Guild Wars 2

Mackdose.6504:

Socks.4159:

So tell me, what is it that GW2 did so much better than the competition that meant it should receive an award? I honestly can’t think of any features it brought out that were significantly better and it doesn’t win on overall IMHO – though I couldn’t actually say who should.

1. I can take 5 of any class and complete any content.
   Same is true for TSW.

1. It doesn’t take 3 months to hit level cap.
   No MMO takes that long. Average is usually a week played.

1. It doesn’t take 2 months after cap to hit the gear ceiling
   Again, neither does any other MMO unless you are very casual.

1. It emphasizes cooperation over competition in PvE
   This is a minor tweak of the usual rules but is very appreciated,

1. Ad hoc grouping
   Rift did this and I presume Warhammer. It’s basically neccesitated by the public quests…I mean DE.

1. Overflow Servers
   Pretty much standard fare these days. SWTOR/TSW and I think Tera all have this.

1. Event chains that affect game play if left to propagate
   Chain events for DE are not much more interesting than chain quests and pretty much are analogs. Nothing truly affects gameplay for longer than it takes to kill a few mobs and get the fort back.

1. Interesting combat mechanics (Complexity != Depth)
   Thief S+P gameplay = 3 3 3 mob(s) dead, repeat
   Builds revolved around choosing a few utility skills and a heal to go with the 5 skills you get from equipping a weapon. It felt like a cut down version of the Skill Wheel from TSW.

1. 3 fully supported game modes
   You’ve lost me. What are these modes?

1. No subscription fee.

Nice, but not really revolutionary. Many games use a F2P/B2P/hybrid model these days.

I just don’t see enough things that GW2 has that are outstanding considering the other releases in the same category during the year. It was enjoyable but by no means a GOTY to me.

Lankybrit.4598:

Socks.4159:

So tell me, what is it that GW2 did so much better than the competition that meant it should receive an award? I honestly can’t think of any features it brought out that were significantly better and it doesn’t win on overall IMHO – though I couldn’t actually say who should.

Hey Mr Negative,

Why not take your negativity to negative threads and leave this positive thread to positive minded of us.

Thanks and Cheers.

It’s not actually a negative post, it’s a neutral one.

Still, while you’re posting, how about you put in your answer to the question I posed. Just your opinion of what it is that GW2 did that was significantly better than the other offerings this year.

So tell me, what is it that GW2 did so much better than the competition that meant it should receive an award? I honestly can’t think of any features it brought out that were significantly better and it doesn’t win on overall IMHO – though I couldn’t actually say who should.

GW2 brought very little to the MMO genre with it’s release that we hadn’t already seen in other games. It didn’t even polish the current state of gaming to a shiny new level. Giving ArenaNet this award is rewarding mediocrity.

I haven’t played for a few months now due to lack of interest, but off the top of my head:

Voice acted story – SWTOR did this much better in every way. TSW had better acting and camera moves and far better characters. Need I mention Traherne? I didn’t want to do my class quest because of that one character.
Combat System – similar but not as good as the Skill Wheel from TSW. If you were a thief using S+P then you could one button your way though almost the entire game.
Jump Puzzles – already seen in TSW though GW2 has the edge here
Underwater combat – tedious and bug ridden. Mobs that often broke off and healed to full. Underwater areas however were often quite nice.
Graphics – about what I would expect from a 2007 title. Tera and TSW beat it hands down.
Asthetic – pretty good, but nothing special. It’s typical swords and sorcery with pirate overtones. Tera left it for dead, and TSW was ahead of it for those who like a modern setting.
Classes – pretty standard fare. TSW beats it hands down here. Tera is about on par.
Effects -ok when you’re alone but almost intolerable with a group.
Quests – Nothing too special. The class quests are pretty forgettable made all the worse by the terrible VA. The dynamic events were pretty decent fun but are just ‘public quests’ from Warhammer. The investigation quests of TSW blow these out the water.
Setting – I am so sick to death of D&D/Tolkien/Sword+Sorcery – time for something new. TSW gave us a modern setting which was a refreshing change from the same old same old of GW2.
Ability to quest with friends – ok, but if you have done the quests already you are basically just there to mash mobs for your friends. It doesn’t penalise you but it doesn’t incentise either. TSW did much the same prior to GW2 releasing with about the same result – slightly better in TSW’s favour though.
Endgame – appalling, but so is endgame for almost all MMOs.
PVP – since this was meant to be the selling point for the game it should score well but it doesn’t. We got a few domination maps which soon become dull and one major zone (discontinuous) for world PVP. PVP in there mainly consisted of jousting a door for 5 minutes, killing a mob, then running off to repeat elsewhere. It was tedious and lacked any skill whatsoever. Seeing five ‘commanders’ running from door to door Benny Hill style all without saying a single word was...×. I had no rated matches and WvWvW scores a 0 with me so I would say it was a big fail, except the other major releases were probably even worse.
Orr – the place MMO players are sent if they’ve been very very bad in their life
Zones – most were typical fare, nothing really stood out. While I didn’t hate any I didn’t feel a particular fondness for any either – it was all crap I’ve seen a million times and at a fairly low res too. Tera zones are much more detailed. TSW zones are just more interesting.

