Guild Wars 2

Just recently I allowed my younger sibling to play on my game account.

Overall she had a lot of fun, but on several occasions the immersion was completely and utterly destroyed by flaws in the game’s design.

The game’s camera spazing out

I have played this game since launch, and the camera still kittenes me off from time to time, but I never really realized just how much I had learned to cope with the annoying camera angles until I watched my sister play the game.

Often times, after getting knocked into a wall by a boar or other enemy, or even doing the Urmaug’s secret jumping puzzle in lion’s arch… the game’s camera just went bonkers and my sister was unable to see anything, without attempting to rotate the camera around for a minute or so to figure out what was going on.

It comes as no surprise that something that annoys me as a veteran player completely aggravates a new player, and I feel that something needs to be done about the whole “camera going into your own kitten” thing.

Times like these definitely broke immersion and forced my sister to deal with shoddy camera mechanics to resume enjoying herself.

The lack of crafting material variety

This comes as more of a suggestion than anything, but something my sister gravitated toward right from the start was cooking. A large part of her motivation in the game world was to go out and explore to see what sorts of cooking ingredients she could acquire. She started gathering at nodes, and came to the realization that moa birds drop poultry meat and/or eggs, and 90% of all the other foes in the game drop red meat.

Deer, drakes, boars, dolyaks, bears, etc. all drop the same type of meat.

She was really expecting at very least some different variety (pork from boars, etc.)

She also noticed that none of the fish in the game anywhere drop any sort of cooking related items;Tuna and salmon items don’t even exist, and someone making the logical assumption that you can get tuna from a tuna, salmon from a salmon, etc would be completely wrong.

She also was extremely disappointed that she was unable to use the crab meat she had collected from killing crabs and that it was in fact a junk item rather than a cooking ingredient.

Again…. these issues are not game-breaking, but definitely immersion breaking. I agree there is no reason why we don’t have any fish (or seafood) cooking items.

(I know we have clams)

Zone/map borders with strong currents

She explored most of Sparkfly Fen before heading north into Bloodtide coast, but was completely put off by her inability to swim from one zone to the other because of the “strong current” map barrier. I agree with her on this one. Being trapped in an endless loop simply because the game developers decided that an invisible wall should go in place of a zone transition is poor game design.

Sure the currents have their place in some maps, but the barrier between sparkfly fen and bloodtide coast should be replaced with a zone transition.

Not only was it annoying to not be able to travel that way for no reason, but it was also difficult for her to properly turn around and navigate back into the zone without being teleported around fifty times.

It definitely caused her quite a bit of frustration, and I had no explanation to give her why she couldn’t simply swim across the border into the other zone.

She accepted it as part of the game, but her immersion was definitely broken for a while after that.

There are many things changed with the NPE that are broken

That’s right… things I remember doing as a new player have been scrambled up a bit….. and in most cases it is for the better. There are however several instances where things were altered and just don’t make sense.

In the grawl cave in Wayfarer Foothills for example… players can earn progress toward heart completion by wiping off cave paintings.

The animation for doing so was somehow replaced with the skill point commune animation. Every single time she wiped a cave painting off, she sat there for 5 seconds and said that doesn’t look like he (the character) was wiping the paintings off at all, as he channeled and communed with every single cave painting.

This is just one of the many things that I noticed while observing her gameplay through starter areas.

Character models and animations

Many times during my sister’s adventures, she would clear an area of foes (with no special magical characteristics) and would witness them just re-appear out of nowhere before she left the area. Sure undead sort of appear in a puff of smoke, and dredge jump out of the ground….. but what about moa birds? What about dolyaks?
She didn’t like how things just re-appeared.

Sometimes enemy models would get stuck on the screen if they were killed in the instant they first appeared. (It looks like there is still a living foe there, except it is a corpse with a bugged animation)
I’ve witnessed this myself on several occasions….
Using a tonic, Lich form, or transform skill often times leaves a “shell” of yourself behind.
Sometimes if something is un-rendered and re-rendered the animation that was playing as that happens just continues to happen forever. (ranger swoop animation playing forever and ever) These issues have been around for quite some time now, and my friends all over the world have seen this issue in some way shape or form…. and it comes as no surprise that when a new player sees it, it breaks immersion.
I should not have to explain “There is no enemy there…. you already killed it…. that is a bug.”

