Okay. Let me preface by saying I hope someone actually takes the time to read this.
I have no degree in game design or anything like that. The only proof to my opinion is that I’ve played a decent handful of games throughout my life and I’m a decently high ranked League of Legends player. I’ve been a Dungeon Master for a couple DnD groups as well, which would be the closest experience I would have to any sort of game design. When I was a kid, I actually grew up wanting to make games, and debated applying to Riot Games when I graduated college, but I didn’t end up pursuing it. Without trying to brag, my point would be that I think I’m experienced in games enough to form an opinion on this.
I would say I’m a pretty average gamer. I’m a 23 year old with a Bachelor’s degree in sciences. I work 40 hours a week and spend my free time on my computer. As far as MMOs go, I’ve primarily played World of Warcraft since it came out, taking breaks here and there. I’ve tried many many free MMOs in the mean time. Nothing has ever “scratched the itch” that playing WoW has put on me. Something always brings me back to playing WoW, and no other game has ever come close to the same amount of fun that I have with that game.
My girlfriend got into GW2 and asked me to play with her, so I gave it a shot. I remember spending a lot time trying to pick my first character. GW2 actually have some interesting races! It was a really nice change of pace from your average MMO. Even if Sylvari are similar to “elves” in other games, they’re different enough to feel the difference.
(It’s actually pretty interesting, because normally EVERY game has humans being the “new, young” race, where in this case, Sylvari are the youngest but they also are the ones that resemble elvish type races, which are normally the oldest).
So I made a Sylvari. Started playing through the starting zone and started my first personal story mission at level 10. I never finished it. I picked the “Green Knight” dream during the character selection. I don’t remember my exact reason for the sudden disgust towards the game when I played through that mission, but the quest was so lifeless. The only thought going through my head is: “They’re making me run around and talk to this person and that person just because some dude in armor is bullying people.” It felt like a bad sitcom or something. My Sylvari, which has a vision called The Dream that tells him of his future and his purpose, is to stop a high school bully on the playground? Where are the town guards? Where’s Caithe? This guy is killing people and Caithe just stands there. And you DO kill him. Three times. And he just keeps getting back up. Which makes it even worse! Now he’s not this super powerful knight wearing invincible armor, he’s just an arrogant snob with a cheat-death mechanic. The end result are both the same, but the way the fight is carried out makes all the difference. If he did have magic armor, I shouldn’t have even been able to hurt him, or lower his HP bar at all. While that might be confusing for a player, it SHOULD be confusing. What gives? I’ve been killing dudes all the way up to level 10 and now this guy doesn’t take any damage. Instead, you made it frustrating. I killed him, and had to kill him again and again. It didn’t FEEL rewarding, because I clearly could kill that NPC without much difficulty, but it was just the game TELLING me that I couldn’t kill him, instead of feeling that myself. And then he just runs away and the game forces me to go on a scavenger hunt to find some magical way to actually kill him. A truly rewarding fight would have powerful NPC (without just adding the invulnerable boon to him), and have the story progress when the player lost too much health during the fight. Not only does the player himself feel just how powerful that this Green Knight is, now it gives them a true motivation to find a way to beat him. Because he was “actually” beatable, as in, the game didn’t just make him invulnerable or make him come back to life in the first encounter. It’s a really minor point, but it drastically changes the way a player perceives the game.
I quit the game at this point, only to come back later due to more encouraging from my girlfriend.
Fastforward to the Fort Trinity story missions, up until Zhaitan. Before even finishing the final mission, I always had the feeling like the game was being rushed at that point, like they were coming up to their deadline for the game’s release so they had to cut corners at the end. The last story mission was absolutely and 100% buggy, meaning, multiple times I had gone through the final story mission and gotten stuck after the part where you defend the airship and a chopper is supposed to fly over and grab you to take you further. The chopper never moved. This happened to me, my girlfriend, and each one of her friends, whether we did it solo or in a group of varying sizes. Obviously, bugs happen and it’s understandable to some degree. Game companies get more data in one hour of content being live than they do in all of their alpha and betas and all the quality assurance testing they can do. But not when a bug is so common that it’s reproducible and completely stops forward progress. You had no way to get around the bug. The chopper never moved and you’re sitting on an airship. You can’t go and walk, you just die if you jump off the ship. There was nothing to do.
