Guild Wars 2

Give me a mix, GW1 and GW2 are good about that.

100% gritty is boring

100% upbeat is annoying

On the subject of “clean” cities……I’m not sure how anyone could look at the black citadel and see clean and sanitary……..or even safe.

Everything about that place looks like a hazard.

As long as you’re going to be running around with 20 slots bags, I’m not going to listen to anything related to realism in an MMO.

Every place in this MMO looks like Singapore.

Too clean

It would be nice to add some grit, but due to money hole(s) in Anet, there sure have a lot of money to keep everything clean.

Personally I like the fact that most of the world in GWII is “clean”.

With the industrial wasteland the real world is becoming I am very pleased to be in a world that, except for The Black Citadel, Orr and to a certain extend Ebonhawke, is nice, calm and beautiful, without having to read a book.

I like having a little gore in games, but I don’t like games that are in some way representing the real world in terms of pollution and destruction, or even architecture.

too much realism is boring.
a bit mix of both is just right..

Well… Like I said in this other thread I don’t think it’s to clean to be credible. I personally don’t see it so much as a difference between happy, light or whatever and darkness, tragedy but rather as a difference between something realistic and something rather artistic.

Skyrim for example had an awesome graphic but I personally found it rather boring. Even though it was including some fantasy-elements I always had the impression that this game was trying to mimic the real world at least the landscapes.

GW2 on the other hand at least from my point of view is not doing this. It is trying to create an artifical, artistic world on it’s own. It’s a fantasy world and I think it is not so much that the cities are to clean or not dark enough I think the question rather is, is this world credible. Does it work as a whole.

And I think you have dark “dark” places. Orr for example is depressing, dark, gloomy. And I think that it is that contrast between those beautifull cities and landscapes and Orr that is telling the story of what is at stake.

Erm, yeah well I have no idea if someone understands what I wanted to say.

It’s not all squeaky-clean and eco friendly. Pretty sure I’ve come across sludge and oozes in Queensdale and neighboring areas.

I think the overall ambience of GW2 is a lot less dark than many games. But I like the way this world was imagined. DDO was considerably darker…and eventually all the dank, gray, dripping ugliness just got old.

I wish there was a darker tone to some of the current world’s stories. Sure there are some but as far as personal story I feel its much too upbeat and noble. My favorite characters in TV shows, Manga, Anime, and film are the tragic heroes as well as anti-heroes. Still good and noble on the outside but having a side of them that is sick of doing the right thing all the time. Idk, maybe I’m being too specific lol.

While the cities could use some dirtying up to make them look more lived-in (Witcher 2 does fantastic everyday grime), the real problem is The Beautiful People.
There’s a severe lack of normal looking people in this game. Old people, fat people, people with limbs missing (of which I’m sure there would be a LOT of in a medieval feudal scenario), dirty people, ugly people, they’re all missing.
Well, apart from that one scary old lady skin that’s used maybe twice in the game.
I think such NPCs would add a lot to the game.

Then there’s mechanical things that don’t make sense; they’ve probably been streamlined for the sake of gameplay, but stuff like:
Submerging in water should extinguish burning.
Fire should do more damage to ice creatures, and water should do more damage to fire creatures.
Conversely, creatures that say “Immune to Burning” should be completely immune to fire damage.
And as hammer CCs are useless against giant creatures and bosses, maybe we should look at making slashing weapons useless against certain creatures to level the playing field somewhat. Elementals and oozes for example. Indeed, it would be more interesting to have oozes actually divide and multiply if attacked with slashing weapons.
There should be more methods of indirect attack, where a line of sight isn’t necessary. Say lobbing a grenade over a wall or firing a barrage of arrows over the top of a barrier you can’t see through.

And another thing that’s getting more aggravating as time goes on? Lack of variety in voice actors. Yes, there’s plenty of talented people providing voices for this game, but familiarity with the same lines repeated over and over again results in the curtain being drawn back and suspension of disbelief dissolving. For example, there’s one guy I know for sure provides a Dredge, Skritt, Human and Asuran voice. He’s done a good job of making them slightly different, but unfortunately I now recognise his voice whatever character utters the line.

Then there’s the tendency to rely on emote animations to animate characters in the world instead of making bespoke animations for unique situations.

But the problem with this stuff is that it all requires time and money to make the illusion more convincing.

There was a reason why so many people liked GW1’s Pre-Searing, especially as compared to later Ascalon…

I agree with the lack of variety in individuals in the game, you’d think every humanoid character in this game was artificially created…oh wait, they were. But that’s the problem; as Mungrul said there’s no variety in body type. There are literally no people who have any kind of extra weight on them, even though GW1 had NPCs who had this. The only things with other body types would be the risen, but they’re supposed to look dead and disgusting. This sends a rather bad message to people about body type.

And Anet said that they wanted everyone to feel like a hero. Well Anet, I support you on most things but this is actually kinda offensive to some people. You’re telling people that they cannot look like a hero if they have other body types than those portrayed in the game. I mean, congrats on having so many options in the first place, but these options don’t provide nearly the variation that is needed.

NPCs in cities all pretty much look the same. The men and women of Divinity’s Reach look like they were all made from the same clay mold. It’s kinda disturbing actually, so if you wanted grittiness or disturbing stuff, there it is.

Onto the other grit and realism: as someone earlier pointed out, it’s difficult to talk about realism in a fantasy world that gives you multiple bags with 20 slots each and the ability to carry more than five of them. But on the other hand, grittiness is not about game mechanics and magic in the world, it’s about the characters. Characters give a world life (even though environments do a good job too), and if there aren’t any characters that seem to be having trouble that isn’t essentially disguised as a joke, then there is no realism or character.

