Unfortunately I was never in the right place at the right time to try the other 2 adventures available but I did quite a bit of Tendril Torcher. Here’s my opinion:
Expectations: The Adventure was a little different than I expected. I had misinterpreted the blog post and thought that Adventures would all be instanced and every player would be on an equal page, so I was surprised that the Adventure was in the main world. After re-reading the post they did make that clear that some would be instanced and others not. I was also expecting Adventures to be standard to all players, that is to say one person wouldn’t have any advantage over another in terms of utility use, etc. However, I had to take advantage of a Mesmer portal in order to reach the Gold level. Personally I would prefer this type of adventure to be standard so that a specific class doesn’t have an advantage over another (obviously DPS test type ones would be different).
Difficulty: The difficulty was pretty much what I expected for this type of Adventure (do as much as you can within a time limit). The 3 tiers of rewards gives you something to strive for. My first run was about 45 tendrils or so, and I knew I had a ways to go. The devs did a really good job making the Adventure so that you can understand it immediately, but if you want to excel at it your going to have to try different things and start forming a pattern that works best for you. It took probably 4 cycles of the event chain (when the Adventure opens) before I felt I could make a decent run at the top tier.
Leaderboards: I like the fact that there is a leaderboard, but it is very limited. It would be nice to be able to see the entire board, either in game or on the website. The Top 3 should be emphasized more as well, maybe as a separate part of the window with the gold/silver/bronze colored highlights. It would also be nice for the Adventures where class will matter to have the profession icon next to the name so others can see what class they did it with and maybe give them an idea of how to better their score.
Specifics: For Tendril Torcher the gameplay itself is pretty good. Sometimes on my try-for-Gold runs I felt that I had hit all the tendrils but when I finished my lap I would be at 138 or 139. I do wish there was an easier way to make sure you had torched the tendril in question. They are a bit small and some are slightly hidden. A simple solution would be to make the counter larger so you can check it easily throughout the run. Eventually I knew how many tendrils I should be at for my pattern at specific points in the run. I also wasn’t a huge fan that from far away you could see the name tag easily but once you got close it would fade away.
Restarts: In the blog post they mentioned how for Adventures it should be easy to restart a run whenever you want too, or at least that’s how I interpreted it. I found that the only way to do that is to run outside of the adventure area or somehow die. Now I may have missed something, but I would have enjoyed having a restart button somewhere to immediately end your run and take you back to the start. There’s times when just 30 seconds into the run or so you knew you weren’t going to make the time limit and just wanted a fresh run at it.
Overall I had a lot of fun and very little frustration at that particular Adventure. I’m especially excited because there where 3 Adventures in a fairly small area so that makes me think that there will be a variety of Adventures to try when the expansion comes out. Two things on my wish list are Adventures using content that already exists in the game and Adventures that are speed runs of Jumping Puzzles.
(edited by SlackerATC.5934)