inb4everythingistheendgame
Fact of the matter is, the grand whopping majority of complaints about this that or the other stem from PvE content that was not made available during the BWEs. Stuff like the post-50 personal story (especially the final boss), every dungeon except AC, every open world zone that wasn’t 1-25 or Gendarran, etc. And even then, none of the content was tested long enough to truly gauge its replayability.
Now, I’m not bashing the game here. I’m playing, I’m enjoying it. Plenty of people have sunk hundreds of hours into GW2, which is already several times better than most other games, in any given genre. However, before release I had serious concerns about the longevity of the content, and very little that I’ve seen suggests to the contrary. Just to cite some stuff that I can claim to have experienced (in a spoiler tag to save space):
- Most people assumed that zones outside the 1-25 were going to be better for Dynamic Events. I remember Colin (or was it someone else?) mentioning stuff about there being more events and fewer hearts in the later zones, with absolutely no hearts in Arah. While he wasn’t lying about Arah…basically any zone prior is effectively a rehash of the 15-25 zones. Now, I do enjoy the world, and making my pass around the Fields of Ruin in particular I enjoyed mucking about, walking up to random stuff just to see if it did something. However…I don’t see any of that convincing me even so much as remotely to ever revisit that zone on the same character unless I’m farming for crafting materials. DEs are bricked into dead-end situations, and there’s way too much empty space between them…which was originally occupied by Hearts.
- I feel that I can basically break the Personal Story into three, separate parts: 1-30, 30-50, and 50-80. Emphasis on separate. Your decisions branch out to various results within the sections, but absolutely none of them seem to matter outside those sections, and nothing I’ve heard about anybody else’s story seems to suggest otherwise. If anything, there’s a sense of discontinuity such that previous actions that should’ve had an impact (eg: meeting someone earlier) ended up doing absolutely nothing (eg: meeting that person later and they don’t recognize you). I wasn’t expecting Mass Effect here, but even the lowest-budget JRPGs at least have the decency to have decisions make SOME sort of difference in the end.
- Killing monsters outside of Hearts/DEs or leveling your weapons is a complete waste of time. It simply takes so darn long for so little reward that I’d get more bang for my buck by running around hitting resource nodes. I completely understand that Anet doesn’t want us doing ye old fashioned grinding, but if you’re going to put an army of aggressive mobs between me and walking across the map, I just feel that I shouldn’t be forced to either accept the long time sink for nothing or else run like a wuss past them. WoW eventually went quest heavy, and even added gathering Exp, but they never rendered killing stuff entirely irrelevant.
And what really annoys me is that so much of this could have been mitigated, possibly even avoided, if members of the public had a chance to fiddle with it before release. You could say that release was really just as extended beta, and you’d be right to an extent. It’s unreasonable to believe that Anet has the capacity to test a global Trading Post and account for 1 mil+ people trying to use it at the same time…without actually having 1 mil+ people trying to use it at the same time. Many of the Event bugs were not experienced during beta. Even the overflow migration and social features worked better during beta. Nevertheless, there were still several issues that could have been resolved quickly and effectively if Anet just let people have at it. I mean, the proof is already there: people have identified the broken parts, and Anet has fixed them very punctually.
You could also say that Anet didn’t want to spoil the later stuff. However, I can’t help but think that a half million people getting spoiled earlier might have saved the next 1.5 million from running into all these avoidable issues. And quite frankly, Anet had already made their buck off that first half million, so I don’t think there was much to lose in that regard. Even if that half million got spoiled, they still would’ve had content like WvWvW, sPvP, re-running DEs, working up to non-wiped cosmetics, etc.
So, I dunno, in the end your impression is probably that I’m venting, and you’re right. And indeed, hindsight is 20/20. However, it still just bugs me that so much pain could have been avoided so easily if Anet had just let us work out the wrinkles before release. After all, if this is really a successor to GW1, we’d still have a reason to come back to GW2 long after we believe we’d “exhausted” it.
(edited by Aldracity.9463)
