… just call me … Tim :)
(edited by Balthazzarr.1349)
The PoF Beta... what do you think so far?
Mobs seem kind of tanky to power damage idk.
(edited by Justine.6351)
Got in… did the first part of the story on it… then found “mastery point”. Yay a mastery point, right there in the city. Oh wait… it’s more like a “heart”…. and super pain in the butt exercise that I finally gave up on. I’m not sure why this was implemented this way but I finally gave up on it… went out into the desert for a few minutes… and I haven’t been back.
Probably won’t be back until the update comes out. For me at this point, I’m not seeing a compelling reason to go back there. I spent a bundle on it so I suppose I’ll have to go there when it comes out just to try that Mastery Point again and ride some mounts. But for now, it’s back to the ‘old world’ and WvW for me.
Same for me. I was so bored yesterday that I have not bothered to return to the PoF preview today.
That was the lamest, least compelling introduction into a strory line I have seen in a computer game so far. But since Ellen Kiel’s office will open at release, I assume there will be more story to it. I also hope that what we have seen so far was not the introduction into the Crystal Desert, because it felt like, “So, we got you here, now see if you can find something interesting to do by yourself.” Yawn…
By the way, blitz events are not the way to make a map and story more compelling, either.
Mobs seem kind of tanky to power damage idk.
You’re right, i used warrior to try and power damage through the mobs but i ended up dying before i even did any substantial damage to them =/
i mean like wtf?? in HoT and even core tyria warrior felt powerful and overpowered the mobs! but in poF i cannot even dodge to avoid dmg because they even deal so much conditions to me!
Mobs seem kind of tanky to power damage idk.
You’re right, i used warrior to try and power damage through the mobs but i ended up dying before i even did any substantial damage to them =/
i mean like wtf?? in HoT and even core tyria warrior felt powerful and overpowered the mobs! but in poF i cannot even dodge to avoid dmg because they even deal so much conditions to me!
Think it’s their way of making vulnerability more desirable in regular pve play. Might have to find cheap easy ways to stack vulnerability, maybe mace offhand will become popular for warriors idk.
I’m finding the combat pretty fun so far. Those fire hydras are just awesome!
I chose elementalist with a full set of celestial gear, water/air/tempest (fresh air) build. Strong heals and decent power-based burst through fresh air. The veterans definitely have some meat on them, but I’m not finding anything to be too much of a threat so far. But then I am using a pretty tanky build.
Mobs seem kind of tanky to power damage idk.
You’re right, i used warrior to try and power damage through the mobs but i ended up dying before i even did any substantial damage to them =/
i mean like wtf?? in HoT and even core tyria warrior felt powerful and overpowered the mobs! but in poF i cannot even dodge to avoid dmg because they even deal so much conditions to me!
Think it’s their way of making vulnerability more desirable in regular pve play. Might have to find cheap easy ways to stack vulnerability, maybe mace offhand will become popular for warriors idk.
yeah.. warrior right now after being nerfed by the balance patch is in a pretty bad spot right now anyway.. perhaps vuln will be more necessary and mace offhand yeah..
So far the scenery is nice, the night sky is absolutely gorgeous, the fights are fun, and mounts seem well implemented.
I am not one to try to do too much in a demo or beta, but I had decided to hold off on buying this expansion until well after release, if at all, due to my perceptions of HoT. Now I shall probably prepurchase PoF.
It is too early for me to judge the final release, but some things irk me badly.
1. Lack of Waypoints. This is the main reason I mostly avoid WvW, and no mounts are not the replacement or the solution. I feel like I am wasting time running somewhere after death or wrong path.
2. Unidentified gear. Just No!
3. Fire throughout the Story chapter looks bad, really bad and we are fighting the Flaming god of war.
(edited by Excellent Name.9574)
So far the scenery is nice, the night sky is absolutely gorgeous, the fights are fun, and mounts seem well implemented.
I am not one to try to do too much in a demo or beta, but I had decided to hold off on buying this expansion until well after release, if at all, due to my perceptions of HoT. Now I shall probably prepurchase PoF.
