Guild Wars 2

As a GW1 veteran (some 17500+ hours) there are a number of features that are in GW1 that didnt make it to GW2. Many of these features were as a result of requests from fans, lessons learned from the game or just hugely increased the community aspect of the game.

I suspect the answer to these is ’didn’t make it in time’ but theres a few in which i’m curious as to why they were’nt included as they were a staple component of GW1. Such as
1. Apperance changes
2. A robust alliance system
3. Dedicated language districts
4. More information in the guild panel (last login time etc)
5. Announcement of winning teams in PvP ‘so and so has won a battle in the hall of heroes..’
6. and finally ( and most important to me anyway) why they did away with an (invisible to the user) serverless system and replaced it with a more limiting server based one(I get the server pride thing, but there were other ways of doing the same thing)

Just kinda curious as to why these were omitted or chosen in the design.

Id put bets on the appearance changes being a paid for item thru the TP at a later date.

The alliance system I thought they would have brought over too, always liked that feature.

As a GW1 veteran do you remember what GW1 looked like when it first came out?

zogrim.6925:

As a GW1 veteran do you remember what GW1 looked like when it first came out?

Yes, amazing. Or are you talking alpha?

Games are much more complicated nowadays than they were several years ago. Customers are somewhat spoiled and very demanding. GW title is known for its ability to dinamically update game client and add features on the go. Take your time and enjoy the game and these minor inconsistences will pass in due time.

Rukia.4802:

zogrim.6925:

As a GW1 veteran do you remember what GW1 looked like when it first came out?

Yes, amazing. Or are you talking alpha?

I’ve only seen alpha in videos. Purchased the game in about a month after it came out. So much has changed in the last 7 years.

“As a GW1 veteran…”

I stopped right there.

Maybe the team wanted to make the game different and not exactly like GW1. I say they pulled it off with flying colors.

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

As a GW1 veteran (some 17500+ hours) there are a number of features that are in GW1 that didnt make it to GW2. Many of these features were as a result of requests from fans, lessons learned from the game or just hugely increased the community aspect of the game.

I suspect the answer to these is ’didn’t make it in time’ but theres a few in which i’m curious as to why they were’nt included as they were a staple component of GW1. Such as
1. Apperance changes
2. A robust alliance system
3. Dedicated language districts
4. More information in the guild panel (last login time etc)
5. Announcement of winning teams in PvP ‘so and so has won a battle in the hall of heroes..’
6. and finally ( and most important to me anyway) why they did away with an (invisible to the user) serverless system and replaced it with a more limiting server based one(I get the server pride thing, but there were other ways of doing the same thing)

Just kinda curious as to why these were omitted or chosen in the design.

Servers are needed for WvW.

Kana.6793:

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

As a GW1 veteran (some 17500+ hours) there are a number of features that are in GW1 that didnt make it to GW2. Many of these features were as a result of requests from fans, lessons learned from the game or just hugely increased the community aspect of the game.

Servers are needed for WvW.

Actually they’re not. Instead of servers allow the users to select a ‘team’ to WvW for. Keep the same restrictons on changing team as now for servers (limited size, cant change more too often, changing teams costs money etc).

As for server pride, team pride is just as stong. Try telling a soccer or baseball supporter otherwise.

De-coupling servers from WvW, gets you a whole load of benefits too.

O No need to worry about server mergers/population
O Guild influence can be game wide(currently guild members only get the benefits they have earned for the the guild on their server)
O Does away with the need for overflows
O No need for friends on a server to guest to
O The game automatically scales according to population

Sure I remember what GW1 looked like when it was first out, but why throw away much of that evolution and not learn some of the lessons already implemented into GW1

I think people need to distinguish that this is Guild Wars 2 and not Guild Wars 1 vol. 2.

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

Actually they’re not.

Functionally… no of course not. Practically, it’s just a way of players identifying with which “world” they belong to.

