Hi everyone!
Now that Halloween has come and gone I’ve decided to lay down some thoughts on the events we all got to enjoy (even if it doesn’t end for five days yet) because I am incredibly pompous and think that you care what I have to say.
Overall, I was extremely impressed with the effort put into this event. Having played a multitude of other MMOs in my time, I can say with certainty that GW2 surpasses all of them in terms of content quality and quantity. There was so much to do! And they made it for people that they don’t need to convince to maintain a monthly subscription!
But of course, since this is the first holiday event we’ve had in this super-new style of MMORPG, there were problems. Not big ones mind you, but I think this is a valuable opportunity to learn what worked and what didn’t so that future events can be even better.
Act 1 actually had nothing wrong with it. The haunted doors were neat (except the ones that glitched out, didn’t despawn, and got people banned for farming them) and the quest to learn His Royal Madness King Oswald Thorn The First Of His Name’s past and get rewarded with a unique back piece was extra-sweet. If I wanted to be super-critical I’d say that hiding one of the second phase’s pages in Sparkly Fen was mean to low-level characters, but eh.
Act 2 was also mostly good, but it was where most of the problems lived too. The PvP events were awesome and fun and I dearly hope they stick around in some form after the Halloween event is over. The PvE events, however? Well…
Exhibit A: The Mad King’s Clock Tower
The Clock Tower is probably the most polarizing event in the whole entire holiday thingie. People praised it and condemned it for its difficulty. I personally found it fantastic fun. It was faster than anything we’ve had before and victory was, for once, not assured. Finally making it to the top of the tower is a great feeling and it’s something we don’t see very often in this game, where failure is sometimes not even possible. This is probably the one event in Guild Wars 2 that gets my adrenaline going and I will miss it when it’s packed up for next time.
So what was the problem?
Issue 1: It’s not instanced.
When you run the clock tower, you run it with everyone else running the clock tower. Sure, this means you get to laugh when someone else falls, but massing everyone onto the same narrow path and having them move at the same speed makes it very easy to lose your place in the swarm and miss a jump, not to mention the frame rate lag adds an element of difficulty. The first time I ran the tower I actually couldn’t complete it until I came back later when there were fewer people trying.
In addition, you were running this thing alongside norn and charr, whose gigantic massive selves blocked out everything beneath them, which was everything.
Next time, I’d love it if events like this one were either personal instances or had smaller population caps.
Issue 2) Running this thing as anything bigger than a human was awful.
Until today I’d only been running my humans through the tower. Today I tried it with my norn, whose freakish tallness caused her to smash her head against all sort of invisible ledges and fall screaming into the green.
Then I tried it with my charr, which was even worse. The four-legged gait of the charr has always made jumping puzzles tricky, but it’s extra-bad when you need to time your jumps perfectly on the fly. There’s no indicator of where your “feet” are, and their bigness gives an illusion of slowness that screws with timing even worse. Then there were camera issues, where sometimes your point of view would fly straight up your own butt.
My solution would be to have the next puzzle transmogrify everyone running it into something that vaguely resembles a humanoid, so that not only is it easier to time one’s attempts, but also reduces the problem of having to run the puzzle with your head up a charr’s enormous backside.
To be continued, because I hit the character cap.
You gotta love GW2 though, I haven´t come across even one “XXX Dri…. XXX” in this game yet.
