Guild Wars 2

The title says it all. I was way more hyped when i saw future features coming out on the preview page for a release than after they dropped them for the short trailers. I see data-mining posts on reddit, and even those get me more hyped than the trailers that anet puts out now.

So, Anet, bring back the preview pages that actually told us something awesome!

I never read the books so DE seemed completely foreign to me when i picked up the game. Some of them would show up for a storyline, storm off and act like petty kittenes. I’ve never seen the appeal.

Other zones have floating mountains and wiki tells me they don’t appear in dry areas too.

You have an unlimited amount of time to get crafting to 400. There is no need to make it easier or faster because you’re not on a deadline.

“Gates of Maguuma, Open July 1st” is preeeeetty suggestive wording. Not to mention the artwork splashed across the main GW2 page is people walking in a desert!

If we don’t get to walk in a desert when it “opens july 1st” i think people will be justified in being disappointed because of how it’s being presented.

The Dominion of Winds is already there, so any argument about a capital fitting on the map is already completely moot.

I think what they were saying earlier was that those kind of items won’t be available from vendors

They’re always careful about reintroducing stuff that was always tradeable and has a high market value. I can’t think of a time where there was a super expensive, limited time drop that they brought back as something easy to get.

Thala.2801:

I swear, the most common complaint I must hear from the GW2 community is “I’m mad that ArenaNet removed this stupidly exploitative farming method”. Why do people keep expecting them to stay?

Why would people expect players to play an MMO without drops?

Celestina.2894:

Had to delete my hentai back pack for space, good to see I can regain it.

I was like “What hentai ba… ohhhh, sclerite.”

sorudo.9054:

Ree: All of the dwarves eventually participated in the ritual.

The thread should have pretty much ended with this official statement right here.

Kurrilino.2706:

I refuse to close the door on Dwarfs coming back just because people are use to Borgs with laser guns.

Once they add Borgs with laser guns, you’ll have something that starts to resemble the tiniest beginning of an argument. Until then, you’re just tilting at windmills.

Kurrilino.2706:

…dumbing the game down…

Which is exactly what you get when you try to add something super generic and ubiquitous back into a fantasy game. Making GW2 closer to every copycat tolkien-clone is “dumbing it down” more than doing something new and original. I read your original post as “GW2 is not generic and bland enough. Please add this element to make it less unique and more like a million other franchises.”

What’s next? Elves and hobbits?

Kurrilino.2706:

Beside that i can guarantee you that the maps are already created and they just appear blurry to us.
No company would be stupid enough to leave everyhting empty just to figure out what to do later

Are you serious?

SnidgetAsphodel.7961:

I’m glad they gave human males the option to NOT look like a steroid-addicted gorilla. It’s not something you often see in games.

Ehhh… there are plenty of games of asian origin loaded with male characters that are so feminine they are nearly indistinguishable from females. Anything out of the east with at least a hint of anime aesthetic is packed with them.. Just like “steroid-addicted gorilla” is an idealized image that isn’t reflected in the everyday appearance of real-life men, so is the ubiquitous visage of feminine bishi-boys that dominates the asian MMO game scene.

Bellizare.5816:

Roll a Norn Female. They look more masculine than human males.

lol. That’s a joke. The norn females looks like barbie with an extra 10 pounds.

Sunshine.4680:

Females have better models, Males have better armor design. Look at some of the gem store armors etc, look bad kitten on males and on females they look stupid and prissy. Some of my characters are prissy but I wish I could just have a standard robe for my females without having to roll human. Cannot stand the plastic looking human female faces.

Some of the problem is that you can’t make genuinely buff females, so the large and imposing armor pieces on a large males look puny on the puny female models, even when they’re identical models. After rolling a max-sized female norn since launch and making a male norn, i can’t go back to the female since she feels so ridiculously small and weak in comparision.

Just letting you use dyes in the bank wardrobe should pretty much fix all of your issues. Then you can see all armors and dyes at the same time.

