I’ve been meaning to talk about some of these things for a long time now, but with the announcement of a new expansion, I thought this would be a good time. Some of these things might even be in development, but I thought it can’t hurt to put out this feedback when they can be slotted in alongside other big changes.
I like Guild Wars 2, but only after two years and without an expansion yet, parts of it feel a bit… bloated, to me. Not that those things are bad, but that more and more things are feeling a bit tacked on, and could use a bit of patching up to weave them more strongly into the rest of the game.
Inventory Clutter
Before I say anything else, I want to stress that this is different from Inventory Space. The issues overlap, but Inventory Space has several outlets at the moment, and I don’t want to get into those.
Inventory clutter is not fun. It may be subtle, but inventory clutter saps the fun from away from a game. No one likes fiddling around with things that you’re not sure if you can drop, seem redundant, or otherwise seem unnecessary to be sitting in your bags, when you could be out playing the game and finding loot you actually want.
New currencies continue to sit in our inventories instead of the currency tab. I don’t really understand why this is. If they’re worried about the currency list getting too long, just let us hide ones that aren’t relevant to us anymore.
I have a variety of boosts and such that don’t stack. Some of them I understand, as they don’t literally do the same thing, even if there are so many close variants that it seems ridiculous to have them all. But I have at least two items that don’t stack, despite being identical in every way except one says “Binds to Account” and the other says “Binds to Account on Acquire.”
Living Story Clutter
The obvious problem with this, is that the Living Story has handed out countless items that were primarily relevant to their chapter, but didn’t remove themselves afterward. Some of these are almost certainly droppable, although it would be nice if the game would remove doubt by doing its own cleaning in this respect, but some of these items have some uses. There’s Marjory’s Journal, for instance, which plays a cutscene. Something like that should probably just be part of the Story Journal.
More than that, though, are the items that have been permanently added as content. Back items and other things that often use the Mystic Forge. These items often require one-of-a-kind items, but have long collections associated with them. When doing all of the content when it’s new, this isn’t much of a problem. However, for new players, or anyone who might not have been playing the whole time, many of these items pile up together, and will be there for a long time, each of them competing for inventory space with each other, but you can’t just drop them.
The solution I imagine would be a neat kind of trophy collection in your home instance, where these items have a special storage and blueprint system. However, it seems to me that the Mastery system might actually be a solution for some of these going forward. I just hope old stuff gets included, for consistency’s sake if nothing else. Otherwise simple things can get complex fast if they all start playing by their own rules.
Salvage Kits
On top of these more general suggestions, I have a more specific idea. Salvaging has been a core part of Guild Wars since the beginning. It seems really strange to me that such a core feature is still done through consumable items just sitting in your inventory like any other random item even in the sequel. Now, I’m not suggesting that all the levels of salvage kits should be removed (they could, but that’s not the core of my suggestion).
My idea is simply that “Salvage” becomes a button on your backpack. It could still have charges and maybe multiple buttons for the various stages of salvage kits, but this core part of the game would no longer be taking up inventory space, and would become a part of the UI as befits its integral nature.
I really want to suggest something similar for the gathering tools, where at least it would automatically use the minimum required tool in your possession for what you’re gathering, but with all of the strange cash shop variants and such of the tools, it might be harder to consolidate.