So my experience with raiding is rather limited.
(take what I am about to say with a bag full of salt)
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But it there where I finally figured out what missing in GW2 that prevented me from enjoying GW2 endgame all this time: Roles.
There are no roles in this game, you never have to work together in anything but the loosest of senses, and you never rely on anybody for anything.
Which leads to a incredibly dull multiplayer experience, and for a massively “multiplayer” online game, that is a colossal problem.
And as such, I think that this move away from the Holy Trinity, however well intention, may have been a wrong move in the end.
I praise them to high heaven for trying, and I wish more MMO developers would try new things, but things just don’t always pan out.
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(Note, if you already know what roles are, how they work, and agree GW2 could need them, feel free to skip the next three parts)
Defining Roles
I feel this needs to be clearly defined, so we avoid confusion on the issue, esp since in the past Anet have stated that GW2 does indeed have roles, of Control/DPS/Support.
But in fact this is not true, and these so called roles are more just nebulous ideas then hard mechanics.
A role is a class distinction, where one excels in one gameplay element, to the detriment of others. And as such in multiplayer experiences, other players fill the roles that you can not, so where as the group is greater then the sum of it’s parts, and complete a unified whole.
Lose any one part, and the group fails.
This can be anything, from tanking and healing, scouting and sniping, tackling and DPS, or art and programming. But whatever the case, you can’t be everything all at once, you NEED other people.
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However, it’s also not a role if the game never requires it of you.
Stealth for instance is something only the Thief and Mesmer have, but there is never any instance where they game asks “Do you have stealth? If not you fail”, and so it’s not a role, just a class mechanic.