Then there was the multi-classing, which I thought they’d keep in Guild Wars 2. Imagine how many ills could have been solved with multi-classing. See, the more nuanced classes in Guild Wars 2 feel like they’re meant to be paired up with another. If you could, say, have a Paragon/Engineer, that would fix so many problems. But no, that’s impossible, they had to force the single class system to make it familiar to other MMO players. Apparently, the average MMO player isn’t bright enough to grasp the concept of a multi-classed system.
I think the only thing where Guild Wars 1 fails the same as Guild Wars 2 is the story. I think they’re just badly managed in that regard and ArenaNet tends to run out of money. And yes, I’m talkin’ about Trahearne. Of course.
The end-game I would have preferred was if my warband and my Order compatriot had remained with me for it, and if I’d been taking orders from the equivalent of my racial leader of Destiny’s Edge. Instead of the atrocity that was The Pact, we could have had something like… The Coalition, a mutual agreement to work together. Destiny’s Edge could have been appointed as Generals to guide and order us.
It wouldn’t have made any difference to the lore, since history could just record it as “the many hands of the Coalition of Orders,” or somesuch. It could have spoken of the eloquent tactics of the Generals, and the efforts of the agents of each Order (including us). All this could have been achieved without ever introducing Trahearne.
I’ll admit, I used to think that Trahearne was someone’s Gary Stu. I still do, to a degree, because there’s a serious Sylvari fetish (used to express a deep obsession) through the entire game. Though I think the reason it became necessary is because they just couldn’t afford to pay the voice actors any more.
So the end of the game was just…
Well, let’s just say that the least we say about that, the better. I actually feel sorry for them, because it was one of the most memorably bad things I’ve experienced in an MMO, and I’ve witnessed a lot. It was far, far worse than Kormir, even.
Another bad move was the inclusion of a certain someone who designed the cash shop to be more exploitative, to make it necessary for play. With the only other option being grinding. Now, whilst that might be hard to believe, if you play Guild Wars 1, this all becomes clear. Pretty much everything that’s a purchase on the cash shop is available in Guild Wars 1 as a free item. It reminds me of the sort of behavioural conditioning used by mobile games with in-app purchases.
“I’m still good at the game! …but it’s getting harder. Maybe just a little help from the cash shop wouldn’t hurt. Just a little more. Just a little more. Just a little more. Just a little more.”
I was under the impression that it would be closer to Guild Wars 1, honestly. The end result is similar to every other exploitative MMO out there. In fact, one of the only MMOs I’ve seen that doesn’t exploit people is the original Guild Wars and The Secret World. TSW is weird, though, because it actually gives you cash shop money for completing quests. I wonder how they even make money.
But The Secret World reminds me more of Guild Wars 1 than Guild Wars 2 ever could. Not to mention that TSW has no levels, and horizontal progression. It has the best instance of horizontal progression I’ve ever seen, honestly. I daresay that it’s better even than Guild Wars 1. It’s just that the combat and AI lack in comparison to GW1.
And I look back…
I remember why I was so excited about Guild Wars 2. It was going to be this game with pretty good writing, with great aesthetics, with excellent mechanics, and no subscription or exploitation of their player-base. That might seem like it’s impossible to achieve, but… when you look at Guild Wars 1, it isn’t.
I invite you all to go back to Guild Wars 1 to play it again to see just how much better it was, in every conceivable way.
(Cont’d.)
(edited by AuldWolf.7598)
I’ve recently gone back to play the original Guild Wars, I find that the experience left me introspective, considering why I didn’t like its sequel very much. I won’t con you by leading you in with any other opinion.
There were a few stand-out elements that were immediately obvious to me. Such as animals being window-dressing for the scenery rather than actual mobs, I dug that. It meant that unlike Guild Wars 2, you couldn’t end up taken down in one hit by an angry lynx after having been praised as a war hero for his efforts against the Flame Legion. That was silly.
This leads me to another thing. Flow. Guild Wars 2 had some really weird disconnections between zones that its precursor never did. For example, stepping out of a city to find yourself in a zone 30 levels above you was something that would never have happened, there. The design of how places linked together and how they were related was superior, the closer you were to civilisation, the safer you were.
And the aesthetic flow was better — in that the zones surrounding a city would actually reflect that. The Black Citadel and its surrounding lands never had that. The charr had cars but no roads, really? Tanks but no real factories? No infrastructure to speak of? This did much to break my immersion and my enjoyment of the game.
Another thing that stood out was how exploitative it had all become, how much it drove you to buy things from the cash store. For example, how easy it was to craft armour without needing to grind, how long a single salvage kit would last you, how you could just be running around and doing stuff, then there’d be this collector who’d offer you a new piece of armour for things you were already doing. It had the illusion of that, but it was perverse. Through a twisted, smoky, distorted lens.
It’s something you can only really understand if you’ve returned to Guild Wars 1 again after its sequel.
In Ascalon, another revelation occurred to me. By introducing other players, they could no longer have the superlative AI they once had. If I may, I’ll relate a story of the original Guild Wars which will so lucidly express to you the difference in how the AI was handled. A friend and I were tackling some charr, we found a high point up on a cliff and we were attacking their healers.
The healers hung as far back as they could, away from us, trying to keep out of range. Their ranged fighters tried to put a roadblock between us and the healers. And what were their melee fighters doing? Where did they go? They flanked us! They came up the hill from behind and blocked us in, there. When the melee fighters had us locked down, their ranged fighters came into closer range, and used more powerful attacks.
Let’s run a comparison with Guild Wars 2. The mobs tend to attack in zerg waves, they would never even try something like flanking a foe. Ranged mobs are dumb and quickly get into melee distance, and worse, if you try to snipe yourself from a height, the game pops up with ‘Blocked!’ and the foe below you squirms around trying to somehow path their way to you, desperately wriggling.
“How do I use the stairs! I don’t know how these things work! Does anyone have a manual? There’s someone shooting at me up there and I can’t figure out how to get to them!”
(Cont’d.)
(edited by AuldWolf.7598)
How about the fact that it looks overly huge, even on a charr, inviting WoW levels of grotesquerie? And the fact that the armour both clips and leaves parts of the body exposed at the same time, despite no other race having this problem? Or that their only way of dealing with horns is to completely remove them?
That, along with the absolutely awful depictions of the beautiful concept art, and the nerfing of the intellect of the charr and their technology (going against the grain of revealed concept art and lore leading up to the game’s release) was what turned me off them as a race. And the charr were the only appealing feature, the rest of GW2 is just a very typical MMO with well-disguised quests.
Now, consider Everquest II, where every beast race has had the armour tailor-made for them, including tail flaps/holes, horn flaps/holes, and properly connecting at every joint no matter how strange the anatomy. So it’s not that hard, it’s just that ArenaNet tossed aside the charr in favour of more popular races, even kicking them when they were down.
Some people (in the lore/concept art departments) at ArenaNet clearly loved the charr. The people responsible for designing the game weren’t among them. As such, I feel like the charr are well-hated runts whom ArenaNet would prefer to see removed from the game, if they could. Likely refocusing on their beloved Mary Sue races (the sylvari and the asura), leaving everyone else by the wayside.
It’s just a badly managed game, and some of the design heads have had too much bias, egotism, and control. In a good company, they would have been fired, but not at ArenaNet. This means that the game has suffered, so some parts of the game have had way, way too much attention, whilst other parts only received barely, barely enough for it to be considere done.
I’ve seen better quality than this in indie games. Hell, the quality of the creatures in the Kickstarter game Churbles looks better than the charr. I can’t shake this feeling that the charr are just so reviled at ArenaNet, they work on them begrudgingly whilst wishing they could work on their Mary Sue races instead.
So, yeah.
On the other hand, SOE is releasing Everquest Next, soon, and that promises to give better attention to the beast races. That’s where I’m going. I once loved the charr, but the sheer hatred that ArenaNet have for them have just given me a massive distaste for GW2. Compare with this kerra from EQ Next. There’s no clipping, the armour looks like it was designed for the body, and it even has a tail flap. And EQ Next is in its alpha stages.
So whilst the charr are down and being kicked repeatedly in the teeth, the kerra are rising high. I’d rather play a game where the developer actually likes the race I play, rather than feeling like the runt that everyone hates.
(Same with the engineer, to be honest. An afterthought that ArenaNet would remove if they could.)
I really disagree with the perception that Charr are “aesthetically grotesque.” Leaning toward the feral side more than the humanoid side is by no means the wrong choice.
