Guild Wars 2

Plok.5873:

Does not necessarily have to be a corgi, but I’d like to see a canine mount. Still missing my one from Warhammer Online.

What about the jackal mount?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mounts#The_Jackal

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

Edit: umm well the fantasy world created by Anet has a Lore but everything that doesn’t go against the lore is there as soon as Anet devs put it in there. If it goes against there lore, well… It’s there anyway, what the devs put in the game is there. I don’t think things that Anet put in the game is immersion breaking, it might sabotage your picture how Tyria is. Tyria is Anets world and they can do what ever they want with it.

Just because they can theoretically do anything it doesn’t mean that they should do it.

Now if you excuse me, I’ll use my space shuttle that’s powered by 4 giant hamsters to fly to the new Season 4 map called unicorn land where it’s raining candy all day long. Oh Tyria is great isn’t it?

Edit: Funny, they just released a new glider. Take a look at it, riding on a burning fireball/meteor in a sci-fi suit.

No to these mounts. As well as SAB rainbow cloud mounts and the like. I also dislike the standard bunny mount.

Hevoskuuri.3891:

No one has ever stated in any official manner that Guild Wars 2 is intended to be immersive or lifelike in any way. This is a completely fictional fantasy land we’re talking about, after all, with tiny rodent-like races and dragons and magic and so forth. I can never understand why people keep mistaking GW2 for an immersive simulator game.

Yes, a fictional fantasy world which already existed in the previous game as the number in Guild Wars 2 suggests. Actually they should have sticked to the ‘grown up’ look of Guild Wars instead of adding pink unicorn shooting bows, shiny rainbow staffs, quaggan backpacks, hats and legendary shields, shiny Skritt gathering tools and 8-bit rainbow cloud gliders – which completely destroyed every last bit of immersion that could have remained.

There are things that simply don’t fit into a certain fantasy world. If you play Lord of the Rings online, you probably don’t expect to see neon colored bunnies hopping around – and you surely won’t like it either if you’re a fan of the franchise. The Elder Scrolls Online also stayed away from extremely shiny pink cute pets, mounts and sticked to a more serious style in general – like its related games. Then why did Guild Wars 2 have to be shiny, cute and rainbow-like if the style of the original Guild Wars was completely different?

You can’t just take a franchise and turn it inside out. There’s a target group, a fan base for every type of game. This drastic change in design and style was one of the reasons that scared off Guild Wars players to play GW2. They didn’t expect to see Skritt shinies and COOooooOO quaggans with matching backpacks and hats in their known fantasy world. And no, this time there’s no ‘but it’s been 250 years, the world has changed’ argument.

Obviously the whole cute stuff attracted another group of people which likes these things. But they also lost lots of people who don’t like it. You can’t keep everyone. I just don’t understand why they had to pick Guild Wars in particular and perform this 180° turn. There are plenty of MMORPGs that do have a more colorful and cute style. Guild Wars had its fans with the serious style and it should have stayed like that.

And here we’re talking about an expansion map, which was created in the 2 year time frame by a dedicated team of 70 people (obviously not all of them worked on it but still).

Transfer that onto the much smaller Living World teams and their 6 month time frame for a new episode and map.

maddoctor.2738:

It’s the amount of content that is problematic to create, a huge barren wasteland with nothing in it to do doesn’t take much development time. […]

It’s the amount of content that makes maps hard to develop, not their land mass, that’s why a comment like “It has the largest maps we’ve ever created” means little to nothing to me.

Exactly, that’s what came into my mind as well. So if you think about it, will there be a decision between either

• more barren landscapes with less event density
  or
• less maps overall, therefore adequately filled with events?

Due to the mounts, we’re getting (horizontally) larger maps in Path of Fire.
Do you think the maps in future will be generally larger as well?

If so, is it even possible to keep up the pace of the Living World maps in Season 4 when they will be larger overall? What do you think?

Hybarf Tics.2048:

There’s no point in reading a book if in 2 weeks you reach the last page. No point in seeing a movie the will end only one hour forty minutes. Why play an MMO if the story ends, might as well quit right now.

This discussion is quite different since they already had a way to make it last longer and now shifted back to another design.

If you know that it’s possible because it’s been done before, you may wonder about why they changed their attitude and approach now.

I’m just afraid that PoF and Season 4 will follow the same pattern as the Season 3 maps.

Silverwastes and HoT maps were definitely designed with replayability in mind due to these large map wide events that made them special.

Season 3 maps however feel like they’re only there to bridge a short amount of time until the next map is released in 2 months. And I’m afraid that PoF + Season 4 will do the same, more short sighted, designed only to last aprox. until the next release.

If I’ll buy it I guess I would play through the story once or twice and explore the maps. Then I would probably repeat the grind for hero points and xp for (mount) masteries just like in HoT.

I heard the meta events won’t be map consuming/huge as in HoT, but rather like Cursed Shore. So I guess I would play them a few times, complete some achievements and then move on, after all:

2-3 months after the release, they will probably expand Elona with the continuation of Living World Season 4. But if the maps are like Season 3, they’ll last maybe a week for me.

