Guild Wars 2

Firstly this isn’t a come play eso and quit gw2 or vice versa for anyone who sees this from Google.

Just really got into eso and wanted to share my thoughts to you all.

The world.
Ok gw2 wins this hands down, eso world was a little bland feeling to me the way it was designed. Gw2 is much more vibrant and in a way felt more open to me even though the zones are a quarter of the size. Everything in gw2 was amazing to explore while in eso it felt more like “eh I’ll go over there if a quest needs me to”.

Crafting
Eso kinda crushed crafting in any game I’ve ever played. Basically crafting is fun and rewarding. Basically you craft things, compared to gw2 what you craft is just stats (no bersekers or valk or knights) but there is set crafting like the tunes from gw2. Then upgrade the color up to legendary from anything you make.

Questing
Gw2 has hearts, while eso has hundreds of fully voiced quests. I loved the quests as I felt like I was accomplishing something. The long quests with chains are amazing to. The main story in both games was rather boring, gw2 slightly better though in my opinion.

Combat
Gw2 really managed to perfectly capture action style combat between the dodges and targeting and using abilities which trigger right away smoothly while in eso things felt a little clunky

Abilities
Gw2 fell very short here. Weapons determine your skills which was always a nightmare, you couldn’t select what you wanted. Every guardian with a greatsword is using the exact same five skills. In eso each class has there own lines you can pick from, then level each skill, then actually morph them and pick options what else you may want it to do.

Mounts
Eso

Gear treadmill
Neither REALLY has one. Eso has been out a year and a half and only increased the max level by 2, gear change was kinda like going from exotic to ascended.

Pvp
I’m not much of a pvp player but I’d say it’s about the same

I really loved both games a lot. The only main difference for me though was each day I feel like logging into eso there is something to do that will actually help progress my character, but still upon reaching max level and getting good gear I don’t need to log in though daily still like I used to have to do in ff14 for daily dungeons.

Just wait until you reach champion points part. If people thought mastery was grindy, try ESO champion points, It drove me insane.

warbignime.4610:

Just wait until you reach champion points part. If people thought mastery was grindy, try ESO champion points, It drove me insane.

Lol I love them! They truly are not a major major advantage which is why I like them. Just by playing you get a little better at a time. They aren’t truly required but makes playing always worth while because there is always something to work towards

warbignime.4610:

Just wait until you reach champion points part. If people thought mastery was grindy, try ESO champion points, It drove me insane.

So much this.
I really liked ESO when playing my alliance’s storyline back when it launched. Having to start from the ground up with “go fetch me my boots, peasant” quests in the next alliance put a damper on my enthusiasm. The grind for champion points killed all motivation I had.

Now that it’s free to play I still log in occasionally but it just keeps driving me away whenever I get back into the champ grind

Bought it on sale, got to around level 14, questing was ok but it felt incredibly slow. The voice acting was okay but none of them were particularly interesting like the traditional ES games, save for the main quest. Read up about the champion points part and uninstalled.

Played ESO in beta, and immediately uninstalled thinking : “players are going to expect ‘Skyrim Online’, and it absolutely won’t be that.” It turned out i was right. They expected something different and ESO went from sub to F2P in an instant. They knew they would have a dead game if they didn’t do that.

The ONLY reason ppl play ESO is because there is no new ES after Skyrim. If there were, ESO would simply die out because no one would log in again. How many players do you think Fallout 4 has now ? A LOT.

And lastly, they won’t release another Elder Scrolls game for quite some time because they’re still milking the cow called ESO and they just released F4.

As far as gameplay ‘overall’ is concerned, GW2 wins hands down. I think that GW2 is what ESO should have been with Skyrim’s world. That would have been a game i’d love to play. And be honest, just call it ‘Tamriel Online’.

I started playing FF14 a few days ago and I’m having a blast. I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for an alternative or secondary mmo. The last time I played the free trial I wasn’t into it, but this time around I’m hooked.
I Tried ESO during the beta. Things were very broken then, which ultimately led to me never trying it again. One of these days I’m sure I will though.

