Guild Wars 2

Mastruq.2463:

Its been said already but if you miss doing an achievement then you only missed doing that achievement. No other consequences. Nothing bad will come of it, so dont worry!

You have lost all potential to ever get 100%.
Which pretty much kills the appeal in doing anything in a game for some.

BuddhaKeks.4857:

The consortium themself are somewhat interesting, since they are not “for teh evulz!”, they are just ruthless capitalists.

The consortium are basically Team Rocket and the Southsun resort is their Pikachu.

I can’t take them seriously at all when nothing about them seems have any degree of subtlety whatsoever.

It could have worked if it were handled better. But with the Asura as flanderized in-game as they are, I guess they prefer the vintage Saturday morning cartoon approach. :-/

Basically, once all is said and done, it simply boils down to the following:

“Looks like Team Rocket’s blasting off again!~~~~~”

I’ve got to especially agree with the sentiment that relegating the deeper storytelling to blogposts and the like is a major detriment to the game. Honestly, looking back, this is an issue I’ve had with the game from the start.

We had glimpses of brilliance and an image of an amazingly-engaging world back when they first started posting about the Skritt and the Krait and such and this got my hopes up that it would be awesome to see everything unfold (along with how immersive dynamic events sounded like they could have been).

Instead, I got little-to-none of that depth in-game with most characters and scenarios feeling like superficial filler, the threat of the elder dragons reduced to ‘just another conflict’, and all of the interactions I was interested in seeing handled lazily if at all (Skritt vs. Asura in particular).

I just don’t understand how they can have this exciting vision for the world and convey that so handily outside the game, but completely miss the mark when implementing it.

You expected more?
The personal story pretty much set the stage, and after how abbreviated F&F was, this is pretty much par for the course…

Auesis.7301:

That whole “Guild Wars means wars and guilds” argument is redundant. Guild Wars is a title based on a specific period in the lore and NOTHING more. Stop it with that tired statement.

Honestly, while I personally hate the concept of guilds and tend to avoid them entirely (inb4WhyyouplayGUILDwarsthen!?), I’m kind of tired of seeing this rebuttal used.

It feels fairly obvious that “Guild Wars” was chosen as the title specifically because of the guild-centric PvP gameplay element of the first game and that the lore reason for the title was created as a ‘clever’ way of working it into the game’s background. Basically, it’s not called Guild Wars because of the guild wars that happened in the game’s story; the guild wars that happened in the game’s story occurred because they wanted to reinforce calling it Guild Wars.

Zlociutki.9165:

Rework the Bifrost auras, footprints.

Honestly, I’d say all the footprints need work. They either need to be changed to have a tapered-effect around them or be replaced by a trail that follows you rather than discreet spots since they just look like blobs right now. Kudzu is probably the worst offender.

I’m not a big fan of the lazy approach to mini-pets they’ve taken in general, but the ones that are cute chicks are the only ones I’d bother with, so the price disparity is understandable. A bit irksome as a buyer, but meh…

Meh, in my experience socializing in games works better when the grouping is more free-form like this. If you have to actively seek people out to group with/join a guild, you end up either with sub-communities that tend to more insular and limit the pool of people that you play with (and thus the possibility of finding the people in the community you might enjoy being around the most), or you get a more base experience with a lot of ‘Facebook friends’. And neither of those is particularly desirable.

It’s pretty much going to come down to female Sylvari and Asura for me. The grove gate assistant gets bonus points for being adorable. Seiran does as well, in spite of the fact the whole personal story thing taints my opinion of most things involved with it.
And though she’s probably not the best-looking Sylvari around otherwise, Owain gets a lot of points simply for the crazy.

Also, Largos. <_<;

Light-armour is pretty much the only class I like.

Was rather surprised since I actually tend to like medium-armour fairly well, but there’s just not much of it in the game right now that appeals to me. And I actually LIKE trenchcoats and stuff. Just all feels too bulky and stuffy. Need some more stuff that flows freely and fits loosely. Also skirts… Not skirt-like attachments to chest-armour, but actual skirts that go into the leggings slot.
Heavy-armour always sucks. There are a couple of sets here that aren’t too bad, but… yeah…

Scott McGough.6897:

(or, I should say, we’ll spend more time with her but see less of her, as she won’t always be wearing her beach gear).

