Guild Wars 2

I really want underwater areas to explore. I know other games and people have mentioned problems with underwater zones for years now. Frankly, I don’t care. I’d like to see something, anything. The underwater zones of GW2 are by far the most beautiful I’ve seen in any MMO, and if they can make it work, it would be amazing to get something to explore, if nothing else. The tease of Bubble’s real name gives me a teeny, tiny bit of hope. Mordremoth’s design was freakin’ amazing. The threat of Bubbles and its link to the karka, Largos, etc. are so tantalizing.

It is odd that Taimi would know the name of the dragon, unless the Asura have knowledge that we haven’t seen previously. In either case it’s going to be something unique like the other names have been.

Although Steve the Dragon is cute, lol

I’m a returning player from long, long ago. lol But I have to say, I’m really enjoying this new storyline and content. Ember Bay is fantastic and for the first time in a long while, It’s like Guild Wars has come back to it’s roots. I still haven’t completed much of the masteries and new skills etc., but I love the direction this is going in and can’t wait to see what episode 3 has in store. I love the concept of the Elder Dragons absorbing other magic and abilities and it makes the story seem like it’s going to escalate into something big. The dialogue and story scenes within the game look fantastic so far. I love the gliding mechanic, though that technically came out with HoT. I’m looking forward to more story centric driven plots and less….weird random stuff that doesn’t belong in Guild Wars.

All in all, the mystery and awe-inspiring magic that made Guild Wars so great is starting to come back. If you guys make another expansion in this vein, I’d definitely purchase it.

Also still holding out hope for Cantha in the long run, but we’ll have to see.

The Lunar New Year stuff was great! So when will Cantha save us from E-sports Hell?

That’s true, you’d think with Airships nothing would stop us from going to Cantha!

It was disappointing to hear that they are sacrificing story for their so called wonderful gameplay. The Storyline was part of the reason why I got so hooked on GW1 in the first place. Even WoW is digging back into their old BC title to make new lore and story content. Does this mean we have to wait until GW2 is 10 years old before we will see Cantha?

Regardless, Cantha or Elona should happen. Fresh continents with old lore would satisfy both new and veteran players.

Wake me up when we get to Cantha……

Zalani.9827:

I think you Cantha people will like this: http://www.callofcantha.vasburg.com/

That almost brought tears to my eyes. This artist is so talented! And so young too! It’s a lovely tribute to the original designers. But it also reminded me that Jeremy Soule will no longer contribute to the GW soundtrack since he made that deal with the now defunct Everquest Next. It’s really a shame. Guess I have to wait for the next Elder Scrolls title to hear anything new from him, gamewise.

I’ve actually enjoyed Teq runs, just for the sake of themselves. Sucks that you haven’t gotten any ascended loot. I haven’t had anything other than Tequatl’s Hoard which I was fortunate enough to have drop for me three times. I would like it if they made more boss battles like this though.

Rytlock is ok. Logan….man I wanted to like him but he’s just sort of blah. And it was a pretty lame plot device for him to suddenly run off to save Jenna. It doesn’t make him seem very heroic.

Wish they would kill off some of the other characters though….

Alright I admit that’s cute.

DPDude.7205:

Granola.7309:

There still dragons in Elona and Cantha, i guess we will explore this countries in other xpacS ! HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPE !!!!!

From all the Lore i’ve read, there are no confirmed dragons in Cantha or Elona. The reason we’re unable to travel there is because of the unnamed Deep Sea Dragon and it’s minions blocking all passage to either island state. Unless that dragon gets dealt with (which I fear is something that will never happen, because underwater combat is atrocious), we might never see those continents again.

Pricing issues aside, if the expansion is successful Cantha and Elona may become a reality sooner than we think. They’ve been releasing gem store items that are both GW Prophecies and Cantha related, so it is possible they’re testing the market for interest in Cantha. Releasing a new Elder dragon encounter per expansion would have room to include new zones such as:

Deep Sea Dragon → Cantha
Kralkatorrik → Elona

Perhaps Primordius → Tengu lore and the depths of Tyria
or Jormag could open up the Northern portions of the map.

As the game ages, they may loosen up the restraints on what can and can’t be done simply because they wish to retain the player base they have.

Underwater combat and exploration are fine as concepts and dare I say it, in gw2, but the problem is that they haven’t yet created challenging and interesting content involving the underwater zones. A future expansion focusing on underwater zones has the potential to further push the mmo genre. It’s risky but I believe there is room for innovation and GW2 is capable of making that push.