I honestly can’t think of anything that GW2 did that was so outstandingly better than anyone else to receive this award. I can think of a lot of things it did that were mediocre or worse.

Online games like this actually have code to prevent people like you from cutting the net connection to avoid dieing. You will have ‘keep alive’ counter on your connection on the server, and only once this times out with the server consider you to be out of the game. My experience of GW2 suggests is around 30 seconds…so here’s what actually happened to you:

1. You tossed your toys out the pram.
2. Hit alt-f4
3. Your character stood helplessly still inside the game for 30 seconds while the mysterious but cool thief did everything he ever dreamed of doing and then some to your body.
4. Your body disappears.
5. Thief laughs and does it to someone else.

He got that kill.

I’ve been running through most of the game zones completing them for the achievement. Across the board most seem to contain perhaps 5 people, though it can be hard to tell unless you end up at the same heart. If you check in /map you might find others willing to group – aside from that, it’s pretty lonely out there.

I don’t even see them paying NPC+15% – the vast number of items I tried to sell were listed at NPC+1 copper. I’ve since just vendored everything I made or had drop since it would provide me with more profit. Even salvaging the items is worse than vending and then buying the raw mats off the AH. An item that might give 60 copper could break down to two pieces of leather worth half that.

For me it’s just the greets, I can live with the other ones in general. In the crafting zone you here the same ones constantly, several a minute and some of them several times a minute. I actually have to turn the volume on my mixer down when I’m in the area to stop me punching the screen.

Fixes: greetings should only play for the person who interacts with the NPC, not everyone in the area. The greeting should have a cooldown of perhaps 2 minutes for each player so you don’t here it in quick succession if you need to visit the vendor a few times.

Esya.3427:

High Marshal.2185:

OK, now for my story.

I am on the Human street rat mission The Greater Good which is level 8. I am supposed to meet Logan Thackeray and stop the bandits from poisoning the well.
…

I find this one to be particular hard as well. Played it in beta so knew what I was getting myself into during release, but I got myself killed again a few times in this one. I played this on a necromancer, not sure if I was level 8 or higher as I was a bit afraid from beta I might have outleveled the instance first. So far this is one of the few personal stories that I think are really hard.

I encountered this one during beta on my thief character as well. I hadn’t had a chance to try many weapon combos and had only basic abilities available. I died to spawns on the ramps numerous times and the boss killed me a huge number of times partly due to her glitching into a place that made her hard to hit – and the stupid number of swarms that spawned at the ramp top and ran down to pound on me. The truly useless NPCs did not help one little bit.

On release I choose to play a thief again and made my way to this quest again. This time I waited till I was 2 levels higher and made sure my gear was up to date. I had a shortbow this time around and was able to use my circle strafe skills to circle around the packs of mobs and take them out. I finished the quest with perhaps one death – I can’t recall for sure whether there was even that many.

While levelling I have chosen to wait until I was the recommended level or even higher before doing the personal quests because I had bad memories of The Greater Good. I carve groups of mobs to shreds with my bow and kiting techniques. Tough mobs are shredded with a sword and pistol (boring, only need to press one button for most fights). I have two stealth skills on my bars, one when healing (recently been using SoM instead) and one on a 1 min CD to take me out of combat (basically a lie, it’s like a brief moment of health renewal and a fairly long stealth). When the going gets tough I bug out either briefly or slink off and hope they de-aggro.