So do I get back to the expansion maps then? Depends on their replayability.
All in all it feels like they’re now focusing on releasing ‘lighter’ content with a faster pace – IIRC that’s what NCsoft expected them to do now, release smaller expansions more often.

New content at a faster pace doesn’t sound bad at first. But none of the Living World Season 3 maps had the replayability value of Silverwastes e.g. for me. I know that many people will like the current maps due to their lighter feeling, you can jump in and out as you wish. But to me, they all felt the same, there was nothing special I could remember about them and after getting a certain item in this map, I never looked back.

All in all, it feels more and more rushed to me. The maps are more like a means to an end in order to buy certain items with map currency. After that, they’ll be left aside and the new map will be played for a week or two. It seems like it’s getting even more casual than before.

If i knew how short it would be I wouldn’t have even started this story instance again…

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Again, those items listed above weren’t ‘real armor’-type gear.

Regardless, it matters little. Cat Ears were popular in Guild Wars, and popular in Guild Wars 2, as well. If the Devs ignore player preference, then (as there already is) there would be threads lamenting the lack of such items.

Oh come on, this is definitely not about cat ears. Cat ears were so subtle you wouldn’t even notice. Not even about chaos gloves. Just compare the first two pictures of GW with the picture of Danikat and you’ll see what I mean. The flashiest Norn with 2 disco balls as weapons in his hands.

A certain game has a certain style. I liked the style of GW and aesthetics are one point of choosing which game to play. Now this style was changed drastically, I don’t like the aesthetics of GW2 anymore.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Tekey.7946:

Andred.1087:

Always lmao at complaints about immersion in MMO’s. News flash: there are other players in this game. If you want immersion, try reading a book.

If you play a game that takes place in the middle ages and only features medieval clothes/armor/weapons, there’s still immersion, no matter if there are other players.

Like I said, in Guild Wars, there were no quaggan backpacks, no unicorn bows, no SAB cloud rainbow gliders.

I’m not sure how medieval-appropriate Cat Ear’s or Wedding Attire, or Formal Attire, or even Santa Claus or Rudolf hats were in Guild Wars. /shrug

I didn’t mean to say Guild Wars provides a medieval setting, I meant games in general. I think there are some current alpha/kickstarter MMORPGs that do have this medieval approach.

The second sentence should only emphasize how the Guild Wars universe changed in this matter, it definitely had some outfits or tonics, but the armors and weapons were much more conservative – no quaggan backpacks, unicorns, nothing greatly over the top, just real armor.

Nah, I meant the stress test will definitely be tomorrow, today is still 30th like Dethl said

I thought it was August 31st, not today but tomorrow?

Abakk.9176:

What i think is really happening is that many of todays gamers are spoiled and jaded and all seem to know how a perfect game should look like.

Maybe you should go play WoW for a bit and level a character to 100. Then come back and look at this game again.

You cannot have a game where there are thousand of quests that are all unique. Just as you cannot have self-reprogramming events that are completely unpredictable.

At the end of the day these games are nothing more than interactive databases and bound to a certain amount of predictable programming. As far as GW2 goes i think it is one of the more cleverly wrapped databases and good looking as well.

But maybe coming from an age where gaming was done on boards around a table makes me appreciate what we have today more. Not to mention a rich imagination honed by reading a metric ton of comics, novels, etc..

It seems more likely that you’re currently hooked by GW2 which influences your evaluation. You’re calling people easily bored and spoiled because they talked about their experience with GW2 events the design in general.

Abakk.9176:

You cannot have a game where there are thousand of quests that are all unique.

Honestly, how many of them do you find unique? You may list them here if you want to.

GW2 events are highly limited due to their nature. There’s no room for stealth/investigation missions, your decisions don’t have any impact on the story and it’s exactly the same event for every race and profession.

After playing a while you’ll see that you’re basically doing the same 3 events over and over again that were copied, reskinned and adapted to the new environment. And that makes me get bored faster and faster with every new map that’s been released. There are always exceptions, somtimes you can use your glider, PoF will probably make use of the mounts sometimes. But overall, the events of GW2 are mostly not different to some basic, shallow kill 0/x, gather 0/x quests. The only thing they really ‘revolutionized’ would be how they easily make people play together – especially with regards to meta events.

Andred.1087:

Always lmao at complaints about immersion in MMO’s. News flash: there are other players in this game. If you want immersion, try reading a book.

If you play a game that takes place in the middle ages and only features medieval clothes/armor/weapons, there’s still immersion, no matter if there are other players.

Like I said, in Guild Wars, there were no quaggan backpacks, no unicorn bows, no SAB cloud rainbow gliders.

Guild Wars was much more serious and grown up in that matter. Sure it also had non-serious tonics for fun but at least there were no unicorn shooting bows and SAB rainbow clouds everywhere. It was much more immersive.

