Guild Wars 2

Story, Immersion, Cooperation, Challenge

Four pillars that can greatly enhance the player’s interest and investment on a game. The fifth would be: Competition; and the sixth, perhaps: Grinding. I’m unsure if Reward counts, because players like to be rewarded (or, in broader terms, satisfied) by what they do, be it grinding or following the story, be it helping the community or doing challenging content. I’d say Reward/ Satisfaction is the consequence of work + pleasure, and and those should be inherent to any of the other five pillars.

We know that Anet intended for GW2 to be a MMO game that would bring back plenty of RPG qualities to the genre, like the storytelling and the world immersion. We know that Anet intended for the game to reward skill over grinding. We know that MMORPGs are driven by their community, and that’s one of the key differences between them and single-player RPGs. Community usually means cooperative gameplay or competitive gameplay (pvp).

If we look at the current state of GW2, we can see that it is driven by grinding. Grinding is defined by timesinking (repeateable) content that is monotonous and skill-less. Almost every goal you want to acchieve in this game, be it skins, ascended gear or acchievements, is obtained through grinding and farming, which goes against Anet’s initial intentions for this game. To give several examples of grinding and farming in this game: We have world bosses, where players grind gold by going to their location at the right time and auto-attack until the event is completed. We have several dungeons, especially CoF path 1, where players follow the same easy pattern and get plenty of gold and some items. We have Orr events, where zergs auto-attack through everything. We have dailies and acchievements that mostly consist of doing easy tasks X amount of times.

The purpose of this thread is to look deep on what went wrong, discuss and offer suggestions and feedback to Anet.

CHALLENGING CONTENT

First, I’d say the amount of grinding is not a bad thing by itself, as long as there’s more alternative content that involves some serious degree of challenge to acchieve the same goals. If a player could choose between harder content, or safer-but-slower content, we would get several player types happy (those who want to be challenged or have some fun, those who want to grind and farm, and even those who like to do a bit of both). The main problem with grinding in this game, is that there’s no funnier alternative to acchieve the same goals. Want to get dungeon armor? Repeat the same dungeon over and over – there’s no option to choose a harder but more rewarding route. Want to get ascended gear? Either repeat fractals over and over and pray for the RNG to smile upon you, or farm dailies each day. Want to get tier 6 materials? There’s no alternative to event/ zerg farming. Maybe if the more challenging champion encounters rewarded as much – if not more, tier 6 materials than event chaining. But they don’t.

This estabilishes challenging content as a possible alternative to grinding content. Challenging content would still need to be repeatable to a certain degree, but if well designed, it should be varied enough and remain challenging for each repeat, to never fall into grinding territory.

WORLD IMMERSION AND EXPLORATION

There are, however, some mechanics that also incentivate more grinding than what was meant for them to be, like world exploration. This is also a very important issue, for a different type of players. Hearts are the most generic and grinding quests out there, and they can’t even properly tell a story or reveal tidbits of Tyria lore, like traditional quests can. And outside of Hearts, map exploration is mostly driven by rushing from point to point for a mathematical grind in filling a bar. There’s almost no mechanic that slows down the pace and allows us to immerse in the world of Tyria and let us smell its flowers, so to say, to appreciate it. The only exception are the vistas, which are non-interactive cutscenes, which makes them more intrusive than immersive. There’s no reason to interact with most players you find in the field, outside of the occasional rezzing. There are some interesting jumping puzzles for those who like them, but outside of that, all maps play the same. Exploring Tyria is mechanically cold, and this doesn’t helps world immersion.

We have seen, in the latest living world updates, the devs trying some new stuff. For example, tying exploration tasks to acchievements, which leads to more creative tasks and better attention to detail than the original system (example is the crystal collecting in bazaar, which makes it a very unique map; or the swimming and NPC dialogue acchievements in southsun, which are tiny details that make the world feel more alive and immersive).