No. She should continue to wear the bikini regardless of the situation or locale, and none of the NPCs should even make any mention of it, treating it as perfectly normal.

Rifle for Thief and Ranger.

Barring that, a kusarigama could be fun, but it’d almost certainly be too short a range for me to ever actually bother with.

4) Make a decent selection of town-clothes available as in-game rewards/purchases…
Remember the idea that any clothing you see an NPC wearing in town could be your own? :-(

A good, worthwhile, collectible rare system.
Everything has a chance to drop something awesome and you don’t just want one particular item; you gotta catch ’em all.

Eh, I’d agree that a Dragon was a bad end-boss for this game, but I’d say they could have still been a great ‘primary antagonist’ of sorts.

Basically, I’d like to have seen the threat of the dragons set the climate for the entire game, encompass a major portion of the threats we faced, but not necessarily end up being addressed to any sort of conclusion here and now. Well… I mean it’s not ‘concluded’ in the sense there are still more of them out there, but you know what I mean; Zhaitan should have been something we hit after long-term build-up, IMO.

Kain Francois.4328:

The personal story constantly hinted the dragons were actually intelligent.

Which was one of the major disappointments for me.

The idea that these things were truly ancient and were more akin to a force of nature than an actual entity that could be readily-understood made them seem like a huge threat that we could never imagine winning against, and that sets an amazing tone.
From how they were initially presented, I expected the Risen to be like a plague that constantly spreads, mindless and relentless. Something that behaved nothing like a normal army, with no sense of strategy or order, and which normal tactics would be useless against. Instead, we got faux-zombies that like to vocalize their positive feelings about death, zombie anti-aircraft guns, the whole stupid Eye and Mouth of Zhaitan bit, and all the rest of the dreck that followed. Oh, and then we killed one of them in fairly-short-order.

The dragons and their minions went from being this unknowable force to ‘just another army’, IMO. Rather than Orr being this horrific sea of brainless corpses, we may as well have been fighting the Kournans again.

And honestly, my disappointment with how the dragons were handled seems to tie together with some of the other big disappointments I felt; most notably the direction they went with the orders. I really liked the idea that each would take a different approach to how to handle the dragons, but they ended up being fairly shallow and pointless in the end, especially once they were rolled into ‘the Pact’. Had the Durmand Priory story moved in the direction it initially sounded like it would (and had they not just ended up being lolgadgets weirdos rather than genuine scholar-monks), that could have been something really compelling.

But I’m kind of veering off course there… Basically though, it’s the idea that the dragons had to be a directly-confrontable threat and that we had to take out Zhaitan by the end of the personal story (forcing everyone to converge at this point, at that) which seems to have mucked up their potential the most for me. Honestly, I’d prefer the dragons to just be something of a fixed part of the world at this point, rather than just a gauntlet for the races to slog through. Something we have to work around while slowly devising methods to survive, and ultimately counter them.

(And as another aside, if we were going to take one out head-on, I’d have gone with Primordus… I think each dragon would have worked better as specifically embodying a different form of ‘corruption’ with his being the most suited for a direct conflict;
Zhaitan – Plague-like corruption: completely mindless, it just aims to spread, consume, and grow
Jormag – Intoxication, manipulation, and madness: Draws individuals into his service willingly by granting them corruptive, addictive power that turns them into zealots.
Kralkatorrik – Assimilation, somewhat like the Borg: Forcibly takes control of specific creatures and turns them into drones.
Primordus – Destruction: Unlike the others, he doesn’t corrupt beings into his service; he just makes his own minions and has no use for living creatures, aiming simply to slaughter anything and everything.