And even if there had been things like that, you wouldn’t have noticed it because of the instanced zones

I’m already afraid of the mount skins.. You’ll see gliders for a few seconds, but when they’re riding on their pink unicorns constantly…
Some devs even considered the standard “cute” giant bunny mount to be one of the things that don’t necessarily fit into the GW universe.

Gaile Gray.6029:

and head into the Crystal Oasis.

So it will probably be the same part of the map as in the demo? Or is it the full map this time?

Twyn.7320:

Abakk.9176:

I don’t get anything done because im always re-playing events and here is one that is done with any map in 1-2 days….. whut?

Never played an MMO as replayable as this one tbh. Its pure genious, plain and simple.

Sounds to me you are rather easily bored OP.

Well, no, I’m not easily bored. I’m easily bored by content that gives no replay value. The only map that sees any kind of replay value in LWS3 is Bloodstone Fen, from my experience, and maybe the leather farm in Lake Doric, but that’s just a pointless grind for gold.

I feel just the same and also analyzed the events of the Season 3 maps. With the exception of a few, they could easily be separated into the basic quest designs: Kill: 0/x, Gather 0/x and Protect/Escort. That’s where GW2 always wanted to be different compared to other MMORPGs but in the end, those smaller, independent events are just as or even more grindy than some WoW quests. The only difference is that events are happening right now and can be easily accessible for multiple players.

What was really different were meta events of HoT and Season 2 (Silverwastes) where several groups split up and did different things at once in order to progress the overall event.

Abbak, you said GW2 was the most replayable MMO you’ve played and it would be genious. Well to me, it isn’t. The large majority of events in the whole world are nothing but basic MMORPG quests disguised as dynamic events. In other games I was happy when I finally finished the “Kill 0/10 wolves” task and could move on with the story. In GW2, this event will repeat over and over and over again every 5 minutes.

1. I don’t even want to repeat that boring quest, I want to get rid of it as soon as possible
2. Our actions don’t have any impact on the world of Tyria. You’ve rescued a few allies? oh look, they’re trapped in there again. Rescue them again.

After leveling multiple characters to lvl 80, playing through the game, I have no reason to replay these events. They’re plain boring to me. Meta events changed that a little, but they alone also don’t last 2 years for me.

I guess it’s subjective as you liked to delete your characters and start all oved again. Other people would have liked to see more large meta events in lvl 80 zones.

The funny thing is that I could find several events in the PoF demo (lvl80) that were exactly the same as in Queensdale (lvl1-15):

• We should defend the Amnoon farm workers from the Forged just like we protected the ranchers in Queensdale from bandits.
• We should defend the water pipes of Amnoon from saboteurs just like we protected the water pipes in Queensdale from bandits.
• We should gather fish in Amnoon just like a level 10 heart quest in Queensdale told us to gather crabs for the fishermen.
• (n/A yet) We should escort people in Amnoon just like we escorted the trading post caravan, Moa Trainer Kappa, carnival caravan in Queensdale.

All in all, they’re all the same. I don’t care if I escort a caravan in Queensdale, Gendarran Fields, Wayfarer’s Foothills or Crystal Oasis. They’re all the same to me, copied over, reskinned, with changing enemies. There’s no way I still want to do that after the 100th time. They have to think of new concepts. In many games, the quests will change, be more complex over the time. Sadly, we’re seeing a step backwards in Living World Season 3 and thr PoF demo.

Vayne.8563:

I’m not saying everyone needs to have rewards for doing it. I’m saying we need to be able to experience that in game as our characters.

This genre is called mmoRPG. Seems like some people at Anet don’t really focus very much on the RPG part.

[…]

A raid story mode shouldn’t even have been a question. It should have been a given…in my opinion.

Exactly, that’s what it feels like.
It’s just ironic how other players told us to watch videos to see it. We don’t want to watch videos, we want to play an MMORPG on our own and experience the stories in the game.

Randulf.7614:

Raid wing 4 closes off an old GW1 story and is self contained. Whilst it has links to the LS3 story, it has no bearing or impact on the narrative of LS3 whatsoever so works as a stand alone.

And what would you tell GW1 players who don’t necessarily raid? How would you explain them that their old story is concluded within an isolated game mode that’s being played by only like 10% of the players? Why couldn’t it be open for the whole playerbase as a story instance/dungeon?

TheRandomGuy.7246:

They did not explain anything in raids. I raid every week and I have no clue why Lazarus is important and who that Saul D’Alessio is and why we even went to that prison.
Making story mode will just create more questions since story makes sense only if you played gw1 or watched lore videos.

It’s just weird that they continued a story of GW in raids only. On the one hand, there may be GW2 players that don’t know who he is like you said. On the other hand, there are GW players that wanted to experience that story themselves outside of raids.

Let’s say 10% of GW2 players do raid. How many of them did play GW? How many of those care about the lore, story? A percentage of a percentage of a percentage. Is that worth locking the story inside of raids?