Fernling.1729:

I started playing FF14 a few days ago and I’m having a blast. I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for an alternative or secondary mmo. The last time I played the free trial I wasn’t into it, but this time around I’m hooked.
I Tried ESO during the beta. Things were very broken then, which ultimately led to me never trying it again. One of these days I’m sure I will though.

I just tried it today and yesterday..

It’s better, but still really really bland and boring overall.

Morrowind on the original xbox was just as fun if not better.

So you came on the official gw2 forums to talk about ESO. Yeah, no wonder this forum is so toxic.

Brimstar.9036:

So you came on the official gw2 forums to talk about ESO. Yeah, no wonder this forum is so toxic.

to be fair, the design thesis behind the two games are similar.

a lot of peeps are putting down GW2 and looking for other MMOs to flock to.

Sheobix.8796:

Fernling.1729:

I started playing FF14 a few days ago and I’m having a blast. I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for an alternative or secondary mmo. The last time I played the free trial I wasn’t into it, but this time around I’m hooked.
I Tried ESO during the beta. Things were very broken then, which ultimately led to me never trying it again. One of these days I’m sure I will though.

I just tried it today and yesterday..

It’s better, but still really really bland and boring overall.

Morrowind on the original xbox was just as fun if not better.

Waaaay too many fetch quests and back and forth to give items to quest givers who are different zones apart. The small map sizes and constant loading screens were too much for me. Looks nice, awesome atmosphere but it played way too slow in its questing and combat

I’ve been playing ESO since headstart, but haven’t really gotten into the game. I’m mostly playing it on the side, because my husband and a group of close friends (we all used to raid together in LotRO) are very into that game.

From seeing both endgame raids/trials/dungeons/whatever-pve and endgame pvp in ESO through my husband and friends, endgame certainly isn’t what I’d call casual friendly. Champion points do give a significant advantage to people that have a lot of time to spend, both in pve and pvp, more so when leveling alts on an account with a lot of champion points.

Gear grind, while not being as obvious as “we’ve added 10 levels so your gear is outdated” does exist by the simple fact that each update introduces new crafted and/or dropped sets with superior set boni as well as better materials. They’ve actually had 3 level cap increases since launch, too (v10→v12→v14→v16), which also made all your endgame gear obsolete.

Then there’s perks in crafting skills that have a heavy impact on gameplay, especially the +potion duration in alchemy and +food duration in provisioning, making it pretty much mandatory to level those crafting disciplines on each character you seriously want to play engame with. Then you’ll want to level the three armor and weapon crafting disciplines to gain the skills that reduce the cost of improving the quality of your soulbound gear to attainable levels …

I could go on that way for a good while. Don’t get me wrong, ESO is an awesome game early on, with a very interesting skill system and well thought-out quests, but if you seriously want to jump into endgame in that game, it’s a grind that makes attaining ascended viper’s gear for a few of my toons look laughably trivial in comparison.

It’s a good side-mmo to jump in for a bit of change now and then, but for a fulltime investment, GW2 wins for me hands down. Once you’ve checked out what you are forced to do to maximize just one character in ESO (and there’s a lot less account-bound than in GW2, meaning a lot more repeat action if you’d rather play more than one character) you’ll come to understand again how much more “play the way you like” there is in GW2 after all.

Fernling.1729:

I started playing FF14 a few days ago and I’m having a blast. I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for an alternative or secondary mmo. The last time I played the free trial I wasn’t into it, but this time around I’m hooked.

I took a break for GW2 earlier this year into the summer and picked up FF14. It was amazing fun, The story in that game is amazing, especially with Heavensward. Plus I got to be a tank again. Love that kitten.

But after Heavensward launch content dried up. Fast. Basically the Devs had no major updates to the game for about 3-4 months, with the big patch coming out only a little over a week ago.

The game is great, very well made. It definitely will scratch itches that GW2 doesn’t but, The game is old school in a lot of its fundamentals. Grinding and an actual gear treadmill are what I found after a few months of playing. I t felt like work logging in to do dailies to reach my weekly cap for esoterics.

It’s fun, but it’s very old school fundamentally. Just a heads up.

Eso is great for story, better thsn gw imo, at least in the way its presented. As a pvx player u most likely would get more out of gw, and i didnt like the zones that much in eso, much feels copy pasted like the buildings and towns. I had to quit eso cuz of the champ chore

warbignime.4610:

Just wait until you reach champion points part. If people thought mastery was grindy, try ESO champion points, It drove me insane.

