Guild Wars 2

I’m a headstart gamer, and I’ve seen most of GW2 throughout the years. If you count closed betas, I’m here for more than 4 years and counting. Seen how content flow has degraded this much, being as honest as possible, I’ve been wondering: is GW2 a game you should visit yearly? The pace of content releases is so low that sometimes I feel bad for the devs, because I believe they put so much effort, but it turns out so little content to do. It seems like better strategy to wait until the game stacks up in content and try it out after one year or so, so it doesn’t feel so… shallow?

And yeah, I’m talking about dynamic content: new maps, new instances to play, new story, new classes. All those stuff people always say that take time to develop, but other MMOs put out so much faster.

Thoughts?

I think it’s more to do with how many hours a day you can play than what period of time it’s spread over.

I’ve been playing since day 1 of the headstart period (plus betas if you want to count those), I’ve never taken a break from the game unless you count times when I was on holiday or otherwise away from home for a while and yet I’ve “only” played for just over 3,000 hours, so (with 9 permanent characters and numerous temporary ones) I’ve still got tons of stuff I want to do in-game. I haven’t even started the new storyline because I’ve been working on other things.

And that’s without playing PvP, and very little WvW, so it’s not even that I’m trying to do everything at once.

For me the pace of releases is about right. I’ve never run out of things to do and since the end of Season 1 I’ve never felt overwhelmed by it all either.

But I know a lot of other people, usually people who can dedicate a lot more time in a day to GW2 than I can, get extremely frustrated with the rate stuff is released and end up playing the same things over and over because they don’t have anything new to do and for some reason don’t want to play another game instead. Then when something new does come out they burn though it as fast as possible, and are back where they started. I don’t understand that mentality myself, but I assume it works for them (in spite of the complaining) because surely if it didn’t they wouldn’t keep doing it.

I mean it’s a game. The point is to have fun right? So if you’re not having fun you stop and go and do something else.

Well GW2 was a new type of experimental MMO and what you’re experiencing is really the staple reality of not having “anywhere to go”. It isn’t that content is produced particularly slower but instead that content can be beaten significantly faster and that keeping up with the player is harder due to the nature of the MMO itself.

It’s primary focus on removing the need for other players as well as “play as you like” has created a huge hole in what makes or breaks something so ultimately being “good” or “bad” is meaningless since everyone can essentially do everything. With it being an MMO you end up with strong sources of information such as Dulfy or the Wiki and bam, you’ve “beaten” the content before you’ve even started it.

Combine this with the general episodic feel and you’ve got the brew for your complaints.

Even after playing nearly every day since head start almost 4 years ago I am still finding new places to see, new events to do, new things to do and new people to talk to. And I haven’t even finished LS2, HoT or LS3 yet … so much to see and do …..