So, basically the notion of combining all our skills and tech could work when we end up in direct conflict with Primordus somewhere down the line (after longterm planning), but for the others we would need more subtle ways to take them out, ideally in stages. Hell, for Zhaitan, it could have opened up the perfect chance to revisit the Dhuum storyline again… But I dunno…)

Err… So, to break it down, I don’t think it’s so much an issue that the dragons don’t have such distinct personalities or dialogue. I think the real issue is that they didn’t succeed in making them ominous and alien enough for them to be accepted without those things.

Meh. I did it once. Didn’t have much trouble, but didn’t have much fun either. Seemed more tedious than anything.

Eh, I’d like a larger variety of medium armour too. While most hate having ‘skirts’, I actually like the jackets and such, and my biggest issue is how most of it looks synched and ‘bulky’. Have some nice lighter-looking outfits with a jacket, or, better yet, some skirts that are actually part of the leggings rather than the top and I’ll be satisfied…

As it stands, the only armour in the game I actually tends to be light-armour and that’s just for casters… :-(

Eh. I previously opposed a new class, but I’d be OK with it now if they throw in a fast-paced, range-centric, cloth-armour martial class… Granted, it’d kind of step in on the domain of Thief, but eh, don’t care…

As far as race goes, Largos or Djinn would be alright, but there’s really not much else I’d care much for.

Feh. I like jump-in-and-play content and the feeling that the path you take can be as worth it as the destination…

So basically, yeah…
@#!$ pre-structured group content and end-chest-centric instances.
That kind of stuff is simply tedious and just fosters an extremely unpleasant atmosphere, IMO.

Zanshin.5379:

Join a guild. You won’t have to group with strangers anymore.

Don’t like to group with strangers?
Join an arbitrarily-defined, insular group of strangers!

Totally different.

Mini-dungeon like font of Rhand, plz…

You get something akin to a dungeon without all the hassle the normal type bring with them.

Honestly, my biggest issue with it in the end is that the story just felt far too abbreviated and uninteresting.
“Hey, I’m some random Charr, come with me!”
“Oh no! They destroyed the hatchery and took some dudes!”
“Hey, I’m Eir’s son (that totally makes me instantly important and worth caring about, right?), come with me to help save my village!”
“Oh no! The village has been burned down and they took my bros!”

And then we get a dungeon where we rescue said dudes and bros.

There was not enough build-up to make me care about these characters, nor were their stories deep enough to engage me. Add to that how lazy the side-bits to F&F seemed, especially since they were just shoved into the existing maps rather than changing them (Why are these refugees walking right past a lodge with a bunch of Norn getting drunk and acting oblivious to their existence?) and the whole thing feels like a lazy push to try and just throw some content into the game rather than an actual effort to make something compelling.

emikochan.8504:

Quarktastic.1027:

SpyderArachnid.5619:

Unlike GW2 where your actions will actually matter. If you ignore that event, the bandits will burn down that town and they will kidnap the townsfolk. Then you get a whole new event to put out those fires and save them.

None of this happens. Bandits may attack a farm. If you fail the event to repel them, guess what they do. They stand around doing nothing until someone comes along and clears them out. Then the whole thing repeats 30 minutes later.

It’s a step in the right direction, but nothing you do has any impact on the game whatsoever.

Yeah basically these back and forth chains need an extra couple of failure states, ending in total destruction of said town, so that an event needs to send builders out from the capital to rebuild.

Basically I want orr everywhere.

I’d say they need a fair bit more than that, honestly.

I know I was probably far too hopeful going into things, but my initial take on the game was that the ‘chains’ we currently have would be more akin to stages of a single event and that the actual chains would be far more in-depth and more intricate with ‘meta-events’ being a series of events that take place across multiple zones and could potentially take days to reach their conclusion.

I saw events being far more interconnected and branching as well, such that while an event might not be part of chain X or Y, the results of those 2 could dictate the direction it begins in, allowing things to carry on even further.