This raiding content could have potential if it’s coordination driven like Teq is, even on a smaller scale. That could be fun for a large boss fight. I really hope they haven’t abandoned dungeons in favor of this though. Having both with incentives would be better for the game and players. Small and large instances would be appropriate, especially since this game is free-to-play now. The incentive system is good, as long as these activities don’t become gear-gated. Then we really would be in fail-copyWOW territory. I really wish the devs would focus on making GW like GW rather than trying to steal ex-wow players from FFXIV or from any other game they’ve been playing. The days of massive WOW subscriptions are over.

Sinope.5630:

When I read “…future of the game…” what occurred to me was, they will be announcing that they will shut down all servers and tell us: “That’s all Folks!”

Well… That’s all Folks

Not gonna lie, the thought did cross my mind. XD

Moving to Pay to Play would be hilarious since they’d be the only company to do that. So many other mmo’s have become free to play from that model aside from FFXIV and WoW.

Regular expansion releases (once a year, 2 years) would be encouraging.

I would rather kill off the new characters from LS1 and 2 and continue to develop the old characters. :/ The new ones aside from Braham and Rox are particularly annoying.

It’s just not worth pre-ordering at the moment. It’s completely baffling to me that people are willing to drop $100 on HoT with 40 dollars worth of gems the way things are right now. I’m not surprised people were disappointed with the beta weekend as it stands, and at this point I doubt we’ll get more than the Maguuma jungle as an explorable map with this expansion. This is peanuts compared to the content we got from Factions, Nightfall and EoTN.

So again, I wouldn’t mind pre-purchasing it if it were WAY cheaper, like about half the price. Plus, with no release date, little to no content aside from some new, admittedly exciting mechanics, it really does look like a fast money grab to fuel development for incomplete content.

I’m also reluctant to shove money at Anet because the storyline has been absolute kitten for the past two years. The living story itself wasn’t a bad concept, but it was poorly implemented and 1 kittening year of Scarlet was a complete waste of resources. The storylines for GW included many new characters, new armor for each profession, new lands, new races to battle, etc. The GW story just got better and better. It didn’t rely on kittenty one-liners, it had an epic story about ‘saving the world’ which worked really frickin’ well. My last hope with all the hints that have been dropped so far is that they actually do something tangible with the storyline and don’t just dangle superficial names of characters in order to appease the old GW players and lore nerds. I want a SOLID story which taps into the rich lore that has sustained the original over the last oh, I don’t know, 8 YEARS.

Consumers have a right to pick and choose what they will spend their money on. It isn’t being demanding, ungrateful etc. This has been and always was a business transaction. People pre-ordered GW2 on the premise that it was a brand new game, and on faith in a company that made promises which customers expected would be fulfilled. Most of them weren’t. It’s understandable that people will be suspicious until they see something tangible which is worth spending money on.

The writing in Edge of Destiny wasn’t bad. It had a childish naivete that made the writing a bit simplistic, but it wasn’t bad. It was heavily action oriented and worked well enough for Edge of Destiny. Besides, Logan was always kind of a jerk to begin with….

Ghosts of Ascalon and Sea of Sorrows were sooooo good though. I wonder if Ree is still at Anet? That last book made me yearn for what could have been in this game. T__T

Bumping an old thread, I know, but I love the mini mythical dragon! It’s huge and the flying animation is fantastic.

Hmm, intriguing.

That would probably depend upon what they do with the Zephyrites during the expansion storyline. Unless they’ve been wiped out I don’t see why they can’t add a modified version of it. Granted it would probably take a lot of man power and resources to design a whole new area aside from they one they had before. The old area was really beautiful though and it would be a shame to not have an excuse to revisit that place or if it’s within their budget, to make new content involving them.

It would probably be a little hard to implement, but I think it would be worth investing in for future expansions or even just for update patches. People always love new races and it might encourage people to purchase more character slots. They already have the lore in place for many new races, and since they don’t have a problem with altering things for whatever reason, I don’t see why they can’t add new, exciting races. Aside from the traditional ones like the Tengu, Centaur, Skritt, Hylek, Drege, Kodan, Grawl, Krait etc. we still don’t know much about the Largos maybe they would be a good addition for content against the Deep Sea Dragon.

The traditional ones are fan favorites though, so they’d be just as good to start with as the Largos would be. :p

It’s true that MOBA’s and app games on devices are very popular with people of all ages. They’re easy to pick up and learn and don’t involve a huge time investment. I heard that when WoW tried to incorporate those kinds of mechanics it pushed away their playerbase since they were expecting more traditional MMO mechanics and content. I don’t think the answer is to try to emulate those games and would argue that GW2 pvp is great for people who just want to ‘pick up and play’ something, while maintaining that competitive aspect. PvE in addition to this helps the game maintain it’s identity as an MMO.