After all, I don’t even care anymore. Their decisions regarding raids (locking xp progression, stories,…) are just plain stupid to me. If you want to lose players, that’s how you do it. Other games that were mentioned here provide a story mode for a reason – GW2 doesn’t want to do it, fine.

Randulf.7614:

marelooke.9708:

There’s barely any story in the raids. Unlike in WoW’s old raids (no idea about the new ones) where they basically wrapped up or continued the single player story. Even the white mantle stuff is so minor that they don’t tell you anything you aren’t told through the Living World (I mean, I do hope most people figured out that the White Mantle was trying to revive Lazarus, which is all I’ve gleamed from the raid story so far.)

Which is a good thing imho, this way as Anet doesn’t have to bother doing the extra work of making an “easy” version of the raids (which they probably don’t have the manpower for anyway) as the only thing you are missing out on is the bossfights and some minor ambient dialogue.

People that think the raids somehow plug the plentiful holes in the LS3 narrative are in for a huge disappointment.

One of the big feedbacks from the. community was for raids to avoid significant story continuations in raids. Casual players or non raiders did not want to be forced i to raiding to find out whst happens next. Any story in the first three raids was recapped by any npc in bloodstone fen, which worked well

Guess I missed the whole Saul D’Alessio story in the open world zones or episodes then? As far as I can remember, the only thing we were told to get the story was to watch videos on youtube if we didn’t want to raid.

You may say it’s not important for the main story of GW2. But you also said we wanted raids to avoid significant story continuations in raids. GW2 is a sequel of GW and the Bastion of the Penitent did finally, after years conclude a special part of the story. I’d say it was pretty kitteny to do that in a raid that doesn’t have a story mode.

Apart from that, some people would have also liked to play the new encounters themselves with an easier level of difficulty. Maybe reduced to a 5 player instance just like fractals or dungeons with adjusted rewards. It’s not always about legendary rewards but rather the fact that you’re able to play those instances without preparing, training and organizing weeks for it.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Harder to explain is ANet’s decision not to hire and direct/instruct voice actors with a distinct flair. Part of it might be that there are quite a lot of accents to cover: North African, Middle Eastern, Persian, and perhaps even other parts of Africa.

I don’t think we need a large variety of different accents but just a hint that we’re in a foreign country now, meet people from another culture that we didn’t see for 250 years now.

People would probably understand that Anet isn’t able to provide that much of a variety but it still would help to immerse. I wouldn’t mind if I couldn’t tell the difference between someone who grew up in Kamadan and someone who grew up In Vabbi only by hearing them talk..

After all it’s just a fantasy world that doesn’t have to be a 100% accurate. But sadly we didn’t even see 1% since there are no accents at all.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Then again, we haven’t seen all of Elona yet, so maybe…

I know, there’s much more to see. But if that was really the start of the expansion it’s weird that they didn’t take the chance to introduce the culture with all of its facets to us. We could alread see how different the architecture e.g. is and I don’t really see how and why the point of accents could change during the expansion..

Since GW2 now has way more experience with voice acting compared to the original GW series back then, I always expected to finally hear some interesting accents that would add a nice touch to the game. Sadly, neither the Charr nor the Asura had a special way to talk (except for using the word bookah), they talk exactly like everyone else.

They all have a different origin compared to humans so I always found it weird that they talked exactly like them, without having the slightest accent ( – think of Khajiit for example). Yes, they all live together in cities like Lion’s Arch now but they still have their own culture, meaning that they don’t necessarily had to lose the way how they talk, at least not all of them.

Now that we’ve already seen a part of the new story in PoF, we know that the people of Elona we encountered do also talk just like us (except for adding the word Ahai). We’re now playing in foreign lands and still there’s not the slightest hint on an accent. To me it just felt weird that they talked exactly like our characters, it took the immersion away for me. It may be harder to find voice actors but I think it would have been worth it.

If I remember correctly, some dwarf characters and the Lich in GW had some sort of accent, but there was no concept overall I think. I would have liked to see a more elaborated concept in GW2

Hawken.7932:

FrizzFreston.5290:

Plus it’s the start of a new expansion. Instead of coming from HoT and LS3 alot of players come from just core and the start may intentionally be easier and easing people into the experience where it gets harder later on. Something that was heavily criticized for HoT. So i think it’s intentionally on the easier side.

This was precisely my thought.

Other players here have already explained that Living World Season 2 was the bridge between core Tyria and Heart of Thorns. The Mordrem were harder than the usual mobs but not quite as hard as HoT. If I remember correctly, the start of HoT was even way harder until they adapted/nerfed it?

Other than that, HoT overall was heavily criticized by a certain group of players – casual type of players. That’s perfectly fine as there are always different groups that demand different content. They couldn’t complete hero points on their own anymore -> because they were too hard. Huge meta events needed dedication and enough time, Dragon’s Stand should be an obvious example. You’ll also need some time to adapt to the difficulty and setting of the maps (just think of the navigation through Tangled Depths). Overall it certainly wasn’t an expansion for casual players who only have half an hour to play each day. HoT took the game to the next level.

