Guild Wars 2

Ah the Mad King. Those were good times. I loved the GW holiday events.

Indeed. It is very frustrating to try to participate in a crowded dynamic event when all the enemies drop the moment they spawn.

I do miss the oddly shaped maps filled with loads of monsters that didn’t respawn on top of you.

I miss zone clearing. I guess that’s all impossible now that they aren’t instanced anymore.

I also miss elite skill hunting. Running about with my signet of capture looking for that boss and the feeling of satisfaction from adding another skill to my collection. Of course that’s all changed too with the pre-fab skillsets and limited skill choices. The trait system isn’t half bad, though.

I’ve got to say, zone clearing, elite hunting, and the complexity of map exploration is what kept me playing GW1 for years at the level cap of 20. Now it’s just “run from heart quest to heart quest” grab waypoint on the way. Swapping that for level grinding was not a good trade off.

I think the biggest issue deals with vendor NPCs, particularly crafting vendors where people are likely to idle. When crafting and going through your inventory you are likely to hear the same lines spoken over and over and over. This becomes especially grating with the same lines spoken to the player when interacting with them are heard when OTHER players access the vendor.

There’s nothing wrong with NPC banter, it’s just an issue of “familiarity breeds contempt” amped up to ridiculous levels.

Personally the 2-person cutscenes don’t bother me at all. If anything they show the great attention and detail that went into the faces and expressions. The voices, however, are unfortunately lackluster.

It isn’t that the voice actors are bad. Many of the voices are excellent, but seem to lack direction. I began to realize at some point that it was as if actors were given a large list of lines to recite with very little context to the lines. A notable example would be one of the male skritt voice actors, particularly when any line ends in “Yes?” Usually in this situation the intonation goes up and then slightly down at the end before the word yes, but instead in this case the sentences are given an emphatic, almost villainous treatment (but given as a statement) only then followed by a tacked on “yes” like an afterthought. Though the example is minor in the context of the game, it’s a bit bothersome.

In this case I wondered if he really understood the context in which the skritt were speaking in the game and who the lines were meant for. These lines were mostly spoken by friendly NPCs to the player often asking for aid.