Guild Wars 2

I’m attaching to this post a screenshot I took earlier today, in a fight against Kuraii, with the option to reduce particle effects in combat.

You can barely see anything. My character is invisible. The bosses’ animations are not visible among all that light. Red circles are only visible from range.

Now, other than the visibility concerns, we have the fights themselves. They are mostly zergs, allowing people to just auto-attack and, if they are attacking from range, take a few steps to the side every once in a while. Even with the “anti-zerg” mechanics in the Crown Pavilion, players can still zerg the Legendary enemies there easily. Many of the big fights in dynamic events barely require the players to move at all – see the Shatterer, for example.

I don’t think this is due to the lack of a holy trinity. I think this is due to how large scale combat simply doesn’t work in Guild Wars 2. The game has been balanced around sPvP, with even the UI favoring a small group of players fighting against another small group of players. Add more than that, and the particle effects severely hurt visibility even after the update that would theorically have solved this issue. Take the context of an open world, and we have bosses impossible to balance – how to make a boss that would be challenging to 8 players and properly scale it to be challenging against 40 players, while keeping the same mechanics?

I believe proper large scale combat with an unknown large number of players against a single PvE enemy with buffed stats is not viable. I don’t believe ArenaNet can actually balance such thing while keeping it both challenging and fun. IMO, they should change the dynamic events that currently rely on said model so they would force players to split and do different objectives simultaneously, instead of making bosses we can hardly see.

Not sure about this game but back in 2001 we did it in DaOC /rollseyes.

Yeah, those late night relic raids of 300 or more people I never once had a issue with lag. Even with all the stupid CC breaking Thanes and their hammers my rig never lagged like it does in this game. And this isn’t a issue of eye candy either because that game had just has many spell effects going on regardless of which side you played.

Why a graphic engine in today’s age lags like this really befuddles me. Developers and/or publishers really should pay attention to the possible concurrent users globally and on the same map and/or space. It is like we are taking a stride forward then 2 backward

Yeah the optimization in this game (for this day and age) is absolutely badbad

Large scale combat could be viable, if the developers bothered to create some reasonable artificial intelligence for the mobs.

For example, a boss (any enemy for that matter) could be programmed to fight intelligently thus;

Heavy Damage Knockback Skill
If attacking melee players > X, periodically execute knockback skill
Ranged Defense Skill
If attacking ranged players > X, periodically use shield/bubble shield with dangerous retaliation (reflection of damage)
Evade and relocate Skill
Not really a ‘skill’, but the boss should be able to jump somewhere, away from combat, or roll somewhere away from combat.

If you simply combined only the above 3 basic examples of AI programming, we would all immediately see the “blind” zerging at both melee and ranged distances disappear. Players would be forced to watch carefully what the boss was doing due to the danger in being hit. Everyone could no longer just mindlessly spam all in the one location, hugging the boss.

It’s doable. The boss AI needs a little work, that’s all.

I feel your pain, however with such an emphasis placed on spell and weapon effects, it is very hard to optimize for all but the best gaming rigs. If we all played on super LEET puters it wouldn’t be a problem but most people are still running Windows XP. No real data to back that up save an episode of Monty’s Minute on GamebreakerTV where he (Monty, a game dev) explained the reasoning why most games are based around lower OS. Upgrading a PC is a low priority for most homes.

It’s a tough situation for A-Net… and us.

Ask yourself a simple question: which game has had good 1vs100 real time combat in the past?

You cannot add 100 players to a level, then give them a single point of interest in a tiny space (i.e. boss) and expect things to go well from a combat simulation standpoint.

But for the people who missed release, zerging down bosses is fun. It is something they never experience. I may might make the designers cringe, but who cares, fun first. If you want precision combat, 1on1 and dungeons still work. if you are just playing for the rewards while expecting entertainment, you have my pitty.