Straw-man. I said nothing about them looking more human. I’m talking about how they look more like bad halloween suits than a believable creature*. They don’t look like something that’s alive, they look like something you’d expect to find in a horror house. They look too pantomime, their grotesqueness makes them cartoony. It makes them less scary because they’re so much of a visual mockery. And the funny thing is is that this makes them look more human rather than less, because it looks like a guy in a cheap monster suit (so cheap that the mouth can’t even close). Think Godzilla.
Take a look at this dragon, or this tiger. Would you say it doesn’t look dangerous? I think it looks very dangerous. Now, use your imagination to add huge jowls, have its mouth explode with teeth from every angle, give it a ridiculous humpback, give it a gigantic brow above its eyes, and then tell me if you still think it looks dangerous. That’s the problem with being aesthetically grotesque — the creature stops looking dangerous and starts looking… well, hilarious.
I don’t want the charr to look hilarious, I don’t want them to be a laughingstock, I want them to look dangerous. Maybe it’s the perceptions of an artist who’s spent time looking at different animals, maybe that’s what it is, and you’ve not ever really done that. So your perceptions are very limited. Perhaps that’s why you don’t see it.
The charr are just bad art, they’re the tween perception of ‘kewl.’ I don’t appreciate it.
(edited by AuldWolf.7598)
Also, I wish people would stop making excuses for how many more pieces of armour GW2 has. Let me illuminate you…
GW2 has one beast race. One. Everquest II has five. And EQ II has at least four times the amount of armour available than GW2 does. Thus, you’d think that the handling of beast races would be worse in EQ II, right? The logic is that because it’s more work, it’s going to be hard to do.
Let me give you a rundown:
- None of the beast race armour in EQ II has clipping.
- Every piece of armour has been redesigned to fit the proportions of the beast races, and they’re all very different from each other.
- Every piece of armour (every single one) has a tail flap or tail hole designed to fit the shape of the tail of that race.
Huh. That doesn’t seem right, because EQ II has more, the quality must be less, right? That’s the rule, is it not?
The rule is wrong.
It’s all about how much a developer cares about quality and polish. And ArenaNet doesn’t really care about either. It’s just a job to them, just money, and they’re not at all passionate about what they do. They did just enough work on the charr to make them barely serviceable, and that’s it. Whereas SOE went above and beyond with Everquest II.
Don’t believe me? Everquest II is free to play. Grab the client, sign up, and try it for yourself. Every piece of armour, right down to the armour you begin the game with, is fully designed for a beast race.
There is no excuse.
(edited by AuldWolf.7598)
Charr footprints still show up backwards when you are moving forward, but correctly when you are moving backwards, its been doing this since the late beta.
I find it hard to believe fixing issues like this will take even a slightly noticeable amount of valuable development time.
This is exactly what I’m talking about when I say it’s a kitten -take. They don’t care. They never did. The charr were thrown together, cobbled together, and not much effort was put into them outside of perhaps the Black Citadel. You can see how true that is with the charr copter.
The charr copter looks like someone spent half hour on it and just wanted to get it done, no matter how bad it looks. This is just the feeling I get from ArenaNet. They promised us proper handling of beast races, they promised us tail flaps, no clipping, and a huge variety of faces (not just grotesque), and they promised us that we’d see the technological advancements of the charr.
They haven’t delivered on any of those things. At all. And we’ll just happily roll over and accept it. This is exactly why I stopped playing GW2. I like spending money at the cash shops of the games I play and I have plenty to spread around, I’ve bought pretty much every cash shop item in Champions Online. I won’t give ArenaNet that money, though, because they just don’t deserve it.
Ewwww Kerra on EQ. Yuck. Its the Charrs attitude and machinery that make me play them and their ferocious look.
That just sounds like biases, but I’d like to address some things.
Ferocious Look
You can make something look dangerous without making it look grotesque. The kerra in the image looks like it could smack you through a wall, and it doesn’t need a face that not even a mother would bring herself to love in order to do it. My main issue with this kind of base apologism is that it doesn’t take aesthetics into account.
There’s a difference between ferociousness and plain bad aesthetics. You have bad taste, that is a truth, and I’m sorry to say but it is. As an artist, I know better, and I’m very familiar with what makes for bad art. The charr constitute bad art — in their anatomy especially, which has always been appalling. If any such creature actually existed, the posture and anatomy the charr have would leave them doubled over in pain.
So yes, this is either apologism or simply pure obliviousness.
I feel that Skyrim had this problem, too. It was appealing to a minority of people who were vehement in insisting that certain elements of the game be grotesque, even though they have no interest in playing them. What happened is that we ended up with an aesthetically bad werewolf in Skyrim that didn’t look dangerous at all, it looked like a grotesque mockery, it was a laughable pantomime creature rather than a bulky, dangerous werewolf.
See the comparison here with a mod and hopefully you’ll understand.
I bet you really don’t even play beast races commonly, but you’re insisting on grotesque things because that’s what you want to see, that’s your poor taste. But what you have to think of is the people who want to play beast races. Who want to actually look good. We don’t all want to look like pantomime mockeries, we don’t want to represent poor aesthetics, we don’t want armour with crazy clipping.
You can just look around the threads on these forums past and present. There have been countless threads complaining about the anatomy, proportions, posture, aesthetics, and armour of the charr. It’s all wrong.
Everquest Next gets it right.
Technology
Yeah, technology that exists only in a few spots, an anachronism in a fantasy world. Where are their roads? Where’s their infrastructure? Where’s all this industry outside of the Black Citadel? Where, pray tell, is all of this technology? Where, outside of the Black Citadel, are the cars? Where are the trains? Where’s anything that even hints at the charr being advanced. In only a few spots do we even see any hints that they’ve come beyond their tribal stage seen in Guild Wars 1.
The representation of charr technology in the world is a joke. Example? Here’s a piece of concept art by their lead concept artist, Daniel Dociu. That looks amazing! That suggests that the charr will have helicopters, but we only see one of them in a prototype stage before the end of the game. And the in-game model for it is atrocious. It’s just bad art, it’s grotesque in really unappealing ways, it’s like someone really wanted to demean the charr as a species as much as they could.
Why don’t people play charr, ArenaNet? Look to your own art, design, and writing for the answer.
So, yes, the ‘technology’ is a joke. I’d rather the race not be technological at all, rather than being a kitten -take of technological advancement. It’s worse than the Goblins in WoW, and I never thought I’d ever have to say that about anything. Nothing should be worse than WoW.
So yes, it’s just bad art, through and through. I’m sick of seeing people being apologists about this. If we’re mindless sycophants, witless yes-men, and we just bend over to take it up the rear without ever raising a complaint, then ArenaNet will never bother fixing anything. So I’m going to continue complaining and advertising Everquest Next as an alternative.
They could fix things. That’s up to them. But as it is now I’m appalled by the state of the charr. People should have more self-respect. If this is a product you paid for with the intent of playing a charr, you should feel disgusted, that’s your right, as it is mine.
@Ben K
You realise that that still accounts for 15% or more of their playerbase, right? And whilst that might not sound like a lot, consider that’s of their overall playerbase. So that could be thousands of players. Then consider that there are people who’re willing to pay over the odds on the cash-shop for a good beast race experience.
Just consider the aforementioned EQ II and the ridiculous amount of beast races that game now has. SOE saw where the money was, and it wasn’t in short humans, tall humans, humans with pointy ears, and so on. The people who were putting out the most money were statistically those who played more fantastic races.
So you’re losing thousands of players who pay more than the average player.
That’s financially stupid.
The thing is is that SOE will be more than happy to pick up the slack with Everquest Next, by giving us what we want. And us beast race players will show our appreciation by buying lots of things from their store. That’ll be money going to SOE when it could have gone to ArenaNet.
So many companies don’t really look at who gives them money enough, really.
I think they’re being ignored because Everquest Next is on the horizon, and with the obviously superior treatment of beast races within that game, a lot of the charr players are just goint to simply leave. I feel betrayed by ArenaNet, so I’ll be the first there playing a kerran.
And superior? Look at that handling of a tail flap! And that’s actually an in-game model, too. Plus, I honestly prefer the face, proportions, and upright stance. I feel they went too aesthetically grotesque with the charr to avoid lip from certain insecure minorities.
So the comparison I have to make is a butt ugly critter in armour that clips everywhere, or a good looking beast race designed by people who clearly care about doing a good job. It’s not a hard choice. I’d pick an Everquest: Next kerra over a charr any day.
@OP
First of all, please write in paragraphs. Otherwise it’s this wall of wordspew that’s hard to parse and horrible for the people who decide to click on your thread. It’s just common decency. When reading off a monitor, it’s helpful to have whitespace between the text.
“[…] any non humanoid race is so difficult to put design into.”
Balderdash.