A few things off the top of my head of GW1 lessons learned that weren’t implemented or changed in GW2:

- Decoupling of stats from the base armor. Essentially GW1 armor worked something like sPvP armor. GW2 PvE suffers from stat design issues with the “end game” reward system and the lack of comprehensive / consistent reward through each “end game” avenue. GW1 actually did this later in its life and it was akittengood thing.

- Free waypoints. They displaced the 15k vanity sink into a waypoint sink. Conceptually this was a mistake. Generally a game should never overly punish the player for actually playing the game. The current waypoint gold sink system punishes the player for actually going to various places in the world for no good reason aside from a “gold sink” which should have been accomplished in other ways. Never make it annoying to actually play the game.

Rukia.4802:

zogrim.6925:

As a GW1 veteran do you remember what GW1 looked like when it first came out?

Yes, amazing. Or are you talking alpha?

It still looks amazing imo!

I agree on the bring back announcements though, now i see more about gold sellers in the chatbox than who won what in where!

As a another GW1 veteran!

I miss heroes or henchmen. Player in this game feels lonely like in every other MMO on the market except SWTOR or GW1.

Advantages:
- no waiting time in dungeon play (bio break only when I need)
- no leavers in the middle of instance
- no gameplay destroyers (everything depends on skilled/unskilled player)
- company available 24/7
- the feel of being in party of people I know (Not, I´m not felling good in guilds. It´s just very poor system where everyone is strange to me no matter how big the guild is.)
- I knew by heart some of heroes stories, their sentences during AFK time
- they are big part of SWTOR too and I loved SWTOR for story line and NPC lines and their influence based on your behavior
- I couldn´t make several HM instances in GW1 with people. Then I spent a lot of time equipping heroes and voilá almost everything done with 4 “men”: me, 3 heores (I passed on super extreme hard nightfall endgame)

Disadvantages:
-unknown

Would really loved to see companions in GW2 in some form. I just hate people in MMOs because they ruin everything and even now, few weeks after game release people stopped to revive others in battle (Mainly in WvWvW and less but stopped in dynamic events.).

Willing to pay 5000 gems for 1 hero/NPC/companion.

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

Kana.6793:

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

As a GW1 veteran (some 17500+ hours) there are a number of features that are in GW1 that didnt make it to GW2. Many of these features were as a result of requests from fans, lessons learned from the game or just hugely increased the community aspect of the game.

Servers are needed for WvW.

Actually they’re not. Instead of servers allow the users to select a ‘team’ to WvW for. Keep the same restrictons on changing team as now for servers (limited size, cant change more too often, changing teams costs money etc).

As for server pride, team pride is just as stong. Try telling a soccer or baseball supporter otherwise.

De-coupling servers from WvW, gets you a whole load of benefits too.

O No need to worry about server mergers/population
O Guild influence can be game wide(currently guild members only get the benefits they have earned for the the guild on their server)
O Does away with the need for overflows
O No need for friends on a server to guest to
O The game automatically scales according to population

Sure I remember what GW1 looked like when it was first out, but why throw away much of that evolution and not learn some of the lessons already implemented into GW1

I think the overflows are an evolution of districts actually.

Instead of “where are you?” “AE1” “AE 1 is full” “ok lets go to AE4” we now just right click and pick “join in” (if we’re not automatically placed in the same zone already).

I don’t think guesting is any more onerous that hopping districts either.

Draaq Cz.9642:

As a another GW1 veteran!

I miss heroes or henchmen. Player in this game feels lonely like in every other MMO on the market except SWTOR or GW1.