I also like the idea of an expansive world that you can explore and interact with other people in, and MMO’s fulfill that need more than pretty much any other genre. Hopefully with HoT and additional expansions, GW2 will continue to innovate within the MMO genre without losing sight of the things which made it great to begin with.

I don’t know if this is really a mechanic, but I’m hoping this expansion will add content that won’t just be about ‘speed runs’, where you rush through the encounter as quickly as possible so you can grind through it over and over again, just to pick up those collectable currencies. I think they were more successful when implementing their incentive system to dynamic events, rather than with instances. It made them seem really superficial and it became all about having that one specific team of professions, rather than about the experience itself. Ok, to a certain extent, the original GW was a bit like that when it came to the tougher missions, but that was only for beating the missions and you wouldn’t need to grind them dozens of times over. There was incentive to beat them missions in order to complete a larger storyline, which made it feel less rushed and was about the game rather than about the collection grind. Zaishen missions allowed you to play through all the content, which is way different from finding the shortest explorable path and grinding that endlessly.

It wasn’t intentional and players ended up ignoring all the cool stuff Anet made in favor of an endless vanity item grind. With a new focus on tiered (terraced?) maps, it looks like this won’t really be as much of an issue, at least on the surface.

Hylgeriak.8250:

oh yeah, back in those glorious days…“6/8 lf 2 healer” – half an hour later “kitten this kitten, no healers around…I call it a day, cya!”

Except we didn’t call it a day. We’d literally sit for an hour or two just waiting for that last kitten healer. I like healing as a mechanic and a role, but it was no fun waiting around that long for one. The main difference in other games now is that they have MUCH better dungeon finder tools compared to what was around, especially compared to GW1 since you had to spam for a team in local chat. Admittedly that had it’s own kind of charm but was not very time-efficient.

That would be an original touch that would really do a lot to bring the community together.

Legit question and they’ve been oddly quiet about dungeons. They’d really be doing themselves a disservice by not adding at least 2 new dungeons to the expansion. Would be better if they did it upon release, but they’ll more likely add update patches like before with the living world content.

That would be really great news. It’s been too long, they need to add a lot more pets for the Ranger.

To be fair, they will probably buff the Rev before launch. Still I agree that they need to reveal more to make this expansion worth getting. Gone are the days when I will blindly throw my money at Anet. I don’t really play right now aside from getting my log in bonus, just because of time and other things. Lion’s arch looks great, granted but I’m hoping this expansion will be worthwhile and that the Mordremoth encounter (if there is one) will be way better than Zhaitan’s.

I would feel sorry for the people that pre-ordered if that turns out to be true.

Even Square Enix learned from doing that with their disastrous first release of FFXIV in 2009.

Yeah I think it depends on how they are constructed. I’m not usually a huge fan of them to begin with and the GW2 version is….sort of ok. Mostly it’s loud and slow. I wish they had given it more functionality with Mesmer skills. It’s barely useful the way it is. I’ve heard people argue for builds with it in spvp which is fine and all, but it’s just not that fun to play.

My favorite gun toting class is surprisingly the Gunner from Aion. It plays smoothly, with tons of skill options and is very fast paced. The feel of the shooting makes it almost like an action game!

Aside from that, I mostly agree with you. Was never a huge fan of guns in fantasy games to begin with.

Not to mention Lazorz basically ruined Zhaitan, haha.

echo.2053:

Zhaneel.9208:

What should concern fans is the fact that they refuse to sell future expansions separately from the core game at a lower price than the combined version. There wouldn’t have been nearly as much anger from the community if they had just done that to begin with.

“In the future, if we release further Guild Wars 2 expansions, we plan to offer all of the prior expansions, the core game, and the latest expansion for one single purchase price. "

directly from their announcement – don’t count on it. Wont you be pumped for a $100 base price to buy core+hot+ xpac

just seems silly they wont offer just the xpac for a reduced price while maintaining this deal for the newcomers.

As far as their business plan goes, it is frustrating that they would insist on doing everything the hard way. There was generally a lot of positive hype and interest in HoT and it’s just baffling to me that they keep using these shady tactics to promote their game.

The refunds they offered are a start though. Doesn’t affect me personally, but it is something. I hope (but don’t really believe) that they will be more transparent in the future.

