I love all of the content in the game so far, besides a long list of understandable issues with bugged skills, traits and npc behaviour etc.
However, there are still certain parts of the game which are fundamentally broken and are single handedly giving the game an ever increasing requisite of motivation and effort to play.
‘Locked UI’
I feel that this is the biggest problem. Please take a look at http://i.imgur.com/yQbSO.jpg
In this game you have to angle your camera down at the floor to find your target, judge distance and spot harmful AOE ‘red rings’. After doing this, your selected target portrait and healthbar block the most important area of your screen.
From a combat gameplay perspective, how are you meant to watch for his attack animations and react to them?
From a combat feedback perspective, how are you meant to see how much damage you’re dealing?
The target box is locked in the worst possible place and should either be unlocked or moved. I’d honestly rather randomly have the chat window put directly in the center of the screen than the ‘target’ positioning right now. I want to see my target, I want to see the enemy models which your artists have worked so hard on all this time…. just look at all that wasted space on the screen.
‘Certain effects causing serious fps drop e.g. Grenade Kit’
My first character was an Engineer, and after a rough ride I discovered the potential value of kits, specifically Grenade Kit. It wasn’t long after that I realised that the Grenade Kit explosion animations are a ridiculous performance killer. I run medium settings with 40-60 FPS, but when I spam grenades (essential for damage with Grenade Kit build) or see other engineers spamming grenades, then my FPS will drop down to sub 5.
This is clearly a problem with the skill effects, most people would rather have a 2d explosion sprite ripped out of the 16-bit era than unplayable 5 FPS. Note: the performance hit only seems to happen at close range, if you’re lucky enough to be standing 1500 distance away it doesn’t effect you so much – but if you’re a Warrior then you’d better hope you have a top of the range graphics card (I have a level 80 Warrior, and a 2 year old graphics card sigh).
‘Poor targetting’
This is a simple and confusing issue. I’m hoping that anyone who’s played through Arah story can vouch for this. (possible spoiler) The battle with Zhaitan’s lieutenants, you operate a cannon and shoot – but how difficult is it to actually select a target. I tried clicking over the entire screen to no avail, spamming Tab (next target) and the mapped ‘target closest’ key didn’t work either.
Also, you can be standing 2 feet away from a large enemy such as a giant and your ‘target’ key’s don’t seem to work unless you can see higher than their knee cap, so you have to fiddle around with the camera just to target.
This is a minor annoyance, but what’s wrong with a targetting system or at least a ‘target closest’ key which actually targets closest in proximity, not ‘targets closest which you can actually see on the screen’? I believe the reason most people use target closest is when there’s too much crap on screen or an awful camera angle, in which case it doesn’t work more often than not.
There are obviously a lot of bugs in the game which are also nagging at me, but I have a good level of tolerance for these as the game is so huge that many of the bugs relating to skill mechanics, traits and npcs will only come to light after release. But the above issues seem to be fundamental problems with the game, and the first one is a seemingly colossal oversight or bad design choice which I really hope arenanet will reconsider.
(edited by tarquin.4713)