Guild Wars 2

xikira.3264:

Aurene has a habit of randomly showing up. I noticed it I carry the portal stone that goes to her and I do not go visit her for a very long time. She will tend to send me random holographs of her and my character will make an off hand comment on needing to visit her this has happened to me twice.

That’s the kind of tiny detail that I LOVE this game for. ^^

I agree that metas would have made the maps more interesting to replay. But without those, a broader variety of available missions could have made those maps much more interesting to replay. There are countless fun and creative missions and quirky things to discover in the central Tyria area. The HoT area has those awesome metas, and still lots of interesting small missions that contribute to them. While there are some interesting places in the LS3 maps, it seems to me that there are very few interesting missions, and those repeat over and over and over and over. Perhaps it would have been better to put some time into creating more mission chains, so that the same thing is not always happening repeatedly in the same area, and nothing else.

On the other hand, if you view LS3 maps as being designed to be a glorified farming area, then they seem to be serving their purpose well. Lather, loot, repeat.

The release of PoF said that the devs were trying to return to focusing on discovery and exploration. I hope that means there will be lots of interesting, cool, and fun things to find and do, and not just that they will force us to find a hundred stupid tokens that they’ve hidden in a hundred pointless places that you would never have any reason to go to, except to find a stupid token. (Ember Island, I’m looking at you…)

(Central Tyria also had probably hundreds of entertaining casual background conversations that I love listening to, something that was not nearly as well done in later maps. I hope they put that kind of detail into the Crystal Desert, too.)

Either way, that will be a heck of a listing fee.

In a previous game which I will not mention by name, I used to joke that the characters’ shoulder armor was designed to save them from carrying backpacks and lunchboxes, and that when it came to skulls, spikes and flames, the phrase ‘less is more’ was not in the cognitive vocabulary of the game designers OR most of their players. Also used to complain when the guys got an interesting outfit and the female version was basically a gilded bikini.

So Anet is hardly alone.

I use the Mac 32-bit client, in which the gem store VERY frequently fails to load at all. Since the upgrade, it has been loading nicely every time I have gone to look at it. (So far, anyway. I have not tested extensively, yet.) The interface is immaterial to me in comparison to its apparently improved functionality. In other words, Yay, it’s working!

Just one more little note, not urgent or a playability issue—I notice that though the 32-bit client saves screenshots in PNG format, the new Mac version saves screenshots as Windows BMP files. That seems odd and a little awkward. The file size was over 6mb, more than twice the file size of the old PNG screenshots.

Mac Mini, 2.6gz Intel core i5, Intel Iris 1536, running Os 10.10.5

First good thing I noticed was: better colors, closer up, bigger characters! Yay! My Asura is no longer a 1/2 inch high blob in the screen, looking like she’s wearing Goth makeup!

Second good thing I noticed, the Black Lion store now loads correctly, instead of hanging up in loading forever if I try to change from the trading post to the Gem store or something.

First bad thing I noticed. Huge load times. When first starting up, and when going from one city to another, I began to wonder if the game had crashed before the loading screen finally went away.

Second bad thing I noticed: (bug report filed) weird visual ‘ghosts’ in Lion’s Arch, giving my character strange shadow figures or bright auras trailing along with her.

Third thing: super slow visuals. I also noticed the jerky, sputtery, skippy movement (and contrary to one statement above, it did not go away or get better as I played, it got worse if anything.) My glider would not appear before I hit the ground unless it was a reeeaally long glide. My pet was invisible half the time. (Also, I noticed that character sound effects either did not happen or were delayed.)

But the thing that sent me back to the 32-bit client was this: I went to the Verdant Brink. Noticed an orange gear hanging in the air, walked over to investigate, and died. Went to the waypoint, came back. A few minutes later a burning crashed chopper appeared under the orange gear. (I guess I was fried by invisible flames?) And as I watched it, I was attacked and killed by a band of invisible enemies. Saw nothing but a few red bars floating in the air. (Filed a bug report on that, too. Appropriately, as I believe they were actually wasps.)

So, I’m happy you’re working on a better Mac client, and I will be very happy to try it out again once some issues are addressed. Meanwhile, I hope Arenanet will continue to support and update the 32-bit version.

To the OP: I am totally at the same point you are now. I didn’t even realize I had to activate the story before it would start, and went scrambling all over Dry Top freaking out about how hard it was to get anywhere, how few waypoints there were, how often I would die, and where the heck did I go to start the story anyway.

Then I started the main story and died three times during a single battle! But here’s the thing—it let me restart from the ‘last checkpoint’ and every time I restarted, there were less enemies left alive, so I got through it.

Then I had heard that it was important to rank up your glider skills, so I spent my first three mastery points, only to discover that to get up into the Itzel village, I apparently needed the bouncing mushroom skill. Had no mastery points left. All the mastery points I could find on the board seemed to require mushroom skills or were impossibly hard to get to.

Last night I ended up doing a terrified, white-knuckle glide down into crawley cavern (or whatever the heck it’s called) to snag the mastery point down there. My hands were shaking for about half an hour afterward. (My apparent fear of virtual heights has made getting to vistas….interesting.)

But I feel pretty awesome about my hard-won successes now. (Oh, and I managed to glide from the canopy to the roof of the Itzel place I needed to go to without a mushroom involved, after all. Ha ha ha!)

Anyway, I would advise you to take it slowly, and hang in there. Because as you become more used to the new pace, it becomes fun again. Maybe a little MORE exciting, since you have to be careful.

And when you need a break, you can go back and explore some more of the older lands again and enjoy the freedom of running wildly through the wilderness without a care.