Every piece of armour in Everquest II has a properly defined tailhole or tail flap — and not even just a texture, but modelled. You can start up the latest EQ II client for yourself, as it’s free to play, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
This obvious care for designing beast races properly will obviously carry over to Everquest Next, given that everything we’ve seen of it indicates they understand why people liked the beast races of Everquest II.
“[…] Most of them are designed to look like humans!”
Yes, so are most beast races. Your point? The morphology of robots beyond that though can vary as much as beast races tend to. Haven’t you seen Short Circuit? I’d hardly say Johnny 5 looks exactly human.
“[…] they are not a human thus people have a hard time designing an armor for them […]”
Gee. Funny how Everquest II never had that problem. And frankly, the design of the frogloks is even more strange (yet more aesthetically pleasing) than the charr. I see this as weak apologism for laziness.
“[…] You have nothing to base it on except you own imagination […]”
And an imagination can be an amazing thing. You act like we’re all clerical numbersmiths with no capability to envision the strange or novel, which really isn’t the case. Even just looking at Harryhausen’s stuff, you can see how obviously far off the mark this is.
“[…] So when you are designing an armor for Charr it is difficult to design a look or even a variant of another armor for a race that does not relate to humans. […]”
Since we’re repeating points. Care to tell me why this isn’t a problem for Everquest II and Everquest Next?
“[…] It takes real skill to think in 3d for something that you have no real life experience with […]”
Hahaha. No, no it doesn’t. You’re clearly not an artist. Hop on over to deviantART and browse the stuff people draw on a regular basis. I think you’re projecting your lack of imagination onto other people, since from your perspective it’s apparently hard to concoct a beast race.
But we’ve been imagining and dreaming them up since the dawn of time. Are you at all familiar with ancient Egyptian or ancient Greek culture and mythos?
“[…] or they just don’t want to put the effort into it […]”
Yes, because they’re lazy and they’re doing the absolute minimum they need to do to pull in money. Thanks to apologist schmucks who never question lazy work, they’ll continue to do that.
Being a fan is one thing, being a mindless sycophant or yes-man is another. As a paying customer, you really should expect better.
We all should.
(edited by AuldWolf.7598)
I concur with this. I honestly feel that the inclusion of the charr was backhanded at best — their technology permeates the world (no trains, really?), it looks like they had interns put together their armour, the incredible helicopter concept art idea only made it into one quest (which used an awful model that was nothing like said concept art), and the Black Citadel is a far cry from the original concept art.
Considering that SOE have tail flaps for all of their beast races in Everquest II, and they paid obvious care and attention to removing all the clipping issues, it gives me hope for Everquest: Next. And honestly, the upright posture of the kerra appeals to me more.
The only reason I was so into the charr was the promise of technology, but due to poor world design and a desire at ArenaNet to keep the game low-tech, just to appease those whose idea of fantasy is Tolkien and only Tolkien... well. I don’t know. I can see GW2 just dying off when Everquest: Next arrives. Or, well, at the very least the charr playerbase will.
They really need to give the charr some attention if they want to keep charr players around. They need to improve the armour, their home city, and the presence of charr technology within the world.
(Honestly. The charr don’t trust the asura one bit, yet they don’t have a backup infrastructure for deliveries? They don’t even have roads? Seriously?!)
(edited by AuldWolf.7598)
You know, it’s amazing how apt the TV analogy is.
Imagine this scenario: Your TV has a new function, a built in ‘video game’ to add value to your TV experience. You have a button on the side of your TV, and by pressing it you make a hero character chase a monster. You have to catch the monster. The TV manual tells you that there’s actual player skill involved in the affair and that you must push the button faster and in different patterns to succeed.
All that really needs to occur is for the owner of the TV to have pushed the button 5,000 times. Whilst doing this, their character on screen will slow down and speed up randomly. The player will want to play this game every time they turn on their TV, because they’ll be ‘rewarded’ with watching their TV show, and they feel they’ll come closer to understand how to better play that game.
The sensible person looks at this, realises what’s really going on, and asks them why they’re wasting their time. The person is completely addicted, they make excuses about required skill, about game mechanics, and about how worthwhile it is to have something to strive for. The sensible person, however, has a TV which they can just sit down and tune into after a hard days work.
Operant conditioning is a powerful thing, and people really can be sheep.
[…] ppl like goals.
I never have a lot of faith when a post opens with a fallacy.
When has goal-oriented stuff ever been mutually inclusive of grind? I’ll bring up Saints Row IV again — I completed that easily, and I had fun with it. My “goal” was experiencing more of the story, and seeing what fun toys they’d throw at me next. Grind is an excuse for proper content.
Yes, people like goals, but only poor, brainwashed sots think they genuinely enjoy grind. With a quality game, you can have goal-oriented gameplay with no grind at all. The grind in Guild Wars 2 is just to disguise the copy-pasted content. It’s a known scientific fact that operant conditioning works on us, so it’s a pretty cheap shot to use it in place of actually making your game fun. And that it works so successfully that it’ll have people like you defending it?
That’s depressing.
Vertical progression is how the big games have survived this long.
Then explain why many ancient FPS games, even older than WoW, have gotten by without it. This is a fallacy, because you’re assuming that grind is essential to an MMO having a long life. Correlation does not equal causation.
You don’t need to be a basement dweller to succeed in gw2.
That was never the argument. You’re creating a straw-man here because you’re building constructs to argue against which are easier for you to combat.
The argument is that ArenaNet claims that casual players can be on equal footing with everyone else. Yet the reality of the matter is that in order to grind for Ascended, you would have to be a no-lifer, a basement dweller with nothing else to do other than play the game. In the sporadic periods a normal person would play Guild Wars 2, they’d probably not see an Ascended weapon before 2015, and that’s being generous.
This means that there’s content that’s locked out from them, just because they don’t have the time to grind that a basement dweller does. And the content is designed in such a way that it’s inaccessible unless you have the key to pass it, the cheat, as I described. And instead of just obtaining the cheat, you have to spend a nontrivial portion of your life grinding for it. You have to grind for a cheat to bypass an otherwise impossible segment of the game.
If the game was skill-based, then you wouldn’t have sections that would be impossible to bypass without a cheat (gear).
You know, it’s funny. Jet Set Willy on the ZX Spectrum was never completed, so there was a room you could never get past. Up until that point, you could play the game with your wits and skills alone. What if you had to replay the game 500,000 times before you could get a cheat to move onto other sections of the game?
That’s what MMOs (including GW2) are doing, and it’s unacceptable.
Noone is forcing us to get ascended/legendary items/weapons.
Except for the content that requires it, you mean? Do you like shooting yourself in the foot?
It still comes down to skill level, not stats.
If that’s true, then please enlighten me, what non-gear related skills are involved in playing GW2? I’m very interested. Please elaborate!
You were probably hoping that this would be a throwaway point that wouldn’t be picked up on, but I’m calling you out. I want you to tell me exactly what skills you’re talking about.
I highly doubt gw2 would’ve kept even half it’s player base if they never introduced ascended items and new content.
So, grinding and new content are mutually inclusive, now?
That explains why the content of most single player games is riddled with grind that takes months upon months to even come near to completing! …oh, wait. Single player games aren’t like that at all!
Now, let’s drop the silly inclusive comments, shall we?
Ppl woildve gotten bored having nothing to strive for in a game.
You’re turning a video game, a source of entertainment, into work. Oh, you poor thing, you actually believe what you’re saying, don’t you?
Then this must mean that I need to ‘strive for’ something when I sit down to watch a movie, or read a book, or listen to music. Perhaps I need to push a button on my TV 5,000 times before I can watch a show. That’s how it should be, right?
That’s what GW2 is, pushing a button on your TV 5,000 times before you can sit down to enjoy a show.
You max out and then your at a level playing field… Then what…
Then new content is brought out to justify money being put into the game. Most games do that with DLCs. You might have heard of them.
Guild Wars 1 did just fine doing that, and it’s still alive, kicking, and healthy.
Skill involves and requires a number of the following:
- Tactics;
- Muscle-memory;
- Quick-thinking and reflexes;
- Split-second situational awareness and observation;
- Clear thinking/Clarify of purpose;
- And/Or good leadership.
Guild Wars 2 requires passive situational awareness that a tranquilised, soporific tortoise could multitask through, and that’s it. Considering the content has been a continual case of copy & paste, I can’t see this game ever requiring skill, no.
Perhaps the upcoming Everquest Next will fare better. We can hope, I suppose. We can hope. I’m tired of time being a replacement for skill in MMOs.
Ppl want content they want harder content, we need the gear to be able to do it successfully.
Augh, I hate text speak, but it’s necessary to deal with this statement.