Squeesidhe.4761:

I like to create hot female toons, and the hottest ones I’ve ever been able to create are in this game

You should check out the Black Desert character creation videos. Your mind will be blown.

I have a female norn and a male norn, and when the wardrobe hit i decided to equip them both with almost the same armor pieces and see how they measured up. My female has 4 color channels on almost all her armor pieces while the male only has 3 the on SAME PIECES. I won’t even put the aetherblade pieces on the male because he doesn’t get to choose the color of the glow the way the female version does.

It certainly looks like females got more love in the armor design dept.

Ever since the April 23 patch, i cannot play in the evening without constant lag and DCing. It never was an issue before.

I’m surprised they haven’t done anything about this yet. After all, before Halloween ’12 there WAS a hair texture under hats/helmets but that patch removed it.

I’m kinda surprised that there is ZERO hype or teasers for season 2. They even said in a recent interview that they love it when the forums speculate over bits of hinted info and yet we have next to nothing.

Give us something to look forward to, at least, or there will be people losing interest and thinking about other games that do have info coming out.

Steam Ogre

/15 char

Treebeard The Swift.9620:

Unless tolkien was older that the official records state – the original elves and dwarves were from norwegian myths and legends. Which is where tolkien sourced them from.

Right, but they were reimagined by Tolkein and then cribbed by D&D. From what i remember, the norse dwarves were pretty different (not even necessarily being short) and the elves were far more magical, living on a whole other plane of existence.

For example, the wiki says: “In the Prose Edda, the dwarfs are equated with the svartálfar and dökkálfar (”dark elves"); in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the dwarves (Tolkien’s spelling) and the Elves of Darkness or Moriquendi are distinct." Tolkien changed stuff up a bit.

Furthermore, it also states: " Games including Warhammer, Magic: The Gathering, the Warcraft franchise, and The Elder Scrolls feature dwarfs, again largely patterned after Tolkien’s. The dwarfs in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld universe are also derived from Tolkien’s."

We can clearly see which concept predates which.

It’s of sort amazing to see someone actually dispute that modern elves and dwarves are directly drawn from Tolkein by way of Dungeons and Dragons. D&D clearly copped off of LotR, changed a few things, and provided the blueprint for every elves/dwarves fantasy franchise since.

According to wikipedia, Warhammer first came out in ‘83, nearly 10 years after D&D. It’s quite obvious where it all came from.

uknortherner.2670:

The Ultima series of games referred to the main character as the Avatar – the saviour of Britannia (and mass-murderer of children if you played the later games!) and in its transition to an MMO, it probably made sense at the time to refer to all players in that world as Avatars as they all came from outside the world of Britannia (if that makes sense).

I always figured “avatar”, as referring to an in-game persona, was tied to cyberpunk literature which used the term for such before we had modern 3D mmos. Could be Ultima though, i suppose.

Kurrilino.2706:

I am saying that He-Man was introduced as it is.
GW morphed into Battlestar Galactica, that is the difference

Except for the fact that it didn’t become Battlestar Galactica. That’s like me saying that you want it to go back to being Peter Pan vs. My Little Ponies.

Shiren.9532:

I like my fantasy to lean on the side of fantasy and not sci-fi (otherwise I would read sci-fi or play a sci-fi game).

Liking fantasy that is at a medieval level of technology is fine but thing is that this idea that we have fantasy vs. sci-fi and that you like one or switch over to the other in a binary fashion is an artificially contrived mental construct. Like the previous He-man example; there are lasers and ships but the whole thing is still a form of fantasy.

Magic seems less cool when the Living Story writers say in an interview Scarlet can do pretty much anything (cross any class boundaries) via her engineering genius. It felt less cool to be a mesmer.

I don’t think this was a problem with technology, per se, as much as the Mary Sue aspect of Scarlet that the writers went with. If her source of being better than everyone else had been magic, it would have been just as dumb.

Technology is so boring. It’s modern and new, it’s argued to be limitless, it doesn’t seem to have boundaries (or follow rules) and it overshadows magic.

