Guild Wars 2

Since an overwhelming part of players seems to dislike season 3 it seems unnecessary to highlight this again but I hope that some moderators read this and pass it on to the creation teems. As someone who never has played GW1, I totally see the weakness in a storytelling that just does not catch me. Although being commander of the pact, I’m feeling like a nobody running around with stupid side kicks that do nothing to support my personal story or my personal success. Neither are they interesting so that a focus on the “epicness” of these heroes would be satisfying and could be excused. I totally don’t care about Taimi, Trahearne, Majory and who else. They are boring NPCs with boring lives, and mostly no story contribution.

Furthermore the whole design around the pact and my character being an essential part of it, does not feel epic. The character creation at the start of the game kicks off with a lot of choices that should have influence on the way you experience the story – but none of this lasts long and really matters later on in the living story. All I do is permanently helping my boring side kick NPCs to kill a monster or opponent I hardly heard of – no character development hence you played the personal story. You actually could skip that first part level up with scrolls and still be able to “enjoy” the living story.

Certainly, a MMO cannot have the intensive story like a single player title, such as the Witcher or the early Diablo and Warcraft titles. But if I think back to the missions and some cut scenes in WOW, for example when you march on Undercity with Jaina and Vrynn or the alliance and the horde dying together at the entrance of the icecrown citadel due to the treason of the Undead, then I see intelligent usage of the NPCs backgrounds woven into a meaningful story.

Compared to this especially seasons 3 but also the rest of GW2 PvE could make use of some improvements and a better narrative: perhaps a more meaningful story for my character, that evolves over time, maybe reveals some dark secrets or a hidden agenda, less half baked loser NPCs that randomly appear and disappear, better cut scenes, more epic cinematics that are worth watching twice and that really drive the story, less reference to GW1 and a plot that is interesting out of the box and provides the dramatic peaks that every good tale needs. I’m curious if PoF will offer that but never give up hope ;-)

+1
Especially on male toons the medium armor looks like crap (although I found the pirate stuff quite cool at the beginning and I also liked the leather coats).

But now, I’d like to have some medium armor that justifies to be called ARMOR. some leather breastplate, some cool leather leg and arm protection, some metal reinforcement woven in here and there. And especially for my huge Norn ranger who just looks stupid and fat with most of the existing armor skins.

EDIT: I forgot to complain about the ridiculous head armor. Why does medium head armor has to look like kind of S/M toys? Vote for more cool hoodies or helmets.

Zedek.8932:

Excelsior.

The game is badly optimized and outdated somewhat, it’s clear and simple.
Many people brought the core aspects up already and there is no point in beating the horse all over, but GW2 is the only game that did not get any benefits of my recent €2.400 PC upgrade… Which is somewhat a shame because it’s a big share of my PC gaming.

As video editor, I upgraded to a Ryzen, an Octacore. An incredible powermachine with awesome performance. Video rendering, using jDownloader (ressource hogging Java!) to Demux a Let’s Play playlist from Youtube, watch Videos on Youtube or playing a game meanwhile all at the same time: No problem, thanks to 8 cores – or better: 16 threads. GW2 however has zero improvements, because my Ryzen’s cores are 3.6 GHz average. Loading takes ages but when I look at my ressources, the game takes barely any ressources at all and I ask where’s that loading time going to. League of Legends for example loads for me in 15 seconds but uses 1.35 GByte of RAM. Too much, but reasonable for that loading time. RAM and VRAM in GW2 are not a problem. The only benefits I got compared to my i7-3770 I had before come from my GTX1080. It is sucking up some performance downgrades due to weaker (but more) cores I have now..

The network however is as stable as it can get. I had a few disconnects over the past years but all these lost their packets in a scandinavian node. Neither my ISP nor ArenaNets fault. There is so far not a single “maintenance” that I noticed unlike FF14 for example. Download speed reaches maximum of my 50 MBit connection (6 MByte/s) unlike FF14 which has often below 1 MByte/s.

So yes, the engine works, I can play the game fine, but it feels “bad” to me as well, like a beat down car that can’t handle everyday’s business and for what it’s made for.

While I agree that the game is terribly optimized for multi core setup and benefits more of single core performance than of a fast graphic card, I cannot say that a system upgrade to a modern gaming machine did not help my performance. I also upgraded to Ryzen (only Ryzen 5 1600 in my case) and a GTX 1080 and compared to my old system the game is massively smoother than before, plus I can play in ultra settings. I had a Phenom II Ghz and a GTX 660 before and while I used to get something about 30-40 fps in lions arch I have at least 60 fps now which might be more if I had not frame capped the fps to 60.

So, yes the system needs optimization and it might benefit less from modern hardware than other games but it’s still worth a hardware upgrade.