Guild Wars 2

First of all, a bit about me. I’ve played very many F2P MMORPGs in my life, I’ve tried out WoW, and I’ve played GW1 for a long time. I don’t want to say that I’m very good at them, but I have some experience with how a MMORPG should look like and I’ve tried many different ones. I’ve loved GW1 and I’ve played it for quite some time, I really loved the PvE (I was one of the few players who were actually happy about the game being completely instanced) and I thought that the PvP was fun aswell. Have to admit that I havn’t played PvP as much as PvE though.
When I heard that GW2 was going to come out I was full of anticipation for it. Watched the trailers, read about it all the time and preordered it. I’ve played during the beta as much as I was able to.

Small note: all the things I’m going to list are my opinions. I’d love it if you’d comment them, but don’t start flaming. We can do this in a friendly way, can’t we?

Now, to the things I liked in GW2 and the ones I didn’t like that much:

No-Quest-System: (++) I was really surprised how well a RPG could work without really having quests (except for your own story). The Renown Heart “Quests” were fitting perfectly into the game and you almost always found something you could do in your spare time, while not having to “clean up all the quests because your questlog contains more than 50 quests again and you can’t find the ones you really want to do”. It’s really nice to not have to care about doing a quest now or later and just doing the quest when you want to.

GUI: (++) Perfect stuff: Put all your crafting material into your box from everywhere. (Deposit collectibles!) A really, really nice feature. The Guild page – really nice. So many small features that make your gameplay easier.

Black Lion Trading Company: (++) Very, very nice. It’s just comfortable. Buy stuff whenever you like, sell stuff whenever you like and whereever you are. The F2P styled Gem store is pretty nice aswell. Being able to pay everything with ingame money is a very important aspect in games like this for me!

The Dungeons: (/) I am still not sure about whether I like the dungeons in gw2 or not. Some aspects of them are really, really awesome (like the endboss in Sorrows Embrace which had a neat gameplay) some aspects were just completely crap. Especially the WoW like “Hey, I know that I will defeat the enemy boss in the fight after 1 minute, but I have to fight for 5 minutes just because he has kittenons of health.” fights. Why drag out fights unnecessarily? Most fights are “over” after 1 minute (when you’re still alive after 1 minute, you will survive the rest, when you’re not, well then you’re dead anyways) but players still have to hit the enemy for ages because of huge life pools. That just sucks. It reduces the time I can REALLY play the game. Another thing is making bosses almost completely immune to CC. Why would you want to do that? It’s just frustrating to use CC after CC on the enemy boss and then, when your CC would work, some random player accidentially uses a soft CC and you have to take the CC counter down again… Of course, make bosses strong, they should be strong! But don’t make them strong by making them immune to CC and almost completely immune to damage. That’s the wrong way. On the other hand, it’s pretty neat that every dungeon has three different paths (in explorable mode) – it gives you more variety which is VERY important in games (I will address the overall variety in detail later in this post). Some bosses have really nice ways of fighting you, for example the endboss of Sorrows Embrace that I’ve mentioned before, or the one in Twilight Arbor that polymorphs you into small animals that have to fight Nightmare pups. Really nice! More of that! Players want to see something like that!

Abilities: (/) Again a part of the game that I’m not sure about. Some of the abilities are really, really nicely designed, the combo part is a really awesome way to improve your damage / effects in combination with other players. Synergy between players gets encouraged! That’s great! I still like that you can only have a limited time of spells at a certain point of time (unlike other MMORPGs like WoW, in which your whole screen is full of abilities that you can cast…) even if 3 spells to freely chose is even less than in GW1 But well, that’s still something that you can get happy with. At least you can change weapons (or Attunements, ….) and chose your spells better that way. Nice idea. Some professions still don’t have the amount of weapons to chose from that they should’ve, but that’s okay. A thing that bothers me though is the way you can “build” your character, which I will talk about in the next point.

(continue in next post)

Building your Hero: (-) A weak point. However I build my hero, I feel bad. I’ve wanted to play an elementalist on earth attunement (since I hate that everybody is running around with fire attunement). After playing for a bit, I decided to go on Condition Damage using a Scepter to stack bleeding with Stone Shards. I’ve played this elementalist for quite a while until I started a necromancer – just to find out that he can easily stack bleeding AND other conditions at the same time. The developers said that every profession can be played in almost every way, and yes, they can. But it’s just not viable. (If what I say is wrong in PvP, please tell me, I havn’t played my elementalist in PvP yet). They’ve said that you can play your hero the way you like and still do decent damage – that just doesn’t really work. My guardian is almost fulltank with AoE melee heal which works surprisingly well but I can’t deal damage at all which just feels weak compared to how you were able to deal damage as a tank in GW1 / other games aswell.

Renown Heart Quests (/) Some of them were really nice, others were just strange. Some of them were described in a way that I didn’t even know what to do, or WHERE to do it. In the long term all I did was fight enemies again, because it was the fastest way to finish those quests. Either reduce the renown you get for killing creeps or set the renown you get for doing the stuff described in the quest to a higher value. Additionally, set a pointer to the map showing where the stuff you have to do is. Sometimes the quests were on the border of the area and I was scouting for minutes to find the place the items dropped. Add a circle around the area like in events. Please. It would make the game so much more fluent.