I like it precisely because it does make the world more rich. If everything is magic, then you potentially have a boring setting where everything is done by the same force. If you have tech that can compete with magic, then you can have power struggles and cultural conflicts that you can’t really do in a magic-does-everything world. I agree that it shouldn’t completely overshadow magic but i haven’t really gotten that impression in gw2 since a majority of the classes are not tech and much of the tech is magic powered in the first place.

I think the way this next LS arc is shaping up might please you though. It looks like we’ll be getting a strong injection of magic and dragons instead of a high tech villain.

Kurrilino.2706:

A: Eternia is a complete different setting. It had characters like Stratos,Beastman or ManAtArms from the beginning and people loved it.
Despite the technology there was no mass destruction, everything was still fought man vs man in most cases.

What does this have to do with supporting any of your points though? They flew around on Battering Rams with lasers (tech) and beat each other up like barbarians (brute force). The show is a strong example of exactly what you’re complaining about.

B: The Quality. Everything on Eternia had a deeper meaning. As kids you couldn’t see instantly but even every episode was made for a learning purpose.
…
These days you don’t have any message anymore beside there are no heros anymore,
no reason to be descent or heroic.

If by “deeper meaning” you mean “incredibly cliche and oversimplified morality” then, yeah.

I see action cartoons nowadays with heroes just like in the He-man days except with more far more developed characters and plots. When i try to watch the old shows now on netflix, i’m shocked at how ridiculously simple and campy they were compared to what’s out now. Newer stuff can still hold my attention because there’s more depth but i can’t sit through the old stuff i used to like as a kid anymore because it’s superficial and simple to an absurd degree.

What 2 lesbian lovers have to do in a game for kids is far beyond me but this is just my opinion.

Because, just like in the old He-man shows, having a story that shows that accepting people that are different from you is important for kids. It doesn’t need a contrived and intellectually insulting speech at the end to send a message. The irony here is that it’s going to be the kids of the future that are going to be the accepting ones and the older generation that will be more bigoted.

C: Gw world is not a cyberpunk or space suit setting.
It started with awesome adventures, well written storys and incredible magic mixed with epic combat mechanics.

Having a crap story has nothing to do with having technology though.

Why we dump all this to introduce the Borgs, Terminator and Power Rangers is far beyond me. Even 250 years after GW1 is no excuse to create a mix of Battleship Galactica and Star gate.
Whats coming next ?? Skritt finding Nascar racers or Norn inventing the stock market? Spirits of Ascalons are allowed to marry a horse to be political correct??

I guess when you make stuff up and pretend it’s in the game, that makes it look pretty ridiculous, huh?

And yes, i still think it is generation related.
Just watch how people interact with each other and how the kids lost the ability to put effort into something, where everything loses interest as soon as they have to do something for it. If it isn’t available instantly and without effort nobody wants it anymore. And this is why i am concerned about GW2.

And this has NOTHING to do with liking tech in fantasy or Aetherblades.

If we’re following some sort of idea of the real world but with magic, of course a society is going to develop items and structures like aqueducts that consistently put out magical effects like water, light or power instead of having someone stand around and do it manually all day. There are a lot of tasks that people can perform in real life but, whenever possible, humans find ways of making machines or tools that do the work for them. Now add in magic that can produce permanently flaming objects, electrical swords or otherwise unlimited energy output and the only logical conclusion is that humans WILL develop advanced technology based on these wildy better-than-real-life rules of physics that they have to work with.

Kurrilino.2706:

I can see the older generation being incredible unhappy with laser, phasers, airships
cyberpunk in our beloved fantasy games.
Maybe it has something to do with younger generations losing they eye for the beauty and being entertained by brute force.

I doubt it’s a “kids these days” issue at all (though that’s a trendy cliche that is ubiquitous anywhere someone doesn’t like something on internet). And “brute force”? How is using a laser more brute force than smashing someone with a mace? Flying in airship as opposed to riding a horse?