Pretty much my thoughts as well.
I have always liked how they made traversing the environment feel in this game. The animations are well done, makes it seem like everything has weight to it yet the controls are surprisingly responsive.
The weakest link to this is ironically the gliders, despite giving the most freedom, they are boring as sin. The mounts though? They feel great.
And the godkitten MUSIC. So atmospheric.
Story is boring as hell, the first heart was pure cancer in terms of design and length of time it took, mobs being obviously tuned for condition damage was annoying, mounts are absolutely terrible and contribute to the design choices made in the dull and empty portion of the map we have now.
I only really care about new elite specs and instanced content anyway, the open world stuff in GW is kind of awful.
So far the scenery is nice, the night sky is absolutely gorgeous, the fights are fun, and mounts seem well implemented.
I am not one to try to do too much in a demo or beta, but I had decided to hold off on buying this expansion until well after release, if at all, due to my perceptions of HoT. Now I shall probably prepurchase PoF.
Pretty much my thoughts as well.
I have always liked how they made traversing the environment feel in this game. The animations are well done, makes it seem like everything has weight to it yet the controls are surprisingly responsive.
The weakest link to this is ironically the gliders, despite giving the most freedom, they are boring as sin. The mounts though? They feel great.
And the godkitten MUSIC. So atmospheric.
Yeah the music is outstanding.
Now, I can only hope, hope, hope, that the story and elite spec teams live up to the standards set by their peers in other departments.
I’ve enjoyed most of it and the fights are challenging but not overwhelming, i certainly do agree power needs a serious boost (Power Reaper). As far as the layout, at first i wasn’t thrilled with the thought of desert but it’s beautiful for the most part and so far not as empty as i pictured.
I for one enjoyed the bounties, the hearts and other quests and found a lot of things i think are being saved for release in this area. The raptors are gorgeous but i would like to see more dye blocks for them.
Lots of great hints of things to come, i loved the unidentified item’s although it’s a throwback it’s certainly a space saver. I think to be honest it would make a great secondary mastery to train up which would allow you to be able to identify the items once your skill is high enough. I also loved the hint regarding bigger bags, although the cost seems a tad high & the new salvage types likely leading to new items as long as there is inventory created for them.
All in all i am very happy i purchased this, but as mentioned i truly hope that power builds are brought up a few notches to compensate for the new tougher creatures and mechanics!
Vini, Vidi, Vici, Viridis…I came, I saw, I conquered…I got a green??
Lots of great hints of things to come, i loved the unidentified item’s although it’s a throwback it’s certainly a space saver. I think to be honest it would make a great secondary mastery to train up which would allow you to be able to identify the items once your skill is high enough. I also loved the hint regarding bigger bags, although the cost seems a tad high & the new salvage types likely leading to new items as long as there is inventory created for them.
I don’t mind the Unidentified items. Not yet at least. Lot of folks ain’t happy with it though, understandably as more RNG is rarely popular.
Despite the map size being touted so much the area we have been allowed to explore so far feels pretty empty in terms of things to do. Perhaps the bigger metas and events will be added with the full release.
Battlelord Taeres
I love desert themes so I’m looking forward to seeing more of what the Crystal Desert has to offer. I don’t really feel the increased scale of map size that Anet advertised. Feels much like the previous GW2 maps in terms of scale, even when taking into account the locked region. Artistically it’s well done, but it looks like they compressed the distance down for some themes and didn’t expand out in areas that would have benefited it.
Part of me was hoping I’d see ESO Alik’r desert style cities and map size . Would have been cool if they could upgrade the GW2 engine to render sprawling cities and large scale maps like that. Nevertheless, this is a start for them and if they make bank on the expansion, they can continue to upgrade their tech along the way.
I thought I would be playing the demo all weekend, but I got bored after a few hours yesterday, so haven’t been back on it today, and won’t tomorrow either. Likewise oddly my friend list and guild members don’t seem to have been on it today either (while I was online).
