Guild Wars 2

Designing challenge content, and keeping it fun, is a difficult task to get right. Below are some things I think make challenges feel fun or not so fun:

Boring Mechanics:
– Massive health pools (damage sponge) offer nothing other than artificially drawing out the fight. I think giving a boss the ability to block, heal, evade, etc. is a much more entertaining way to prolong the fight, especially if there is a way to disable it temporarily. A high health pool may indicate something is epic, but this kind of epic is rarely fun to fight against, unless you add a lot of fun things to do during the fight while you whittle that health down.
– Mechanics that simplify your character’s capabilities (breakbar). The breakbar turns your chills, fears, taunts, immobs, stuns, dazes, etc, into the same thing, a way to reduce the breakbar. There are 3 stages to the breakbar, and in each stage the mob is immune to control effects. While some encounters have interesting effects attached to those breackbars, the fact your capabilities have been simplified can reduce the amount of fun had in my opinion, as it is taking away our ability to control the mob in a more precise way.

Frustrating Mechanics:
– One hit kill skills (in particular ones that are hard to see or predict). I don’t mind wipe capable skills, providing the players have a half decent chance to deal with it. Thankfully, most encounters in GW2 do offer you a chance to stop or avoid these one hit skills.
– Bad camera angles or visual noise as part of the challenge. It is frustrating enough when these things get in the way of gameplay, but when developers use those difficulties as an actual part of the challenge it just causes even more frustrations, and is an incredibly bad way to design content in my opinion. I don’t think the visual noise was intended to be part of the challenge in GW2, but I have seen instances (in other games) where bad camera angles or poor visibility from skill effects are used as part of the challenge, so I hope Anet does not use this tactic as well. If it is poor visibility from environment effects, such as bad weather or fog, that is fine, but poor visibility from your normal skills effects is not ok. No one likes that.

Fun Mechanics:
– Positioning and direction (of the boss and/or player’s) being a key component of success. It is a lot of fun when you need to lure mobs into position or get them facing a certain direction, or when you can keep them in position with a tankier player, or when players need to be in or out of certain areas. It gives us something else to think about beyond the combat and gives us something else to coordinate over beyond combo fields and finishers.
– AI with a large variety of skills, so it can react better to player actions and give the players more things to watch out for and deal with. The most enjoyable (non champ/legendary) mobs to fight in GW2, for me, are the practice NPC’s in the PvP lobby, because they have the same skills and traits set up as a full profession. They are thefore able to react a bit better than most mobs, because they have more tools at their disposal, and can through more things at you to deal with. If they made more mobs like that in game it would be a hell of a lot more entertaining. I understand that this is a difficult thing to do, I suspect it would put a lot more strain on the servers to achieve this, but I think it would be good to do for a select few mobs, such as champs and legendary bosses.
– Encounters where you don’t just fight the boss. Things like secondary objectives can add a lot of fun, but this depends on how fun these objectives are. This can often be linked with positioning, such as having to activate pressure plates at key moments. But it can also be things like keeping adds away from turrets, or collecting eggs and delivering them to NPC’s, while fighting mobs trying to stop you.

I think Anet has tried to add a lot of the fun things in GW2’s challenging content, but they have, inadvertantly or otherwise, also added some bad mechanics into the content. It really is no surprise though. GW2 is a big game, that needs to cater to a large player base, so they are bound to need to cut some corners here and there. So long as we have enough content that is challenging AND fun, I can forgive the odd bit of poor design.

So, has Anet found that balance? Well, I don’t do that much challenging group content, but from the small amount I have done my personal view is that they haven’t quite got that balance right yet. But on a positive note, it is clear to me that they are trying to improve things. Before the Living Story content we didn’t have anything like the Vinewrath and Triple Trouble. When they added the Marionette I thought ‘This is it! They have found the right path’. And while the first few (permanent) challenging content additions weren’t as fun as the Marrionette, they have gradually added more stuff that many find fun to play. So I have some hope for the future.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Ayrilana.1396:

MashMash.1645:

Ayrilana.1396:

I personally don’t see an issue with timers but that’s just me.

It’s lazy. Instead of coming up with actual mechanics, they just slap on a timer and call it ‘challenging’.

The problem is that if you remove timers, what’s to prevent players just slapping on as much vitality and toughness as they can so they can whittle down a boss? How is that challenging? Timers encourage players to play efficiently.

You mean everyone play zerker right? that’s what timers do in this game.

I didn’t say everyone should go zerker and no, timers do not do that. If you had done the raid, you’d realize full zerker isn’t the way to go for the entire team.

DresdenAllblack.1249:

I am much more critical of time gating things to make a small expansion seem larger.

This. I love the difficulty that the new content has presented; it gives me an opportunity to improve my skills with each class I play through it with. What I don’t like is having to wait to do things for no reason at all. Timegating is an incredibly lazy way to attempt to inflate the economy and increase the longevity of the game, and really shouldn’t be a thing at all. Especially in a game with no sub-fee.

Tom Gore.4035:

When there is no penalty for dying, there’s no reason for the developer to make fights “fair”.

Sure there is. It makes for a better game.

Rin.1046:

- Mechanics that simplify your character’s capabilities (breakbar). The breakbar turns your chills, fears, taunts, immobs, stuns, dazes, etc, into the same thing, a way to reduce the breakbar. There are 3 stages to the breakbar, and in each stage the mob is immune to control effects. While some encounters have interesting effects attached to those breackbars, the fact your capabilities have been simplified can reduce the amount of fun had in my opinion, as it is taking away our ability to control the mob in a more precise way.