If I could make some suggestions, is to tie other game pillars into exploration.
1) Add challenge, by making exploration more “excitingly” dangerous. Make more patrol enemies that can pop at the middle of existing fights. Make some champions roam more often. Make some good enemy formations that require high skill or a good party to pass through. Create a sense of unknown with unidentifed enemies, where the players wouldn’t know how strong they are (veterans or champions) until they aggro’d them, but more knowledgeable players would be able to identify those enemies by subtle model details. Better yet, make some of those enemies patrol some of the more dangerous areas. This would create tension, it would make some normal encounters feel timed, and it would reward players who could aggro properly, who could identify monsters by their visual, or who had good knowledg and coordenation of the map. It would also help make each map feel more distinct from each other.
2) Add story. Events can potentially be used to tell better stories or show more world lore. Secondary gameplay mechanics could be created the reflect the unique-ness of each map section and the lore behind it. Maybe in the krytan maps filled with several temples, you could pray in them for something, and follow events that would teach you some lore behind those temples? Maybe going into a more dangerous place in fireheart rise could cause a charr mob to run against you, and you would need to run and survive, or stealth and watch mobs talking to each other in a way that would teach you more about their lore. This already happens in some degree, but it’s so hidden. It should be far more prominient. Learning about Tyria’s lore should a natural consequence of each piece of the world we explore, not something “hidden” in a single NPC’s dialogue or a single object every once and then.
3) Add cooperation. If there are more means to interact with other players, the world will feel more alive, more memorable moments might be created, and the chances to meet new friends are higher. However, GW2 has a bit of an issue with cooperation, and this is the focus of my third point.

COOPERATIVE CONTENT

GW2 lacks mechanics that support player cooperation in general. Anet worried so much on making GW2 solo-able, at the cost of cooperative content and mechanics. One of the biggest problems with this is the way combat system was designed. They didn’t like that traditional heals spent too much time clicking on health bars, but instead of improving party support mechanics, they removed them altogether, and party support has degenerated into aoe skills. It certainly lacks depth. Another problem, is how self-sufficient each build is. The key to deep team playing, is each player covering the weaknesses of each other player. It’s another example where the extreme focus on solo players came at the cost of team players. If I could make a suggestion in this regard, is to add a good system to support party-support builds who want to directly help other players (something better than clicking on them and spamming heals). I’ll be creative with a suggestion for this: a partner-bound system, where several of your actions directly affect a player “bounded” to you, without having to click on them. Another suggestion I can make, is to go the FF14’s route, where players can choice between jack-of-all-trades builds for solo content, and specialized builds with easily identified weaknesses, for deeper team content. GW2’s trait system can be used for this, if the devs ever wish it. And both solo players and team players would be happy.

Better cooperative mechanics would not only enhance world immersion for our fellow explorers, but it would allow devs to design deeper group content, which GW2 is currently weak at. This could indirectly improve the strategy (or lack of) behind some of the hardest events in the game and – better yet, if new mechanics are created for party support, Anet could also have them be identified by the event’s reward system, and have events reward the players that support other players as much as it rewards players who kill the mobs.

There are still a few issues with party support. One of them is the fact that most party-driven builds are not viable for most of the game, as it is meant to be soloable. This even removes build diversity from the game. It wouldn’t be so bad if builds could be swapped any time without requiring a massive gold sink for equipments, but changing the equipment system is too late for that now. A possible solution could be to bring back the hero/ henchmen system from GW1. It could be restricted to instanced content, but it could go as far as existing in the open world, at the very least like FF14 did with with its animal partner system. This way, party support builds could be used outside of dungeons and fractals, without requiring massive equipment changes. You would always have at least an ally to support.

yes! yes! yes!

I really miss the cooperation, which is an important aspect of an mmo. I always played healer in a MMO but I cant play healer in Guild Wars 2. I dont like to DPS all the time…

And also the challenge. There is some challenging content like Arah, but the difficulty was to get all 5 players run throug the trash mobs, that is really sad.
It doesnt felt like trying weeks for a hard boss and finally get it down. That was really epic.

I think also that the stories of the hearts are boring compared to quests because there is no connection between them. In Quests you sometimes have really Quests chains that tell you a story.
Yes there was the personal story with Trahearne and Zhaitan, which i really liked but after that nothing like this came again or I was not really impressing so I cant remember it.

But maybe a lot of people dont care about those things, they just play the game without thinking about that things or they dont care about teamplay or challenge.

I really like the graphics of the game and I like the armor skins and that you can color your armor that is really cool! But the other things like the bazaar of the four winds, yes they are cool but not epic and you didnt needed to teamplay and it wasnt a real challenge.