Basically, I had expected the events to have a lot of depth and a much longer duration, in addition to feeling like part of a consistent world. Not just the quick, simple, and repetitive insular affairs we have now. :-(

As for wanting “Orr everywhere”, don’t get me started on what I wanted/expected for Orr… >_>

Konig Des Todes.2086:

It’s got to do with me trying to understand WHY you hate what you hate, because all you folks have given me is just “I hate it – I don’t hate open world player interaction, which is similar, but I hate dungeons.” It isn’t “5-man WoW raid” – and you constantly saying that dungeons are for “raiders” makes me wonder if you’ve ever did a dungeon.

I don’t like structured group content. I don’t enjoy pre-forming groups and being locked together for the duration of the ride. It turns the game into a chore to me.

I like when you can just start something on your own, without waiting on anyone else, and others can just jump in or out as they please. You can talk and socialize as you play through the content you want to without having to form an arbitrary group in advance. This is why I liked the rooms of PSO, but HATED playing with others in Guild Wars. In PSO, I could open a room, head to the Forest and start my run with others coming and going as they please. In Guild Wars, if I wanted to go into a zone, mission, dungeon, etc. with other people, I had to wait around to form a group and hope they weren’t going to end up being obnoxious gits or bailing partway through.

I’ve never liked this type of pre-structured group content, and while I was willing to tolerate it for the MWF, I certainly didn’t enjoy the decision.

That’s a bit different, as each campaign was (originally) a self-contained story (though I will say that Factions’ writing was bad enough that it still managed to feel like boring filler somehow).

This would be more akin to hopping a boat to Cantha and just forgetting about the Mursaat entirely while we go to kill Shiro. Completely moving on would be fine if we’d already killed all the dragons and cleared that whole mess up, but we haven’t. They’re still out there, and (supposedly) are a world-level threat.

You need to maintain the tone and atmosphere of the main story so it doesn’t feel like the game is suddenly screaming, “IN OTHER NEWS!!!” That’s the main issue I have here is that it seems like a lot of times, it seems entirely possible to forget about the existence of the dragons, but from how they were described prior to the game’s launch, that should never happen. If you’re going to write a side-story that doesn’t focus directly on them (at least for the moment), then you should make sure to carry the hopeless and bleak tone into it and make sure to drive home that this is just yet another issue that we’re having to deal with on top of the much more severe issue that should never leave our minds.

Trying to tie it in after-the-fact doesn’t change the fact that this story felt too disconnected to the state the world SHOULD be in at the moment.

Though then again, the concept of the dragons was never handled all that well in-game, so I don’t know why I would expect anything different here.

Even if there is a link, it’s not overtly-displayed throughout the content, so it’d just feel like something arbitrarily thrown on to justify the existence of F&F. It currently just feels like a random, isolated chunk of content with poor build-up and an underwhelming execution. Had it been like, 1/1Ø of a content-patch that (overall) flowed well together, this would be alright, but as it stands it just feels like boring filler.

@Kajiri: While the Pact stuff may be over the top, I found it far more cringe-inducing when the Risen busted out the zombie anti-aircraft guns.

That was about when I stopped having any hope of the dragons and their minions reaching a sliver of the potential they once had.

Eh, I’ve always hated the achievement and title systems in general. They tend to be too deliberate in their design and feel like arbitrary stuffing forced into the game to try and drag it out rather than feeling logical and natural.

Tbey turn games from being a collection of goals you come up with and personally want to accomplish into a checklist of underwhelming tasks that’s basically been handed to you.

Feh. As I said elsewhere, I’d say taking the mini-dungeon approach (a la Font of Rhand) would be better for stuff like this.
‘Grouping’ on-the-fly is fine.
Having to actually pre-form a group is not.

To me:
Jump in and play group content is good.
Content that requires actively forming a group ahead of time = not so much.

These type of things should culminate in areas like the Font of Rhand rather than a traditional dungeon, IMO.

Honestly, I’d say they need to focus the story more instead of touching here and there on all these different fronts. I’ve expressed my disappointment in the past with the direction they went with the dragons, but at the very least that does have a worthwhile core to build around. Going off on these side-adventures at times would be fine if that driving force remained omnipresent in the overall atmosphere and tone of the world. But it doesn’t. Instead it just feels like we’re met with a number of disjointed side-stories that, honestly, are neither compelling nor well-designed.

