GW1 didn’t have dungeons. Maybe if you wanted to call them alternate zones with higher than average mob density?
They were definitely more than that. “Average zones” didn’t have special mechanics that required you to act differently than normal. Dungeons, unlike explorable zones, required that you go to certain places in a certain order, do something to advance that isn’t generally required, or navigate maze-like passages to progress. Explorable zones were, 95% of the time, wide-open areas that could be traversed in any number of ways and had everything out there for you to experience in any order. In North Kryta Province, for example, you were free to travel throughout the entire zone, there were virtually limitless paths for you to take, and there were no objects you had to find or use to travel to different parts of the map. In Sepulchre of Dragrimmar, on the other hand, you had to unlock different parts of the map by opening the virtue doors by finding their corresponding “proof” pressure pads. In Vloxen Excavations you had to deal with the constantly-respawning undead on the third floor and plan your movements accordingly. Virtually ALL dungeons had traps of some kind, or environmental hazards that you didn’t see in the “regular” game. Moreover, a lot of those maps were pure hell to navigate unless you’d memorized the best route; the overhead map was often intentionally difficult to follow so that you couldn’t see the best route from the get-go.
Perhaps the dungeons weren’t as gimmicky as the ones in GW2, but you have to admit that they did have their gimmicks and unique challenges that were absent from “regular” explorable zones. They are most certainly distinguishable from standard PvE content.
I thought of this topic after trying the new Aetherblade dungeon yesterday, so most of my points are in response to what I saw there. For instance, I thought that the regular Aetherblade enemies were placed in groups that were challenging but not unfair. My group had a few people get downed by those mobs, but nobody died to them, even when we encountered the section with 4 veterans and another 10 or so regulars. That’s a good level of challenge that made me think of GW1, and what I think Anet should continue to try to match. The pacing was good, though I wouldn’t have minded a less linear path to follow or non-obvious/semi-random Aetherblade caches along the way. I appreciated the miniature jumping puzzle towards the end, though the springs were a little hard to manage at times because of bad collision with the environment and getting hung up on jagged edges of things.
The first boss was in many ways like Ilsundr in that you had to be aware of your surroundings and pay attention to what the boss was doing—but there was simply too much going on. There’s a fine line between challenge and frustration/gimmick, and I think Frizz crossed the line, just as the NULL fight from Southsun Cove had just a little too much action to be fun. Take any single element of that fight out, and it’s balanced…keep them all in, and it’s frustrating and not very fun. If even one small aspect of the difficulty were lowered, then I think that encounter would be much more entertaining, but keeping up with two pulling, healing, shielding, might-stacking golems, AND lightning walls, AND lazer walls moving at different speeds, AND having to jump up on top of boxes with slippery collision detection was just too much to keep track of. Why not just limit bosses to one central mechanic that everyone can focus on? Look at Fendi Nin, Zoldark the Unholy, and Murakai fights from GW1. The mechanics for those fights were easy to understand and challenging but manageable, as in you only had to focus on one particular strategy and keep at it for a few minutes while you whittled the boss down (or his/her minions, in some cases). If GW1’s bosses were like throwing a baseball at a target, GW2’s bosses are often like juggling three balls while throwing them at three separate targets, and having to hit each target with a ball of a corresponding color at the exact moment someone raises a flag of that color.
The final bosses were fun at first. I even said to my team “does this remind anyone of the Lich/Shiro fight from Nightfall?” and they agreed. But then two things happened that drained all the fun out of the encounter. First, Mai Trin has WAY too much health. Either make it easier to get rid of her shields, or give her less HP to contend with. The combination of both made an initially fun fight drag out into something tedious. Second, the cannon barrage was epic…except that it lasted WAY too long. Sure, make us dodge for 20-30 seconds each time, but not 50, then 1:20, then 1:50. That’s needlessly long and it adds nothing to the level of fun—on the contrary, it significantly diminishes it. I want to be fighting, not running laps for two straight minutes at a time, and FOUR MINUTES TOTAL! It’s an unnecessary time extension to an already too-long fight.
All in all, I liked this new dungeon more than any that I’ve tried so far, but it’s still way too frustrating to keep me interested. I’ll be doing it for the skill achievements (since the dungeon won’t be here forever and I can’t put it off for as long as I want) and then never look back. This is definitely a step in the right direction, but I think that Anet would do well to emulate their GW1 dungeons even more than they did with this last one, if nothing else to give us more options for challenging group content. What do you think?
My question is a simple one: why can’t Anet vary its dungeons with some GW1-like dungeon content?