One of the more critical problems with the breakbar is that the immunities are all-inclusive. In some cases, downgrading CC would be more fitting than ignoring it entirely. Stun/Daze/Immobilize becomes functional cripples to help with kiting. Weakness should almost always be an option to mitigate damage. The “stun on break” mechanic could shift to “vulnerable to conditions” so that during the recharge phase, the boss takes Weakness/Immobilize/Cripple/Chill like it’s supposed to.
That’s much deeper gameplay than CC being “damage” to a breakbar.

- One hit kill skills (in particular ones that are hard to see or predict). I don’t mind wipe capable skills, providing the players have a half decent chance to deal with it. Thankfully, most encounters in GW2 do offer you a chance to stop or avoid these one hit skills.

I doubt ANet is going to get rid of that. It’s one of the problems that pushed and continue to push the game into a nothing-but-damage situation. If the party armorball takes 30k from some overpowered attack, all his toughness and vitality is worthless. It’s expecially noticable in large group content, where basic mobs eventually get so much damage, normal mitigation can’t really keep up. The answer to large groups isn’t to punish a single individual with overwhelming damage, but to target multiple people at once with the same or slightly higher damage of what they’re already used to.

- Bad camera angles or visual noise as part of the challenge. It is frustrating enough when these things get in the way of gameplay, but when developers use those difficulties as an actual part of the challenge it just causes even more frustrations, and is an incredibly bad way to design content in my opinion. I don’t think the visual noise was intended to be part of the challenge in GW2, but I have seen instances (in other games) where bad camera angles or poor visibility from skill effects are used as part of the challenge, so I hope Anet does not use this tactic as well. If it is poor visibility from environment effects, such as bad weather or fog, that is fine, but poor visibility from your normal skills effects is not ok. No one likes that.

Quoting for lawl. I had this happen to me last night. Pitched battle, 4v1 or something like that. Foliage clogged my screen aaaand.. Elite Sniper’d to death because I couldn’t see. “Seriously?” was about all I could muster before shrugging it off.

- AI with a large variety of skills, so it can react better to player actions and give the players more things to watch out for and deal with. The most enjoyable (non champ/legendary) mobs to fight in GW2, for me, are the practice NPC’s in the PvP lobby, because they have the same skills and traits set up as a full profession. They are thefore able to react a bit better than most mobs, because they have more tools at their disposal, and can through more things at you to deal with. If they made more mobs like that in game it would be a hell of a lot more entertaining. I understand that this is a difficult thing to do, I suspect it would put a lot more strain on the servers to achieve this, but I think it would be good to do for a select few mobs, such as champs and legendary bosses.

I would love this. Oddly enough, snipers and no-range frogs are two of my favorite enemies from a design perspective. (Elite snipers can go to Hades. That much damage shouldn’t be on an HP sponge…)
Snipers are sufficiently threatening, low HP, have anti-melee pressure, susceptable to control. A few tweaks and I’d be quite happy with them.
No-range frogs could be better if they actually “dodged” instead of standing there doing nothing. Make them expend a resource and give them counter-play. As it is, they play mostly like a shortbow thief, for the good and bad of it, but it makes their dodging and stealth rather endless. Better AI would be grand.

- Encounters where you don’t just fight the boss. Things like secondary objectives can add a lot of fun, but this depends on how fun these objectives are. This can often be linked with positioning, such as having to activate pressure plates at key moments. But it can also be things like keeping adds away from turrets, or collecting eggs and delivering them to NPC’s, while fighting mobs trying to stop you.

I’ve said in older threads that monolithic fights just don’t work well in GW2. Bosses ignore CC (partially fixed by the Defiant shift), monolith design leads to one-hit-kills for ‘challenge,’ and the whole thing eventually becomes a zerg-mash. Thaumanova is actually one of my more liked boss encounter sets. Subject 6 requires a lot of damage mitigation (dodging, healing poison), punishes mindless damage, and requires managing adds that need to be murdered/CC’d.
The reactor boss uses the environment as the enemy, and for as many times as I’ve fallen in kitten and died halfway, nothing feels as good as being the last one standing with the last 5% left to go and pulling that clutch win. But it still requires decent damage, since the last burn phase starts to permanently remove platforms, there’s a ‘soft enrage’ built in.

Overall, agreed that I’m glad to see ANet continuing to grow. 3 years is still young-ish in MMO terms, and they’re just now settling into a groove on character design, so encounter design will soon follow, hopefully.

maddoctor.2738:

Swift.1930:

As to the hylek stealth guys, usually I’m not actually hurt by them so much as inconvenienced. Seriously, I can take them down in maybe ten hits without losing more than… say… 25% health, but they just vanish and loiter invisibly for ages. If they just teleported, sure, that’d make sense. I thought the whole idea was that they were frogs and were jumping (and that the invis was just a cheap animation cop-out), but I can’t tell.

You can see them with Nuhoch Stealth mastery.

Seriously? Stealth reveal is only 9,999,999 XP away? In most games there’s counter-stealth skills… funny that it’s an unlocked passive here. The thing is, I wouldn’t bother with spending mastery points on that – except to allow me to access the next mastery. I couldn’t care much less about the invis element except for the tedium (which is why I sometimes just give up and walk away). Soooo do they actually have a jump animation? Or do they just go invisible and walk to a different place? (I’d ask if they use the thief’s shadowstep skill, but they wield longbows.)