Guild Wars 2

I was so psyched for this game, the pre-game trailers promised so much, the team kept delaying the release ‘to polish the game’. The promise of getting away from standard questing and tanks and heals was so attractive.

Simply put, I am a little disappointed. I find the game to be unpolished and the complete chaos that ensues without any type of aggro control is beyond annoying. Let me explain further in detail.

The landscape. I run a high end machine and even on maximum graphic settings I am only seeing the landscaping plants and flora moving around my feet. The trees are the A-typical ‘fan’ style flat branch/leaves that look just awful. The rocky terrain is the worst. They’ve been programming graphics like that since the early 80’s. I want to know where the polish is? You have areas that should be able to be jumped upon blocked by ‘invisible walls’, you intentionally make finding your way up onto things tedious and boring. You lost yourselves with the vistas getting away from the jump game and threw in the towel and took the cheap route to the ‘obnoxiously difficult to find game’, coupled with shady rock formation programming and your left with some extremely annoying areas and jumps that totally make no sense whatsoever. That ruins all the fun of it.

As far as combat is concerned, there seems to be some sort of aggro built in such as if you stand still, your sure to continue to get pelted to death. This would/could work if you provided melee with the skills to deal with the damage. Im not saying one should be able to stand face to face with 10 mobs wailing on them, but having no ability to stand up 1 on 1 with a creature in a dungeon for more than a few swings is just annoying. When you dodge out you lose aggro and the chaos begins. I want to fight, I want to be using my skills to kill, not dodging and taking myself out of combat until I my heal is up, again this takes the fun out of it.

Dungeons. Sure they should be dangerous, but senselessy having mechanics built in to intentionally kill players outright like lazers/whatever is just stupidly annoying. No fun in that for the players.

Ground effects. Thank you for showing us where the blast area is but when Im outside of it, I don’t expect to be blasted for 1/2 of my health in one shot. You might as well forget the circle.

Abilities and Boons. Where are our 30 second poisons and cripples? Why are there 1 second boons? Is that joke? A one second boon with a 30% boon duration bonus is still only a 1 1/3 second boon. Why do you bother even programming that? Doesn’t it stand to reason that if some stupid undead farmer or whatever has the ability that these morons in the Pact would too? I’m obviously on the wrong side.

I pride myself on my ability to play the game well, but after several level 80’s I feel more and more every day that I’ve wasted my money. You were right to not charge a subscription fee, few would stick around long enough to collect from. It is obvious you didn’t spend the time and effort on programming the world as well as you should have, nor are many systems well thought out. It’s a shame too, I really thought GW2 was going to be something special, as it turns out, it’s really not that much fun.

I think it’s fun in spurts. There is no grind and monthly fee. For example my engineer is geared out for wvvw. When I feel like it I go out and do some. If there was a monthly fee I would have cancelled by now. But it’s free and fun once in awhile.

@Shinee

I feel there is much to be expanded upon your post, however, there is MUCH in this game that was promised and not delivered (oops, I mean exaggerated to make box sales) and stuff that sounds great in theory, as you mentioned, doesn’t really work as well as intended.

Expanding upon aggro. Aggro is a term ‘core’ MMO’s usually assign to the person who has the mobs undivided attention. This, in a core MMO game is usually the tank, who WANTS it. He not only wants it, but everyone else is trying to pass the buck on to him as well. This works, because you have a centralized character who is pretty pivital in controlling the flow of a fight. If he loses it, ‘raids’ or ‘groups’ can die.

In this game, its like hot potato, if you have it, you immediately want to pass it to the next guy, who dodges it and the next guy tries to dodge it, and if not, tosses to someone else. So on and so forth. The mob doesn’t care, so long as whatever it swats in the mean time goes into a downed state. Then, it is usually pretty content to find the next guy holding the hot potato.

The reason ‘core’ MMO’s have tanks and ‘aggro’ is because for whoever is playing that part (the tank) is usually happy to step up and say: “Stand back, ma’am….I got this!” All the while teh women swoon and titter…“My hero!”