I’m in my mid 30s and i grew up with He-man, who was a fantasy barbarian-type in a world with high magic sorcery and spaceships with lasers. Kids today have no clue who He-man is/was. There’s also Thundercats, which did much the same for my generation.

If you’re looking at a decade earlier, people growing up in the 70s lived in an era where sci-fi and fantasy were constantly mixed in novels and media. Gary Gygax, one of the creators of D&D in the 70s, ran games where fighters, rogues and wizards got teleported to spaceships and the wild west. Hell, the magic system of that game was based on novel set in the distant future of earth.

The issue with accepting technology as part of fantasy has nothing to do with generations and certainly nothing to do with “brute force” (I’m not even sure how that fits into this in the first place anyway). Some folks just can’t get out of the artificially narrow concept that “fantasy” must be equivalent to “medieval ONLY fantasy”.

i’d like to see them hack off the second half of the PS and replace it with a version that doesn’t butt heads with world changes. The whole part where Orr is cleansed in your PS but doesn’t change when you return to the zone is lame enough without even factoring in the LS.

Essentially, we can keep the PS in some form, but design it so i doesn’t have awkward paradoxes with the LS (and itself?!).

We have engineers because they wanted more tech, not the reverse.

The thing is that if we removed all of the tech from guild wars, the franchise would then shift far into the generic “arbitrarily medieval fantasy world where everyone does magic but is inexplicably too dumb to actually use it logically” paradigm that a million fantasy worlds represent. If there’s a fantasy land where thousands of people can walk around cities shooting out fire, electricity or ice out of their hands every 5 seconds, it doesn’t make any sense for the world to NOT advance technologically in a very rapid and radical way.

GW is a world where people can generate an indefinite amount of energy from their bodies and there are magic items that produce an infinitely renewable amount of power and light. Imagine human beings thinking scientifically in a world that functions like our own except that people can control gravity or produce lightning from their fingertips. The only believable conclusion is that people eventually produce technology that is much more advanced than what is possible in the real world.

Kurrilino.2706:

lordkrall.7241:

Kurrilino.2706:

for god sake please let this not to be true.
Aetherblades have no space in GW2. I hope they are gone forever.
And before someone asks…. Space ships and laser guns have no place in a fantasy game.
If i want to play Borgs i play Star Trek

Oh?
I was under the impression that nothing forced a fantasy story to be based on medieval times.

There are many kinds of fantasy in the world.
Harry Potter is one, it is about magic, but they still have trains, cars, firearms and so on.

Science-fiction is technically also a sort of fantasy and at least one fantasy author (JK Rowlings) have won the Hugo Award, which is basically the coolest thing you can get in the Sci-fi world.

I am also rather sure that airships are not space-ships, and to be fair airships did exist (at least in theory) several hundred years ago.

Tyria is a world of magic, but you take issue with them having access to somewhat “modern”-time stuff?

GW2 got the name as squeal of GW1.
I always loved GW1 because of magic and sword n board.
From what i heard is GW2 not called a cyborg or scifi game.
I woudl love to hear your defense when they introduce Nascar racing, laser guns
and space suits into a new Harry Potter well…. if there would be one.

Harry potter has cars and people who shoot energy out the same way people shoot out “lasers” in GW2, so that ship has sailed long ago. It still fantasy.

What about we ask the Star Trek online guys to drop their space ships and get metal swords and shields to fight dragons and goblins….

I guess you’ve never actually seen the original Star Trek series, huh? There were knights in armor, cowboys and capone-style gangers, depending on what planet they visited. There was a ton of things that could be described as “dragons” or “goblins”.

sure we can put 2 hot dogs into a bun or dance tango with 3 persons…. absolutely
but would it be right????

Uh… Yeah?

Beldin.5498:

I think the problem is more tha glow effects have more than one color, and nothing with a glow is colorable in game. Like weapons, flamekissed armor, hellfire/radiant armor, CoF armor ?

