Heart of Thorns - Presentation Concerns

Heart of Thorns - Presentation Concerns

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Eirdyne.9843

Eirdyne.9843

I have invested quite a lot of time into Guild Wars 2 since it released. Over the years I have found that the game has generally moved along much better than the rest of the MMOs I have played (and I’ve played all of them).

By and by, most of the concerns that I have ever had about Anet and NCSoft’s handling of Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 have always come down just a few things. In Guild Wars 1 my concerns tended toward PvE where my mother and sister concentrated most of our time. In Guild Wars 2 my concerns have largely been aesthetics, consistency and continuation of product, and then communication to and from Anet.

Today, I’m focusing this post on communication, which has always been direly lacking from Anet. I’ve come to believe this lack of communication is the result of Anet being a Korean company. As such, the standard of communication between company and its consumers is different in practice than what can be expected of a Western model. Whether or not this is better or worse is not my concern in this post. Rather, my concern is what Anet may end up presenting Heart of Thorns to be.

I’ll be basing my argument along side WoodenPotatoes, starting at 9:25 and beyond, though this entire video should be taken as a very legitimate concern.

WoodenPotatoes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUtMGS3ezLI

Since far back 1997 when Ultima Online really set off the MMO market the standard for what precisely “expansion” really has not changed.

You can get an idea about this from keywording “Expansions” here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online#Expansions

This means from 1997 to the present, no matter the game nor genre, “expansion” has come with what is now understood to be the meaning of “expansion”: new lands and new creatures.
As games became better funded each subsequent expansion tended to include as much content as that which had come before it, but with additional features such as dungeons, UI improvements, and occasionally new races.

Heart of Thorns - Presentation Concerns

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Eirdyne.9843

Eirdyne.9843

All of this Guild Wars 2 has, but the MMO world is precarious. Over the last few years consumers have seen a lot of “front loaded” E3 presentations of games which, when trialed at E3 seemed great, but when launched turned out to be a sham. Most recently this happened with World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor. Activision Blizzard, once Blizzard Entertainment, published that Warlords of Draenor would come with many features, cities, environments which would have revitalized the genre. Instead, players were left with a game rendered absent of practically all of those things. The result was a sudden drop of 3 million subscribers.

While I side entirely with WoodenPotatoes analysis of Heart of Thorns, this also means I submit the same concerns. My purpose in buying the pre-purpose was to simply say, “Hey, I support you guys and still feel my money invested in you thus far should continue. Here’s essentially a 20 dollars on top of what should be a 30 dollar charge so you can put some more funds toward smoothing this into a really glamorous launch.”

That said, most of your new players are not going to think of it as such. They are going to see a 50 pound/dollar charge and say, “What? Um, yeah no. I can get better from Old Republic.” And that’s that. Your veteran players, on the other hand, will look at Guild Wars 1 and ask, “Now wait a minute. I got a free character slot ever expansion. Why are grabbing money? What are you doing with that then?” And for those of us who usually buy the collectors addition, the 99 dollar charge has really caused some fury. This includes opinions from friends I was going to ask to join. Even they did the math. 5000 gems is a 50 dollar value? That’s cool because the “standard” pack IS 50 dollars.

What the majority of players are going to find from this expansion are a few new areas and then say, “That’s it?”

My greatest concern is that a huge majority of player base is not going to care about the really genuine density of content being provided. We’re they’re going to expect is a world as big as Tyria already is. They’re going to want to put all of their time into exploring, having a good time fighting a camp of baddies, and then talking about it over dinner. That’s really not for sale in this expansion, but it is in most every other MMO.

I don’t know how to address this, but I can see this becoming a real problem the moment the expansion comes out. Players will want to know what you are doing with all that money since the gem store sale last summer to now, plus all these pre-orders. As a person who has some experience making games I really do get it. It is a time consuming process and no small work load, but the majority of people will probably just think: “I thought we’d see lots more maps. Older games and retro-games have HUGE worlds. This is really tiny.” And, “I’m going back to Final Fantasy. They have distinctly purposed classes there. Where is the healer? Why are there so few skills?”