I’d already preordered it, so will buy and complete at least the story. But I found nothing interesting for me in the demo, the instance & map part were both boring. The rest of PoF maps / content will have to improve significantly if I’m going to spend any time there after completing the story.
I’m really looking forward to the expack right now since the betas been a lot of fun for me. It feels like the exploring is going to be cool since I’ve been finding a lot of stuff off the beaten path (There’s a giant chest guarded by elites on one of the pyramids and several other things on top of the mountains/cliffs), I can’t wait to wander around the rest of the maps.
I can finally not be sigil spammed by blues and greens when I salvage so i’m pretty pleased with that. Although I can see why others may be annoyed by the identification kits.
I’m not going to comment on the story or anything since I don’t expect it to be that complete considering its a demo. I’ll wait till we get to see the full intro for that.
Jadis Narnia-Sylvari Ranger of [EDGE]
Dragonbrand
Dragonbrand
(edited by Zalani.9827)
To me, it felt like a way to justify the mounts, I still believe they were not needed. So instead of not doing mounts, we are given something weak, empty and pointlessly large just to make mounts work and no other reason whatsoever
I liked the expansion over all. I was mobbed by the mobs.
- I found myself fighting 6-10 at once. I found this happening regularly and found myself dying on certain characters.
*I also found my dodge to be noneffective in the story battle as I would dodge well before fire was launched but still take the damage.
*I made two demo characters, one with my own slot space. I can’t delete either so I can’t get my slot back. I tried several times and while I typed everything correctly, neither one will delete. - Unidentified gear, why now? A turn off and necessary
*Bounties, I got to them only to find out they were already done. Needs to be a way to identify the completed ones. It wastes so much time and makes them feel useless.
*Builds for the characters, again altered playing styles. While understandable to an extent, keep in mind this caused many people to ultimately leave classes and the game with HOT. This is just an observation from in game chat and chat in my guild from many players who seemed to agree with each other. Someone above mentioned warrior issue, happened to me when I tried guardian and thief, happened to many others. No way to handle the onslaught of so many, even when trying specifically not to aggro.
*I think its pretty clear this expansion revolves around mounts and doing content with them. I think many challenges and mission will require them. I am ok with this, however not if it comes at the expense of traveling around by waypoints.
While my comments may seem negative, these are just the things I noticed which could become issues for people, myself included on some of them. I did like the expansion and had a good time until I got bored with the content and frustrated by the bounties. The content was limited so no issues with that, it was just a small sample.
(edited by psychosiz.7109)
Well I finally got to play a bit.
As always, of the little bit of art and environment I saw, it was top notch stuff, GW2 has always rocked their aesthetics and PoF was not an exception to this.
Sadly I was lagged horribly, and.. did no get to do much.
Maybe tomorrow it will clear up and I’ll get a better chance to try things out.
There are two kinds of gamers, salty, and extra salty
Underwhelming demo. Hope the finished product is more engaging.
Its great so far. Only thing is Unidentified gears and a few gated things that prolong things, other than that demo is great.
Map design is somewhat of an improvement, but largely a lateral movement in to a different direction than HoT, which I guess is itself an improvement given the horrible choice of direction of the HoT areas.
Look and feel of the environment is much more interesting, just having empty space feels so nice after the cluttered areas of the previous expansion.
Mounts are fun, love how tactile they feel, not the snappy weightless movements I’ve always hated about GW2 player character models.
Some of the organizational systems like gear identification and currencies needs refining, but are a step in the right direction over GW2s horrible currency/keys/mats/junk inventory clutter. For example, we should not be charged for identifying the average gear drop, specialty gear sure, but the average gear drop should be a free identify, and exist, for that tier at least, solely to give players a more manageable inventory.
That having been said, still not prepurchasing until I see for myself that they haven’t purposely and maliciously powercreeped the specializations like they did last time, even after claiming then, just as they have now, that they would do no such thing.