I have very few deaths in the PQ storylines now, even in the battle for Trinity that people are mentioning.

Some tips if you’re having trouble:

• learn to kite
• don’t be afraid to burn your CDs
• choose your weapon sets carefully to provide synergy e.g. one range AOE and one hard hitting single target melee
• pull it like it’s a dungeon run, carefully
• body pull packs of mobs but only hit one so the rest will hopefully smack the NPCs about while you deal with the first one. Nibble groups apart like this.
• learn from fights you lose (and win). If one type of mob uses a ton of debuffs and bleeds switch your build to counter this.
• burn your heal early. It should be on a short CD so burn it once you are at roughly 65% health. You want it to totally fill your health bar again with as little overheal as possible. Burning it early means it has a better chance to be ready again later in the fight when you are on the ropes.
• keep your gear up to date
  *if all else fails, bring a friend

I’ve done a few of the dungeons as PUGs and wandered through most with few or no deaths on the first try. Boss fights are obvious and utilise well overused mechanics.

It seems like it would be hard to feel elitist about doing something so banally easy, but some do – they need it to boost their self image, which is always low. Personally I like to play games to pass the time – I don’t use it as a means to derive my self worth.

Lucazzy.1709:

Here’s the thing. I agree with everything said here, but it’s not that big of a problem for me. SWTOR spent many, many, many millions of dollars on story and voice acting. What paid off was some awesome, entertaining, AAA quality main storylines, but boring quest dialogue. I always just went into “WoW mode” after talking to an NPC. I immediately forgot what the story was and I just went and did my objectives. Eventually I started spacebarring to level 50, with the exception of class storylines.

They spent a lot of money on animating the cut-scenes and giving us very high quality VA, but they must have forgotten to pay the writers because the script was about as memorable as a MacDonalds meal. It’s not that the writing was terrible, just that it was instantly forgettable. The characters were generic as was the dialogue they delivered. I actually only watched them in the end because I liked listening to the VA actor who voiced the female operative – she was dreamy!

The only thing I remember from my storyline in SWTOR was that I choose to side with Darth Barras. The rest of the time was generic “we need more supply”, “blow up those towers”, “kill 10 wamprats”.

If you want a recent example of a MMO which has truly excellent dialogue, voice acting and great cut-scenes then check out The Secret World. I can remember huge numbers of their characters, the missions, and even throw away lines on NPCS you pass “Grab your surcoat, you’ve pulled!”, “That outfit needs more red.”

The two children in Romania who are bragging about which monsters they’ve seen are endearing and amusing in one. The French girls at the windmill are unforgettable as one monologues while the other goes to town on monsters with a chainsaw. Let’s not forget that stoic old lady in Kingmouth with the shotgun and a bonfire for burning zombies on.

There’s a good middle ground between the very cheap route AN have taken (talking heads with mostly stock animations, cliche dialogue, reasonable VA talent but with little direction and poor delivery and low emotional content), and the path SWTOR took (massive VA budget, awesome voice direction, kitten script). TSW has it’s flaws too, but the writing is not one of them, nor the voice work.

I’m also finding the dialogue to be about on par with a dreadful 80’s b-grade fantasy movie. Not all the dialogue, but the vast majority.

Dialogue is stilted and unnatural; no-one uses slang or contractions. The writers have fallen into the trap of trying to place the dialogue into some vaguely neutral fantasy setting, stopping just short of Olde English. The result is a form of dialogue that has never been spoken before and never will.

The has directly lead to two things. Firstly, I have all but forgotten the story up to the part where we presumably slay a dragon or force him from the lands – I don’t know and I don’t care. The storyline is trite and hackneyed. Going on a journey through dangerous lands to slay a dragon was covered in The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings and I feel as the audience we deserve better than a rehash of that.

The second thing is I found myself delaying starting the story quests after level 25 or so. It’s not that it got worse around there, it’s just that my tolerance had bled out and I found myself using cut-scenes as a good chance to take a bio break.

Working from memory, if I were to retell the story now it would go something like this:

I literally did most of this stuff this week, more of it should be memorable.

In summary, the characters are poorly voiced. They are unnatural and stilted and don’t follow usual speech patterns. Never mind how much of the dialogue was exposition. The story arc is tired and dated and over-used, especially the part where a dragon and his undead forces threaten the realm. Characters are all bar one completely forgettable.