I think the only sure way to get players and new players ready for this expansion is talk to them as much as possible about what’s going on before they get it. Otherwise they’ll get it and not have understood the product you are going to give them will be what you are saying it is.

Heart of Thorns - Presentation Concerns

in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns

Posted by: Inculpatus cedo.9234

Inculpatus cedo.9234

Just so you are aware, ArenaNet is not a Korean company. NCSoft, the publisher is, but the development company, ArenaNet, is not.

I’ve no real comments on your other opinions.

Good luck.

Heart of Thorns - Presentation Concerns

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Posted by: Inimicus.7162

Inimicus.7162

If you watch some of WP’s videos, one of the things he talks about at length was a cinematic version of “Rata Sum” done 2 (?) years before GW2’s actual launch, where the game actually looked fairly well polished.

I’m getting the feeling more and more that this same kind of thing is what was shown back at PAX, what feels like so many moons ago…

That said, I share a great many of the same concerns, and the idea of “fewer, content dense” maps doesn’t sit quite right. Content density can very quickly become a hassle to navigating maps… the Living Story’s instances that required trips through Drytop to the Leyline Hub, sometimes blocked by one of the single most annoying mobs yes designed (light infused golem), or the story steps that involved Skritt tunnel travel in the Silverwastes were both very pointed exercises in this.

I have said, and say again, “content dense” maps are not a bad thing to have, but open, unused, vacuous tracts of land, mostly empty caves (the Skritt JP cave floor is a perfect example), that aren’t complete nothing, but don’t come with the constant wave of red vomit popping out of the ground trying to kill you. In fact, I think the presence of these actually does far more for the game play. Certainly, these map areas will ultimately never be touched by a great many people short of them stumbling onto it by accident, but that’s the thrill of exploration in a world where not everything needs to exist by all the rules of our mundane outside life. One of the things that always gave me great pleasure in GW1, was to go see all the weird, and random things placed all over that world and just sit there and spin little stories about them. It’s actually a large part of why Prophesies ultimately became my favorite GW1 campaign in the end. But it’s something I can’t do while under attack by howling beasts every 5 seconds, or bleeding out my ears while some Charr cub hums to himself every 3.471 seconds…

Empty areas of maps do contribute to a few things, first its space to put new things if ever something is wanted or needed. Second, it’s a place for things not related to the game to go on, exploration, self story telling, or even just sitting there admiring the view. And lastly, maps with large 2d map footprints that have a lot of empty/sparse areas (not too big, ofc…balance is everything) would have a greater psychological effect because regardless of how “dense” they may or may not be, looking at that world map is likely going to be the largest and very first true impression people really have of the ultimate value of HoT. As WP pointed out in one of his videos, we’re coming up on GW2’s third year, and while the Living World/Story has it charms, the fact that not a whole lot actually was added to the map has greatly diminished their long term effects (and ofc the non permanent nature of that first round’s main events). So people aren’t going to see all that, they won’t see all the things that were built to make these things happen faster in the future, they are just going to see “how big is this thing” at first glance, and it needs to be a lot more than what we got now.

I know a lot is still being developed, and I assume they were talk more about it as it finishes up, but not all our fears are completely unfounded.

Heart of Thorns - Presentation Concerns

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Posted by: Hyper Cutter.9376

Hyper Cutter.9376

I’m legitimately a little bit worried that HoT is going to be a catastrophe for Anet.

The playerbase has been desperate for new content for a very long time. When people think “expansion”, they think “lots of new content”. When they think “expansion for GW2” specifically, the unspoken assumption is “Anet made Factions and Nightfall for GW1*, so of course a GW2 expansion would be of similar scale”. Anet seems to have no desire/ability to deliver on this, and that’s a recipe for disaster. A lot of people, even many of the current white knights, are going to react very badly if HoT really is as bare-bones as it currently looks.

*They’re not technically expansions, but that’s how they were perceived.