After receiving this feedback they went back to smaller, casual, more independent events in Season 3 where you could jump in and out easily just like in core Tyria maps.
Now, if we transfer the principle of Living World Seasons as bridge to the expansions, what can we expect in PoF?

They tuned the difficulty down significantly in S3 – instead of preparing the players for a higher difficulty just like S2 did. The demo showed us weak enemies as well, that may be because of marketing reasons (everyone could join and look what it’s like) but it may also be that it’s the difficulty of the new expansion, in order to cater to another target group – the more relaxed, casual players who disliked HoT.

You said it’s probably adapted to players who come directly from the core game. It’s the second end-game lvl 80 expansion that’s being released. As a player who plays the game because of its PvE, I would at least go for the latest Living World episodes to find out what’s even going on in the story or just to know if I liked the newer content and its difficulty that leads directly to the expansion I want to buy – no? That’s the needed bridge to the next expansion. There’s no need to dumb down the first three maps of the expansion just to make the introduction easier.

But as we know, there are people who liked the difficulty of HoT and there are people who disliked it. I still expect them to cater to the second group of people this time – meaning that PoF will be way easier than HoT.

maddoctor.2738:

Tekey.7946:

In general, I noticed several things in the PoF demo that hinted towards core Tyria/Season 3 design in contrast to HoT:

But that was the first map only. And not the whole map.

I don’t sew how the reintroduction of heart quests (in the story) could vary in other maps. The same with the difficulty of mobs. The difficulty of HoT overall could be seen in the first map Verdant Brink as well as Auric Basin or Tangled Depths.

Do you think the hydras will be much more powerful in the next map? Why should they be weak in the first map and stronger in the second map?

Hawken.7932:

FogLeg.9354:

I expect PoF to be much like LS3. And quite a lot more like core Tyria when compared to HoT. Which for me is good thing and only reason to even consider buying it since I dislike pretty much everything in HoT, including those timed map-wide meta events.

What would lead you to expect this? I don’t expect it at all. They pretty well have to make the difficulty on par with HoT (which I love), otherwise they’re really not going to maintain their level 80 population.

In general, I noticed several things in the PoF demo that hinted towards core Tyria/Season 3 design in contrast to HoT:

• reintroduction of heart quests
• implementation of heart quests in story instances
• overall easy difficutly of mobs
• Crystal Oasis didn’t have much verticality (maybe due to desert theme, lack of gliders or general design)
• overall simple, small events that reminded me of Queensdale
• low event density on a stretched, larger landscape

I think that PoF will be the exact opposite of HoT since there were always two sides, the ones that (dis)liked verticality, (dis)liked huge meta events, (dis)liked the difficulty.

Boring and repetitive. Probably not for new players as they’re still exploring the world overall. But with all of the positive aspects of events on the one hand (‘active’ maps, gathering players, jump in and out quickly) there are also crucial points that prevent me from considering PoF to be interesting -> PvE.

After Season 2 and HoT the design changed from larger meta events back to rather smaller, quicker events. I could basically witness multiple rotations in a extremely short amount of time while doing a few Season 3 achievements in the new maps. Up to that point when it simply got annoying and I left… “Really. You’re trapped in there again? I rescued you 5 minutes ago, how did you even do that?”

These new maps make me feel like being stuck in a way too short, annoying time loop. It’s really frustrating to see the same things happening again and again within a few minutes – in contrast to completing a quest forever to move on with the story. Of course, it’s always been like that with events, but the design of Season 3 somehow made it even more obvious.

Another point is that I expected events to evolve over the time. The events of Season 3 could be divided into simple defeat, protect/escort and gather tasks. When I played in the new Crystal Oasis map (demo weekend) I even encountered events that reminded me of a core Tyria starter zone – Queensdale:

• We should defend the Amnoon farm workers from the Forged just like we protected the ranchers in Queensdale from bandits.
• We should defend the water pipes of Amnoon from saboteurs just like we protected the water pipes in Queensdale from bandits.
• We should gather fish in Amnoon just like a level 10 heart quest in Queensdale told us to gather crabs for the fishermen.
• (n/A yet) We should escort people in Amnoon just like we escorted the trading post caravan, Moa Trainer Kappa, carnival caravan in Queensdale.

I really don’t want to buy a lvl 80 expansion in 2017 if we’ll do exactly the same things as in the core game starter zones of 2012. At some point it’s just all the same copied over and over again. Maybe add one or two events that include the new masteries (gliding, mounts) and there you have it. A new expansion.

Keep in mind that those points are purely subjective and concern PvE only

Edit: sources: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Queensdale
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Crystal_Oasis

So what do you think about the events in Path of Fire? Do you expect them to be different to anything we’ve seen before? Or just more like the core game?

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Outfits are easier because they are a single item. They don’t have to be mixed or matched with anything else, except combat animations. Armor pieces have to be designed to work with every other piece of armor of the same weight (but different location). It’s a lot less total effort.