Champion points don’t gate content .. HUGE DIFFERENCE!

I tried ESO during open beta and the game was just way too easy. Like there’s easy and then there’s faceroll easy. Had to do content a few levels higher than mine and it was still too easy. That gave me a very bad impression.

Holy crap was ESO a waste of money for me. I mean, you wanna talk broken promises? They were to remove those “champion levels” or whatever they were called once you hit the max level and replace it with something else because the xp requirement was INSANE (people complain about mastery exp. No no no. This was atrocious). But what did they do? ADD MORE. I uninstalled right there and then.

Their auction house or trading post was a mess to navigate and find the right mat to buy. You had to basically go around the world to find the right store from a guild and hoped that it sold an item you needed or wanted.

Their crafting, good? You can’t be serious. Its horrible. Sure, you can upgrade an item’s quality, WITH A CHANCE AT LOSING THE ITEM COMPLETELY. But oh, you can get more of the item to reduce the chance of failure! Have fun grinding that out and fighting others in dungeons for that loot.

And oh, you can level up your craft just like in skyrim! Make a bunch of useless junk to level it and salvage it (getting a lot less in return), then have a left over skill point to unlock the next perk.

Wanna research a perk you can add to weapons and armor? Starts off short at first, but once you start to know everything, the research time increases. I think I stopped caring once it hit 3 days (not to mention, you have to FIND an a piece of weapon or armor with that property. And it doesn’t unlock it for all types, just that one specific type. IE, a sword that can crit more? Research it. Now you can craft swords to crit more! Now find a dagger with that same property to research it so you can make daggers that crit).

And if you think Scribe in GW2 is bad? You know nothing about inscriptions in ESO. If you don’t have an “inscription buddy” DON’T DO IT.

ESO basically FORCES you to pay RL money for a mount. Sure, you can get it with gold…eventually (like, after hitting max level and even then still being poor), so its basically “pay us money”. Litterally people and guides say to just pay $15 dollars for a month to get the mount. Then, you have to TRAIN IT (spending more gold) to make it go faster and have a bigger inventory (the third stat you ignore till its last, endurance). In which case, you can only level up one trait one at a time, every 24hrs.

You can fast travel, but there is a “cool down” to it, in which it’ll cost you x gold (scales with level) if you try to fast travel from one spot to another immediately. I think the last mine was at was 700g, unless I waited 45min (the cost goes down the longer you wait). This is really bad when the quests for crafting are at one town, and you are questing on the other side of the map. Have fun!

Want to sell stolen items? Can only sell 100 stolen items a day.

I will give ESO one credit. They got stealth right. The thief class had only one short invisibility spell, on a long CD. Stealth was how it was in the other Elderscrolls games. So props to that (I can’t disappear right in front of you).

The rest of the game? Well, there is a reason they are offering a random million bucks to anyone that plays for a certain period of time…

And I didn’t even GET to mods that are required in order to fill basically functions liking looting….geesh….

And how is the “world versus world” there?

I played two betas of ESO. After that, I stopped. It’s the first game I’ve ever beta tested and didn’t buy the game later . . . if that tells you anything.

ESO felt too generic for my taste. It also felt dated I hate static quests now, voiced or not voiced. I mean it’s okay..but that’s all it is from my point of view.

Sthenith.5196:

Played ESO in beta, and immediately uninstalled thinking : “players are going to expect ‘Skyrim Online’, and it absolutely won’t be that.” It turned out i was right. They expected something different and ESO went from sub to F2P in an instant. They knew they would have a dead game if they didn’t do that.

Yeah i was expecting skyrim and left the game in about a hour lol

I like ESO cuz I can play as a Werewolf w/o having to play as a fat disproportionate Norn and eat people. I got it for Black Friday but I played the beta and had no interest in buying an unfinished game (which was easily noticeable in beta that it wasn’t ready for launch) nor paying monthly… or buying it for 60 dollars, lol. but it’s a lot better naow. It’s really not the same type of game as this though. It’s more serious and lore driven~ almost too lore driven if you have ADHD and just want to reach your next skill and all the NPCs won’t stop bugging you.
Only thing I can say I dislike is travel time~ which is why I’ve never been much of a fan of mounts. They ironically make you go faster but slow the game down as a whole.
Only game I truly enjoyed mounts in was Wildstar just because hover-boards are awesome.
I still hate traveling for 20 years: Gotta go fast. Speaking of which it’s still always a breath of fresh air when playing an MMO that doesn’t instantly slow down your movement forever when something hits you.

