Guild Wars 2

As is probably apparent from anyone who reads even one of my posts, I have some pretty strong opinions about this game and about game design in general.

I’ve said a lot about HoT since it came out and I wanted to compile some general points that explain why I would or wouldn’t recommend this game to friends.

Gliding Pros:

With Updraft use, Gliding is an absolute joy and with Lean techniques, it’s pretty easy to get around from Updraft to Updraft.

Gliding cons:

Pre-Updraft Gliding is very limited and it’s impossible to participate in a couple zone bosses without it (VB Patriarch and AB East Octo).

Without Lean techniques, it’s difficult to go from Updraft to Updraft, especially in VB. There’s virtually no room for error.

Any lag at all can muck up gliding royally.

The XP barrier of entry to gliding (not just the mastery, but getting to level 80) means that it’s not much of a selling point. "Come glide in this game… once you reach level cap AND get experience in a very particular set of zones, at which point you’ll only be able to use it in those particular zones).

End-game content pros:

There are numerous large scale events with distinct rewards for each and reason to keep at them for weeks or months to get all of the rewards.

There is always another skin to obtain, or another set of gear you could craft.

The types of end-game content are highly varied and can please a lot of different preferences (PvP, WvW, open world, dungeons, fractals, raids, etc.).

There is virtually no gear treadmill, so barrier to entry is low.

End-game content cons:

Most of the HoT metas are super long and can wipe out all of your progress if you DC / lose your place in a map instance.

End-game rewards have very little meaning beyond “cosmetic,” but often have time investment that is in line with games where rewards have a more concrete meaning (such as power).

The game has challenging content (especially with raids coming out) but does not endorse tools that make challenging content more manageable (ex: meters).

Summary:

The game a lot to do. So much to do, in fact, that if someone kept at everything, they could probably be playing the game forever. However, a lot of this “stuff to do” has poor motivation for doing it. For instance, you could spend a lot of time collecting all of the BL weapons in a single set. But this is just a mindless gold/ticket grind and the reward is 7 BL tickets. Which gives you a headstart on new BL weapons, but gives you nothing to show for the collection itself. What are you going to show off? What are you going to be proud of?

Another example: Legendary weapons are actually very showy, which is great! But then, due to the alt-endorsing nature of this game, and the variety of weapons any given class can use, you may not even use your legendary weapon half the time. So your lose your showiness once again.

The theme I see is that there is a lot to do and little reason to do it. Many of the rewards themselves are cool at first, but the shelf life of any given reward is not very good. If we think of gliding as a reward, for instance, its shelf life expires outside of HoT maps. The result is a game where even permanent items tend to feel consumable and it’s hard to feel like you’ve done anything lasting.