Regardless of when it is, I find it disturbing that people are so willing to pre-purchase something with no release date. Hopefully after the community address they will reveal that soon. Wouldn’t a proper release date encourage sales? If you’re doing beta weekends then why isn’t a release date set in stone and ready to be announced?

I used to scoff at people who would try to encourage others not to pre-order a game, especially since it is becoming an industry standard to push this but now….maybe the consumer really would benefit more from waiting a while.

What should concern fans is the fact that they refuse to sell future expansions separately from the core game at a lower price than the combined version. There wouldn’t have been nearly as much anger from the community if they had just done that to begin with.

Reposted:

“We want to be clear about our business model for future expansions now that we are approaching our first paid expansion for Guild Wars 2. We believe that to keep the game dynamic and vibrant with a constantly growing community, it should be as easy as possible for new players to get into Guild Wars 2. For Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, we didn’t want the core game’s price to be a factor in a new player’s decision to begin playing Guild Wars 2. In the future, if we release further Guild Wars 2 expansions, we plan to offer all of the prior expansions, the core game, and the latest expansion for one single purchase price.”

You guys do realize that they will use this^ as an excuse the continuously raise the price on us, right? $49.99 = HoT $59.99 = Future expansion: aka because it includes HoT already.

That extra character slot still isn’t a sure fire thing. I’m going to wait until they’ve expanded their servers, dropped the price, or whatever before buying HoT sorry.

“We want to be clear about our business model for future expansions now that we are approaching our first paid expansion for Guild Wars 2. We believe that to keep the game dynamic and vibrant with a constantly growing community, it should be as easy as possible for new players to get into Guild Wars 2. For Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, we didn’t want the core game’s price to be a factor in a new player’s decision to begin playing Guild Wars 2. In the future, if we release further Guild Wars 2 expansions, we plan to offer all of the prior expansions, the core game, and the latest expansion for one single purchase price.”

You guys do realize that they will use this^ as an excuse the continuously raise the price on us, right? $49.99 = HoT $59.99 = Future expansion: aka because it includes HoT already.

That extra character slot still isn’t a sure fire thing. I’m going to wait until they’ve expanded their servers, dropped the price, or whatever before buying HoT sorry.

ReV.6097:

Arioso.8519:

Beldin.5498:

Or .. give us Timelord and Angel at least as new classes

They did. but they’re Light and Heavy class, respectively.

They don’t even get the trench coats!

I think The 10th Doctor would have something to say on that matter ^^

I have to say that is quite awesome.

But yes, no more trench coats. Maybe they did that on purpose so that people would buy more of their gemstore items? But many of those skins are treanchcoat- like too.

If you’re just going to play the base game, sure why not. Give it a try and decide if you still like the current content. If you’re interested in getting HoT I would say no, since you have already purchased the core game. I like sPvP that is still pretty fun if you play casually.

Johje Holan.4607:

Omocha.4931:

One has the looks, but the other one certainly has the soul. GW2 is focused on the bling-blings from Gem Store, GW1 was focused on player’s experience more.

Had to quote this because it perfectly explains how I feel. GW1 was just so much more of an… experience. GW2 just feels like going through the motions.

Its like the art and finance departments were too big and the content creation department was too small.

At this point I wish they would’ve just made another GW1 expansion and kept it going.

Yeah the story and characters were much better too. Actually I think they had too many people involved in iteration. But aside from that yes, GW1 really was an unforgettable experience for a lot of us Veteran fans.

This chart is amazing, by the way.

Sorry if this was already mentioned in this thread, but EOTN is cheaper because it was considered to be the first real expansion to the GW franchise. Factions and Nightfall were campaigns which were stand alone games that could be played without the others.

Ah I still haven’t completed Caithe’s portion of the living story. I have it unlocked already, I just need to put in the time to do it. Want to maybe level one more class too, like my thief or necromancer. I still haven’t experienced the MM yet.

Haven’t purchased HoT yet, but these are good things to do anyway. Edit: I would like to buy the game, just going to wait and see what Anet does. I don’t have money right now anyway and as it is, it is not worth it.

webtoehobbit.4201:

If you think about it, many of us spend a good $50 heck, even $60 on a new game. Take Fallout 4 for example. If they had announced Fallout 4 a day before it released, no one would need to know ANY details about the game because players know Bethesda and they know that they truly deliver on their games. Players trust Bethesda which in turn makes them LOTS of money.

Maybe the real issue here in our community, isn’t that the price is “too high” or that vets aren’t getting enough freebies. Maybe it’s all a matter of a degraded trust between us, the playerbase and ANet over the last couple years.