I thought it was basically impossible to match every single armor piece with the existing ones. Many of the existing armor skins overlap with others or just don’t match well but that didn’t prevent them to release them anyway. They certainly didn’t match them with every other piece of armor of the same weight so I don’t know why it’s still considered to be the reason for selling outfits/taking them 9 months to release a single armor set.

Let’s look at it this way, at the first sight: Outfit = Full armor set.

Difference: The armor set had the ability to customize them, mix and match them with other pieces, while it’s definitely not required to do so. But there’s still a chance to find some pieces that work well together. Outfits won’t even give us that chance. There are plenty of people who say: we can decide ourselves what matches, just give us armor pieces instead of outfits.

Yes, there will be people that complain about clipping, but there are also people (right now) that complain about the shoulder pieces of an outfit that they can’t hide. There will always be people that complain but that shouldn’t be the reason not to release armor sets.

The Greyhawk.9107:

Also, no one can accurately say how many people want this housing thing. It may be a majority of the player base, it may be a minority, it may even be an insignificant number, no one knows. Maybe this is worth putting in the game, maybe it isn’t, I don’t have strong feelings about it either way. But just because someone or even several someones want a feature doesn’t mean it has to be put in. No game can have everything everyone wants.

The Greyhawk.9107:

So, Wow and everquest have every single possible feature that anyone and everyone that plays them could want? Every single person? If not than my point does still stand, that its impossible for every single requested feature be implemented. As I already said, I’ve no real opinion about player housing, but one has to be pragmatic about something like this, would it be worth the effort and time that may go to something else. Everything added in game is the result of a balancing act.

Well, in your words: no one could accurately say how many people want this mount thing. Many people were even completely against it. But Path of Fire will introduce mounts to GW2 – many people thought Anet would never do that.

Everything that could result in money is worth the effort for Arenanet. Mount skins will be sold in the gem store just like glider skins. The required target groups are already there, mounts have been requested for a long time, just as housing.

Housing items, decorations are even more versatile than mounts and gliders. They could sell tons of different items in the gem store. As long as there is nothing else that could result in even more money, they will probably go with housing.

I would like to see them upgrade the instuments, adding semi tones and reduce the delay so we had no limitations.

Related to the desert theme you mentioned, here are two bands I found in the demo of the Crystal Oasis map. They’re using the same instuments we already know

I’ve seen a bunch of people who pre-purchased Path of Fire as soon as possible (even before the first demo started), so I wanted to ask why they already bought it.

Sometimes I’ve been hyped for a new game but eventually was glad I didn’t already buy it because it turned out quite differently.

So back to the initial point: The trailer included some major points like mounts, elite specs and the setting of the story. However, it didn’t really contain more specific information on either of those points.

Why did you still pre-purchase it without knowing how it’ll turn out? Were you completely sure even before it was announced? Or did the hype make the decision for you?

Well they do scale with the character size but as far as we could already see it, they didn’t make differences between races – meaning that the largest Asura character will have the same mount as the largest Charr character.

Which eventually lead to funny looking Charrs riding on small raptors

During the demo we could already see how funny some Charr characters looked like on their tiny raptor mounts.

Compared to the raptor, there seems to be even less space for a Charr on the bunny springer mount.. Do you think it will be alright or just weirdly funny?

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

And then, people would complain there are no actual item drops.

I dont think anyone would miss thousands of bags that contained nothing but blues and greens which eventually cluttered your inventory just so you can salvage them to materials – when they could get the materials immediately instead. I wouldn’t mind if they started a survey.

We would still have exotic drops that may be more useful for alts or the trading post.

Rauderi.8706:

Tekey.7946:

Otherwise, they could just give us bags that contain crafting materials and skip the unnecessary blue and green armor/weapons in lvl 80 zones.

I feel it necessary to adjust this statement slightly. We get enough bags. Just go straight to the crafting mats or Exotic+ rewards.

Even better, seems like I couldn’t even imagine GW2 without bags

The only reason we’re still getting tons of those useless “rewards” is the gem store:

• copper-fed salvage kit – 800 gems
• shared inventory slot – 700 gems each
• additional bag slot (soulbound) – 400 gems each

Otherwise, they could just give us bags that contain crafting materials and skip the unnecessary blue and green armor/weapons in lvl 80 zones.

RedDeadFred.1256:

The biggest criticisms I and MANY others had about HoT was that it only had 4 maps whilst reinventing amd creating a bunch of systems. This expac seems a lot more content rich for people like me.

The more I think about it, especially a few weeks after the announcement… I’m not a huge fan of HoT either but I don’t really see the difference anymore (PvE).

