Guild Wars 2

Hi all you lovable Tyria-folk (and other furry/branchy/unreasonably big-eared beings)!

First a fair warning: The following is my subjective evaluation of the game after having reach level 80, completed my personal story, reached 400 in 2 crafting disciplines and finding my way through every dungeon. If you are not interested in a somewhat well-written and coherent, if opinionated, topic (for once), then disregard the text below.

I am new to MMOs and started following GW2’s development back in early spring of this year. The reason I became interested was simply the visual standards, I saw in the beta coverage. And after experiencing the beta weekends myself, I knew I would enjoy playing this game. And I have, and still do to some degree. The graphics are the most appealing I’ve seen in a MMO and is in my opinion easily comparable to console games. The world doesn’t just look good – it feels good. Most of the areas are enveloping and exciting to explore. Orr is the exception here, but it’s meant to be uninviting and give you the sense of urgency to get the hell out of there.

So I have joined a guild (actually 2) and am generally helpful if questions pop up in the general chat – or revive if I pass someone who’s dead (believe me, not everyone do). I try to be as constructive as possible when I’m playing in a party, so I would say I have tried the social aspects of the game as well. Now that that’s out of the way I can get to the point at hand…

I know what I’m supposed to do now, or at least, I know what my options are. There’s literally a million different things to do in GW2 once you’ve finished your personal story and as I have stated above I have tried out various aspects of these options. However, at this fairly early stage of the game, I find myself trying to defend keeping on trucking through dungeon runs, completing every zone or doing some WvW. I still enjoy my time in the game world, but the fundamental item hunt is off.
Allow me to explain: I have stated elsewhere on this forum that I think the primary skills are tedious – and the fact that you’re not able to change your primary skills one by one is a mistake. We’re talking fundamentals here and something I of course was well aware of before purchasing the game. However, I did not consider the impact this would have on my end game experience. I often think of my character as a treasure hunting warrior-at-heart type of hero, which is a thought that isn’t limited to this game. I generally find the treasure hunting and loot systems in GW2 to be pretty good, but the fact that the weapon you’re currently using does not affect your primary skills makes the item hunt less appealing. Your weapon does not for example up your attack speed, it does not add elemental damage to your attack nor does it add variances to your primary skills. All of these things would make the item hunt more appealing to me. I realize that this isn’t necessarily something the developers wanted, I’m merely stating that the lack of an interesting item hunt has made weapons less important to me throughout the game experience so far and it has become a question of sheer dps and cosmetic value. Now that I’m contemplating my further participation, I have serious doubts about what I’m trying to achieve. Maybe, I have exhausted my primary character and need to start alts – maybe I should ignore my doubts and collect dungeon tokens for a cosmetic upgrade… Maybe. But the fact remains that the item hunt, weapon as well as armor, is pretty much only cosmetic at my character’s point in the game. Upgrading my character’s skills just isn’t a factor in the item hunt and it’s a shame. The fact that my primary skills does not evolve after having used a weapon for 5 minutes is a shame. The depth of GW2 does not extend to the primary skills in any way, which makes it harder to differentiate the feel of your character. I love the myriads of dye-colors, and I love the differences in the look of armor as you progress. But this game sorely needs to add depth where there is none – and that is in the ability to feel a sustainable progression in your primary skills. A skill tree such as the one for utility skills, should have been implemented for primary skills – it should NOT just be weapon bound. You get very, very tired of your standard attack…

Continued below:

These are my two fundamental grievances with the game; the lack of interchangeable primary skills and an item hunt, which is little more than purely cosmetic. I have serious annoyances such as bugged skill points and spammers. The gold sellers is the bane of online gaming and not something easily remedied, but bugs shouldn’t be allowed to be up for days on end. I have 3 different zones, that I haven’t been able to complete for 3 days now, because of bugged skill points. (A missing NPC, a constantly dead orrian sword and a surprisingly friendly orrian sword… (cough Far Shiverpeaks-server cough)) This will of course be fixed at some point soon, and I get that any start of something this big will have it’s faults. I want to commend the developers for a job well-done. I will hang on a little while longer and definately check back in when expansions hit. Right now my interest is unfortunately fading. Too much time is spent looking for parties to do dungeon runs – and here my disagreement with MMOs start to surface…; Why am I not able to solo the dungeon if no one is around? Why isn’t the content of the dungeon just downscaled to accomodate a single player? Or why isn’t there at least implemented some kind of queue-system to auto-assign players to a party?

So you see, I have a couple of thoughts on the game. Hopefully ANet will be able to deepen the value of the item hunt as well as the primary skills sometime in the future. And hopefully I will be able to grind for tokens solo some day – or with how many players happen to be available at the time, I want to play…

Otherwise, I have enjoyed my experience with the game – and I hope you continue to do so as well

I agree with you. I do think though then when they made the game they imagined people would play through the story and keep making alts to keep repeating it, or just focus on pvp. I soloed through the personal story but am stuck on the last part because I can`t seem to find help to kill the dragon. But while going up to that point i only uncovered about 55% of the map. So I take time here and there to explore the places I haven`t been to yet even though there really isn`t a reason to. I have my armor set and my weapons i need but like you said I am only going to forward now to try and get the appearance items that I really want. Once that goal is finished I`m not sure where to go from there. I guess either make an alt and go through the whole thing again or take a break and wait for an expansion.

Good critical post, without any “waaah waaah”. Agree with both points somewhat, but I think there’s probably still some “headroom” in the game. Bear in mind that Anet have to keep something up their sleeve for the future, they can’t splurge every possible idea they’ve had about the game on release, both for practical reasons and for reasons of ensuring the game changes and develops over time.

I agree there is so much headroom for future development there. But the main thing is what direction they wish the game to go in. Do they want to keep it as is now and just add more varied content? Or add more of an mmo style type of character progression system so you can keep expanding on your character to impove him more and more.

Could go either way really if they put some thought into it. I like playing alts now and then but I am the type of player that prefers to play one character and stick with that usually. I am curious to see what they have in mind for future updates.