Advantages:
- no waiting time in dungeon play (bio break only when I need)
- no leavers in the middle of instance
- no gameplay destroyers (everything depends on skilled/unskilled player)
- company available 24/7
- the feel of being in party of people I know (Not, I´m not felling good in guilds. It´s just very poor system where everyone is strange to me no matter how big the guild is.)
- I knew by heart some of heroes stories, their sentences during AFK time
- they are big part of SWTOR too and I loved SWTOR for story line and NPC lines and their influence based on your behavior
- I couldn´t make several HM instances in GW1 with people. Then I spent a lot of time equipping heroes and voilá almost everything done with 4 “men”: me, 3 heores (I passed on super extreme hard nightfall endgame)

Disadvantages:
-unknown

Would really loved to see companions in GW2 in some form. I just hate people in MMOs because they ruin everything and even now, few weeks after game release people stopped to revive others in battle (Mainly in WvWvW and less but stopped in dynamic events.).

Willing to pay 5000 gems for 1 hero/NPC/companion.

Sorry, but this is a very strange post. You feel lonely playing with people but feel like you have company when NPC’s follow you around? If you hate people in MMO’s that’s fine, but why on earth do you play multiplayer games?

I’ll take what GW2 gives me over any of those features any day every day.
I am glad they removed announcements, but if they bring them back they should allow players to disable them as there are more casual players here. The game needs a lot of work in the GvG and PvP areas. If they improve that the game will be much more awesome.

The guild panel is horribad, but other stuff is simply amazing.

As a fellow GW1 ver I gotta say you need to be less focused on the server crap. They wanted to give us WvW and that’s the way it played out. I sure don’t miss the old districts thing, but hey having individual overflows for FR, DE, etc. servers would be awesome. A lot of new players don’t even know when they are in the overflow. “Why u talks in english this is a ** server !?”

I was a bit of a hardcore player before, now I moved on to a more casual playstyle, so I can say that both sides of the coin shine just a much and deserve just as much repsect. I hope the game keeps improving in both areas.

Have fun !

I wonder if they intend to add companions later on.

Apart from dungeons I don’t really see a reason for them.

Wayfinder.8452:

I’ll take what GW2 gives me over any of those features any day every day.
I am glad they removed announcements, but if they bring them back they should allow players to disable them as there are more casual players here. The game needs a lot of work in the GvG and PvP areas. If they improve that the game will be much more awesome.

The guild panel is horribad, but other stuff is simply amazing.

As a fellow GW1 ver I gotta say you need to be less focused on the server crap. They wanted to give us WvW and that’s the way it played out. I sure don’t miss the old districts thing, but hey having individual overflows for FR, DE, etc. servers would be awesome. A lot of new players don’t even know when they are in the overflow. “Why u talks in english this is a ** server !?”

I was a bit of a hardcore player before, now I moved on to a more casual playstyle, so I can say that both sides of the coin shine just a much and deserve just as much repsect. I hope the game keeps improving in both areas.

Have fun !

Yeah overflows definitely need to be language specific. I keep seeing people swearing at others for speaking German in map chat because they don’t realise the overflows are multi-lingual.

What I loved about GW 1 was the number of skills. I’m voting more non-weapon slots (5, not including elite/healing) and a hell of a lot more skills please.

The one thing I’d like to have back from GW1 is the fact that you had to go find the skill trainers that had the specific skill you wanted, and that you had to buy a signet of capture and head off to hunt a specific mini-boss out in the world to get the elites.

<— Also that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying GW2, but it frustrates me that it’s heavily marketed as innovative, when it’s blatantly no where near as innovate and unique as GW1

CrimsonNight.4791:

<— Also that. Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying GW2, but it frustrates me that it’s heavily marketed as innovative, when it’s blatantly no where near as innovate and unique as GW1

I would say, that GW2 is closer to the MMO genre than GW1.
(Not saying it’s a good or a bad thing, they just differ.)

