Guild Wars 2

Jumping puzzle was easier than the clocktower for me but more annoying with my largeish charr. There’s one pair of candy canes in the middle of one of the snowflake paths where jumping to cane 2 screws up the camera and makes it impossible to see, and the same thing happens but worse at the very end when you’ve got to jump onto the thin cane to the right between the two blue presents. After my third failure because of the camera I literally closed my eyes and just went off memory of where I should’ve been jumping to to get through that gap and it worked.

We’re delivering presents, why not have an NPC in the staging area willing to temporarily turn you into a human-sized and human-animated elf thing to cheer up the children at the other end?

I love the jumping puzzles, it feels like a test of skill in the same way that a good boss fight should. There’s no ability for individual professions or races to shine, though, so given the differences in camera behavior between them, why not provide the option – at least for challenges like this – to level the playing field for players who want it?

The tooltips and descriptions are still missing or broken or half-typed for things throughout the game. The camera still works against me when I try to view more of the world from behind my charr’s head or navigate through a jumping puzzle with a low ceiling or tight wall. Storyline cutscenes are still an embarrassing hodgepodge of poorly scripted in-game flybys and partially voiced stabs at the style sold as definitive of the game prior to launch and which only really exist in the intro cutscenes. Charr and asura armor (specifically helmets) are poorly textured afterthoughts in a lot of cases. I can’t see at night in half the zones because the washed out purples and blues bleed together into something that’s hard to look at. I play the game because I’m lazy and bored, not because it’s currently good or because I’ve got much faith left in the ability of the development team to fix what they launched with. I’m one of two people I know that still plays the game just a few months in, and I can’t really justify trying to get anyone else interested at this point.

I’ll give Anet until their first expansion to convince me that it’s worth buying. The only way they can do that is by finishing the game they launched before then.

The siren thing I’ve been getting more and more frequently, it’s basically guaranteed to crop up after an hour of play or less now. It usually happens when there’s a lot of combat going on, but once it’s started that’s it. It continues until I either close the program or the game hard locks, turning it into a horrible sort of machine gun sound. That’s been happening for the past week. Something bad got introduced recently.

Agreeing with most of the criticisms raised above, though I’ll state it more strongly – the lack of narrative cohesion between story chunks and the lack of introduction for even important characters (much less incidentals that you may or may not have met previously based on your choices) makes the personal story missions unpleasant to play even in those instances where the gameplay mechanics are actually novel and engaging. It’s like trying to read a book where 60% of the pages are missing. The “high level” is visible, but the details are vague or missing altogether. I know ArenaNet is interested in feedback on this front, so here’s mine – I don’t think the personal stories are going to be salvageable as a complete experience without doing a lot of the existing work over again. Even tacking additional high quality content on to it in the form of expansion branches will still require new characters to muddle their way through the existing story, at least in part. I love the game, but the personal story is by far the weakest element.

I understand why the change was made from an economic perspective, but it feels bad having things outlive their usefulness and then needing to completely destroy them.