are the core problem for Guild Wars 2’s competitive ambitions? Way back in the day tabletop games came out that were turn based and people would optimize their builds for their roles. Game Masters would dictate the flow of play and everyone would work with it. Then turn based RPGs would come out for the 8-bit systems. They were so vague yet give just enough to stimulate the imagination. Your characters were your own and could imagine how the world was. There were lots of blanks to fill. Maps were complex and the mechanics seemed well suited for turn-based combat. Then the 16-bit games came out and it was largely the same deal. Buffs and conditions were stuff you took into account and had to manage your resources marathon style, and you could die a lot due to RNG factors (instant death spell proccing, etc.) which was of course bad. Then the prospect of 3D made everyone hopeful for even deeper, more complex gameplay. Instead of opting for deeper gameplay and more sophisticated dungeon layouts developers opted for voice acting, linearity, and fleshing out more story, many strikes against the RPG genre. This is what X character emphatically and unanimously sounds like and this is how the world is, no real room for your imagination to operate. Those cool gritty robots you imagined? They’re actually cartoony and non-threatening. Think your endgame level knight is on par with Batman? Nope, a cutscene logically implies otherwise. The spoonfeeding of dissonance canon via cutscenes can really make a game less enjoyable, but that’s a topic for PvE.
Then in the mid zeroes MMOs came on the scene when emo bands roamed the earth. They were real time and open world but still kept lots of the old mechanics: evading was stat based, conditions not rebalanced to account for a real time open world, and monsters gained weird immersion breaking invulnerability if you tried hitting them from safe spots or vantage points. Voice acting and cutscenes also cut deep into a game’s budget, meaning less money for the real meat of the game.
What Guild Wars 2 did right was remove stats for evading instead making it active, getting rid of mana, and simplify the skill bar limiting it to only 10 abilities. However, even it still has vestiges of the old Pokemon style RPG, conditions and boons give extra damage or stats otherwise but have their roots in turn based games where the environment can’t be taken account of. Am I saying remove boons and conditions entirely? Of course not, Dark Souls does them very well. They’re an action game with some trace RPG elements. Guild Wars 2 needs to emulate Dark Souls better with fewer abilities being gamepad friendly, and for ranged classes to optionally play like a shooter. Dark Souls has this mode although pad is terrible with aiming due to the thumbstick properties not being sensitive enough if giving a light push but too sensitive past the threshold. Everyone says that Dark Souls’ PvP is fun, but there are problems with it:
- Soul and gear level give players advantages over others.
Another plus for Guild Wars 2 was gear and level scaling to max in PvP (once you get into level scaling you should consider not even bothering with them since they could further screw up balance and scaling creates empty levels that make progress feel illusory). Perhaps the world is evolving past the need for RPG mechanics? Story is considered a strength of the genre but games that aren’t RPG’s like Mortal Kombat and the Street Fighter series have incredibly rich, deep, and solid stories without compromising their core mechanics. To accomplish a shedding of the negative parts of an RPG we need to consider simplification.
For example: what can a thief do?
-Stealth
-Traps
-High burst damage
-Great mobility
-Venoms
What if we simplified it down to:
-High burst damage
-Great mobility?
Would that be better? Why or why not? The same type of simplification could happen across classes so other classes won’t feel left out. If everyone can do everything then those who can’t do those roles quite as well will be left out. Every class can therefore have its core focused on. This would trim the power creep. This is especially important given the game’s competitive ambitions. With games like Street Fighter 5, CS:GO, Overwatch, and League of Legends Guild Wars 2 has some big competition with very well balanced, polished games.
Tl;dr: Tabletop and Pokemon mechanics were made with those systems in mind, trying to fit too many into an action game just creates too many complications that detracts from the core gameplay.
(edited by Agemnon.4608)