Completed agreed, it’s way closer to a typical MMO ;p
GW1 re-defined the genre

I’m not an academic or anything, but I loved coming up with unique builds with all the skills out there, even the elementalist reshuffle that’s just come out has got me really excited, says a lot that it’s going to make me take a break from GW2 already I think. The traits help but I was really shocked when I saw the number of skills compared to GW1. I just hope that expansions that provide more skills to classes are released soon allowing for greater uniqueness and more experimentation

CrimsonNight.4791:

What I loved about GW 1 was the number of skills. I’m voting more non-weapon slots (5, not including elite/healing) and a hell of a lot more skills please.

I love unlockables and I like the limited number of active skills. I do think however that weapon choice really does take over a little too much of the build in terms of skills.

I miss hunting down bosses to steal their skills. Maybe, just maybe, we could unlock techniques that modify our weapon skills? So for example, hunter’s shot on the long bow might change from vulnerability + pet swiftness to a weakness+cripple?

I understand that adds a whole bunch of balancing work but it’s more stuff to spend skill points on. I think running down the elite skills in GW1 was one of the things that kept me playing for so long.

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

6. and finally ( and most important to me anyway) why they did away with an (invisible to the user) serverless system and replaced it with a more limiting server based one(I get the server pride thing, but there were other ways of doing the same thing)

Absolutely agree about the servers. This is probably the biggest disappointment to me and feels like an extreme step back and a big degradation to the overall game experience. Can you people imagine how long Guild Wars 1 would have lasted without its superior server system? It would have been dead years before. Now we are left with this new “home world” system where we constantly need to jump through hurdles to play with our friends and the population of zones rarely feels correct to me.

This may not bother those who are new to the Guild Wars franchise, but for many of us who have, as yourself, spent thousands of hours in the original, to now find that we are using a more restrictive server system and we are unable to play with the dozens of friends we made all over the world (in some cases we can, only after jumping through many hurdles and facing “error” messages in the process).

As for World vs. World, I agree it seems possible to have been designed around team selection rather than home worlds, and simply limiting how often one can switch teams. This idea would certainly need some more work, but it sounds reasonable.

Of course, there may be more potential profit foreseen with the current system (having players pay every time to switch home world), which I won’t argue but if that is the reason for the design flaw, it is disappointing as well.

If I remember right, the appearance change option in GW1 didn’t come about until after EotN was released, so that took a fairly long time to be implemented. I miss it, too, and would LOVE to see it implemented much sooner in GW2.

I completed the majority of the GW1 campaigns solo with just heroes and henchmen. I really thought I would miss having henchmen & heroes, too, since I relied on them so much, but so far I haven’t. I can see there being a need for them in dungeons if people are having a hard time getting that last member of a 5-man party, but right now I honestly don’t see a real NEED for them.

I miss being able to repec for free. I realize respecing traits is fairly cheap (and free in PvP), but still — it was FREE in GW1.

I kinda miss the weekend events. I realize we’re probably still waaaaay too early in GW2 to have weekend events, but I liked them in GW1.

I can’t wait to see what GW2 is like for Halloween and Wintersday.

I miss the wide variety of emotes in GW1 (/drums, /guitar, etc.) — and that each profession & gender had their own /dance (which gave us 20 different dances after NF came out). I thought that was very cool, and now the /dance is only different per race.

I can tell you what I don’t miss — Master Togo’s crappy voice acting.

EDIT:

Also, this

What I loved about GW 1 was the number of skills. I’m voting more non-weapon slots (5, not including elite/healing) and a hell of a lot more skills please.

I miss that, too. Would love to be able to capture skills again.

the only thing i miss is the group story missions. that’s where i met all my gw1 friends.

respecing in GW1 wasn’t really free off the start. well, it was free but it had a sort of cool down where you had to play and build up respec points if i remember correctly.

Yup, and there was initially no way of changing your secondary profession either.
But the respec thing went something like two to three weeks after release and became completely free. I hope the same happens with respecs and waypoints here, but I suspect they’re included to drive people towards the gem store.

The 5th one isn’t needed tho, it just spams the chat for things nobody cares about. xP

The rest are probably things to come in the future tho.