Well.. another post said there were too many human females in the game ..

Well.. another post said there were too many human females in the game ....someone has to be expected to “titter” I suppose…

I find this game pretty fun. You should go back to older MMOs or something.

Shinee – to deal with the underlying point of your post: sorry you don’t enjoy the game, and I hope you find another game that suits you better. There is no game that satisfies everyone. The objective sales figures and the anecdotal evidence of the RMT market suggests that you are probably in the minority – that people like the game, or at least want to spend money on it. There’s no reason you should have to like the game just because other people do, and it’s great you’re clear about what you like and what you want from your leisure time. It may be the case that if you played a little more you’d like it more, but as a general rule you should be able to make a good assessment of a game from its opening hours, and if GW2 hasn’t sold you in its first 10 hours then that’s ultimately on its head.

To address your specifics though, I’m really not sure where you’re coming from. I play on a mid-high-end machine and I can play just fine with all the settings at max. I find the game graphics to be technically proficient, and the underlying art and aesthetics to be gorgeous.

Your complaints about dungeon design, AoEs, and conditions and boons suggest you don’t understand them very well. There are good reasons for these deliberate design decisions, and they form some of the basis of the challenge and complexity of higher level play. Your problems with these aspects suggest you either didn’t get very far into the game, or didn’t think very much about what you were doing. Once again, the game absolutely should do a better job of explaining these ideas, and do so at an earlier stage of the game, but being ignorant of the mechanics doesn’t make your complaints valid.

Lastly: jump puzzles were a bad idea, and even when they’re well implemented they’re wasting design resources that could have been allocated to something the engine handles well rather than platforming mechanics it handles poorly. Agreed.

GregT.4702:

platforming mechanics it handles poorly. Agreed.

Wait whut? What do you mean it handles it poorly? I dont understand.

Ring.6928:

GregT.4702:

platforming mechanics it handles poorly. Agreed.

Wait whut? What do you mean it handles it poorly? I dont understand.

Sorry, I mean that it’s not an engine built for traditional platforming gameplay.

By “platforming gameplay” I’m talking about your traditional jumping-from-platform-to-platform gameplay seen in games like Super Mario Bros or Ratchet and Clank, or hybrid forms of it seen in stuff like Uncharted or Assassin’s Creed.

The GW2 engine wasn’t designed to do that well (or if it was designed to do it well, they didn’t succeed). It has issues with camera positioning in tight spaces (a traditional problem of 3D platforming), it has trouble conveying which slopes can be walked up and which can’t, it handles fall damage unpredictably on slopes, it’s not very good at identifying and explaining non-standard mechanics (like, say, the wind on that windy jump puzzle), and it has trouble with offering appropriate rewards for that kind of activity. Characters have a poor range of movement options (move, jump, roll), and a keyboard/mouse combo in any case is not an ideal input method for this kind of gameplay. On top of all that one of the key advances in platforming games has been in recognising and rewarding intent as well as execution through stuff like auto-camera-focus, ledge-grabs and dynamic jump length, and GW2 obviously has none of that. And timed jumping puzzles or jumping puzzles involving moving platforms occasionally cause problems for people with slow-loading computers or poor internet connections.

That’s not to say it CAN’T do it – I mean, a lot of the jump puzzles are pretty fun – just that it’s not playing to its strengths. You could probably make a kart-racing game in the GW2 engine as well, and it might even not suck, but that’s not what we came here to play and I don’t think it’s a terribly smart use of development time and resources.

Kromsin.6359:

I think it’s fun in spurts. There is no grind

But there is a grind. Anet were being disingenuous on that point. For top level gear we have to grind, not just for gear that is equal in stats but for actual ordinary exotic gear that has the best stats. There is a big difference between easily obtainable greens and normal exotics. This was not the impression I got from the pre game marketing.

GregT.4702:

Ring.6928:

GregT.4702:

platforming mechanics it handles poorly. Agreed.