Serophous.9085:

ESO basically FORCES you to pay RL money for a mount. Sure, you can get it with gold…eventually (like, after hitting max level and even then still being poor), so its basically “pay us money”. Litterally people and guides say to just pay $15 dollars for a month to get the mount. Then, you have to TRAIN IT (spending more gold) to make it go faster and have a bigger inventory (the third stat you ignore till its last, endurance). In which case, you can only level up one trait one at a time, every 24hrs.

Want to sell stolen items? Can only sell 100 stolen items a day.

I will give ESO one credit. They got stealth right. The thief class had only one short invisibility spell, on a long CD. Stealth was how it was in the other Elderscrolls games. So props to that (I can’t disappear right in front of you).

The rest of the game? Well, there is a reason they are offering a random million bucks to anyone that plays for a certain period of time…

And I didn’t even GET to mods that are required in order to fill basically functions liking looting….geesh….

Cash Shop Mount isn’t forced~ I got one somewhere around lvl 10-15 just from NPCing all the junk I found/stole/got from quests. It was like 12k gold or something, which wasn’t hard to save up for a fresh newbie. Sucks having to train it daily though~ I’m generally useless in “World VS World” as a lowbie but could still d*** around with a guild zerg and leech tons of points. Problem is my mount was a baby and they had to wait for me a lot. XD

Stealth is pretty fun and so is stealing~ I can actually feel like a useful Thief especially with all the Stamina build buffs they did. I haven’t had much issue with the stolen goods sell limit since it takes a lot of effort to reach if only selling valuable items and not worthless 5-10g stuff so I haven’t bothered skilling it up with all the extra points I have.

I have mods to find mage guild books and skyshards~ only basic function the game was lacking that REALLY annoyed me was no option to see damage numbers. So I had no idea which actions did more damage than others so I had to find a mod for it.

I had great hopes for ESO and did buy into it for about 3 months on release.

But I dont even need to go into details on why I left. Zenimax failed all EU players and left broken things in the game for too long. Simple as that. We expected them to release the game and stay on top with a rapid patch cycles and bring the EU servers online in weeks. They did nothing.

A lot of good and bad in every mmo out there. Sometimes I think of my own “perfect” mmo would be.

Guild Wars 2; world (hands down, its just the best)
EVE Online; crafting & economy, character customization and world PvP rules.
World of Warcraft; gameplay (close to Gw2 but skills not tied to weapons wins the deal, sorry)
Guild Wars 1 + expansions; difficulty (when playing without npc companions), skill hunting.

I’ve been playing both GW2 and TESO (mainly PvE, since I’m not much of a PvPer) since just shortly after their launches and I still enjoy them both immensely!

Among the other positives listed here, I completely agree that TESO has the most straightforward crafting system.

In any case, both games also have the most beautiful graphics I’d ever seen in MMO’s and I’ve tried out a lot of MMO’s in my day (I’m old ), though I haven’t tried FF14 yet and heard that the graphics there are beautiful as well.

Elvirais.5472:

And how is the “world versus world” there?

When i left it was a trainwreck. Now i did leave before the imperial city update so maybe it is better? But the lag in that game was horrible. People talk about skill lag and stuff here, but in eso your game could turn into a slide show.

I actually had this experience several times, oh there is a group of enemys coming my way better move. Game slows down. Enemies still in front of me. I die. Enemies blink to some distance behind me. Then add in just taking a tower could drag your fps down to 2-4. It was horrible.

I actually told my GF when we came back, i remeber complaining about the lag here im GW2 but they either fixed it or I had no idea how good it actually was herr.