If I’m right about what the background behind F&F was, then I can see them trying to tie all these ‘extra’ bits together, but it feels like far too loose (and contrived) a connection for something that isn’t all that interesting in the first place.

So hopefully, they stop trying to do insular chunks and instead expand their scope to more massive, flowing arcs with a significant focus on atmosphere.

I liked him a lot better in the original GW before they decided to give him a backstory.
He was far more interesting as the random, mysterious “Halloween dude” with a candyman army than he has been since being cited as a king of Kryta who lead a reign of terror, had a rivalry with Palawa Johko, had a load of wives, etc…

Of course, I also feel Kieran Thackery was better off as just “The Wintersday dude” as well, so meh…

Cheesed my way through it solo. You can snipe him from ledges/platforms. >_>

Got an exotic 76 axe… Better than most of what I tend to get, but eh… Good to know you can redo the dungeon at least, but instanced party-content is my least favourite type in these games, so feh… Dunno how many times I’ll rerun it.

Seras.5702:

I don’t see how you think it’s all “grindy bollocks” (i’m gonna remember that one). The scavenger hunts takes what…..15-20 mins? And you get an immediate reward. Carving pumpkins, opening doors, mining candy corn…they all can happen as you play the game. Want to dedicate an hour or 2 to the event? Then you’ve got a large chunk of it licked already. But if you want all the ultimate stuff right now and cheap….then that seems a little spoiled. Don’t you think there should be something in the game that requires some actual effort and dedication to acquire?

I figured it was clear I was referring to the craftable skins there, but if not, I apologize for not stressing that.
That said, there was no need to make any of the event items ‘ultimate stuff’. That’s the problem for me; why couldn’t the whole thing just be about fun things you get as you go along? Why force grind into a sodding holiday event?

I have no problem with long-term goals… I do have a problem with the way they are implemented in GW2, as they all require a dedicated effort with no real shot of incidental reward. But even then, if you did want that, it already existed in the game in the form of legendaries and a load of the named exotics. Shoving more of it in here just kills the momentum of the event and screams, ‘Yeah. Don’t even bother.’ to me…

Only reason I could see this potentially being true is if NCSoft is trying to keep a distinct line between Guild Wars 2 and Blade and Soul, and they fear that Cantha could muddle that.

But it’s doubtful anyway. You’ll probably see Cantha in the future, as it’s too major a part of the world to be handwaved… Maybe not until a much later expansion, but I’m sure you’ll eventually be able to return there…

Tyrick.9867:

I’m guessing you spend $50 on part 1 of 4 of the event and didn’t get what you want. Maybe try some patience next time, and go to a GA meeting.

Err… I’ve spent nothing in the CS, nor did I have any intention to.
Though I’m not exactly fond of a chunk of the new stuff being relegated to the cash shop, I kind of resigned myself to accept that it would be, so I’ve no significant issue there. Whether rare, common, or directly-purchasable, that’s content I wouldn’t have touched anyway.

My biggest qualm really is with the craftable skins. I left about a month ago, shortly after I lost interest in bothering with a Legendary and it was mentioned by a dev that the ‘cool’ exotic skins were all given specific (and generally fairly expensive) MF recipes. So there was no real possibility of getting incidental/short-term ‘fun stuff’ for me and the game wore thin.

Figured the holiday would be a good chance to jump back in with everything being simple and fun to get as you do the events. Only to get hit with another batch of grindy bollocks, even worse than most of what already existed.

Sours the feel of the festival when you hang that kind of crap over it. There was no need to bog anything festival-related down like that, and it kills my drive, as well as my faith in the direction future content will head.

Honestly, it doesn’t really matter to me what is added beyond this point unless changes to the existing items accompany the updates. The presence of the type of content they’ve opted for within a festival setting at all is enough to make things unpalatable to me. I’ll stick around to see the new areas and events for the Hell of it, but really, there’s nothing additional they could really add to win me back at this point.