No, the average sheep doesn’t want ‘harder’ combat, because that would require actual skills. Like tactics, muscle memory, quick-thinking and reflexes, observation, clarity of purpose, and so on. It wouldn’t rely on gear. You’ve defeated your argument and made yourself a clown by even suggesting that gear equals skill.
Back in the day, playing the likes of Contra, did we get gear? No! We got horizontal progression, we could play the game differently via temporary power-ups, but it was an equal playing ground. And you were either amazing at it, you learned to be amazing, or you sucked. The only kind of “gear” back then was the Konami Code, and we called people who used that cheaters.
Grinding for gear is the same as grinding for a cheat. That’s all you’re doing. If the content is hard by its own merits, you should only need your own faculties and abilities to be able to get past it. You shouldn’t need a game mandated cheat. To even insinuate that mandating a cheat, including a cheat in the game, and then forcing everyone to spend ridiculous amounts of time to get that cheat is good game design is ridiculous.
Think on that.
(edited by AuldWolf.7598)
If this thread proves anything, it’s that us humans are brainwashed via operant conditioning with worrying ease. It completely screws up our concept of quality and value because of our brain’s work-reward design. This is why “gamification” has unfortunately become a very real consideration for workplaces. Mixing the correct amount of grind and reward leaves to people who become slaves to the endless hamster-wheel of it all.
There are plenty, plenty of games out there which offer fun on either a reasonable curve, or with completely horizontal progression. Those are examples of fun games. If, by playing a game a couple of hours a day, you can’t be on the same footing as everyone else then the game design is bad. Not everyone can be a basement dweller with no job, no social obligations, no partner, no personal hygiene considerations, no health and fitness considerations, and no cares in the world other than the game.
And some of us are grown up enough to realise that we have enough grind in the real world, that we don’t want it in our entertainment. To be honest, I’d love to see more games actually do away with vertical progression, and just make the game more fun as you play it with horizontal progression, by giving you new toys and different ways to play all the time.
To me, the grind is just an excuse for not having varied and different ways of playing. They could have included mounted combat, they could have done more with the tanks, they could have had vehicles play a more pivotal role, they could have done more fun things with the technology of the Charr and the magic of the Asura.
But the content is all the same, just reskinned!
Let me give you an example: You’re taking materials to repair a mortar cannon to fight the Shatterer. How are you doing this? By means that could only be considered medieval! Why not use a train? The charr have that sort of technology, so why not? Why not make it a rail-shooter segment where you have a mounted minigun with which to fend off hordes of things?
I know some people are precious about “mah high-fantasy” but that’s already ruined by the charr having tanks. So why not?
Because grind is easier. Grind is cheaper. And people are easily brainwashed.
It’s like how Puzzles & Dragons rakes in two million dollars a day, for what? For making the game easier via microtransactions. Why grind when you can buy? A recent top iOS developer tweeted that ‘content development is for suckers,’ because people are more interested in grinding, and then sometimes paying not to grind.
We’re less indicative of a truly sapient, self aware race, these days. Most of humanity seems to be comprised of sheep. As much as I hate saying that, it’s true.
So there you go.
@Durzlla
When it doesn’t blow up in their faces, at least, which also carries the gnome analogy further. Since asura tech is likely to do just that. Pretty much any quest involving an asura involves technology that’s blown up, gone rogue, or is threatening life as we know it. Even in the asura personal storyline, where a mad dictator of an alternate reality almost gains access to reality prime.
So, it’s fair to say that they make one-use devices which may or may not actually work for that one use. Most often it seems the latter comes into play. Whereas, according to both lore and in-game, the charr tend to blueprint, prototype, and thoroughly test something until it has relevant uses, and then it’s mass produced. The charr are basically the closest thing Tyria has to real world human technology.
I haven’t posted here in a while, but I felt like weighing in. Why not?
The distinction that many people don’t understand is that the divide between the asura and the charr isn’t at all dissimilar to the divide between religion/mysticism and science. Jesus turned water into wine via some pseudomystical means, via some power granted his patron god. This is obviously different to modern wine production methods, as we don’t rely on a divinity in order to power us.
If the power of the gods drained away from Tyria tomorrow, the asura would be helpless, as their very nature is magical, their very intellect may be related to the magical energies they channel. Whereas anything constructed by the charr would continue to work. This is why, according to known definitions, the asura have something more akin to magical reality-bending, whereas the charr have proper technology.
The asura being magical beasts is also betrayed by how inefficient their creations are. Often, their experiments will fail (such as fire elemental-based reactors exploding, or golems going rogue, or opening planes to other realities which they then lose control of, or levitation generators draining life from the land for reasons which are completely unknown to them) due to the chaotic nature of magic. Very little the asura have made is capable of being mass produced. Even if someone were to cite the golems, I’d point out again that a golem could become self-aware at any time, or could explode at any time. They’re just quietly hoping that won’t happen.
Whereas when the charr create a form of technology, they are infallible in reproducing that technology. Furthermore, their intellect for real world systems means that as soon as any form of technology has been prototyped, they can roll it out via mass production.
Let’s look at an example.
An asura could create a magitech arcane-thrower. This might work, for a time. But it also has the potential to turn its user into a toad, or it might start spewing black holes at some point for no given reason, or it might even become sapient if certain crystals are used in its creation. It’s just luck whether it’ll remain stable.
The charr can mass-produce flamethrowers and have no stability issues, due to that their means are via proper technology, not magitech.
Ultimately, whilst the feats of an asura might seem impressive, you have to look at it from a Discworld perspective. It’s the aspect of magic itself having fun with the asura and using them as puppets, but magic is a truly chaotic thing. Their new food replicator could just as easily replicate ancient dragons as the food they desire, which makes the asura very dangerous indeed.
Whereas charr technology is as stable and reliable as real-world tech and will only improve in time. You have one charr in the Citadel who wants to use electricity to power things, even. So they have the smarts for proper application of real technology, whereas the asura are essentially the puppets of the aspect of magic.
I’d rather stand around a bunch of charr tanks than an asura air purifier, personally. I’d feel safer.
So the counter argument is…
That because I don’t poop rainbows, and because I won’t accept that magic has some innately inherent (yet entirely unprovable) element of creativity/imagination rather than being mere deus ex machina, I’m closed-minded? And therefore wrong?
So if I think that Stephen Hawking is smarter than Harry Potter, and that Harry’s magic doesn’t automatically make him a genius, I’m a closed-minded poopy head and utterly wrong faced? Okay. So where’s the argument, here?
I get that you’re throwing your toys out of the pram, but other than calling me closed-minded, I don’t see any argument against why the asura are nothing more than instinctive creatures of deus ex machina. And I don’t see any argument as to why Harry Potter is “magically” (heh) smarter than Stephen Hawking.
And no, sorry, I’m not going to poop rainbows just to see your point of view. I’m a realist. And by real world standards the asura just aren’t very bright. They rely on deus ex machina to do everything for them. Whilst the charr rely on good old real world ingenuity. Their own two-hands and their collective ingenuity created everything they have.
If an asura wants a brain for their robot, they wish it into existence with the powers of rainbows and sunshine.
If a charr wants tracks for their tank, they build them, just as we would in this real world of ours.
The charr are still the smartest race. Admittedly, none of the races are incredibly intelligent in the world of Tyria, but of the ones on offer, the charr show the most promise going forward.
Really, if you want to win this argument, you have to explain to me in no uncertain terms why Harry Potter (or Dumbledore) is more of a genius than Stephen Hawking. That’s all it comes down to. Magic vs Ingenuity. Go on. I’m listening.
Try to do it without resorting to insults which embarrass us both, this time. Oh, and if it’s not too much to ask, let’s refrain from further bouts of “Oh won’t you please set aside your reason with me? Poop rainbows! Imagiiine, and belieeeeve that my favourite race is the smartest. If you have imaginaaaation you can belieeeeve.” if that’s okay? I really hope it is because I want to be able to take your opinions more seriously than I can take those of a Creationist.
That’s what the asura remind me, to be honest. Creationist deus ex machina rubbish. And apparently I’m supposed to poop rainbows and just take this into my heart. :I
(edited by AuldWolf.7598)
I still don’t see how anyone would rank the asura over the charr.
By real world standards, the charr are clearly the smartest race. This argument is basically ingenuity versus deus ex machina. Ingenuity makes a person smart, whereas deus ex machina makes them lucky.
To me, it’s like asking: Who’s smarter, Tinkerbell or Leonardo da Vinci?
And you have some people quite unironically replying with Tinkerbell. And I’m just sitting here thinking… really people, really? Good grief. So I guess our own ingenuity and our ability to put a person in space without deus ex machina means jack all, since real world humanity would be less intelligent than the asura.