VictorTroska.3725:

World of Warcraft; gameplay (close to Gw2 but skills not tied to weapons wins the deal, sorry)

I kinda like GW2 combat, but it was jarring at first only having 5 skills and those skills were tied to what weapon you used since I came from WoW. My ideal with regard to this is actually a compromise; one (or maybe two) class-specific weapon skill(s) that change depending on what you have equipped to add flavor but otherwise have primary weapon abilities be tied to the class. In WoW it felt meaningless as to what weapon you equipped just that you had one equipped because it literally didn’t matter so long as it was more powerful than your last. It could add room in GW2 for more customization, which is always nice.

I actually dislike the question in TESO. It is simply the same over and over again and you HAVE to do it. Unlike GW2 where you can level by doing whatever you want to do.

Cyrotek.7019:

I actually dislike the question in TESO. It is simply the same over and over again and you HAVE to do it. Unlike GW2 where you can level by doing whatever you want to do.

H0T has added a huge pile of gates and timers, so GW2 feels a lot more gated than TESO now.

TESO is an adventure story game, so it’s hard to compare to what used to be an open world ‘play how you like’ game.

I liked the upgrade system in TESO- getting the materials wasn’t that hard. I found the buy/sell interface terrible for actually finding what I wanted.

WvW on TESO was a huge disappointment- the areas were just too big to move around in and it took forever to reach a battle, then the broken werewolf or was it vampire thing…the actual sieges to take place were awesome though.

They are very different games- but with the recent move in GW2 towards ‘play where we tell you’ and gating thing behind timers and events and Jump Puzzles, other games are looking at lot more appealing now. Maybe it’s time to dust off my old ESO accounts..

I’ve been playing ESO since just before the buy-to-play transition (exactly a month before actually, so my free month ran out just as they switch it over) and I really enjoy it, but not as much as GW2.

Even though they’re both MMORPGs I find it hard to compare them because in a lot of ways they’re quite different. For example there are elements of both crafting systems I like, but when I try to think how to combine them I can’t make it work without completely scrapping one system.

I have to admit I do prefer quests to events, because it’s easier to add lots of dialogue and background and to have them span multiple zones or long periods of time. Some event chains come close, if you can catch them right at the start and you’re able to see/hear everything the NPCs say along the way, but that’s hard to do. (What I’d really like is a combination of the two, based on content type. So for example defending a fort would be an event on a timer so attacks come periodically regardless of what you’re doing, but recruiting new people to help and seeking out a spell/artefact/other MacGuffin to help the defenders could be a quest that involves going to several different maps.)

But overall GW2 wins hands-down for the amount of stuff to do in the open-world, which is my main interest. I still love exploring in ESO but it’s a bit disappointing to know that if an unclaimed quest marker hasn’t appeared from 1/2 a mile away the best I’m going to find when I get to an interesting looking cave or island or whatever is a chest to open or a few items to collect, maybe a lore book if I’m really lucky. There’s nothing like the jumping puzzles and mini dungeons and a lot of the map is essentially just empty space. (A lot of it is actually inaccessible too, like almost the entire peninsula south of Daggerfall, which is blocked off by cliffs too high to climb, and invisible walls for the bits that you could climb.)

I tried the trial for FF XIV at one time for a few days but as it was still during my “burn out” phase I also quickly forgot about the title. Plus, I desteted the idea of forced group instances during the leveling phase to progress the story, no matter how easy or fun the dungeons may be in reality. It’s not my cup of tea. I never tried ESO as I never got into the hype around Skyrim and its precedors.

ESO:
PvE quests, story, graphics, first person view is outstanding, endgame content, wvw server system, crafting, engine is generally way better in ESO, specially the Mac version which isn’t an eternal beta like GW2. They’ve improved a lot since the release, it’s worth a try certainly. WvW is too big for its own good, takes too long to run to a fight.

GW2:
Guild Wars 2 has better raw gameplay with combo fields, jumping/dodging physics and competitive modes that results from that are much more fun. It also has a better interface for inventory management, the art is also more stylish. GW2 had better class balance by far but I’m not sure how large that margin is anymore since it’s been going downhill for over a year.

I go back to ESO when I get bored of GW2, but I always come back to the GW2’s community. The perfect game for me would be a mix of both games.

GW2 has its hooks deep into me for three big reasons.

