I think most of whine comes from younger generation that didn’t get to experience this type of game. Obviously there are few of older guys too, but I think you guys got carried by the moment.
For me W2 is by far better then W1. W1 was just too, you could run it in about 10 minutes. After day or two of W1 everyone was just farming it multiple times with alts, and super adventure box became super farming box.
W2 reminds me on old school games and really brings up those memories.
Well, let’s see. I had an NES for my first game system. I cut my teeth on Mega Man games, the original Mario trilogy, a lot of other less famous games that I’d probably have to dig in storage to remember the name of these days.
These days, one of my favorite games that does a hard, old-school throwback properly and still in an entertaining way is Super Meat Boy. I’ve played through it, love it.
I still think World 2 is both too difficult, and more importantly it is difficult for the wrong reasons.
1. First off, we’re taking an MMO engine and using it to do an action platformer. This is already going to cause design issues, as has been mentioned, even by Josh himself. The difficulty of the jumping needs to be toned down in Normal even if there weren’t other factors simply because the devs of SAB are making GW2 do things it was never designed to do. If you want pixel-perfect jumping, you need pixel-accurate controls, and this was not something that GW2’s developers had in mind on an engine level. The existence of Charr alone calls for more forgiving jumping.
2. Secondly, and this is I think another big reason for the uproar: Imagine having one of those old school ballbuster platformers, but you were only allowed to rent it for one month. After that, it will be taken away, and no one knows when you’ll be allowed to rent it again. Incidentally you’re also not a kid on summer break anymore. You can’t play for hours and hours on end every day until you master this or that part. You still play a decent amount, for sure, but you can’t do a marathon anytime you feel like it, and anyway that sort of amount of gameplay wasn’t healthy then and it’s even less healthy now for the average gamer in their mid-30s. The stated time constraints on how long we have to master this thing are another big reason why the level of difficulty is a problem. If SAB and its accompanying rewards were announced as a permanent feature, I bet we’d see far less complaints. They’d still exist, but October 1st wouldn’t be looming in the future and threatening to cut the whole thing off before we master the experience. There are very few complaints that the world’s jumping puzzles are too difficult when they’re permanent additions to the game that we can woodshed to our heart’s content.
The thing is, World 1 evoked the feel of old school games just fine…but it did it with aesthetics, music, and the fun aspects of old school design. Looking for secrets, exploration within a relatively simple medium, the coin-collection aspect of it, lots of little touches that gave us a fun taste of the old days without making us sweat blood for it.
World 2 as it was released focuses more on the face-bashing aspects of old-school design. That sort of thing really belongs more in Tribulation mode, something that a lot of the pro “hardcore platformer” posts seem to be forgetting exists.
*If you want to keep a hardcore, woodshed style experience, Tribulation mode is for you. For the rest of us that fall between that and the almost tourist-mode of Infantile (or at least how Infantile was supposed to play and did in World 1), Normal needs to be brought down to where it’s fun on its own merits, and not just for those who take fun out of bashing their face against a wall.