This topic hurts my brain.
I’m sorry people, but no, Tinkerbell is not smarter than Leonardo da Vinci. If you think that, then you need to re-evaluate things. Look at your life and choices.
But I doubt that my words will stop anyone from voting for Tinkerbell, since this essentially amounts to a popularity contest, rather than who’s smartest, doesn’t it? Gnomes are cute when they giggle, I like them better, so they’re smarter than real world scientists.
/twitch
You know; This is what’s wrong with politics. People vote for the person they find more charismatic most of the time, rather than voting on their actual policies. That’s why my country (the UK) is in the state it currently is. I wish people would actually consider what they’re voting on, here.
Because, really, we have people in this thread who’re saying that being able to sprinkle deus ex machina-laden pixie dust makes you smarter than having a doctorate in physics. And that’s ow, stoppit.
At this point I’m just starting to think that people are doing this just to see how much of a rise they can get out of me, just for laughs. Okay guys, joke’s over. Can we please now stop saying that Harry Potter is smarter than Stephen Hawking because magic? Seriously, if you keep this up, I’m going to end up weeping over how ludicrous this is.
(edited by AuldWolf.7598)
All of this still ignores the simple fact that the asura are artefacts of deus ex machina rather than self-made.
I’ll boil it down to even simpler terms: Who’s more worthy in your eyes? The rich kid who was given everything, pampered, and throws a wobbly the moment the world doesn’t work his way; Or the self-made man who worked to get where he was?
The asura are the former, the charr are the later.
The asura rely on the deus ex machina of magic. Nothing will ever change that fact; They can simply hand-wave whatever they want into existence. AI? Who needs to develop AI? A little bit of plotholeum-laden hand-wavery will solve that problem! They’re not really anything, that’s the issue.
Now the charr have entirely eschewed magic in favour of being self-made. If a charr wants something, they don’t just wave a magic wand. They don’t throw a tantrum when they can’t wave a magic wand. Instead, they make it. They make it. Not magic; not plot power; not deus ex machina; not the eternal alchemy; none of that. It’s simple, basic, pure ingenuity.
You know, the kind of stuff that we used to put a man in space. Would putting a guy in space have been even a tenth of the achievement if we’d waved a wand to make a rocket fly?
I had to put that in italics just to draw attention to it, to drive the point home.
The asura are barely aware creatures who’re pampered by the existence of magic. They desire, magic provides, there’s not a single asura who’s ever had to or chosen to work for anything in his or her life. Everything has been delivered to them on a silver platter, just like that rich kid. They don’t need to be smart, or clever, or logical, or ingenious… all they need is the ability to wave a hand.
So asking me to think of the asura as smart is like asking me to think of a pampered rich kid as smart.
Asking me to think of the charr as smart is like asking me to think of those who put people in space as smart.
The former? Hahahaha… no. The latter? Very much yes.
I’m sorry, but the asura are barely beyond instinct. They desire, they get. They don’t have to think about it or even act. The moment they try to do something for themselves rather than being totally dependent on deus ex machina… well, then we might have something to talk about.
If that’s not enough, let’s do this from a roleplaying standpoint.
The asura waves his hand, and the air lights up. “I wibblegaffed the splaif to increase the iridescent levels of gloop in the air,” the asura rambles, hoping no one would be smart enough to realise that basically he hasn’t got a clue how magic does what it does. But he waves a hand and it works. Like magic!
The charr is working on her helicopter. She’s just figuring out the basics of how one might work and might say something like this: “Ah, yes. I’ve been working on that problem. I found that if both sets of blades are both spinning clockwise, it’ll cause the rotary motion to transfer to the body itself… with interesting results. They have to be spinning in opposite directions for that effect to cancel out whilst allowing for lift, something to do with the forces of thrust involved…”
And that’s it, really.
(edited by AuldWolf.7598)
@Oglaf
That’s like saying that us humans are good at what we do, but only that. And thus we’re limited because we’re good at what we do.
Oh fallacies.
Come back and talk to me when the asura have figured out electricity without the use of hand-waving deus ex machina. Meanwhile, there’s a charr figuring out electricity at the Black Citadel, doing it the same way us real world folk would.
That’s what the charr are: An in-game parallel to real world human ingenuity. They don’t rely on deus ex machina to get their sandwiches (as I mentioned prior). And this is why they’re clearly the smartest race.
That’s like saying that if I were to meet a gnome who could summon a sandwich out of mid air using deus ex machina, I should accept him as being a smarter being than the person who could figure out how to make their own sandwich. The charr make their own sandwiches, the asura rely on deus ex machina for their sandwiches.
The asura are just artefacts of deus ex machina and nothing more.
The charr symbolise real world ingenuity.
(edited by AuldWolf.7598)
@Dustfinger
That implies they aren’t the best at non-magical technology. Which they clearly are.
To me, that makes them the smartest race by my real world standards. They don’t wave a wand and get a sandwich (asura), they actually have to go and gather the ingredients, figure out which ingredients taste good together, and then put together the sandwich.
This is the same for golems versus tanks. There’s a lot of deus ex machina wand-waving involved in golems. But tanks are based upon mining resources, refining them, R&D involving them, putting together prototypes, creating factories for mass production, and then mass producing via hand and machine.
We don’t wave wands in reality for anything. There is no sudo make me a sandwich in reality, which is what defines the asura. So, again, by my real world standards? The charr are the smartest due to their technology.
The charr make their own damn sandwiches.
Let me put this in another way.
If a god turned up on our doorstep tomorrow, and offered humanity the chance to handwave things into existence if they universally adopted his eternal alchemy philosophy…
Would you accept it? Half of the world might, half might not. I would personally disown the ones that did. Sure, it would make things easier, but it would also take away our cultural and technological distinctiveness – we would basically be the borg. This is why there’s a lot more craziness between styles of charr invention than there are between asura inventions (which look very aesthetically samey).
Personally, I put value within exploring and understanding the Universe; Which is science and the doctrines of education thereof. Every person should strive to have a basic understanding of the world, of physics, and of their body, of biology, and so on. The fact of the matter is is that those who adopted the god’s eternal alchemy and wand-waving would be screwed if the god ever disappeared.
If magic ever disappeared from Tyria, the charr wouldn’t notice, the asura would be screwed.
What defines the charr as the smartest race is the same thing that defines the geth as one of the smarter races in Mass Effect: They don’t want the technological and cultural distinctiveness of other races thrust down their throat, they don’t want to be forced to adopt that. They want to find their own. The charr are the same way. It’s a long road, but if you take your own path, it’s your own feet that got you there.
It’s a matter of whether you want to walk or be carried.
The charr are smart enough to walk.
The asura are complacent enough to be carried.
(edited by AuldWolf.7598)
They’re one of the oldest races in Tyria, the exact age of a number of races is indeterminable. But it is strongly implied at points that they were around long, long before the gods.
You’ll have your charr haters though who can’t say anything good about ‘em because they’re a beast race. “Wah, the dwarves must have come first because they’re not a beast race.” ad nauseum.
Noap. Many races, including the dwarves, the jotun, the giants, and the charr have been around for an indeterminably long time.
(I’m sure this’ll turn into a good thread for pinning the charr haters, though!)
(edited by AuldWolf.7598)
The way I look at it is this.
80% of charr inventions are successful according to what we see in the game.
20% of asura inventions are successful according to what we see in the game.
It speaks for itself.
I got bored. As much as I like the charr, they’re too much of the old stereotypical beast race for me. And the game just got tiresome; It’s so much like WoW, but with dodge-rolling tacked on because hey why not.
I’m instead playing Mass Effect 3 and reminding myself why I loved and continue to love the geth so much.
@gattsuru
I read that book, too. Nowhere did they mention the size of the military forces involved. So, frankly? My version of it is still valid. Nice try, though.
Fantasy racism, so ridiculous a concept. Especially when people buy into it as though it were reality. Very questionable.
Wow GregT, that was some trolling effort. Your fallacies are repugnant.
“You’re not doing what you say you’re doing. You’re doing what I say you’re doing, because of entirely specious reasons.”
Ever thought of going into politics?
As for charr casualty rates. They face the strongest, hardiest, and most virulent opponents of any of the races. Including one that will never go away until the last of them is in a containment device. No other race comes even close to the threats the charr face. If you swapped the positions of the charr and the humans, the charr would have their region running like clockwork within the week, and humanity would be extinct.
Ebonhawke is an open and shut case, really.
Under Flame Legion Leadership
The shamans were idiots, plain and simple. Out of paranoia, they stopped all advancement of the legions and hid away any advancements that they could have had out of fear that the charr may rebel and use them against them. Okay, fair enough, they did have a small rebellion on their hands.