It seems to me that there are important and fundamental differences between the GW1 dungeon design philosophy and the GW2 design. In GW1, dungeons were largely about exploring large areas, finding secrets, dealing with dungeon-wide gimmicks for opening new areas, dodging traps, and dealing with wandering groups of normal but fairly threatening enemies and boss-level but generally not gimmicky stronger enemies.
GW2, on the other hand, has relatively linear dungeons with little to no exploration. Instead of wandering around an expansive dungeon, it goes like this: trash mobs -> gimmicky boss encounter with tons of HP -> more trash mobs -> another gimmicky boss -> final boss. There’s no exploration or secrets to find, and there’s no real sense of progress other than moving forward through a predetermined path. No finding and using bombs to blow down walls that may or may not take you where you want to go if you don’t have a preprepared map, no hidden treasures to be uncovered, no torches that all have to be lit within a certain amount of time to open a door, etc.
Now, this isn’t to say there are some similarities between GW1 and GW2 dungeons. Some GW1 boss battles in particular were comparable to the ones I’ve seen in GW2, like the Ilsundr fight in Catacombs of Kathandrax where you had to move to avoid getting hit by fiery rolling balls of death (similar to the new Frizz boss fight) or the Rragar/Hidesplitter fight where killing Rragar first would send Hidesplitter into a berserk state (like the Mai Trin/Horrik and Molten Alliance duo from the Living Story dungeons). Fights like those would be right at home in GW2. Moreover, some levels of the GW1 dungeons were linear and did have a trash mob -> (non-gimmicky) boss progression--but they weren’t the only aspect of dungeon play.
GW1 dungeons were tons of fun in my opinion. For the casuals, you could go through at your own pace and not have to worry about new mechanics every 5 minutes or a seemingly limitless health pool on bosses, to say nothing of the murderous trash mobs. For the hardcore players, you could try hard mode, where the enemies all got significant buffs and were often extremely challenging, but you got double rewards for completion too. It wasn’t hard to find groups for casual play OR speedclears; plenty of people were interested in both. Dungeons could be completed (depending on which one you were in) in 30 minutes to an hour or so, with little variation in how long it would take (unless your team was particularly ill-prepared or bad).
GW2 dungeons, in contrast, are quite unappealing to me. It’s not terribly fun to drag through tough trash mobs and then get to a (generally) gimmicky, high-HP, powerful boss that takes 5 minutes to kill if you’re prepared—and then that’s not even the end of the dungeon. If you’re in a good group dedicated to speed and precision, dungeons are over extremely quickly. If not, expect to be there for a very, very long time.
My question is, why not vary the current dungeon lineup with some GW1-like experiences? How about a dungeon that involves exploration of a huge map, semi-random secrets to uncover, and larger groups of regular-strength enemies rather than 2 to 3 really tough ones? And bosses that shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to down and present unique challenges rather than frustrating gimmicks?
Scrap silly stories give us legitimately fun content that isn’t deleted ever 10 days.
+1. If we can’t play the new content whenever we want, then why bother adding it in the first place? The living story may attempt to emulate the gradual passage of time for major events in the real world, but we aren’t playing MMOs to be in the real world. Tyria isn’t Earth, and making Tyria too much like Earth (namely in the don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it way, since we can’t rewind time in reality) is not necessarily a good thing.
If you weren’t able to complete all the achies, just consider this: Those of us that did finish it all, only got a title and a pair of neat-looking gloves. Nothing game-breaking. I’m happy to have finished it and got the prizes, but I know I’d be just fine without them. The gloves don’t even match my outfit.
Scant comfort for us completionists whose achievement tab will never be truly finished…
I think the main aspect is not that it needs the achievements, but that the content needs to be strong enough so that rewards, achievements etc aren’t the overriding reason for doing it.
I agree with you again there. I really resent the fact that so many people only play in a select few areas because of the time/reward ratios available there. For instance, if you go to any of the starter areas, you’ll find crowds of people waiting for world boss events so that they can get their daily rare item plus the reward chest. If you go to other areas, there’s nobody there to enjoy all the great content available. For instance, I was exploring Fireheart Rise a few months ago and I was blown away by some of the events, the scenery (an updated version of Post-Searing Ascalon from GW1) and the challenging enemies. But nobody was there to work with me. Unlike the starter areas, there are no impromptu groups that are created for the purpose of running around and enjoying the content, because people find no reason to go to other areas because there’s no incentive. I wish people didn’t NEED that incentive, but apparently they do.