(edited by Conncept.7638)
I enjoyed the demo so far, mounts are awesome, the big open maps are a joy, difficulty of the mobs are between core and hot. the melted to my power dragon hunter. All an all I had a great expernance in the demo.
- Aesthetics: Top notch, as always GW2 landscape art is very well done.
- Mobs: Hydras! One of my favorite mobs from the Crystal Desert in GW. In fact, I can’t say I found a roaming mob in that limited area that I did not enjoy fighting.
- Story: Just did the intro, not even sure that there was an option for more. Pretty generic, tbh. Props for village rescuing as was done in the tutorial for NIghtfall, but alas no corsair ship.
- Bounties: I took one, not knowing how they worked, and then wandered outside of town. Mr. Whoever popped up straight away. I thought, “This is probably meant to be a squad-based iteration, but what the hey.” Fought him for around five minutes (pays to be a ranger sometime, because I’m surely not a solo-Lupicus type of player). Pets and cool downs burned through with maybe 10% of his bar gone (maybe less, I did not have the % indicator enabled so I’m guesstimating), and I got that I was right. Now, I don’t have a problem with these things being for larger groups. However, the way this one worked, brace for complaints about bounties from some of the people who take them unknowing and get stomped.
- Raptor Mount: I don’t seem to have the motion sickness thing discussed elsewhere, though I had to shelve ES: Oblivion and drop Unreal Tournament due to same. I also like the way the raptor moves. The jump distance, however, does not feel all that special.
- Identifying Loot: Oh, kitten, no! Nuke this feature from orbit before release. It’s the only way to be sure. Whoever thought this would be fun … well, I won’t go there because this is only a game … but this was the only thing I encountered in the demo that made me think maybe I won’t buy PoF. Making already cumbersome inventory management even more involved, with more clicking, turns what was a chore into a really annoying chore.
- Aesthetics: Top notch, as always GW2 landscape art is very well done.
- Mobs: Hydras! One of my favorite mobs from the Crystal Desert in GW. In fact, I can’t say I found a roaming mob in that limited area that I did not enjoy fighting.
- Story: Just did the intro, not even sure that there was an option for more. Pretty generic, tbh. Props for village rescuing as was done in the tutorial for NIghtfall, but alas no corsair ship.
- Bounties: I took one, not knowing how they worked, and then wandered outside of town. Mr. Whoever popped up straight away. I thought, “This is probably meant to be a squad-based iteration, but what the hey.” Fought him for around five minutes (pays to be a ranger sometime, because I’m surely not a solo-Lupicus type of player). Pets and cool downs burned through with maybe 10% of his bar gone (maybe less, I did not have the % indicator enabled so I’m guesstimating), and I got that I was right. Now, I don’t have a problem with these things being for larger groups. However, the way this one worked, brace for complaints about bounties from some of the people who take them unknowing and get stomped.
- Raptor Mount: I don’t seem to have the motion sickness thing discussed elsewhere, though I had to shelve ES: Oblivion and drop Unreal Tournament due to same. I also like the way the raptor moves. The jump distance, however, does not feel all that special.
- Identifying Loot: Oh, kitten, no! Nuke this feature from orbit before release. It’s the only way to be sure. Whoever thought this would be fun … well, I won’t go there because this is only a game … but this was the only thing I encountered in the demo that made me think maybe I won’t buy PoF. Making already cumbersome inventory management even more involved, with more clicking, turns what was a chore into a really annoying chore.
The longer jump for the raptor comes from training the mastery. Also, holding down the spacebar, or using the lowest option in the option panel so you can use your dodge key instead of space bar.
Over all I liked what little I played but I didn’t feel there was enough of it to really get the full effect of the expansion. The mounts were may favorite part of it. I’m not a huge fan of big open zones (I prefer the 3D complex zones in HOT), but it seemed okay
The raptor racing was fun, as were some of the bosses. Only tried one bouty and it was fine for what it was, but just going out and doing a boss fight isn’t why I play this game.
Mobs seem kind of tanky to power damage idk.