Bugs aside, the fight with Zhaitan was… anti-climatic, to put it lightly. 80 levels of build up, and I finally get the final boss of the game, and all I have to do is click one button and he dies. Are you serious? How is that, in any way shape or form, rewarding? If it’s that easy, why aren’t all the dragons dead already? I think it’s non-debatable that the final mission was a complete let down.
But, I still play the game. I bought HoT, and played through it. Haven’t finished all the content yet, and I’m already unsatisfied with the game.
I haven’t yet figured out exactly what about HoT discourages me from playing, but the best word I can think of is: polish.
The game lacks any sort of polish to any of its content. Something that Blizzard and World of Warcraft are very well known for.
Every decision I’ve had to make, every cutscene that I watch, every meta event that I do, and now the new raiding content, too. It really makes a player wonder if the game developers really thought out what they were doing. The example that comes to mind is the Itzel poison mastery that lets you walk through some poisonous areas in Verdant Brink. Normally those poison areas have a mastery point or a chest or something worthwhile in them. Guess what? I walked around the poison by accident and bypassed it completely. My character still to this day does not have the Itzel poison mastery, and I have collected everything in Verdant Brink. Did anyone actually test this? Try it out? Think it through? What’s the point of an obstacle if there’s a no-effort solution?
I mean, I like to think the game developers don’t think GW2 is like “a B-list” kind of game. It’s not just another free MMO in the masses. It’s decently popular and normally highly recommended! So… why does it feel so shoddily put together?
Here’s a perfect example.
The raids came out not too long ago, with the entrance put in Verdant Brink’s map. That’s pretty normal, raids and dungeons are always in the map themselves in most games! World of Warcraft does this too.
But what World of Warcraft doesn’t do, is have meta-event maps.
Guess what normally happens when people want to raid? They park their character in front of the raid entrance and go spamming in the LFG tool. This puts a sizable effect on the Verdant Brink meta event. Now, the game thinks there more people on the map than there are people actually participating. Since the game thinks there are enough people, it doesn’t prompt them to move to more populated maps (which is genius, by the way). Now, you force players to “taxi” into other maps by hoping that someone graciously put a “taxi” in the LFG tool, so you can jump over to their Verdant Brink that actually has people participating.
I can think of a couple solutions.
You could have a LFG queue instead of a group advertisement. You already established that certain roles (tank, healer, different types of DPS) are needed, so it would be the simpliest thing in the world to queue up as a certain role and get put in a group.
You could make a lobby for any dungeon/raid where the entrance in on a meta event map. PvP has a lobby, so I don’t see why a raid shouldn’t. It would be TREMENDOUSLY convenient if there was armor repair or merchants or a Black Lion trader outside the raid in a “lobby” type zone, instead of forcing me to, once again, abuse the fact that I can jump to the PvP lobby free of charge and access my bank, merchant, Black Lion, etc… and then pop right back where I was, free of charge.
Verdant Brink is considerably more of a chore now that the raid entrance is there. People AFK in front of the entrance all the time while they’re looking for a group, because it’s difficult to find a group… because raid leaders can’t advertise their party for whatever reason. We have been resorting to someone leaving the group and advertising in the LFG tool to find people, since the raid leader can’t do it himself.
It’s all these little things that start adding up and make a player truly wonder if the game designers care. They seem to care, since they respond to player feedback about certain things (like when HoT came out), yet the game just isn’t polished to the same level as something like World of Warcraft, which remains the king of MMOs for a good reason.
Well, I spent about an hour writing this. I hope it has some kind of impact. GW2 feels like a game that has such a good infrastructure to be a truly amazing game and experience, but some design choices (that never end up getting addressed) are constantly getting in the way. It’s all about the way the game makes the player feel.
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