1) The combat is so frentic and each fight feels engaging.
2) The world, the design team of GW2 makes some of the most beautiful and feature rich zones I’ve ever seen.
3) The sheer amount of stuff to do. PVE, PVP, WVW, event farming, masteries, exploration, and chasing the long term goal of legendaries. I love it all.

I’d love to play SWTOR or Wildstar, but those three reasons make it hard and sometimes even boring to play anything but GW2.

For what it’s worth, Guild Wars 2 was one of the runners-up for MMORPG.com’s 2015 Best MMO… which was won by The Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited.

At least Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns won that same site’s 2015 Best DLC/Expansion (MMO category).

I didn’t try ESO because so much of what makes Skyrim great simply doesn’t work in MMOs. In Skyrim you can give yourself infinite energy (energy doesn’t give you a combat advantage so it isn’t game breaking just an added convenience) and download good quality player created skins like convincing lightsabers. Skyrim offers great customization and you can randomly be lead by a talking dog into a temple where you’re given a blue fire sword! It’s a good game because it offers flexibility and you can just go nuts.

In MMO’s however you need economic balance due to other people playing the game, which can hamstring fun and class balance becomes important. You can’t have custom mods because a player could create a gamebreaking weapon and totally invalidate a trading post. Things need to be restrained and balanced for a big community, which just isn’t compatible with Elder Scrolls’ strengths.

My son and I both just patched our ESO (we’d not played since we bought the expansion to GW2 and come back here) games all up and he’s been excited about their sales going on (he collects the mounts, etc).

I think they’re apples and oranges, but I usually only give my time to one or the other. I’ll have to log in and see how it (ESO) is looking.

played eso for about 8 months, got gold in question – really good fun and value for money with about 300 hours questing, but then at end game, pvp was fun to start but it became clear why the pvp community is sick of the issues in the game, it is a mess, their engine is not coping at all with major lag, animation cancelling is rife and they take a long time to fix balance breaking bugs and exploits.

Re crafting, once you get to end game there is no real economy as such, so the focus is gathering materials to make a couple gear sets. ESO could be a good game and is better than the likes of WOW and SWTOR etc, but I came back to GW2 because the world has a richness and depth to it while ESO feels flat somehow (issues aside).

Torvic.8256:

I’ve been playing both GW2 and TESO (mainly PvE, since I’m not much of a PvPer) since just shortly after their launches and I still enjoy them both immensely!

Among the other positives listed here, I completely agree that TESO has the most straightforward crafting system.

In any case, both games also have the most beautiful graphics I’d ever seen in MMO’s and I’ve tried out a lot of MMO’s in my day (I’m old ), though I haven’t tried FF14 yet and heard that the graphics there are beautiful as well.

After having played some of the 14-day free trial for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, I can now officially list it alongside both GW2 and TESO:TU as the most beautiful MMO’s I’d ever seen.

And all three MMO’s run well on my PC with pretty high settings, to boot.

Serophous.9085:

Holy crap was ESO a waste of money for me. I mean, you wanna talk broken promises? They were to remove those “champion levels” or whatever they were called once you hit the max level and replace it with something else because the xp requirement was INSANE (people complain about mastery exp. No no no. This was atrocious). But what did they do? ADD MORE. I uninstalled right there and then.

I know this thread has been necrod for some reason but reading through it now there is some blatant misinformation spread by quite a few people. What the above poster is talking about is the veteran rank system, and I think all the others mentioning champion points are also actually talking about the veteran system. The champion point system replaced the veteran rank system and is not a grind at all, its far less of a grind than GW2’s mastery system. I left ESO because the veteran grind was so bad but its been completely removed because ZOS actually listens to their players and acts.

EDIT: Didn’t realize this was a ridiculously necro’ed thread until after I posted.

Abilities
Gw2 fell very short here. Weapons determine your skills which was always a nightmare, you couldn’t select what you wanted. Every guardian with a greatsword is using the exact same five skills. In eso each class has there own lines you can pick from, then level each skill, then actually morph them and pick options what else you may want it to do.

these might be something GW3 takes into consideration.
I’d also like to see GW3 redesign there engine.
and become more immersive then they are now.
But i’m sure I won’t be playing gw3, i’ll have quit gw2 long b4 that ever happens.

edit: ahh i just read the comment above mine lol.