Walking Downhill to your death

I don’t think there is anyone who has ever played the game who has not accidentally walked slowly downhill to their death, but just in case you haven’t, yes this is a thing.

Some bug with fall damage will occasionally cause players to continue to take fall damage just for walking slightly downhill. It is possible for a player to die this way- no downed state- complete death.

This happened to my sister once… and I explained it was a bug… but she was not happy about it.

Anyway…. thanks for reading. Feel free to comment.

All valid points that have been beaten to death for 1-2 years because.. well.. they’ve been around that long. Most of the community has simply given up/turned it into a running joke despite how unfunny it is. All we can do is pat you on the back and say “we know, buddy, we know.”.

I take it that your sister is new to MMOs?

Respawning enemies are pretty much a necessity when there are a million bloodthirsty characters roaming around and killing every living thing that’s not green.

I get it that it is immersion-breaking for mundane mobs like Dolyaks respawning out of thin air, but how would they respawn, then? Or should we remove all mobs that have no “explainable” way of appearing out of thin air?

I’ve yet to play an immersive MMO.

i think the biggest immersion breaker ist the black frame on your screen which u cannot turn off in options. :[
ya the camera angle is kinda bad aswell. everything seems soo far away and small.

TheBlackLeech.9360:

~Snip~

The lack of crafting material variety

This comes as more of a suggestion than anything, but something my sister gravitated toward right from the start was cooking. A large part of her motivation in the game world was to go out and explore to see what sorts of cooking ingredients she could acquire. She started gathering at nodes, and came to the realization that moa birds drop poultry meat and/or eggs, and 90% of all the other foes in the game drop red meat.

Deer, drakes, boars, dolyaks, bears, etc. all drop the same type of meat.

She was really expecting at very least some different variety (pork from boars, etc.)

She also noticed that none of the fish in the game anywhere drop any sort of cooking related items;Tuna and salmon items don’t even exist, and someone making the logical assumption that you can get tuna from a tuna, salmon from a salmon, etc would be completely wrong.

She also was extremely disappointed that she was unable to use the crab meat she had collected from killing crabs and that it was in fact a junk item rather than a cooking ingredient.

Again…. these issues are not game-breaking, but definitely immersion breaking. I agree there is no reason why we don’t have any fish (or seafood) cooking items.

(I know we have clams)

~Snip~

Actually there’s a very simple answer for this, the designer of the crafting professions wanted to save some items for introduction later on in the games development for the chef profession, hence why nothing comes from fish and the crab meat is unusable. As for the other animals all dropping red meat…she didn’t want to make it to complicated and all those items require additional coding and resources, which are limited.

“Walking Downhill to your death” has happened to me many times. I seem to do so once every few months always forgetting to pause every few steps. My latest death was walking down from the jumping puzzle far south of Cursed Shore.

Crafting wise the only thing I have come to despise is every new item added to crafting takes hundreds of mats to make a single item. There has to be better ways to get rid of crafting mats. Maybe more useful / fun consumables.

My biggest immersion breaker relates to your third point. I dislike how the zones feel so “disconnected” from one another as if they’re all in their own universe. Like you can’t swim from one to another that’s literally right next to the other and you can’t even see scenery from nearby zones, instead you just see the end of the world. For example, you should be able to see Claw Island from Bloodtide Coast but you just see endless ocean and similarly you should be able to see the Shiverpeaks from adjacent zones yet there’s nothing in view. There’s nothing that makes the land of Tyria feel like a grander world when there’s no sense of connectedness between the zones. Unfortunately, many zone-based games have this problem but I feel like there could be improvements that could boost the sense of immersion.

Suggest me an immersive MMO please.