I was running full glass FA Sc/Wh tempest and haven’t had a problem with mobs except the hyena bounty boss that kept teleporting to me and 2-shotting into downstate.
To me, it felt like a way to justify the mounts, I still believe they were not needed. So instead of not doing mounts, we are given something weak, empty and pointlessly large just to make mounts work and no other reason whatsoever
My sentiments exactly, I know we didn’t get to try a full map, or one with a meta, but the whole place felt like a large boring empty space stretched out to give space / distance to justify mounts. I’d much rather have had smaller/regular sized maps which are actually interesting, full of content, interesting things to see etc, not bigger maps that have nothing in them so there’s space to run on a mount.
It is overall… really bad.
However, it has lots of positive elements.
The Good
- The mount animations are fantastic.
- The zone overall seems really pretty and well designed.
- I love how some of the events are a bit more complex than just spamming autoattacks at things, for example the race through the city to collect coins.
- Did I mention the animations? Sooooo pretty :o
- Event balance feels really good.
- The new mobs are cool, lots of cool little elements which can kill you if you don’t remember them.
- Love jumping chasms!
The Bad
- The raptor gets stuck on everything. It’s even worse than my Revenant’s mace-attacks.
- Bounties are confusing and often over before you notice what you’re doing. There have been a few threads how to improve the UI for them, because frankly that’s all they need.
The Ugly
Unidentified gear. But this deserves special explanation.
The original problem
It takes way too many clicks to sort inventory in GW2. So many that I have repeatedly considered quitting (and have reduced my playtime) simply because I’m way worried about RSI. No other MMORPG I’ve played since I started with EQ1 back in 1999 had inventory management even a fraction as problematic as Guild Wars 2, largely based on the sheer amount of “stuff” thrown at you and how many clicks it requires to process.
The “supposed” solution
We saw that WP image of the unidentified gear. “Hey yeah, that’d be a way!”. We could have 1 stack of unID’d gear each, replacing all bag and item drops, which can be salvaged directly for the same results salvaging that amount of actual items would have had, or identify it if we want the actual gear. Ideally also make the mass-salvage not drop the sigils/runes and hey, inventory woes (mostly) solved.
The actual implementation
Basically instead we get all we had before and the new unID’d gear on top. And, it’s only one type, green quality, but it can ID into all kinds of items.
This is a “worst of all worlds” implementation:
- We still get our inventory filled up with random items.
- We still have to open lots of bags, tons of extra clicks.
- We also now have to be careful to not accidentally mass-salvage the unID’d gear.
- Then we have to complete a heart, ID all the gear, then mass-salvage / process / sell the gear, since now we have lots of extra greens/rares/exotics.
Frankly, and without meaning this in a bad way, this is just cruel. It’s like someone in the office saw the complaints about how loot in GW2 is done, and figured he’ll show us how much worse it could be.
Why do this? The implementation is even very close to an actual improvement where instead of tons of greens/blues/bags we get 4 stacks total of unID’d gear, one each for green, blue, yellow, orange, and that’s all we get. Neat, compact, efficient.
The strength of heart to face oneself has been made manifest. The persona Carighan has appeared.
(edited by Carighan.6758)
I am definitely in the loving it camp.
I hated HoT, the map and minimap couldn’t cope with the multilevels well; in a game that wants you to move and dodge during combat they put you on these narrow paths with no room for maneuver; you could barely take a step without some event kicking off; basic exploring was almost impossible and stopping to admire the view very inadvisable.
So for me the Crystal Dessert Demo is really a step in the right direction, the scenery is beautiful and you aren’t likely to end up getting steamrolled by mobs while you stop and look around you. Enemies are plentiful but don’t swamp you. I am hoping that there will be plenty of nooks and crannies, and ruins to explore that can be done solo rather than needing massive parties to deal with. My ranger is eyeing up all the new animals and wanting to know where the juveniles are, and hoping that this time they aren’t hidden behind major events, Sand Lions, and Sand Eels are already on my want list, I also saw what looked to be wild horned camels wandering the dessert, and want to know when i can have one of them as a mount.