But maybe if they hadn’t ran around making martyrs wherever they could, and designating half of their race to utilitarian roles, then they wouldn’t have had a rebellion to deal with.
Shamans: Not very bright.
Immediately After the Flame Legion
The charr needed time to organise, so they temporarily broke off the attacks against Ebonhawk. They sent only small numbers of warbands to ensure that the peoples of Ebonhawk couldn’t press out and occupy charr land. Humans killing them off like cattle (‘dumb beasts’) and stealing their lands was already a sore spot for them.
Following Those Events…
The charr were looking at threats from Kralkatorrik, invulnerable ghosts that can’t be truly defeated (only contained), ogres, harpies, and many other potential enemies. There was already talk about how a peace agreement with the humans would be beneficial. Besides, the hate was the hate of ancestors, and the charr are pragmatic enough to put such behind them.
Until a peace treaty could be arranged, the same small smattering of warbands was kept around Ebonhawk to protect against human expansion. Sure, they could have rolled in the tanks and blasted Ebonhawk off the face of the map; But that’s not going to look very good on a treaty, is it?
“Oh, hi Queenie. We’d like to arrange a treaty with you. But uh, we killed a load of humans holed up in some fortified castle estate thing because they were being jerks. You don’t care about that, right? You do? Uh. Oops?”
The charr are smarter than that. The obvious truth here is, indeed, obvious. After they organised themselves, they could have chosen to obliterate Ebonhawk but they didn’t. Ebonhawk was spared as a gesture of peace.
I quit a little while back. So did a number of people I follow on tumblr, at least 20~ some people in my social circle. And if their posts are any indication, their social circles are the same, too. Many have gone to other games (everything from Mass Effect 3’s multi-player, to Champions Online, to Free Realms).
If that sample is any indication, then ArenaNet must be hurting right now and wishing their souls away to quickly become the next WoW, somehow. They’re already a good way there with their many ‘fun taxes’ and their dismissal of the power plateau. And to be honest, considering how many threads/posts I’ve seen here, on GW2Guru, and on MMORPG.com about empty servers and the results thereof?
Well, I think that my social group is a pretty good indicator. The mass exodus begone a while back, it’s only going to get worse from here as more and more people just get fed up and leave.
It’s Warhammer Online all over again.
Hey, ArenaNet needs you to buy those gems! So the money they filter into the game is cynically tight-fisted and stingy, and the prices of things like racial armour are artificially high! Towering costs! 10% of them will grind for it. 90% of most won’t bother with that. 50% of those who won’t will (and have) leave. The rest are the gullible sorts who’ll buy gems to convert to gold.
That’s ArenaNet’s bread and butter right there.
As I keep saying, it’s following the history of WAR strike for strike. It’s morbidly fascinating how closely the two are tied. WAR had a power plateau, then it didn’t. WAR had good PvP ideals, then it didn’t. WAR had lots of players in its public missions, then it didn’t. Everything that counts for WAR is counting for GW2.
And WAR is now pretty much dead. I’m not holding out much hope for GW2, to be honest. If they’d designed this game well, they would have put great reasons to keep a player in a zone, in each zone. Even GW1 did this. But I think a lot of the people who worked on GW1 aren’t those working on GW2. At least not the important ones.
It’s basically going the same way as WAR. A number of people, myself included, saw this possibility in the beta. By centring the game around a gear grind as they have, they’re forcing people into high level areas, which means that all zones other than the current stat darling (fractals) will be empty.
People have been posting pictures of completely empty zones where every waypoint that can be contested is, in fact, contested. People are too busy grinding away in the fractals, and due to the waypoint travel tax, they don’t want to pay in order to help out with anything else.
The same thing happened in WAR due to vertical progression. And within six months, WAR was dead. To be honest, the parallels between WAR and GW2 are quite surprising. It’s almost like a cloned game in some respects. And even PvP fans are falling out of love with the PvP, just like in WAR.
I give this game another three months before NCsoft realises there’s something wrong and cuts funding to it. After a year, it’ll be on life support. By its second year it’ll go the way of CoH.
1. When did you begin playing?
I played the beta weekends and I was there at launch.
2. how many hours total do you have?
I’ve had GW2 uninstalled for a while now, so I can’t check.
3. What’s your most gold banked so far?
Same answer as 2, but it was pitifully low due to the obnoxious waypoint tax.
4. Do you have a max level character?
Nope. I couldn’t bring myself to go any further after meeting Trahearne.
5. List 1-3 areas / zones / events / tp; where you spend most of your time for income.
Not sure. I got around a lot.
6. Do you mainly use MF or not?
Not. I’m not a gambler.
7. Have you ever got an exotic weapon from a mob? If so, how many and total?
Nope.
8. Have you ever got an exotic weapon from a chest? If so, how many and total?
Nope.
9. What’s the most number of rare weapons you have looted in one day or 8hrs time?
No clue. I’m apparently not an obsessive archivist.
10. How many rare or exotic weapons do you “expect” to loot in one hour of time?
I don’t think the game should be designed around stats and vertical progression in the first place.
11. How many lodestones have you looted total so far?
No clue! Not many. Barely any?
12. Do you craft? If so, do you have a 400 crafter? if so, how many?
I don’t craft. Crafting is boring. Hell, crafting in Free Realms was more fun.
13. Do you sell your looted crafting mats?
Yes, at the trading post/vendors. Usually at the vendor since they don’t fetch barely anything more at the trading post. (Hooray for GW2’s economy being in a deflationary spiral.)
14. Do you feel your return, (in terms of items, completion, income, etc) for your time, has been worth it?
Definitely not. Considering the taxes in this game, taxes on almost every activity, I was always low on money. This was one of the contributing factors of me quitting (along with the butchering of the power plateau).
15. In ONE word, what needs improved most; from your perspective?
Everything. The feel of the game, the AI, the combat, the skills, and even the graphics are butt ugly compared to GW1.
…and heartlessly smashes it into the ground.
I couldn’t help but read that any other way.
1. The Unshakeable Power Plateau
From the moment GW1 launched to current day, it’s had a power plateau that hasn’t once moved. ArenaNet is planning to cast aside GW2’s power plateau in both levels and further gear tiers. I don’t want to spend my life grinding, and I don’t want every fight decided by who has the biggest numbers. That’s what the power plateau prevents. Once you get to a certain point – everything is decided by player skill. Nothing in GW2 other than perhaps sPvP is decided by player skill.
2. Character Freedom
If I had been designing GW2, I would have given each weapon around 50 total skills, and then I would allow people to pick and choose the five that work best for them. Considering the limited pool, however, and how many skills feel like reskinned versions of other skills? It makes me wonder if there are more than 20 total skills in the game.
3. Freedom to Explore
There was no ‘exploration tax’ in GW1. I didn’t have to pay to go and help someone out with something. In GW2, if I want to help someone out with something across the map, or worse, across the world, it bites into my gold supply. That’s completely obnoxious. This makes me sad because even Free Realms does this better. And when SOE is being less cynical and more fun than you, you’re doing something very wrong.
4. Memorable NPCs
GW1 had plenty of these. In GW2 the only character I truly loved was Lightbringer Tybalt Leftpaw, and he doesn’t even stick around for the whole game! In GW1, they didn’t just kill off characters because it would be inconvenient having them around, that’s bad game design. If it was my choice, I would have taken Tybalt with me to take down Zhaitan. Instead I got Trahearne. And Trahearne is the most hateful character I’ve ever encountered throughout the history of roleplaying games, including the badly translated Japanese ones.
5. A Beautiful World
This is where it bites the most. Most areas of GW1 look better than most areas of GW2. I recently went back to GW1 to run a comparison. They took greater time and effort to make things look better in GW1, it’s as simple as that. In cities it’s probably the worst. You have clipping models in cities with no border rims or detail textures (sorry for the technical terms) to hide this clipping. And out in the world isn’t much better. I was genuinely disappointed how much copypasta there was in the first zone outside of the Grove. GW2 is just… ugly compared to GW1. It’s depressing when you look at the fantastic GW2 concept art, then the truly poor implementation in the game. Painterly my butt.
(edited by AuldWolf.7598)
Erik Kain, Contributor
In other words he is not a Frobes employee, just a random nobody giving his opinion.
Which forbes thought was quality enough to publish under their name. So I’m not sure that I understand the point you think you have.
Besides, I’m asking people whether they think this review resonates with them. Not what irrelevant details they’re able to spot.
Here’s a review written by forbes.
