Guild Wars 2

I know I give you guys/girls a hard time a lot, and you are probably waiting for me to slip up so that you can feed me to the Grasping Ghouls this year… xD

But, I wanted to say thank you for having such a crisp environment. Many games have a foggy, or have grainy feel to them. Your world is very refined, very bright. Not too much bloom, not too much fog. Everything is simply perfect.

Also, you put a lot of work into terrain functionality. I spent lots of time working with designing maps for some much older games… I can really respect the effort you put into securing each and every corner. There are some flaws, but they are far spread… and few. Most of the “flaws” that I find are more of an adventure than a “bug.” Being able to scale a mountain in this game is simply breathtaking!

Crispness and clarity gets a 10.
Environmental design gets a %9.999999. (Better than anyone else!)

The thing I admire so much about your environments:
You are not blocked by an invisible wall. The mountainside actually prevents you from exploring further. You create more than a game. You created a world. An you did a dang god job with it!

It really is awesome. I found this spot that was probably outside of where I was expected to be able to go when I was looking for some clues to a jumping puzzle. I didn’t realize it until I started moving my camera around and could all the sudden see through solid rock.

Lovely view, even if I was afraid of tripping and breaking my neck and the lighting was a little wonky.

Oh here’s another one from a spot I was able to jump up to, that appeared to be there just to give me a safe place to take a break from the Dredge.

World is gorgeous. Camera needs altering to let us see more of it.

I will also say, as someone who spent hours hunting kisk spots in Aion and for artifacts and the like in Rift that GW2’s terrain is quite often blocked off by invisible walls even when the slope appears climbable.

I’m not saying that’s unreasonable, but yeah, invisible walls are quite prevalent compared to those two games in particular.

You have to do that just a little bit, because of how the terrain is programmed. Otherwise some walls would still be climbable. Nothing is blatantly obvious as a wall unless you are in an ocean. And then, they have no other choice but to put a wall.

Check this out:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/fangen/Master-Cartographer-Guild-Wars-2/first#post83021

Well, they’re artificial walls added specifically to prevent you from getting to a place using that route, and not how the terrain is programmed. I can tell the difference. I can give you the really obvious examples of the top levels of the various capital cities, and bridges like the ones across the great collapse in divinity’s reach, but you’ll find them in other places too, such as if you try to continue exploring the terrain past some vistas.

I can’t think of specific examples of that, but it happens just enough to notice.