GW2 hearths are not supposed to be quest, events are. But you are correct, traditional quest feel more like you achieve something, like you make a difference.

Sad thing is that when they announced the event-system they praised it as something where you have an impact on the world instead of ‘just killing some boards’ as if all quests are like that. In reality it is the other way around. (Because they repeat it does not feel like you make an impact, even if you see some temporary changes, and most are kill or collect x, y or z) Not having traditional quest is imho still one of the biggest fails of GW2. Not to say that events are bad. Events are great, as an addition to traditional quests. But events are not able to replace quests.
That events where not able to replace traditional quest was something you could already notice in the beta of GW2, years ago, but they never put normal quests in.

“The only main difference for me though was each day I feel like logging into eso there is something to do that will actually help progress my character” That is probably also because there are always quests waiting for you.

I’ll never do quests in other MMORPGs after being spoiled by the events of Guild Wars 2. I don’t understand the “need” for traditional quests, especially MMORPG-style quests. Some story-driven (similar to the story journal) quests might be interesting but the traditional MMORPG questing is some garbage that needs to be forgotten and removed from gaming. It’s a MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE RPG. Traditional questing makes a game feel like a single player RPG that requires an internet connection, especially the absolute garbage quest system of ESO with all the phasing.

You saw your party member that opened that door by pulling a lever? Well guess again you must go and use that lever yourself so it updates on your screen too because there is no interaction between players. Your party members are fighting, or talking to, invisible mobs that you can’t because you are not on that same quest chain part. Yes the awesomeness of traditional MMORPG questing, good riddance.

Kill quests need to disappear. Where you have to kill a certain number of enemies because they are doing something, but in reality they are not. And you are talking about a “lasting impact of traditional quests” when you will be handing in the quest to kill 10 bandits and the NPC will be grateful while at the same time he will be saying to the player next to you how they got to kill 10 bandits because they are invading the village. Yes a real impact that lasts 1.2 seconds, until the next player talks to them, even better if they are in the same party as you.

Escort quests need to disappear. You cannot help an escort quest in progress, you have to find the NPC in the world at their starting point, then do the entire escort from scratch. Cannot help other players doing it.

Gather quests need to disappear. Gathering materials to progress your personal quest line, instead of gathering materials together with other players to progress the world story. There is a huge difference.

Boss quests need to disappear. Similar to the above, how many times you’ve killed a “boss” that is just roaming aimlessly around and got nothing for it? In every single MMORPG I’ve ever played that’s the reality. If you are not on the specific quest to kill the boss you get absolutely nothing for engaging it. Pathetic.

Quest chains need to disappear, permanently. Especially those that affect dungeons and in general instances. When I read how you would be able to “complete” quest lines inside dungeons was the final nail in the coffin of ESO, I don’t want that garbage in my MMORPG. You are in a dungeon to kill the big bad boss, while at the prison of the dungeon your allies and party members are saving a prisoner. But you can’t because in order to get to that quest part you need to do the 10 previous parts of this “epic” quest line. My friends are saving him but I can’t because nobody sent me to save him!

Different players see quests in a different way. I see them as single player content with no interactivity between players, what I do doesn’t affect you. With events, what I do affects you, and the world, if only for a time.

Quest gives you more binding with the world. You learn the NPC’s, you learn more about little areas of the game. All that helps to create a binding with the world. No quests mean many NPSC’s, are just that, NPC’s. No story to them, why care about them?
Also quests gives you goals and are a great way to reward items and at the same time have a backstory to the items. A quest-chain can send you all over the world. Great!
Yeah it is a massively multiplayer online role playing game. So it’s a massive world, where many people are playing at the same time. It does not mean they all have to be playing together all the time. In fact, most people don’t play like that. The maps in HoT try to achieve exactly that, but also seem to proof that is not what many people want. If you see how often they events fail because people are not all working together.

The personal story in GW2 feels like a single player, quest in an open world do not. While doing quests you meet new people, you group up with them. Some quests are group quest so you do them together with the people you did just befriended. Simply the fact that you see other players and interact with them makes it not a single-player game. (Of course you can do many quests together)
Phasing is not always great no. It can work at times but too much of it breaks the immersion.