I’m not big on following stories, but managed this start easily enough on both a ranger and a necromance, the two classes that I main most, I didn’t bother about gear or traits, just took what i started in, my ranger was downed a couple of times but never died and the necromancer just walked it.
Overall a distinct improvement on HoT in my opinion.
Mobs seem kind of tanky to power damage idk.
I was running full glass FA Sc/Wh tempest and haven’t had a problem with mobs except the hyena bounty boss that kept teleporting to me and 2-shotting into downstate.
Its ironic but the ele I ran seemed to be better here as well. Its was the exact opposite with the same build in HIT so I expected a similar result. I was pleasantly surprised at the play of the ele in this event.
Loved the raptors, dying the raptors and lion ranger pet. Hated the sous chef mastery as he kept moving when you threw the item at him. Also hated that you couldn’t kill the twisters near the big chest on top of the pyramid. Overall i really enjoyed the beta.
Tifa
Reaper
Everything she touched crumbled to dust.
Reaper
Everything she touched crumbled to dust.
Mobs seem kind of tanky to power damage idk.
I was running full glass FA Sc/Wh tempest and haven’t had a problem with mobs except the hyena bounty boss that kept teleporting to me and 2-shotting into downstate.
Its ironic but the ele I ran seemed to be better here as well. Its was the exact opposite with the same build in HIT so I expected a similar result. I was pleasantly surprised at the play of the ele in this event.
Well the mobs are kind of odd. My two demo character is a marauder dd (sort of raid specced) and an apothecary hybrid condi scrapper built for WvW (thats literally the opposite of a raid build, no bombs, grenades, mortar or anything lol). I tested both against the hydras and was quite surprised that while the dd has roflstomp damage and can 2 shot mobs… for some reason the mediocre condi build seem to match it vs the hydras. Plus I can facetank their attacks. Engaged 3 of them at once np in that valley, lol. Heads everywhere.
Got to remember to try a condi ele…
There is a lot of missing information when spending an hour in a Beta map… however, I may seriously never know after playing this uninspiring Beta. I felt I was done with the map after 1 hour, and felt no desire to go back into it, for any reason, what so ever. Still don’t.
TBPH, from what I saw, It felt more like an old forgotten unpublished GW1 expansion that was dug up and digitally remastered. (Palawa Joko with new and improved sand worms to ride?) From the landscape, to a purely nostalgic, and, apparently totally non-functional, transporter pad memory game, …to the very unwanted “item identification kits”, it felt more like I was visiting GW1.1, than playing a GW2 Beta. It actually left me feeling completely uninspired to purchase it. And, I am worried that flooding the content that is introduced in there into the old maps, might seriously ruin those.
Mounts, to me, are like riding an ostrich. And, I want nothing to do with riding an ostrich around in the game. But, since they are faster, and can jump farther, we are all doomed to HAVE to use them now for speed and efficiency if nothing else. It effectively breaks the game for anyone who liked the game mechanics the way it was. And, doesn’t want to bounce around riding on an ostrich on ALL the maps, all the time. (Me for example, it honestly makes me want to quit the game entirely after all these years, and move on.)
Rebuilding and re-armoring all characters (yet again) for new elite trait lines still leaves me flat. And, since they will almost certainly obsolete all other builds, it will be necessary to have them to continue the game and remain even remotely competitive.
Because these things are becoming essentially mandatory items, I feel they may ultimately “dead end” the game for a lot of people.
I have to wonder, why didn’t they do something completely original, and completely GW2 relevant? Like (instead of mounts) building and driving your own Golem, with the help of your Asuran friends? Which is already part of GW2. Instead of changing the whole game to involve riding ostrich mounts that have never existed in this game, and make no sense to it, and may very well change (ruin?) all of the rest of the previous game play because of it.
I could have played many hours this weekend. But, I was completely done after an hour, and had absolutely no desire to return to the Beta map for any reason. The recent story expansion maps have been far better, and those didn’t completely upend the whole game, and we’ve had much more to do in them.
