Guild Wars 2

After reading some complains about gw2 and other mmos in general, I found an interesting video on youtube about this issue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTHsll9LFZ4

Personally I find the pseudo-academic style of this video better.

So much so that I quote it regularly. For example: Haruhi Suzumiya ruined anime for 10 years or so.

EDIT: You know, I’m actually going to talk a bit about this more. Watch my linked video, first.

I actually have a bit of the same feeling that Fevir has. The genre is bit stale.

My first “MMO” was phantasy star online, and phantasy star universe. Those games are team based instanced action games with a fairly straightforward story. Good sci-fi universe that I really got in to, and I felt attached to the world. PSU was kind of cool in that everything was a level: your profession was leveled up, your skills were leveled up, your crafting and weaponry was leveled up… you developed a sense of character, and your appearance itself was highly stylized.

Second MMO I played was Runescape, which was a point and click Java based grinding simulator, but had enough interesting lore for me to get in to, and hey, it was easy enough to play while doing other things. That grind and inconvenience brought something though: true accomplishment. In runescape, if you were rich, it wasn’t just a bunch of kids complaining that they couldn’t afford all the stuff they want. You were rich. You would exude wealth and power in your every step. The things you did in that game were an accomplishment, and the trek around the world felt like an actual world. And the quests, they were by far the best questing system I’ve ever seen in an MMO. Basically you were given a hint and a general direction, and were left to your own devices. Sometimes it ended in tragedy if you weren’t prepared, and you had no idea how prepared you were supposed to be. Best part of Runescape was Dungeoneering, which is a randomly generated scaling dungeon system. Though I don’t have a desire for most of the game now, that randomly generated dungeon still calls for me. As do the quests.

Third MMO I played was City of Heroes (AKA my MMO), which was a traditional MMO in how most things worked. Now, the other worlds I liked, but in CoH I thrived. I lived. Everything was so customizable that unless you specifically built yourself to be like another player, there was no one else quite like you. The character creator was epic, so much that no one looked like you. In that world you got to be a cheesy hero, a serious hero, a cheesy villain, a serious villain, an anti-hero, basically whatever your mind wanted. Everything had character, and the whole world was in on it. The animations and moves felt great, and with proper customization you could become insanely strong. The plot lines that coursed through the game were varied, and the culture so thick that it generated in-game memes. Whatever hero you could think of would come alive in this game, and because of this I still think of them to this day.

I picked up DCAU for a month. Then I left DCAU. Didn’t much like it. Hard trinity game with non-intuitive controls that felt spammy, and a fraction of the character. Every mission was “press f”.

Guild Wars 2… is the game I play because City of Heroes was killed. While I can admire what it has accomplished from a technical aspect, there are many things that are just lost. There’s a saying: Its the journey, not the destination. The thing with GW2 is that, for convenience, it eliminated a lot of the journey. They’ve made a vast and wondrous world, and all of those locations have no meaning to them. The things you accomplish in the world are mostly for some kind of achievement and little else (seriously, renown hearts are a flop for a very big reason). The character customization is 75% face, which is the part of you that no one ever sees, so I’m basically a faceless mook in an army. The storyline is generic mystic-babble that is not witty, intriguing, or differentiates itself meaningfully from any other fantasy setting. Various design decisions have left a lot of the game’s enemies gutted and uninteresting. Due to the very obvious advantages gained between different specs, any class I play is basically one or two builds, and I am indistinguishable from others of my same class.

A lot of these things are done for convenience sake, and I am certain they are alleviating many tensions that games I have not played have, but as a game itself I am not nearly as invested. Tyria isn’t a “world” like the ones I am familiar with. It is just the place where gameplay happens. My toons aren’t “characters” that feel and look distinct that I can be interested in. They’re just the avatars that are necessary to make the gameplay happen. The story… half the time I don’t even pay attention. I’d rather listen to some British guy ramble about it for half an hour, so I can get the gist of what is going on. The achievements and missions aren’t meaningful, they just provide the direction for gameplay to happen.

But hey, at least the gameplay is good, and the economy is fairly solid. More importantly, there’s nothing that really grasps my attention of other games. I thought EQ Next might be interesting, what with trying to make an MMO out of Minecraft, but that is on life support last I checked.

With the movie coming in a week, MrBtongue video made me feel like Blizzard was like the empire xD