“Kill quests need to disappear. Where you have to kill a certain number of enemies because they are doing something, but in reality they are not. And you are talking about a “lasting impact of traditional quests” when you will be handing in the quest to kill 10 bandits and the NPC will be grateful while at the same time he will be saying to the player next to you how they got to kill 10 bandits because they are invading the village. Yes a real impact that lasts 1.2 seconds, until the next player talks to them, even better if they are in the same party as you.”
That is the thing, if Anet talks about traditional quest they act as if all quest are like this. That is false. Yes those quest are not so great. Having a few in there is fine but not too much. However the events in GW2 are almost all like that simply because the event-system makes it hard to set up a real story.
And to you the NPC will act as if you did help it, you don’t get that quest again. While with events you see bandits attacking. So with a traditional quest it’s not 1.2 sec, but until you do it with an alt.

“Escort quests” Yeah that is something where the event-system is indeed better at. Like I said, you need a mix of the two. The two complement each other, you cannot use one to replace the other.
“Boss quests need to disappear. Similar to the above, how many times you’ve killed a “boss” that is just roaming aimlessly around and got nothing for it? In every single MMORPG I’ve ever played that’s the reality. If you are not on the specific quest to kill the boss you get absolutely nothing for engaging it. Pathetic.”
I think boss quests are really nice. Doing it as a quest means you can also reward a quest-item instead of having the boss just be a grind fess. You can place the quest-giver near the boss if you want to prevent people running into the boss, killing it and only picking up the quest after that having to do it again. There are ways to solve that problem.
“Quest chains need to disappear, permanently. Especially those that affect dungeons and in general instances. When I read how you would be able to “complete” quest lines inside dungeons was the final nail in the coffin of ESO, I don’t want that garbage in my MMORPG. You are in a dungeon to kill the big bad boss, while at the prison of the dungeon your allies and party members are saving a prisoner. But you can’t because in order to get to that quest part you need to do the 10 previous parts of this “epic” quest line. My friends are saving him but I can’t because nobody sent me to save him!”
Then you have something to look forward to, that quest-chain. It also gives more meaning, story and purpose to dungeons. In the end you are playing your personal story, and other people are playing their personal story. You are an adventures, so it makes perfect sense you are not always doing the same as everybody else.

“I see them as single player content with no interactivity between players, what I do doesn’t affect you. With events, what I do affects you, and the world, if only for a time.” Again a reason to have both.

The new release made ESO feel like a completely new game to me. It has nothing to do with the rough launch, literally everything has been improved and it has joined GW2 up there on the list. That said GW2 and ESO are both great games with their own merits. Since there is no monthly fee for either of them it’s really the players who benefits from trying them both.

I would add that the main reason I mostly play ESO right now is because the Mac client of GW2 crashes constantly and they do not have a console version.

I do hope that GW2 can redefine itself with the next expansion the way ESO did.

Xillllix.3485:

The new release made ESO feel like a completely new game to me. It has nothing to do with the rough launch, literally everything has been improved and it has joined GW2 up there on the list. That said GW2 and ESO are both great games with their own merits. Since there is no monthly fee for either of them it’s really the players who benefits from trying them both.

I would add that the main reason I mostly play ESO right now is because the Mac client of GW2 crashes constantly and they do not have a console version.

I do hope that GW2 can redefine itself with the next expansion the way ESO did.

That doesnt really say much though.

Does Cyrodil actually work now? Just curious. I havent played ESO since about 3 months after release. No EU servers without them speaking to the community about it together with the vampire exploits killed the game completely, the guild I was in literally dropped from 200 to 5 players over a few months.

I mean the concept of ESO was great. The more physical combat and such was a fresh concept and worked just fine in PvE. But it all broke down when it started lagging in PvP. Every moment of play was like a 3-way in SM… Except people rubberbanded all over the place too and insta-killed/perma-stunned. With dynamic waypoints broken (the placeable tent didnt work) it was always a ton of running and very, very little actual combat. I have more combat in 10 minutes of GW2 than I did 2 hours of ESO.

Hey everybody, we’re locking this thread since it is not only off-topic for the GW2 Forums, but it has also been necro-bumped.