This is a very good point. Bethesda has an excellent reputation with their community and their relationship to their community is directly linked to their marketing and sales. Bethesda knows this. Look at what happened when they were trying to introduce paid mods on Steam. Their players were livid! And what did they do? Days, DAYS later even after writing a blog post defending their decision, they immediately took paid mods down because they could see they were problematic, poorly implemented and heavily divisive among the community. They didn’t hide anything, they didn’t try to save face, they didn’t try to censor or BELITTLE the community. They listened because they were going to announce new, highly anticipated games and they knew better than to go into E3 by tarnishing their near flawless reputation.

All the other points have been mentioned but I wish Anet and perhaps NCsoft would pay closer attention to incidents like this one.

A very good article illustrating the point that we don’t know if HoT will be worth the amount we pay for:

“Here’s the thing: we still don’t know a whole lot about the expansion. ArenaNet says that it’s built for repeatable, challenging content, and that the design of the jungle creates more verticality than ever before. But we don’t know how big the expansion will be. When I asked Colin Johanson this, after the expansion was announced, his reply was that ArenaNet wanted to “do a smaller sized area for total scope, and focus really on depth.” Even after a beta weekend, we’re still not fully sure how that depth will manifest.”

http://www.pcgamer.com/guild-wars-2-players-rightly-upset-by-heart-of-thorns-pre-purchase-scheme/

I made a post in another thread with the same point, but found this article right after that. I’m glad that some members of the press are sympathetic at least.

Hey don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that they’re finally adding a feature like Guild Halls which should have been implemented 3 years ago. Heck, I’m even excited about the Revenant, since I can sort of make the Charr “ritualist” that I ways wanted (with staff skills to boot!). But I think this massive response from the community says a lot about the state of the game at the moment.

Even if WoW came out with higher priced expansions in addition to a sub, people thought the amount of content they were getting was worth it. Raids, Questing, races, classes, huge maps. And I don’t just mean one jungle, I mean maps with 8 to 10 new zones, etc. People thought they were getting their money’s worth.

I’m thrilled that they are making an actual expansion, I really am, but you have to consider that the community does not know what to expect in terms of amount of content especially since all this time we’ve just been getting mini updates. It’s hard to toss down money when you are used to getting a relatively small amount of content PER UPDATE. You know what I mean?

If we were getting GW2: CANTHA or GW2: ELONA for example, people already have expectations for how big the new world will be and how much content to expect because they’ll compare it to the original campaigns.

I like the direction they are taking and I hope they continue to make more expansions like HoT in the future. But they need to consider what they’re player base is saying that’s all. We’d happily support things like the gem store where you can spend WAY more money than you would with a sub game easily, if we knew what we were getting out of it.

Maybe I missed it but did they even put out a release date yet? I guess not. Then we’d be calculating approximately how many beta weekends we’d be paying for.

You should consider selling a fourth option: The Heart of Thorns expansion pack for $39.99. FFXIV Heavensward is $39.99 so it would help if your prices were competitive. Even their digital collectors edition is $59.99 which is $15 cheaper than your collector’s edition. Just a thought, Anet.

Figured they’d be kind of rare. It’s a novel idea for beta access though, despite the usual RNG madness.

I like that they are adding incentives to play through the missions. Haven’t had time to log in yet due to rl stuff, but I am so looking forward to grouping up again with people for some nostalgic runs.

If this expansion is a success they will definitely continue to make more. It’s good for generating hype and re-invigorating the community. Things like this can bring in new players too. With games like EQN up in vaporware territory, this is a good opportunity to really beef up the game and ambitiously expand on the game. I like the nods to the old game and I like that they are adding features we have been begging for.

/still holding out for Cantha.

Ok, I admit I filled this out right away. It’s nice of them to host a contest like this.

That was a very nice post. This game has it’s ups and downs, but Guild Wars will always be one of the greatest MMO’s ever made.

I honestly wouldn’t mind removing most of the GW2 music and replacing it with the original soundtrack. I think I could listen to that all day.

Hey guys check out their twitter it seems as though they’ve actually added a few things like tokens for the 10th anniversary!

https://twitter.com/guildwars

1. Cantha (even something small like an island)
2. Lore and storylines relating to the Tengu
3. A house within the Home instance would be pretty nice actually. I love what they’ve added so far.
4. More skills we can swap out of our weapons to customize them. Favored Trait builds are still a thing, yo.

Teniz.5249:

QTwo.6824:

What does your GW 2 “Wish List” look like?

GW 1 + better graphics

DONE

More frog factions! It’ll be great seeing what voices and animations they’ll have. I like that they’ll be having their own separate conflict from the other races in Tyria.