Conversely, Arenanet creates artificial scarcity and time-based incentives by making Living Story episodes last for only a brief period of time. I think this is a bad idea because it sort of forces completionists to do the new content for fear of missing out on something. But really, the new content should be inherently rewarding, like the SAB. People shouldn’t be convinced to play it because of its limited period of existence, but rather because it is good, solid content.
So in other words, why can’t they just find some way to make every area exciting and interesting so that people will play in all sorts of different zones, all the time? What we have now is a lot of people enjoying only a fraction of the content available, so why can’t they make EVERY area more rewarding somehow to spread out the density of the population? The living story merely brought a few more people to two areas for a few months, and wasn’t a permanent fix by any means. I think that Arenanet is going in the wrong direction with the living story, though I admire its attempts to try to fix these problems.
Getting rid of the Living Story achievements maybe one option.
I agree on this. If you’re going to make limited time content, why make achievements permanently missable? I’m really upset that I wasn’t able to get the last 3 F&F achievements due to real life (law school exams + graduation) making it impossible for me to get the dungeon done in 12 days. I had one shot at it earlier today—it took me 3 hours to get to the end bosses because my party sucked, and then everyone left, so I’ll never get the achievement now that the dungeon is permanently gone.
But then the problem is how to fill the gap. If there are no achievements to guide players through what they “should” do to get the most out of the event, why would some people bother with the event at all? Look at me, for example…I wouldn’t have even wanted to do the dungeon if there weren’t achievements available for completing it, and the Wintersday and Halloween PvP achievements were something I had to force myself to do because I generally hate PvP, both here and in other games. On the other hand, the SAB achievements encouraged exploration, experimentation, and old-school (i.e., NES-era) challenges. Where’s the happy medium? And how do we reconcile the temporary nature of this content with the achievements available?
I’ll remember it as the time I was permanently denied 3 achievements because a dungeon was only available for 12 days, during which time I had no choice but to spend all my free time on law school exams and graduation.
Honestly, I feel like that was a perfect compromise between the content being short lived enough to really read as a thing that happenned in the world without being so short (like the ancient karka line) that it makes it night unachievable for a large number of players.
Sure, some people won’t ever see it, but it isn’t as if the living story ends here.
But what motivation do we have if we can never see it? Why should we care about what’s going on if we can NEVER see how it got here? I think the perfect compromise would be if they gave us some way to pay for the old content; that way, people who wanted to see it could, and the rest wouldn’t have to do whatever they didn’t want to do.
Would you rather come to the game brand new after a year and have some arbitrary backlog of content that theoretically “already happenned” that you’ll have a very difficult time finding people to play with, or would you rather keep the potential on a month to month basis for the world to be different in some small way?
I’d rather have a potential backlog of content for those who want it. As we all know, the rewards for the living story are merely aesthetic. How would it hurt to make those events available for those who want to pay for it? As long as it was clear that this was purely optional content divorced from the main story, there would be no backlog, just in the same way that the Bonus Mission Pack in GW1 was an “optional backlog” of events that had nothing to do with the main game and were available for those players who chose to pay to access them. Flame and Frost is on the same scale as the BMP, and I not only would gladly pay whatever price Arenanet asks for such an option to be available in GW2, but I also think it would do nothing but help the company in terms of engaging the player base with more content and giving a reasonable means of income from those who choose to pay for access.
Just because you weren’t there for an event doesn’t mean you won’t be there for the next one, and the one after that.
But what about those who take completion seriously, and are prevented from completion by real-life needs and concerns? Maybe there should be some trinket or hat only accessible to those who were there to see things when they happened, but making achievements and story content unattainable after an event is over is something else entirely. It means that latecomers will never be able to experience 100% of the game, or complete 100% of its content, and that prospect bothers me quite a lot.
The usual approach of just piling on more simply fractures the player base and makes it very difficult for new players to ever really get anything done.
The BMP didn’t fracture the player base at all in GW1. How is this any different at all, assuming they make it so you can’t farm in the Molten Facility?
What’s more fun? Being told that Zhaitan and the risen are a problem… and then not… despite nothing at all having changed outside one little instanced corner of the world, or having things actually happen and then seeing them actually be resolved once and for all?
I would rather have all content produced by the development team to be permanently accessible in some form, even if it requires real money, so that we can participate in the events that happened, following them through to their respective resolutions, and then still be able to see the lasting effects of those events after having had the chance to participate in them.