• HoT added 4 (smaller looking, partly vertical) maps – Dragon’s Stand purely meta.
  -> PoF adds 5 maps that may look larger, but probably are flat like core Tyria and probably won’t provide as much density as HoT maps due to the desert theme (barren, empty landscapes) and the mounts:

We could already see 2/3 of the Crystal Oasis map. Most of the time I just encountered a few foes in an overall empty (deserted) environment.
There were just a handful of events that weren’t connected to each other and some of them really reminded me of Queensdale: Farmers are being attacked by the Forged – Farmers are being attacked by the bandits. Protect the water pipes from saboteurs – Protect the water pipes from bandits. Help someone to gather fish from the bay – even sounds like a starter area heart quest.

source: Demo, https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Crystal_Oasis

• HoT introduced elite specializations + a new class
  -> PoF expands elite specializations – no new class

• HoT introduced guild halls: 2
  -> PoF expands: + 1

• HoT introduced a new form of transportation: Gliding
  -> PoF adds a new form of transportation: Mounts

Then there’s $, initial price of HoT 50$, initial price of PoF 30$.

The price tag alone doesn’t really convince me to buy PoF. While HoT introduced some new systems (mastery, guild halls,…), PoF will mostly expand those existing forms without adding anything that’s really new. Bounties were highlighted in the presentation – what they really are: some random foes (champion/legend) with a timer – nothing that would sell an expansion to me.

Guess that’s what future expansions will look like as well – story, a few maps, 1 set of elite specs, some sort of transportation. Doesn’t sound too bad, but it won’t surprise anyone, there’s nothing special about it..

Amaimon.7823:

I feel Anet is not utilizing the living world properly,
Theyre too random and too far apart.
The only one I felt really significant was the trail to Ember Bay. The rest was just
“See, magic’s going whack”

Current events can be used for so much more.
Inquest activity, abaddon knows they need to step up their game. All their ambitions are gone with Kudu, who was far from a boss/leader?
Cenaur activity.
Tengu activity.
Dwarven activity, why did ogden stop caring about us after Ember Bay?

Exactly, there’s so much potential, many things they could do.
These side-quest activities you described (centaur activity,…) would make Tyria feel alive again – similar to the first season of the Living World. The world doesn’t stop because there’s an Elder Dragon/human god/… coming up.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

ANet said that there will be more to the Rifts. I’m expecting that to continue after PoF. Like the, erm, current Current Events, I expect it will be in Core Tyria, not HoT or PoF zones.

What’s the latest official statement on current events? The only thing I could remember was that someone asked if there’s a hidden achievement that unlocks the next part of the rift events (Class III, IV, V rifts). A dev then told us that there’s nothing else to be found at the moment. Could be a confirmation of more to come or just a normal statement.

However, people are telling me to wait for it since forever now:

• Wait for the next patch
• Wait for the next Living World episode
• Wait for the announcement of the expansion
• Wait for the time after the expansion

The expansion will be released on September 22. In October it will be a whole year since the rifts appeared. Considering that they used to fill the time between the episodes every two weeks, that’s a lot of time. At some point it will just be the same as Malyck’s Tree.

Some said Anet probably waited for the announcement of the new expansion so they could bridge the time between the last Living World episode and the release of the expansion.

The last real current events were released in October 2016! We’re still stuck with Auris Weirdbringer and the rifts in the Fields of Ruin. After that there were only some bandit/mantle letters and the Caladbolg follow-up of the HoT story (February 2017).

Recently, all of the hidden achievements have been revealed but there’s nothing new to be expected right now – it seems they already concluded the current events of season 3?

Hannelore.8153:

You don’t understand how game design works. You can’t just keep churning out unique and exciting content all of the time, it has to be repetitive and boring, otherwise it doesn’t last long enough to make it to the next milestone.

Your suggestion would require a far more complex use of dev resources.

This is the sad reality of games that need to be constantly updated, and why one-shot games only last something like 20-30 playing hours.

Hearts were added back in to pad content so that more intolerable forms of padding (heavy mastery or token grinding, etc) could be toned down which is largely responsible for why LS3 was better than HoT.

But either way, they have to add filler, that’s all.

If anything the story was extremely lacking in filler up until now. Even with having heart-like mechanics in most missions in the past, it tends to be over very quickly and not offer much replay value beyond achievement grinding.

In my opinion many story missions could stand to be much deeper by slowing down, giving the player time to immerse and kitten around a bit.

If you’re time-restricted, then story-based games probably aren’t for you…

Sounds horrible to be honest. And it’s certainly not about time restrictions.
Let me show you an example of Living World Season 2: Meeting the Asura

It’s the only real stealth mission in GW2 I can think of. You can’t run through it, you’ll have to stop and wait, pay attention to the enemies in order to remain being hidden. That way, you’ll spend more time in the story instance – you can’t always go straight-lined through it.

Unfortunately, most of the time GW2 uses another approach to fill the time:

• Secure the way to the boss. 0/10 enemies killed or 5/5 waves remaining.

- which eventually lead to the reintegration of heart quests in the story of Living World Season 3 and Path of Fire:

• Press F to revive 0/8 people. Press 1 to extinguish 0/12 fires. Kill 0/10 enemies.

