As time goes by, I find myself playing less and less.
It’s just not jaw dropping, and I feel like it was overhyped. Too much promised in the manifesto, not enough delivered.
I just got my 7th toon to 80 the other day, and I’m working on getting all of them into exotics.
I also bought in to Star Citizen two days ago, and while that game has a ways to go – I find myself spending more time on their forums learning about it than I want to log into GW2.
My biggest gripe is with how little there is for exploration. I’m primarily an immersion/exploration player, and while I dabble a little in other things like PvP just for fun, most of all I want explore the game world.
GW2 was promised to be a great game for explorers, but I found this was not really true.
Some of it was – it is certainly very beautiful. The art style is one of the best I’ve ever seen in an MMO.
But Tyria feels tiny. I also really hate the zones – I’d prefer a truly open world with no zone walls/invisible walls. And the whole rectangular zone thing was extremely off putting. It just screams lazy design principles, and does a massive disservice to exploration.
Downleveling is a drag – there’s lots of places, like a champion spider queen somewhere near the Saltflood waypoint in Sparkfly, for example, that I cannot come back to at a higher level – no matter how high a level I get, I can never kill that spider unless I bring a bunch of other people, and I am often just exploring solo.
There’s also just not enough hidden content for explorers to find. I think there ought to be vast – hundreds of square miles worth – of underground structures and complexes hidden all over the world. Massive dungeon complexes underneath Divinity’s Reach, for example.
It just feels like the ‘Open World MMO’ aspect was tacked on to a PvP game, but I hear the PvP aspect isn’t that great either.
I did a little WvWvW and it was ok – as with all large scale PvP in MMO’s, the only problem I have with it is that they still haven’t figured out hot to make it less zergy – but this isn’t a problem that is unique to GW2, it plagues every MMO with PvP, so they kinda get a pass on that. There seems to be a ton of potential in PvP – from the siege weapons (which are really cool) to the destructible forts and bases. But, a lot of this seems to get very little use. Just like in WAR, I’ve noticed that primarily people run around ‘capping’ various objectives to score points, and battles are massive eye sores (graphically, my screen just explodes, and epileptics are sent to the hospital in every major battle) with very little actual tactics involved. Everyone just spams their attacks until one side or the other falls back. The zerg is the least interesting part of PvP, because no one really knows what’s going on, it’s just a spamfest of hitting all your skills and hoping something happens.
Combat is ok in GW2, but again I feel like it was overhyped. I thought it would be more action based, more like an FPS. But we got tab targeting, and substantial CD skills. And ultimately, I don’t like the weapon skill system – it lacks customization. I DO like the fact that we are limited to only 10 skills at any given time, but I wish I could pick and choose exactly which 5 skills were on my weapon bar instead of having to take all the skills associated with a particular weapon. Dual wielding makes this a little better, as you can at least mix and match 3 and 2 of those skills, but 2-hdrs. are worse in this regard, and I’d still rather be able to choose a skill independently for each slot. I don’t care if it’s easier for Anet to balance, or whatever their excuse is, the skill bar grows bland and I want more customization of my loadout.
But, if exploration was more fun, I could even forgive the combat, because at the end of the day it’s not bad – in fact, it’s way better than WoW, and just about every other MMO I’ve played.
If there were more to explore in Tyria I’d probably be hooked – but the draw of exploration quickly dies here.
Also, I found dungeons to be highly disappointing too – primarily because they are extremely linear. Rather than vast complexes with multiple levels and huge areas to explore, they’re really just extended arenas with specific kinds of enemies in them.
Also, I don’t like the forced grouping in dungeons. Again, this comes down to my explorer approach to gaming – I want to delve into dungeons on my own a lot, and I’d like it if dungeons were challenging for solo players, but not next to impossible because of the way mobs are designed, with massive health pools, one shot mechanics, and bad AI’s.