I like to play a game where is epicness, where I can be a hero that slayed that evil hard boss or be in a group that did it.
Not a game where you have to farm gold to get cool armor or that grindaries.

Thanks for writing this text!

I guess the long post can scare people away. If anyone has any suggestions to improve the format and readibility, please tell!

I read it. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t like my comments on it and I don’t disagree with it strongly enough to attack it. I can see where you’re coming from.

Those are all important pillars of an RPG, but for an MMO there needs to be another one as well: social dynamism. The game’s focus on accessibility waters down player interaction. The trading post, for instance, removes the sense of identity intrinsic to trading between players or groups of players. Player ends up selling and buying from an interface rather than human. Another example of this is the crafting system which, because of its accessibility, functions as a progression mechanic rather than a form social glue as it does in other games.

Also, you used “suggestion.” A moderator will soon be here to move this thread into the bowels of the suggestion forums, never to see the light of day. Because semantics, that’s why.

Immersion? I don’t think this game takes itself seriously, just look at all the Gem store items, its like they’re all designed for 6 year olds.
And the living story, it’s like a never ending carnival, why can’t we get something more serious, I don’t know, like going back to Orr? Fighting the dragons?

Challenge, what challenge? There’s none in PvE.

Nick.6972:

Immersion? I don’t think this game takes itself seriously, just look at all the Gem store items, its like they’re all designed for 6 year olds.
And the living story, it’s like a never ending carnival, why can’t we get something more serious, I don’t know, like going back to Orr? Fighting the dragons?

Challenge, what challenge? There’s none in PvE.

I agree. The game is far less immersive than it could be. There are a lot of reasons for that.

And I’m a big fan of immersion. It’s why I’ve often said Guild Wars 2 is a good game, but not a great one.

One of the big things against world immersion is how inconsistent the world feels like. So, for example, a player picks the human race, and they get wowed by how absolutely wonderful Divinity’s Reach is. There’s very few RPGs, much less MMORPGs, that can get towns as awesome as DR. It’s the perfect place for a role-player to create their ideal knight or spellcaster, it’s the perfect place for a lover of epic fantasy to start their epic story, etc, etc. And then, the moment you leave Kryta, you see high-tech magical cyberpunk settings with gaming simulators and neon lasers, massive steampunk settings full of rust and smoke with the steampunk equivalent of the Death Star, and of course the mundane modern stuff from the gem store.

I don’t mind this mixture of different technologies, but it feels unnatural the way they did it in this game, due to how isolated each technology is from each other. The moment you leave one capital to enter another capital, it feels like you’re just started playing a completely different game. Why isn’t DR filled with Asura and Charr technology too? To give a fake sense of Lord of the Rings or Final Fanatasy IX/ XII fo a few hours? It creates expectations on the playerbase and then right after crashes those expections.

But I’d say inconsistency is a general problem with the whole game. If we look at many of the issues, we get to see that Anet wanted to appeal to as many players as possible, and tried to add as many different kinds of features as possible, but in turn they all feel isolated from each other, sometimes clashing with each other, creating this sense of inconsistency. Like, for example, they designed this entire game to be driven around cosmetic rewards, yet where’s the budget and the effort to support this model? Some of the armor was shoehorned into different races to ugly results (most charr’s armor), most armor consists of pallete swaps of the same model over and over with different (and most of the time, unnecessary) added details, being the medium’s armor the most glaring. And then whenever we get new skins, they are either gated by gems, or are comestically very restricted by not dyable, by not being part of a complete set, or by being the same across all armor types. I can understand that creating armor sets might be hard or time-consuming, especially when there are so many races and the like, but Anet should have thought this through since the moment they decided to make this a cosmetic-driven game. (As a side-note, there’s also too much emphasis on particle effects, and too little on different forms to make appealing equipment. There’s especially a lack of elegant or majestic pieces, while everyone in Tyria is shining like the sun.)

Regarding dynamic community, player-created events, stronger guild content, better group content, and many other mechanics can be designed to support it. I don’t think the Trading Post is inherently bad by itself, as long as the lack of human relationship from trading is compensated by something else. However, I’d say crafting is truly a missed opportunity to enhance the community. It’s nothing but another progression mechanic, as said. If I’m not wrong, Anet is planning a crafting revamp later this year, so let’s wait and see what they’ll do with it.