But that’s exactly the point where Guild Wars 2 wanted to be different compared to other MMORPGs. It’s funny how often people claimed that “GW2 doesn’t have these boring fetch quests, it’s so different.” and in the end it’s all the same, just extensively disguised. It’s the main story of the second expansion of GW2. Many other games do have a lot of fetch quests as part of the leveling content. However, their main story often provided varied, much more interesting designs. But instead of being creative, Anet just made a step backwards by integrating basic starter area fetch quests into the main story.

You said:

You can’t just keep churning out unique and exciting content all of the time, it has to be repetitive and boring, […]

Your suggestion would require a far more complex use of dev resources.

What did they do in the past 2 years of developement of Path of Fire?

Where and when can we expect unique and exciting content if not in a coordinated, planned expansion?

City of Amnoon aesthetically great.

Neutral: mounts

Negative:

• Return of heart quests in the main story of the 2nd expansion is awful, uninspired, boring story design. -> Quality over quantity. Be creative.
• Map feels empty. Just a handful of events in a large map made people quit after 1 hour.
• Events were boring, without connection – starter area standard: Defend water pipes – Queensdale bandits. Protect Amnoon farm workers from the Forged – Queensdale bandits.

Negative points prevented me from pre-ordering. If the whole expansion is like that, I might as well quit completely.

That’s what I said here, it’s ironic that they called the map Crystal Oasis and didn’t even provide the original soundtrack

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Crystal-Oasis-map-something-missing/first

Many people hoped to hear it again when they first heard of the expansion taking place in the Crystal Desert.

Ayrilana.1396:

Would it be more accepted if they just removed the heart icon from the mission UI? A lot of what they’re having us do is similar to what we have done in previous missions.

mazut.4296:

So you complaint about a symbol on the map o.O
Because the story event will be exactly the same with or without the heart symbol… you know…

Arzurag.7506:

There is only a minor difference between previous mission-quests and now mission-hearts: The heart actually shows up as a heart-symbol, that´s all.
Call it quest, heart, task to fullfill or whatsoever at the end it remains as something you have to do for progressing in your personal story.

No it’s not just the heart symbol. Yes, we’ve already seen a similar design in the personal story (e.g. multiple waves of undead – which directly reappeared in the Bitterfrost Frontier story).

Just because it’s been like that in the past doesn’t mean it has to be like that in the future. A game can be improved over the years. They had 2 years with a team that was directly assigned to the expansion. They could learn from their past and think of ways to make the story interesting. Instead, they used the same “extinguish 12 fires, revive 8 people” heart quests we could already experience in starter area maps.

If the actions of the heart quest (extinguish fire, rescue people) are important for the story, you could forget about the number of fires and people (they’re nameless characters). It’s not important for the story if you revive 7 or 8 people so forget about it.
Represent the villagers symbolically and concentrate on interesting gameplay, quality over quantity:

Instead of helping 8 separated NPC’s you could focus on a group of people that were trapped inside of a burning building due to the attack.

• Take the fire extinguisher to secure the way to the entrance.
• The way is still blocked by wood trusses that collapsed during the fire.
• There are several interactive objects you could use and combine at different points to carry them away.
  -> maybe there’s just one solution, maybe there are several possible solutions.
• Maybe your newly added mount could also help in a certain way.

If the symbolic way doesn’t seem to be immersive because you didn’t save all of them, you might as well provide some uninjured NPC’s that rescued the remaining people in the meantime.

You don’t have to extinguish 12 fires and save 8 people to tell the story. Think of a creative way how to do it instead of the number how often you press “F” or “1”.

One of the first things you’ll encounter while playing through the PoF story is a heart quest. If you weren’t able to participate in the demo, here’s a video, it should start at 12:30

https://youtu.be/-M5-c8y5fGc?t=750

You could progress by extinguishing fires and revive NPC’s. In oder to finish the heart quest in the video it took aprox.

• 12 extinguished fires
• 8 revived people

The latest view on (repeatable) heart quests showed that some people like them while others dislike them. Many people said they’re ok with it as long as they’re optional.

Unfortunately, they introduced them again as a mandatory part of the story in PoF just like Living World Season 3 did. Logically, if they had read the feedback of the players they would have agreed to the compromise by implementing hearts as an optional part of the maps. I don’t understand their decision to integrate them into the story considering the mixed feedback.

Spent even more time there and certainly didn’t hear it. Could anyone confirm?
Would be ironic if they forgot about it when they even called the map Crystal Oasis..

The famous track ‘Crystal Oasis’ from GW Prophecies. It’s missing, isn’t it?

Here’s a link to the track:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oFGagjD18o

Yes, most likely.

Tiz.3204:

I don’t think path of fire will come out in physical form, just digital. I believe the GW2 official FAQ answered this on the 1st of August when it was announced.

Tiz

Quoting the FAQ:

Q: Will Path of Fire only be available digitally, or will there be a boxed edition as well?

A: Path of Fire is available primarily as a digital download. Please visit our official site for a full list of the available editions and exclusive bonus items, or click here to find other official retailers.

Like I said, an official retailer already confirmed that they will be selling physical copies. Probably depends on your region but you could just ask the official retailers in your country as well.