Plunder.8195:

You want to have every player and their grandma walking around with the Halloween themed weapons for the rest of the year?

Sure, why not?

People should pick the gear they like the best and feel looks the nicest for their character, not jump on the Chaos Glove bandwagon just because of expense/rarity.

I started out in PSO, and nothing was really rare due to the abundance of hacks/dupes around. I played legitimately, but nobody was going to be impressed by my Bringer’s Rifle regardless of how I got it. Still loved the Hell out of that thing and felt amazing when I managed to get it.

If I ever bothered to do the dungeons to get the armour setup I wanted, I wouldn’t particularly care if EVERYONE had those skins available to them. I’d be using them because I like the way it looks on my character, and while the lack of diversity in the playerbase would suck if everyone latched onto them, the lack of ‘prestige’ wouldn’t bother me in the slightest.

Sorry.6741:

But collecting the same items for every major undertaking where the forge is concerned is getting a bit annoying. The event was a perfect oppertunity to spice it up in a wholehearted way.

Very much this.

This is a major part of why I stopped playing for a while.
All the crap with the legendary pre-cursors + them being SB on use rather than AB on acquire put me off of going towards those, but every other item really worth pursuing was another instance of “grind out a bunch of Ori and the like and chuck it into the forge” or, at the very least, “Grind out a bunch of gold”. That there wasn’t anything fun to get incidental to normal gameplay kind of killed it for me, and so I was hoping that the prizes here would all accompany Halloween-centric events and ‘quests’… Not more of the same.

:-/

@Alur, You know that the Halloween/Candy components aren’t the issue, no?

Yeah… To Hell with that.

Expected this would be fun, but to be hit with more of the same rubbish that put me off of the game for about a month already…

No.

If those are the recipes, I think the Halloween event is officially the end of the game for me.

Fun things apparently can’t be fun. :-(

Journeyman salvage kit combines with bones, nougat, plastic teeth, and something else. You can only use two of the Halloween items, so I’m not sure what the final bit is.

Gwaiyn.4395:

Neko Romancer you say?

Pfft. If only I could have made my Charr look like that.
°insert raging fanbase here°

Actually got the idea for the name from the Iosys parody of Rin’s theme from Touhou though. So red-hair and braids would be more fitting. <_<

Might need to roll out my Charr Neko Romancer for once…

“Girls do their best now and are preparing. Please wait warmly until it is ready.”

<_<

wumpusrat.4769:

Actually, teleportation without any sort of gate is supposedly something that only one little krewe of asura have come up with (they show it off to win the Snaff Prize during the asura starting quests). And even then it’s not perfect.

So yeah, everyone having a personal teleporter kind of flies in the face of the lore ANet’s written.

Pretty sure there was actually a quest in the original Guild Wars that involved the son of a woman that invented fast-map-travel. >_>

Edit: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Map-Travel_Inventor
So she didn’t invent it, but just told her son how to do it.

alcopaul.2156:

I saw the bikini armor in Lion’s Arch.

It’s medium armor. She was a Norn Assassin.

but i wanna know what type of leggings and top are she wearing.

I might get my ranger this armor.

Top is Duelist and bottom is Vigil.
Would use that myself simply due to the lack of good options to go with the Duelist top, but I joined the Priory. ;-/
Would be nice if there were some proper skirts (read: Leggings slot), but I guess they don’t wanna go that route since they’d clip with everything.

Edit: And I attached the mashup I’d personally be going for if I could be bothered to do dungeons. Not ideal, but it’s decent.
Do agree that there needs to be more options in general though. I expected I’d love medium armour as I generally do, but most of it tends to be too… bulky… for lack of a better word. Some armour more reminiscent to leather versions of light armour would be grand, as would some non-cinched trenchcoats. I love the idea of trenchcoats, but when they’re all waist-hugging monstrosities, most of which are stuffed with a crapload of additional armour underneath, they stop seeming sleek and dapper, and instead just feel gaudy and oppressive.