Guild Wars 2

So I’ve been checking out a couple other f2p MMOs for the hell of it, and one ot the things that struck me the most about them, even the cheapest, most poorly designed of the lot were at least visually interesting. The landscape is littered with decorative pieces and interesting architecture and even the lowliest mobs are if nothing else, cool looking.

Tyria on the other hand is completely bland. The landscapes are beautiful and very well designed, but mostly barren. Rocks and trees, the odd fort or two, but very little else. The humanoid mobs, apart from the Nightmare Court are all so shabbily dressed. The bandits and pirates have next to nothing at all in their forts. No treasure or art or anything laying around. What have they been stealing for the past three years? Are they all really that poor?

We’ve had one bit of LS1 that made some lasting changes to a map but I’m definitely hoping to see a bit more of this in the future, it’d really breathe a bit of life into the world. Very much interested in seeing what others think about this, if anything at all.

GW2 is going for a specific kind of atmosphere and I’m sure that most players actually appreciate GW2’s world design. I don’t really think the landscape or mobs are bland… GW2 has a lot of really cool looking enemies and it does a great job of mixing together realistic looking landscapes with some more interesting and visually stunning locations.

On the note of pirates. Do you really think they would just have treasure lying around? That’s such a fantasy trope – giant piles of treasure and coins everywhere right! But that makes absolutely no sense. Doing so just makes your treasure very easy to steal and puts a giant target on your own head and on your base. Pirates in Tyria probably do the sensible thing like everyone else and keep all their loot in the bank, or hide it somewhere out of sight…

Most of the humanoid mobs have no reason to be well dressed. A bandit is a bandit, they’re usually not particularly wealthy and it’s in their best interests to blend in visually so they don’t call attention to themselves.

Tyria is already littered with a lot of decorative pieces and interesting architecture. It may just be that it doesn’t seem so to you because you’re used to playing Asian MMO’s, which have a very different design, or maybe GW2’s style just isn’t for you?

Actually, I’ve been playing this game almost exclusively for the last two years.

The thing is, I love GW2’s aesthetics. It’s just some of the open world, vanilla maps I find comparatively dull. This is probably because after levelling to 80 back in 2013 I spent virtually all of my time in dungeons and fractals, and most of those do an amazing job at creating atmosphere. I also can’t help but notice a stark contrast between the Maguuman maps (Silverwastes, Dry Top and the HoT content) and the rest of the world.

It’s not a major issue really, I just was wondering if other people felt like the open world could use a little ‘dressing up’.