Heart of Thorns - Presentation Concerns

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Posted by: Eirdyne.9843

Eirdyne.9843

I agree with everyone’s replies.

I think gaming companies, by and large, have lost touch with why group-based games were the MMO. There’s far too much effect that the companies expect upon themselves to create some kind of ‘new’ feature. The tried and true method of the MMO has been camps controlled by NPCs, separated by large swathes of beautiful empty landscape which players opted to challenge themselves against.

I believe companies shifted to the solo style MMO only because of the difficulty that Everquest in 1999 was for so many. Players could not solo practically at all. It wasn’t until Dark Age of Camelot came along that the first option out of grouping (as the only option for play) became available.

Unfortunately, Everquest turned off many casual players. It took Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, and Guild Wars 1 to convince the vast majority of MMO players that: “Yes, actually these games are for me.”

With the release of Burning Crusade’s arenas and equipment ceilings, many players in World of Warcraft began to see a retraction from playing ‘the game’ as the game to being forced to either do dungeons or pvp. Equipment also became a major game killer because players were constantly gaining more stats, but the game itself was never updated. Consequently, by the end of the expansion, players could solo entire dungeons that formerly had taken 15 or even 40 people.

This culminated in a huge drop-off in players near the end of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. In many ways the game never recovered though Blizzard admitted the entire expansion had been in error several times for variously subtracting player’s options for playing the game into playing a specific path within the content.

Unfortunately, internally Blizzard never corrected other base issues – such as the capacity to play with friends outside of dungeons. The game content had been so thoroughly designed for soloing that playing with a friend was punished. Experience gained from any single creature was halved when grouped by just one other person and then dropped by a percentage for each additional person. No locations where creatures were dense enough to be a challenge for a single person ever required a second. And so, grouping and play with your friends aspect of the game died.

The long result of this slow shift toward entirely solo-based MMOs has only marginally been reduced by the success of such game as the recent Final Fantasy reboot. There again, Final Fantasy corrected the grouping issue, but not the density of maps issue. Most players quickly realized that they wanted to play in all of the maps as their mood for a desert shifted to a need to see trees and so on. Quickly they discovered that the maps where surprisingly small; frequently only a series of valleys or tunnels at higher levels.

So yes, I think if Heart of Thorns fails to provide at least five very large maps and a few small ones players are going to become extremely angry. Anet has commented that this will not “technically” be an expansion, but that comment by the rarely speaking Anet is too anonymous to have much weight. The vast majority of players would rather find ‘the truth’ from reliable sources: Woodpotatoes, Dulfy, and etc.

Players have shifted loyalty away from expecting reliable comments from Anet to their own community; which should be understood to be the natural way of things. This is the manner in which the majority of games operate. A real competitor, this year, for Anet will be the Old Republic, which has – hands down – a powerful, lore aware, story and world. Likewise the devs are communicative.

My great concern remains that Anet remains dubiously aware of how challenging it is for its player base to find reliable information from them. Likewise, most of the information the player base receives from Anet comes from speculation by the community because of Anet’s powerful lack of communication and inconsistency within statements made by Anet.

As it stands, most new players will imagine a lot, expect group content, but log in to find very little. Maps are usually interspersed with too many creatures. Enough so that in places like the starting zones they creatures don’t even have pathing. They just stand in place. That, very much, as turned off the game to most friends I’ve tried to convince to get to it. They see an incomplete product.

All in all, I think the game is set for a very challenging year post-release of Heart of Thorns should it not be factually communicated what exactly the product is and how it should be enjoyed.
has continued to produce mediocre content in the games ever since, but has slowly been trying to undo this sort of ‘caged in’

Heart of Thorns - Presentation Concerns

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Posted by: Eirdyne.9843

Eirdyne.9843

" has continued to produce mediocre content in the games ever since, but has slowly been trying to undo this sort of ‘caged in’ "
— is a comment not relevant. this was from the comments about Blizzard and some how got bumped to the bottom of the page