There is grittiness in GW2. Malchor’s leap, for instance, is the name of an area based directly upon suicide. Suicide is a tough and touchy subject, and putting it into anything is risky. Everything in Orr is essentially rather tragic in one way or another, but the tragedy is often dulled because the people there are just zombies with no character. They may appear to be terrible shambling tragedies but they feel like little more than the centaurs (who don’t feel like people at all, even though it’s quite clear that they’re intelligent beings) of the game. Malchor was done well, seeing as he’s a ghost.

Also the soldier who questions whether the human gods are dead after you take Lyssa’s temple is one of the rare times where I saw some character in the world. That’s a big issue for these people, humans especially. I want to see more of Zhaitan’s and the other dragons’ abilities to manipulate people beyond just physical manipulation. Abaddon’s corruption in GW1 in many ways is a good example of this, and seeing that he was behind Khilbron’s and Shiro’s corruption was excellent. We don’t get too much of that here.

I like the levity of the game, there is always humor no matter how dark things are.

The cities are safe places, which is why they’re often clean. I agree with others, they don’t really show the underbelly of society or anything too negative in general.

@Astralporing: Erm, sry could you elaborate your point please abit? I have never played GW1 and I’m somehow missing the reference.^^

Astralporing.1957:

There was a reason why so many people liked GW1’s Pre-Searing, especially as compared to later Ascalon…

Pirlipat.2479:

@Astralporing: Erm, sry could you elaborate your point please abit? I have never played GW1 and I’m somehow missing the reference.^^

Pre-Searing Ascalon was beautiful and bright, much like Queensdale in GW2 is.
Post-Searing Ascalon was a burned out dead looking place of despair, so combine that area near Shaemoor Garrison (where we fought the Earth Elemental) with Orr.

I don’t want a lot of grit in my games like GW2. I see too much of it in other medias as it is. Its now getting to the point where its boring in some places.

I feel that GW2 does have some grittiness to it, but enough to still make it family friendly. People do say ‘ kitten #8217;, Oozes show up if Bandits poison the watering hole, Black Citadel is industrial, not eco friendly, and the Charr are still pushy.

Then we’ve got beautiful pristine areas like Rata Sum and the Sylvari gardens which brighten the game.

In GW1 I too loved Pre-Searing Ascalon and the Charr areas in Eye of the North because they had life and looked like they were separated from the horrors.

I couldn’t stand Kaening City in Factions. In fact I can’t finish that episode because the city is so wretched.

I See No Tomorrow.7302:

And Anet said that they wanted everyone to feel like a hero. Well Anet, I support you on most things but this is actually kinda offensive to some people. You’re telling people that they cannot look like a hero if they have other body types than those portrayed in the game. I mean, congrats on having so many options in the first place, but these options don’t provide nearly the variation that is needed.

I wouldn’t blame ArenaNet too much for that. They are following the hero archetypes that have been echoing throughout story telling for countless generations. I too would like more varied body types.

I like stylized art direction, most of all, regardless if it’s dark, gritty or fantastical. GW2, to me, looks more towards ‘pretty’ and somewhat ‘realistic’ than stylized, so it only looks ‘okay’ to me, in terms of the direction they took.

Grit and realism has its place in games, but I kinda feel it’s all a matter of what someone wants to play at the time they play it and what kind of game a person wants to play.

For instance: If I want to play a FPS, I want there to be more realism in it (I tend to enjoy the easier, quicker deaths from something like Tom Clancy games as opposed to the “I can survive a million bullets” CoD arcade-y games). If I’m playing a fantasy game, where fantasy stuff (dragons and magic and the likes) exist, I don’t care as much about realism do to the subject in it – not to say I don’t like it when things look as though they would actually be functional.

As far as grit goes, whatever works well with the setting. A cartoony shooter with the same mechanics as a more real-art shooter is just as likely to get played by me – it’s just a matter of what kind of mood I’m in. Course, that depends on what you mean by grit exactly too – darker, more gritty places exist in GW2 (orr, lands corrupted by Shatterer, Black Citadel), although from the ‘violent’ aspect of grit (blood and gore) there isn’t that much of it (really though, that side of grit is only in a select few MMO type games).

I’m content with GW2. I look forward to seeing more locations, skins, and characters.

@I See No Tomorrow: A hero should be judged by his character and actions, not by his body type/size. You could use this to try and support your opinions about how you should be able to make ‘different’ character body types, but you would also just be contradicting the fact that ideally it shouldn’t matter WHAT the character looks like to be a hero.

TBH I did not like the “slum” look of the Cantha areas. It was so bad in some places that the terrain looked more like a badly drawn comic book than something that should be in a videogame.

As for realism you may as will be asking for blood, severed body parts in combat etc and I doubt that will happen here…

I’m not sure if more grit would increase my enjoyment. Is Divinity’s Reach too clean? Maybe. But there are plenty of areas that are not. Any area with the undead, Krait or Dredge contrast with that. Orr is one huge barren wasteland.

Count me with those who did not like the slums of Cantha. It always felt like such a chore to get through those first handful of missions before you could leave Kaineng and get down to the more beautiful areas of the Kurzick and Luxon.

What’s more, I would argue that the slums of Kaineng were the exception in GW1, not the rule. If we’re going to talk about slums, there weren’t very many in GW1. Lions Arch, Droknar’s Forge, Henge of Denravi, Kamadan, Shing Jea, the Kodash Bazaar all lacked anything I would call slums. Of course many of them lacked things I would call houses too, which I always found odd, but then the scale of those cities were smaller then the major cities of GW2.