Guild Wars 2

Is there anything much more frustrating than spending an hour or more getting to the end boss in a long instance only to have the game crash or disconnect from the game servers for a few second or a bug prevent you from continuing, and then having to do the whole thing over from the beginning?

I realize this is mainly an issue for those soloing the LW or PS. And while I appreciate the staged respawn points when you are defeated within the instance, when you disconnect from the servers, there’s nothing in place to have you log back in to the instance. And once you leave the instance it completely resets.

I’m sure I’m not the only one to experience this. And while it’s certainly possible I’ve had a run a bad luck recently with this issue (3 of my last 10 LS or PS story instance runs have ended with an impassable bug forcing a restart or a very unfortunately timed disconnect from the game servers which had nothing to do with my personal connectivity), I can’t help but think there could be some very easy way to address it, which is having some way to get back into the instance with at least some of your progress saved.

Ok, end of rant…

Yeah, I have to agree that I wish there were more checkpoints or something. My internet can be unstable at times, so I’m prone to disconnecting. I had to do Forging the Pact around 4 times because I kept disconnecting. This didn’t take horribly long since I could skip cutscenes, but you can’t do that with the Living Story and I disconnected a lot during Arcana Obscura too.

I’ve read that the original Guild Wars had some sort of temporary save where you could get back where you were in an instance if you reconnected within 10 or 15 minutes or something, so I wish something like that could be added here.

I loved the long instances that we’ve had recently. It felt very much more akin to GW1’s missions, which often could take 30 minutes to complete even in normal mode your first time through – and this would be without the distraction of going and interacting with every NPC/object; often in Prophecies due to bonus objectives that had you going in opposite directions of the main objective for a while.

I never liked the short 2-5 minute long instances we had for most of the personal story and really wished that there were more instances the length of the story mode dungeons but made for solo players.

GW2 is VERY lenient compared to most games and especially compared to GW1 – in GW1, if you wiped you were sent back to the mission outpost. There were no checkpoints, or merely respawning at the beginning of the mission – at least not until Eye of the North (and even instances in Beyond content went back to the ‘wipe=failure’ idea).

I rather miss it. It gave a crude but fundamental challenge to the game’s content.