Wait whut? What do you mean it handles it poorly? I dont understand.

Sorry, I mean that it’s not an engine built for traditional platforming gameplay.

By “platforming gameplay” I’m talking about your traditional jumping-from-platform-to-platform gameplay seen in games like Super Mario Bros or Ratchet and Clank, or hybrid forms of it seen in stuff like Uncharted or Assassin’s Creed.

The GW2 engine wasn’t designed to do that well (or if it was designed to do it well, they didn’t succeed). It has issues with camera positioning in tight spaces (a traditional problem of 3D platforming), it has trouble conveying which slopes can be walked up and which can’t, it handles fall damage unpredictably on slopes, it’s not very good at identifying and explaining non-standard mechanics (like, say, the wind on that windy jump puzzle), and it has trouble with offering appropriate rewards for that kind of activity. Characters have a poor range of movement options (move, jump, roll), and a keyboard/mouse combo in any case is not an ideal input method for this kind of gameplay. On top of all that one of the key advances in platforming games has been in recognising and rewarding intent as well as execution through stuff like auto-camera-focus, ledge-grabs and dynamic jump length, and GW2 obviously has none of that. And timed jumping puzzles or jumping puzzles involving moving platforms occasionally cause problems for people with slow-loading computers or poor internet connections.

That’s not to say it CAN’T do it – I mean, a lot of the jump puzzles are pretty fun – just that it’s not playing to its strengths. You could probably make a kart-racing game in the GW2 engine as well, and it might even not suck, but that’s not what we came here to play and I don’t think it’s a terribly smart use of development time and resources.

Experience differ from person to person. I actually agree with you, some jumping puzzle can be frustrating. They’re all very fun though. (to me) I have some problems with the game, but its never about the content. I love the graphics. I love the jumping puzzle. I love pvp.

And I thought dungeon designs are pretty alright. Not having the trinity is such a big change and they did a great change to cater that change.

This is such an adorable game to me.
Somehow I’m having a hard time wanting to log on.

showatt.9413:

Experience differ from person to person. I actually agree with you, some jumping puzzle can be frustrating.

I think you missed my point. They could make ALL the jumping puzzles a heap of fun, and it would still be a waste of their time. If I wanted to play jumping puzzles I’d go load up Mario Brothers, and I’d have more fun.

Or to put it another way, if Arenanet could make a first class console-style platformer that could compete with the best stuff put out by Nintendo, Ubisoft or Naughty Dog, they would, and we would be talking about that game instead of Guild Wars 2.

Or to put it yet another way, if you rounded up all the people who thought, “Man, I’m indifferent about the MMO aspects of Guild Wars 2, but I sure do like the look of those jumping puzzles!” and bought a copy as result, you would have almost enough people for a rousing game of chess.

If they can’t be good enough at it to be memorable, and they can’t be good enough at it to boost sales, and it doesn’t enhance or tie into any other aspect of the game, then why are they doing it at all?

Or to put it still another way – if they shipped Guild Wars 2 with a built-in copy of, say, Red Faction Guerilla (to pick an example of a game that was good without being exceptional), I would shrug and be glad to have it. But if they told me they were going to devote development resources to MAKING Red Faction Guerilla from scratch, just so that they could ship a copy with Guild Wars 2, I would wonder why they would do that and who would possibly think that was a good idea.

Kromsin.6359:

I think it’s fun in spurts. There is no grind

There is a huge grind. If you want dungeon gear, you have to grind a dungeon many times for the piece you want. If you want a legendary, you have to grind for karma, mats, gold, WvW badges, and even more. These items may be a long-term goal, but in the end, it is still a long, and repetitive grind to obtain these items. Unless you want to look like a bottom-feeder wearing blues and greens, grinding is mandatory.

NO GRIND? haha u made me smile

Psh if your wearing yellows your a bottom feeder exotics are pretty standard on every lvl 80 hero. The rarity in this game is a joke