Over all, I liked it.
For those being bored.. Yeah, ANet probably hid a lot of the story and quests for this demo. It was designed for a “taste” of the new XPac, not hours of playtime. MAYBE spending a few hours, at most. Not like it was a beta to go in and find bugs.
Charrdian, Ashura Mesmer, Norn Ranger, Sylvari Elementalist and Human Magic Engineer
Got in… did the first part of the story on it… then found “mastery point”. Yay a mastery point, right there in the city. Oh wait… it’s more like a “heart”…. and super pain in the butt exercise that I finally gave up on. I’m not sure why this was implemented this way but I finally gave up on it… went out into the desert for a few minutes… and I haven’t been back.
Which one? I found two in the city: fetching ingredients (did not bother to do) and hopping from one roof to another. The latter took a few tries but I eventually got it.
The demo showed the typical great art quality from Anet, but it also showed a lot of “pleasing to the lesser common factor” choices on their part, boring, easy, railroading designs that IMO are a step back from HoT.
The main problem is with the mount:
The mount itself is very well done, beautifully animated, and answer a lot of the fears I had about it:
- It moves really fast, but can’t strafe, insta turn or evade, so It doesn’t make swiftness and other speed/exploring abilities obsolete.
- Since it doesn’t have combat abilities except for the engage one, it doesn’t impose yet another meta build to use it.
- Since we can’t interact with people, nodes or other activable things while mounted, it avoids the horrendous visual cluttering that is so typical of normal mount-happy games.
However, the big problem is Anet made the mount not a nice mechanic you can use to enhance your experience of the game, but a mandatory ability you have to use all the time, which also DEFINES EVERYTHING ELSE.
- The map is flat, forcefully enlarged, and incredibly boring to navegate. Like a common mmorpg from decades ago, awful.
- There is NO challenge to get anywhere, and no alternative to do it on a mount. The only problem you have to solve is linear distance, and the mount is the pre-defined fool-proof answer.
- Mission locations and terrain gaps are arbitrarily distributed along the map with the sole purpose of forcing you to travel a long distance tens of times, artificially making the mounts feel “useful”.
- Where gliding felt like a natural way to explore maps (not only HoT or LS3, but any map!), here the map, story, npc and challenge locations, and no doubt, even the mobs routines and balance have to rigidly adapt so the mount have any resemblance of purpose. Its way too forced and artificial.
“Only problem with the Engineer is
that it makes every other class in the game boring to play.”
Hawks
that it makes every other class in the game boring to play.”
Hawks
(edited by Ardid.7203)
The intro was cool.
The mount is cool.
The mount race was fun.
Deserts are kind of boring.
Putzed around in town a bit. And did a bit of exploring. Map is ok, nothing great. Not much to look at. Didn’t spend a lot of time in beta, don’t want to burn out on it.
Eh, not my taste.
Love the desert theme, is nicely done. Cool to see one of the Six enter the picture.
But, I was not a fan of Hot, nor am I a fan of PoF.
When I log in, I’ll do core maps which I have enjoyed since the beginning of the game.
I imagine PoF will appeal to fans of HoT and they will have a good time.
Played it for about 20 minutes. Not impressed with that sample.
I imagine PoF will appeal to fans of HoT and they will have a good time.
Doubt it. It negates two of the major parts of HoT: gliding and vertical maps. Only thing in common are non face-rollable mobs.
“Only problem with the Engineer is
that it makes every other class in the game boring to play.”
Hawks
that it makes every other class in the game boring to play.”
Hawks
Tried the demo. Got the mount. Ran around. Had some fun.
I didn’t play too much though, as it is only a demo. The thing is that you’re likely to get bored when playing a demo, since any progress you make is literally meaningless, and that might, in turn, negatively influence your opinion of the product before actually getting to play the full version.
From what I could see, looking at some of the areas we weren’t allowed to go to during the demo, there may indeed be high, vertical areas where gliding might be still needed (or different mounts that have vertical capability.