While I do believe limited time content adds a bit of interesting world feel to it (especially when it’s as easy as this was, and as.. okay well it wasn’t that much fun except for the mini-dungeon but whatever), I can understand those who didn’t pay attention up until the last minute. I do have a proposal though:
Anet could offer some book for 800 gems that ‘recalls’ the events of Flame & Frost. Of course, it’ll have to make your own instanced zone of Diessa Plateau and Wayfarer Foothills, but it’d be a solution that satisfied both parties. But they’d have to restrict the obviously limited-time rewards from the MF dungeon, else it’d make it not-so-limited.
I would totally go for an option like what youv’e proposed, and I hope they release something like that. I’ve been thinking all along that some of these events seem almost like mini-expansions, and monetizing them would be a win-win proposition: Arenanet gets money from gem sales, and we get a great PvE experience. Here’s hoping that they read this post, or already have something like that planned.
@Equinox shutters at the thought of studying for 12 days for Law School Exams, i gotta say, that blows, but as you kinda said, you did get on for 4 hours for it (granted i would’ve bailed after an hour and a half if that group was that bad, instance only takes like 40min tops so far).
I’m just really upset that my 4 hours got me nowhere. The dungeon was either extremely tough, or my party was extremely poor. Now, as a result, I’m going to be rather bitter about this for the rest of my GW2 experience. I’m not going to stop playing or ragequit, but I’m a completionist, and now I will never have the opportunity to complete this chapter of the game, so it really hurts that I got punished for being responsible and focusing on my exams first. I sincerely hope that they make this available through some other means, because otherwise they are throwing away resources. Literally. If they don’t make this content available after the conclusion of this chapter of the living story, they will have spent a lot of time and energy working on something that will have absolutely NO use from this point forward.
I sincerely hope that Arenanet considers the objections I and others are raising about the way the living story is implemented, because this stuff is too good to be wasted. I really did enjoy the first three parts of Flame and Frost. It was good, quality, challenging material. I don’t want it to be lost in the annals of history and never see the light of day again. Newer players who never had a chance to see where the living story began will forever be behind the rest of us who did, and I just don’t see that as fair. I hope they announce a reasonable solution to this predicament, and soon, so that people who literally had no time to play this content or only began playing GW2 after it was released will be able to access an important part of the history of GW2 as a living game. If not, then why bother playing content that can’t be savored over time? Why create so much good content that doesn’t do anything for those who weren’t there to experience it? It just makes no sense to literally throw away time and money, particularly when Arenanet wants to keep attracting new customers with an ever-expanding, permanent world.
At any rate, the whole issue still saddens me, and I hope that other people feel this way too and aren’t just haughty or contemptuous becausey the had the good fortune to get all the achievements where some of us didn’t or couldn’t.
So…this is my first post on the GW2 forums, and the first time I’ve had occasion to make my opinions known. That should say something I guess.
I’ve spent the last 12 days working on law school exams and preparing for graduation. Literally every moment of my free time in the last three weeks has been spent not playing GW2. And now I will NEVER, I repeat, NEVER be able to complete my living story achievements, simply because my life didn’t coincide with Arenanet’s scheduling.
In my eight years playing Guild Wars 1 and now GW2, I have never missed an event. Not one. Then again, participating in GW1 events only required logging on for 30 minutes (something I could usually at least spare time to do) and collect some item or do a brief quest.
Now, I don’t have an issue with GW2’s event-based, achievement-awarding events. I think they’re great, when we have a month or so to work on them. But I have a serious issue with giving players 12 days to complete a dungeon’s worth of content. I do have to confess that I started working with a PUG group around 1:00 EST today, but they were atrocious. It took us three hours to get to the end boss, and then everyone just gave up after another hour, meaning I had wasted four hours of my life. That turns out to have been my only chance to get the final three F&F achievements.
The fact that the event has ended doesn’t really bother me in and of itself. What bothers me is knowing that, unless Anet has some reason to give us a flashback event of some kind, which they don’t seem to have any intention of doing, I will NEVER be able to complete the Flame and Frost achievements. Contrast this with the Super Adventure Box, limited time content that people WILL be able to get old achievements for in future releases.
I acknowledge that many people out there will probably just tell me to get a life, or stop taking this game so seriously, or admonish me for not taking time out of my exams to play GW and get the achievements. But I still maintain that scheduling a 12 day window for an activity that requires not just a group, but a competent one, during one of the busiest times of year for the 18 to 24 demographic—Arenanet’s target audience, I would imagine—is a really awful idea. Moreover, it saddens me that I will NEVER have the opportunity to complete my GW2 experience because of this one-time event. I would not be nearly so upset if there were some way to access this content in the future, but so far as we can tell, there is none, and that makes me extremely mad.