Guild Wars 2

When this game was new, there was a lot of promise of rpg in the game.

There were personality traits. Your character was going to be different from your friend’s character. You could make choices like a bioware game to change your storyline.

The heart system provided an immersive world where you didn’t always have to stab things to help people. You could do other stuff like gathering.

There was town clothes. You didn’t always have to wear combat armor. You could collect neat noncombat clothes to wear.

There was a personal instance that held the promise of being modifiable as you progressed. You could make permanent changes to this area to grow your story.

Yet I feel like Guild Wars 2 has forgot about all this and decided to go with yet another stab people simulator. Instead of more story elements we get skins and collectibles to unlock like its a FPS.

With all this new focus on PvP, removing the personality system, gutting town clothes, forgetting about the multi-pathed resolutions after leveling is done, it feels like they’ve made a choice to remove the RPG from the MMORPG and focus on hack and slash ‘cheeve hunting. I’m starting to wonder if this is the game I thought it was.

Amen.

I agree. I feel like ANet not wanting to release any expansions has really shot them in the foot with this game. I’m okay with the “stab people simulator” idea if only because Guild Wars 1 was along similar lines but this game constantly just releases gem store items and little tweaks with little new content. An expansion at this point in its life would go a long way.

The problem is, stab simulators are pretty much all that people really want to play these days due to being spoiled by modern games. Most players who are new to the MMORPG scene do not undestand what older MMOs, or game console/tabletop RPGs for that matter, were like in comparison.

All they know is whether its “WoW” or “Not WoW”.

Guild Wars 2 was one of the exceptions, actually, due to having an active roleplaying community and players who sought to play in more traditional ways. The problem is the player base themselves has eroded this away over time; WvW has been turned into leagues in which two sides gang up on one side, and PvE has been overrun by the zerker meta, speedruns and mass prevalence of farming.

Then people get their finally legendaries and ascended armor, and quit.

Some of the mistakes were ANet’s fault, however many of their changes were a direct response to mass critism from players. In fact, you can find many responses to threads around here about people first wanting something and demanding it, then whining about it when they finally get it because it “sucks”.

There’s no way to have it all, but players will not stop until they have it all. This puts both the players and ANet betwen a rock and a hard place.

Most of the things that you listed the “elites” do not want, for example.

The RPG elements in this game went the way of the dodo for no discernible reason.

I don’t think the Guild Wars series has ever had a good grasp on rewards and accomplishment. It all just boils down to how effectively you can farm something repetitively. The old RPG elements were small bits of flavor to help make the game taste less dull and monotonous. They are now gone.

When the game first came out it was amazing – the dungeons were awesome first run through, you’d stop at beautiful vistas and just go “wow!” A handful of gold could fully outfit your char and content like halloween was amazing with scavenger hunts and fun.
But it slowly became like a book written to a formula – the same content retold with different chars – over and over and over.
zerg here for 2 weeks, zerg here for 2 weeks – don’t worry – story coming but till then – zerg here for 2 weeks.
the dungeons are the same – no deviation in patrols, mobs or bosses. So it becomes just a routine. Then hey! why waste time? just use the fastest way through since i have to run this to get gold each day and since it never changes its boring as hell so i want it over soon as possible, so the zerk meta appears with good reason, stacking and skipping become the norm because theres no reason not to.
The original diablo had more variety in its dungeons.
The world itself had promise but with no amazing lore and backstories it has no magic to draw you back to it.
gw1 bless its socks had character and kept pulling me back for 7 years, this version has waxed and waned in 1.
The direction has changed substantially since release and not for the better. The world is not getting more developed, its as stale as it was.

Rukh.9287:

When this game was new, there was a lot of promise of rpg in the game.

There were personality traits. Your character was going to be different from your friend’s character. You could make choices like a bioware game to change your storyline.

The heart system provided an immersive world where you didn’t always have to stab things to help people. You could do other stuff like gathering.

There was town clothes. You didn’t always have to wear combat armor. You could collect neat noncombat clothes to wear.

There was a personal instance that held the promise of being modifiable as you progressed. You could make permanent changes to this area to grow your story.

Yet I feel like Guild Wars 2 has forgot about all this and decided to go with yet another stab people simulator. Instead of more story elements we get skins and collectibles to unlock like its a FPS.

With all this new focus on PvP, removing the personality system, gutting town clothes, forgetting about the multi-pathed resolutions after leveling is done, it feels like they’ve made a choice to remove the RPG from the MMORPG and focus on hack and slash ‘cheeve hunting. I’m starting to wonder if this is the game I thought it was.

i kind of agree and i kind of don’t. I do agree with all of your points, but i do think their is an RPG element. Firstly, the technical level, and this is why D3 isn’t an rpg. Build diversity, it exists. I want to play my engineer with as little kit involvement as possible, i love my rifle and will build around it. which is why almost all of my classes end up having really unique builds. When i play my necromancer, it reminds me a lot of Sith Sorceror, only a lot stronger and with no lightning*:(*
This is why i like WvW alot. in there, Engineer is the greatest thing ever especially if you’re a charr, because the ranks make sense Engineer, for me at least, is why there are legions at all. Engineer is the modern soldier, and playing it that way and yelling OORAH alot on mumble is hilarious.

Hannelore.8153:

All they know is whether its “WoW” or “Not WoW”.

This really is the heart of the matter. When WoW came in, the RPG started getting phased out. There’s a science to making an RPG. A clear, distinct science. Though WoW kept some of it, they also sacrificed a good bit of it. The copycats that came afterwards sacrificed more and more. Not understanding the science of RPG creation, or even what made WoW successful, but just seeing how much money WoW was making and wanting a piece of it. Pretty much all of them failed in spectacular fashion. WoW was successful because it made RPGs more accessible to the average gamer, and fans of other genres.

Flash forward to today, RPers are considered “a tiny niche crowd”, get harassed on a daily basis, while their basic needs have all but been entirely removed. When someone points to actual RPGS as an example, people behave like it’s impossible to carry them over to computer games. I’ve also been told that RPGs are just the settings and lore, which couldn’t be further from the truth. RPG ARE the system. The d20 system, the d10 system, the d6 system. THAT’s the core of RPGs. The settings and lore fill in around those, and are usually custom made by individual player groups. These are systems meant to quantify real life occurrences (before anyone says “magic blah blah blah”, it’s prevalent in fantasy stories throughout history and even modern fiction. Therefore it’s something that they would need to quantify.)

If you take a look at a game like Neverwinter, nearly all traces of D&D have been removed from it. It’s Forgotten Realms, however that’s just a campaign setting. One of hundreds of thousands, if not millions. But we’ve seen the actual RPG side of the equation continuously water down for over a decade now, and now it’s drowned out in favor of what actually are third person shooters or action platformers. Modern players have no idea what they’re being cheated out of, while older players continue to hopelessly dream of days gone by. MMOs have become nothing more than thinly veiled cash grabs, continuously defended by fans who just plain don’t know any better. The RPG portion has gone the way of the dodo, yet these companies continue to falsely advertise their games as RPGs. And they get away with all of this due to over a decade of social engineering. It really quite an appalling situation.