I like to think of forbes as a reputable source. Much of what’s written there is reasonable and it resonates with me as what I see to be problems with GW2. Whilst GW2 isn’t a horrible game, the truth of things is is that it’s no better of a game than WoW, and it’s not that dissimilar either. What dissimilarity does arise from it is muchly an illusion.
That’s the problem with GW2 for me. And what I’m finding is that with the inclusion of tiered gear, GW2 has moved just that final step toward being a WoW clone. A WoW also-ran. That’s how I feel about it. But don’t just reply to this. Read the article and see whether it resonates with you and helps to illustrate my feelings at all.
One of the important quotes was this one:
While described as “action combat” it nevertheless isn’t really reliant on any player skills so much as it is on damage-per-second and your level.
And that’s completely true. The thing is is that with Ascended gear, GW2 is even more relying on stats over skill, to the point where the game is just playing itself. It’s just numbers vs. numbers, and that’s the biggest letdown at all. There are no shows of skill to be found anywhere in GW2 other than perhaps in sPvP. But everywhere else? None.
Compared to other games I’ve played, like ME3’s multi-player, where things like skill, the ability of players to co-operate with each other, and tactics can be shown, and at higher difficulties are even required… I just find GW2 to be a flop in comparison. I was expecting something more like ME3, but the notion of skill involved is an illusion. Only numbers matter.
The reviewer goes on to point out that barrel rolling is too clunky to be useful due to the nature of the combat, which I agree with, too. Combat is too slow, and the barrel roll is just unhelpful. If characters simply moved faster, such long and elaborate rolls wouldn’t be necessary. Again, to see how you do this right, you need only look at the speed of movement and dodging in ME3, which is organic and intuitive by comparison. In ME3 you can quickly dodge back out of range of foes as is needed.
It touches upon other things, too, including the similarity of both renown and dynamic events to the fetch quests of yore, and that the illusion of variety (simple reskins of skills/objects) quickly dies off, leaving only repetition. It’s just the same skills over and over with slightly different animations and button pictures. And combat skills have the same problem, too. Too few combat skills which are all very similar, no true variety on offer. And I like his point about being able to acquire new weapon skills as time goes on too as a form of sidegrade-based horizontal progression, so you can mix & match what works for you, similar to GW1.
All in all I find that this review is quite intriguing and it really hits the mark on a number of things. Again, GW2 isn’t a horrible game. This review says that, too. It’s just that GW2 is basically WoW in far, far too many ways. And I don’t want WoW, neither does the reviewer. We’re both waiting for that MMO that will truly break the mold, rather than creating a grand illusion of doing so with PR speak.
So… does this review resonate with you?
@Zaxares.5419
You quite easily mix up ‘charr’ with ‘Flame Legion.’ Not understanding the difference there is like not understanding the difference between Germany an the Nazi regime.
@Iruwen.3164
“Every other MMO out there has vertical progression […]”
That’s not the argument, though. The argument is that we accept that a game has to have some VP in order to keep people like you happy, people who need the placebo effect (and I do feel sorry for you because of that, that you’ll never be good at anything because you rely on stats).
The argument is that there are good games out there which have a power plateau, like GW2 originally promised to have. Except GW2’s power plateau has now been cast aside. To ArenaNet it doesn’t exist any more. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t games out there which did embrace it.
MMORPGs that do:
- Champions Online
- Star Trek Online
- Guild Wars 1
- Dungeons & Dragons: Online
- Marvel Heroes (out soon)
- Neverwinter (out soon)
Champions Online is one of my favourites. It never promised a power plateau, but it’s been true to that element of game design. And to be honest, the Nemesis Confrontation content at level 40 is far, far more interesting than anything GW2 has to offer. And that’s because it’s content designed around player builds and skill, rather than the “I have no skill!” placebo of vertical progression.
I guess for those who have no skill and want to stagnate forever, never having any skill, the placebo effect of vertical progression is fine. But I like having skill, blast it all! And I like getting better at things. And the only way that can happen is if a game challenges my skill, rather than opting for the placebo effect of vertical progression. This is why the best games out there, hands down, don’t use vertical progression.
There’s a reason that Grand Theft IV, for example, doesn’t do vertical progression.
(Edit)
Let me explain this to you. The reason vertical progression is a bit of a cancer is because of the placebo effect which removes skill. Okay, take Super Mario Bros. What if you had stats which increased the length of the invulnerability star, that allowed you to take more hits before shrinking, and allowed you to double jump up to 8 times.
Now, imagine how easy Super Mario Bros would then be, since you’d often be invincible, you’d take a lot of hits, and you could double jump to save yourself from pits and dangers. Sure, you’d feel awesome, but it’s a hollow thing. It’s just mitigating the fact that you’re horrible at the game. So it’s replacing your need for skill with stats.
That’s the “placebo effect” of vertical progression. I’m not a fan.
(edited by AuldWolf.7598)
I hate vertical progression.
The fact of the matter is is that whenever it’s my stats vs those of an enemy, the game is playing itself to a degree, since fights are determined more by stats. The only cure to this is a lack of vertical progression, or a ‘power plateau.’ By removing both as ArenaNet have, it means that they can never develop content designed around fixed stats. They can never create content that’s focused on challenging skill.
The only content they can create, going forward, since they plan on further tiers and level increases, is numbers vs numbers. In good game design, the player’s inputs and choices dictate success or failure. In bad game design, it’s just rolling dice to see who wins. And that’s what vertical progression is: Rolling dice.
With no power plateau, GW2 is a joke to me.
In Mass Effect 3’s multi-player, due to the horizontal progression and kitten near absent vertical progression, it means that they have to focus fights against skill. When you beat the Collectors on platinum, you really feel like you’ve achieved something. The AI in ME3 is tactical, and even punishing on platinum. It’s not the zergfest of GW2.
But GW2 it’s numbers vs numbers. This is WoW 2.0 in the making.
Have fun with it, you guys. I don’t want to play a game that’s all about a placebo effect for how a pathetic and unskilled person I am. I don’t want that. I’d prefer that a game assumes that I am at least somewhat skilled and doesn’t patronise me by holding my hand with stats in the way WoW/GW2 does.
I want to feel the -real- success of winning because I’m skilled. No placebos for me.
The tiered gear means that the game will always be playing itself to a degree. By that I mean that stats are always going to be more important than any skill I have. This is the WoW curse. And moving forward they’ll be fully embracing WoW-style progression, they said as much.
This is why I haven’t felt like I’ve achieved anything, no. I feel like I achieve way more by playing a platinum match in ME3’s multi-player. At least there it’s almost all horizontal progression and sidegrades. When I beat the Collectors on platinum in ME3’s multi-player, the genuinely intelligent AI (unlike the zerging bots of GW2) and the fact that stats aren’t winning fights for me makes me feel like I’m actually doing something.
I’ve been called a kitten medic in ME3. But GW2 feels… sterile. It’s just their numbers versus your numbers, there’s only a very minor impact that skills have. And the vertical progression will mean that there’s never any real sense of achievement. Only a fake sense of achievement. I think that’s what you’re feeling, OP. So long as the stats of you vs a foe decide the outcome of a fight, it will always feel shallow and meaningless.
@Kopa.4206
That’s an obvious lie by someone who has some real mental problems (you take fantasy racism far, far too seriously). If you got into Prophecies so much that you feel the need to spread anti-charr propaganda, then you may need to see a shrink.
The races were both as bad as each other. Don’t believe me? In Eye of the North, a charr was captured and tortured for crimes it was innocent of. This charr (Pyre) found this act so despicable that he outright called his captor (Gwen) evil.
Both races have their atrocities. But the charr never ‘treated the humans like cattle.’
Grow up.
[…] that 10,000 post hread about the disaster that was the lost Shores weekend disappeared […] People moan, but they secretly love grinding the new gear.
No. I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think that, as the earlier part of your post suggests, ArenaNet are just really good at damage control and clean-up.
Not done rambling yet!
Okay, I think one of the things that bothered me the most is that they couldn’t even live up to the ideal of presenting an MMO that broke the antiquated restrictions of old, not even in its aesthetics. One major problem I’ve had with fantasy MMOs in the past is that they were boring. Really, really bloody boring! So dull! Oh gods, the numbing dullness. Were they aimed at actuaries?
And GW2 isn’t that different. Instead of the warcamp that made it into GW2 as the charr city, they could have had a gigantic mechanical jellyfish as a city. Held up by thrusters with a glass and metal dome surrounding it. Sort of like a steampunk version of the SHIELD helicarrier, but more artsy! Inside you’d have cities and installations, factories and workplaces, and the whole thing would bristle with guns and cannons.