Variety: (—-) The thing that bothers me the most about GW2 is the variety. Everything you do is fight Risen (except for dungeons, which are perhaps the only place you don’t have to fight Risen all the time). I’ve played through all the high level areas and it just bored me. It was just plain boring to fight the same enemy type over and over and over again. Bring more variety! Different types of enemies! Another example: Events. They were too repetitive. After playing some time, the events were all the same. There are like 3 or 4 types of events and that’s it. Guard somebody on his way to $randomPlace, defend $randomCity, pick up $randomItem and bring it back. More variety! The dragon events are better. They have variety (like different usable weapons to fight the dragons)

After all these points, the game variety (especially lategame) is such a big downside for me, that I still think that GuildWars1 was the better game. GW2 might be good, yeah, but it’s not as good as GW1 by far.
Because of that I wanted to play GW1 again, just to see the game empty. Nobody plays it anymore. I have many friends that would love to play GW1 aswell, but don’t want to buy a (almost) full-price Multiplayer game that’s dead anymore, which brought me to an idea – why not make gw1 Free2Play and still get some money out of it? ArenaNet would definitely get more money out of gw1 by making it f2p than they get by selling for the full price. Set the max char amount to 2-4, reduce the amount of chest pages a f2p player has, do stuff like that and make the game free, for the sake of those who still like this old game

Kind regards,
ohaz (who will still play gw2 for sure, but will wait a bit, till the variety gets better ;-) )

Are you hanging out in the US districts @ gw1? Since others have been dead way before gw2, everyone just kinda plays there, even the EU players. Last i saw couple weeks ago, there were decent amount of people hanging around and trading stuff.

As for the game, i agree on most points, except variety, i found myself constantly fighting with different stuff, ghosts, spiders, other kind of animals, trolls etcetc.
Well i quess event’s could use some variety, but i’m not too bothered about them.
Major problem is to get players to do them, but everyone just wants to hang out in LA.

Good read, I enjoy objectivity and agree with most of your points.

Variety is definitely one of the lower points of the game. I think the zones are well designed, there just isn’t enough variety in terms of aesthetics, and you fight the same creatures over and over. Thankfully, in the Lost Shores update this is something they said was a high priority to address.

Valtameri.2075:

Are you hanging out in the US districts @ gw1? Since others have been dead way before gw2, everyone just kinda hanged out there, even the EU players. Last i saw couple weeks ago, there were decent amount of people hanging around and trading stuff.

Thanks for that Still, F2P wouldn’t be bad for GW1 anyways (neither for Anet nor for the player base!)

As for the game, i agree on most points, except variety, i found myself constantly fighting with different stuff, ghosts, spiders, other kind of animals, trolls etcetc.

Well, the thing I’ve noticed really really often is that I was pretty much unable to get my daily chest because of the missing “kill mobs of 15 different enemy types”. Because the only enemy type I encountered was Risen. I think that shows pretty well that mob variety in lategame IS a problem. At least in some parts.

Edit: By the way, another problem I’ve encountered. The only real downside of the GUI: In the trait window you are not able to see how MUCH the traits affect your spells / passive heal etc. Like when I play my Guardian and one trait says “bigger area for signets” I don’t know whether it’s worth it to pick this trait or not – because their are no numbers. We need numbers! Also traits like “improves your healing” – by how much? Why not tell us?

ohaz.3479:

Valtameri.2075:

Are you hanging out in the US districts @ gw1? Since others have been dead way before gw2, everyone just kinda hanged out there, even the EU players. Last i saw couple weeks ago, there were decent amount of people hanging around and trading stuff.

Thanks for that Still, F2P wouldn’t be bad for GW1 anyways (neither for Anet nor for the player base!)

As for the game, i agree on most points, except variety, i found myself constantly fighting with different stuff, ghosts, spiders, other kind of animals, trolls etcetc.

Well, the thing I’ve noticed really really often is that I was pretty much unable to get my daily chest because of the missing “kill mobs of 15 different enemy types”. Because the only enemy type I encountered was Risen. I think that shows pretty well that mob variety in lategame IS a problem. At least in some parts.

Edit: By the way, another problem I’ve encountered. The only real downside of the GUI: In the trait window you are not able to see how MUCH the traits affect your spells / passive heal etc. Like when I play my Guardian and one trait says “bigger area for signets” I don’t know whether it’s worth it to pick this trait or not – because their are no numbers. We need numbers! Also traits like “improves your healing” – by how much? Why not tell us?

You being to lazy to get out of Orr is not the game’s fault. Any non Orr zone has enough variety for the daily.

Wait what? Make GW1 free to play?

…It is <_<

A good write-up. Some points I agree with (less Risen please), whilst others I do not, however that’s your opinion. But I would like to address your point on “Building your Hero”. Having every profession do everything exactly the same, which is what you seem to want, will end up homogenising them. Thus playing alts would become boring. I like the fact that my Ele can stack bleeds the fastest, while a Necro will take a bit longer to stack them but will stack other conditions whilst doing so.

Also in any RPG if you put points into specific stats (e.g. Power, Toughness, Healing Power), you should know full well that you are doing so, sacrificing your other stats.