To get to it, you’d go to a launching point and hop on a helicopter, or you’d use a gate. Instead of having the yawnsome bridge over a pit as a defense, then, they could have suspended the thing over a gigantic iris, which leads to a long, long, long drop to the ground. That’s something they could have done.
Or the sylvari area. There are so many mushrooms in nature which are just… amazing! Instead, they copy-pasted the most typical fantasy and real world plants and palette-swapped them. For anyone with an imagination or absolutely any knowledge of nature, the sylvari home area was just… guh. It was… twee. It was colourful in its RGB colours, but it wasn’t really vibrant or alive. The Grove didn’t even have any real animal life in it beyond those plant dogs (did the sylvari kill off all the surrounding wildlife)?
Let me give you an example: http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ma70m3RIwI1qzurzvo1_500.jpg
You don’t see anything like that in the sylvari area. It’s just jungle vines, oh look… it’s the most typical type of blue mushroom imaginable, but it’s glowing. That must mean it’s special. And that’s not even mentioning how much of the asura aesthetic was liberally “lifted” ad verbatim (or whatever one would say for art) from Phantasy Star Online and Star Ocean. PLEASE ArenaNet. Your concept artists were coming up with much better than this, so why weren’t those ideas making it into the game? Why does the concept art look so breathtakingly awe-inspiring and your game look so… bad? Well, not just bad… but… devoid of imagination.
WoW has this curse, too. But I thought the point was that GW2 was supposed to be the game to get past limitations like that, to set aside the old dullness. The old laziness. I guess I was expecting too much? Well, I was expecting what a good single-player game would give me, I guess. I suppose that is too much.
(edited by AuldWolf.7598)
(Continued from last post.)
So I’ve recently been exposed to good AI. And I’m a fan of good AI. The AI of games like Creatures, Ultima VII, Gothic, Black & White’s creature and so on have always left me impressed. I admire that effort. Then I look at GW2’s AI and it just dumbly runs in a line towards the target. You kill them, then they dumbly run in a line towards the target again. Considering how much combat there is in Guild Wars 2… it needs to be better.
Add to that the new grindy elements and the fact that there’s no longer a power plateau, and that the game is moving towards vertical progression, and that’s all just a massive turn-off. I like getting to the power plateau so that I can enjoy the game at my leisure. I don’t think things like taxes and the daily grind have any business being in games. They’re antithetical to escapism and fun. They’re bad design, in my opinion.
But I might be able to stomach all that if the aesthetics and story were great…
Let me talk about the aesthetics, first. They promised us large, living cities. I was expecting something like the cities in Everquest II or Champions Online, which are actually both quite impressive and large/circuitous. Those feel like cities. Cities in GW2 feel like encampments. They promised us that our quarter would be customisable, nope! They promised us activities, and we only got one or two of those, in some cities I believe there are none. So cities were this massive letdown. A textbook example of lazy design.
Look at the charr camp. The original concept art was of a massive sphere, a humongous fantasy deathstar. Now look at the game. The game is nothing like that. It looks like they did just enough work to get it out of the way and no more. And when you’re wandering a city you can see where models have been slapped down, there’s a lack of detail textures and rims around the bottom of models which would help disguise that. It shows a lack of professional pride. They didn’t care.
Okay, so what else? Armour. If you’re not a norn or a human, you’re going to look terrible. You’re either going to lose part of your head (like your horns), or you’re going to clip like there’s no tomorrow. Again, another textbook example of laziness and doing the most minimal amount of work possible. If you look at the armours in EQ II, none of them clip on the beast races. Every. Single. Armour. Piece in EQ II is adjusted to look great on the beast races.
So what about the story? That’s gotta be good, right?
Trahearne.
So ultimately, there was so much potential and I wanted to believe and buy into that potential, but everything about GW2 is a letdown. The gameplay, the lack of a power plateau, the terrible aesthetics (painterly my rosey red bum), the story… just the everything. I wanted to like GW2, I found it impossible to.
So I went back to CO and ME3.
GW2 is a game that could have used longer in the oven, and it could have used a design team that stuck closer to both their original concepts and concept art.
Gaming Background
Long and illustrious. I’m an older fart, not the oldest fart, but not exactly a young fart either. I started out with the BBC Micro, and progressed onto a number of home computer systems. Jet Set Willy, Lunar Jetpack, and so on. Grabbed a Sega Mega Drive (you lovely American types call it the Genesis), loved the heck out of Shining Force, and so on, and so on.
Lately I’ve found that I enjoy more casual games. Games where I can dive in and just have fun with them, games that don’t have obligations, or taxes, or the daily grind. I get enough of these things in the real world, so what I want from my games is escapism, imagination, creativity, and ultimately? Fun.
Fun can come in many forms, it can be an art game like Proteus or Journey where I wander an island. Or it can be a horror game that keeps me on the edge of my seat like Amnesia. It can also be a game which is truly dumb fun and embraces silliness, like Lego Batman 2 or Scribblenauts Unlimited.
What I’m playing most recently is, indeed, Scribblenauts Unlimited, Mass Effect 3’s multi-player, Pid, and Torchlight II. On my iPad, I’m playing MacGuffin’s Curse (which has some of the most fantastic dialogue I’ve read in a game outside of an Obsidian or Lucasarts title), Waking Mars, Incubuto, and others. I like games which manage to draw me in, via their brilliant world, their clever writing, or their continuous vibrant nature and novelty. I value that.
The notion of ‘bang for buck’ as a time-to-money measure has no meaning to me. To my account, Dragon Age: Origins is a tremendously dull RPG with wooden characters and WoW-like combat mechanics, but Portal, at only three hours, is a masterpiece and worth thrice what I paid for it.
My Feelings About Guild Wars 2
It’s a drag.
I don’t honestly feel that it delivers on its promise in any respect. The first thing to annoy me about the game is that it’s loaded down with taxes. You pay taxes to travel, you pay taxes to continue fighting, you pay taxes to make things with crafting, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up having to pay taxes to pay taxes. That and the meagre rewards of the game have left the economy in dire straits, a nasty deflationary spiral which devalues everything.
The combat is also slow. Coming from games like Champions Online and Mass Effect 3, which are zippy and fun, I feel like I’m moving through treacle in GW2. It’s like a Final Fantasy character has cast a Slow curse on me, and I can almost feel the seconds pass. It’s obnoxiously, unpleasantly slow. But that’s not what kills the combat for me, it’s that coupled with the dumb AI, the AI that zergs and encourages counter-zerging.
I’ve been playing Mass Effect 3’s multi-player and I’m awed by its AI. It’s won awards and I can understand why. The AI is tactical, it understands concepts like choke points (and how to use smoke bombs at them), along with covering/suppressing fire, armoured escorts for large, heavy units, tougher opponents moving into the line of fire to protect weaker ones, and even basic things like honest to goodness flanking. When fighting Cerberus on Platinum or Gold, it pays to be a little bit paranoid.
(Continued.)
I’m on the side of those who see vertical progression as a bit of a cancer.
It would be like playing Grand Theft Auto and having to slowly grind my way up to every better car model available, whilst dealing with taxes on my available resources. Rather than, you know, just waltzing up to the car I want and stealing it. And apparently this makes GTA not a game? That’s news to me. No, that’s too kind. That’s the silliest thing I’ve read since the election.
But looking at this thread I’m beginning to wonder if there’s some kind of age/culture divide going on. I’d love to see people share their world region and age, just to get a feeling for whether I’m right or not, here. So I’m going to start a bit of an information gathering exercise, we can move this to another thread, if necessary.
How old are you, what region of the world are you from, and do you support vertical progression?
I’ll get the ball rolling: 37, UK, and no I don’t.
Speak for yourself, Hyena.
That they don’t have decent looking armour is a major contributing factor as to why I no longer play. If SOE can redesign armours to properly fit and look right on beast races, then so can ArenaNet. What’s pathetic about this is that I know that ArenaNet’s team is bigger than the team working on Everquest II.
Whether you do a half-arsed job on something or not is a choice, a conscious choice. They chose to not bother with charr armour. It could have looked amazing. See how armour looks on the iksar and the frogloks in EQ II and you’ll see what I mean.
This is just … really, one of the reasons I’ve given up on ArenaNet. I feel that everything about the charr was half-arsed. I’ve gone back to playing Champions Online (where I can create whatever I want without it looking bad), and Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer (where I can play one of my other favourite fictional races – the geth).
ArenaNet have really killed off any desire I have to play the charr. I don’t even have the passion to defend them against the weirdly xenophobic types around here who’re insistent on portraying the charr as dumb monsters. I just don’t have the will. ArenaNet don’t give a crap about the charr, so I’ve since ceased to give a crap about their game.
37 and I’ve left already because I’m tired of the cynical design choices.