Please correct me if i’m wrong and there are colorable glowing pieces

I have no expertise but someone who does CG modelling was saying on reddit that particle effects are in the data as a greyscale image and they just slap a color on there to change it so, in theory, it should be technically easier to color swap a particle effect.

Eravyn.7483:

100 Stones = 100 Charges
50 Crystals = 150 Charges
5 Splitters = 25 Charges

There, fixed, and still equals 275.

1:1 crystals
3:1 stones

At the ratios they gave us, 100 stones = 33 charges and 50 crystals = 50 charges.

Celtic Lady.3729:

Contrary to what a lot of uneducated people think, no one goes to battle in underwear.

An ironic claim from someone with the name “celtic lady”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudity_in_combat

Xyonon.3987:

panzer.6034:

I guess if i can get a bikini on my fem norn, i’ll live without my custom town clothes.

Only by unequip everything yes. But there is no town clothers swap anymore, so … kinda annoying.

I’m talking about the one found in the data awhile back. Looks like it would just be a box toggle to switch between a costume and armor now.

I guess if i can get a bikini on my fem norn, i’ll live without my custom town clothes.

I had the same experience as the OP. I am/was pretty tired of GW2 overall and am really looking for something else to get excited about. Wildstar looked awesome but after playing a couple of characters i just could not maintain the level of interest required to keep playing.

While i like stylized graphics, per se, i just couldn’t get into the look of the game after walking around killing 12 kinds of cartoony mobs. The main thing that killed it for me was the quest system though. At one point i had a list of 10+ quests on the side of the screen and i found that half of my attention was on the mini map where i would move from the “3” to the “7” to the “10”, and so on, checking of the quests as i continuously added more. The whole thing immediately seemed like a boring grind.

The Sixteenth.2561:

Sorry for bad english, I stopped learning english after 6th grade.

Sounds like most of the internet

I’d rather they work on developing the characters they have instead of trying to add something more interesting on top.

Aedelric.1287:

panzer.6034:

There have been a lot of people complaining that the LS doesn’t actually change anything in the world. Apparently there are people who complain when it actually DOES change something.

I would not say it does not change anything, Marionette ruins, Kessex Hills desolation, Lions Arch destruction are examples that Arena Net have at least tried to make things permanent.

But at the same time things do not really change much and when it does it only ever gets destroyed. The Marionette only changed an unused part of land, the ruins have nothing for anyone to go to for. Lions Arch is essentially an empty unused zone now with nothing in it for players to do, I say it will be rebuilt within a year essentially making the event a simple inconvenience and definitely not permanent. Kessex Hills seems to be a much more permanent change, such a shame though as I found that region quite beautiful before, now I just do not want to spend any time in it due to the looks, the `Orr factor´.

They’ve said that LA was technically problematic with all the lag and people standing around. I’d bet anything that it doesn’t look the same when i gets rebuilt and they shuffle things around.

As for Kessex, it seemed completely generic and forgettable to me before. I wouldn’t mind if it got repaired and we got more interesting structures built but i like now more than before. There are a few maps that don’t jump out at me as particularly special and i’d like to see some more interesting stuff show up there but ideally i’d also like new permanent playable content too.

Zera Allimatti.2541:

Elleven.6541:

Except fiction can also be a reflection of the society we are living in.

Only if you attribute it as such. Stop treating a fictional fantasy game like a reflection of reality (BECAUSE IT kittenING ISNT) and there will be no problems.

It’s incredibly naive to pretend that fictional stories have no relationship to reality. If such were true, we essentially wouldn’t have religion or mythology and none of the great novels or works of a thousand influential authors would matter at all.

Now, i’m not trying to say that GW2 is on that level but the point remains that any work of fiction is the product of an author who, in turn, is a product of a culture and any sort of story they are going to tell is going to necessarily be burdened by cultural baggage. You simply cannot tell a story about “people” (humans or anthropomorphic characters) who engage with each other in any sort of relatable manner without having real world social paradigms come into play.

One the the basic foundations of writing fiction is that you need things like “believability” and “versimilitude” in order for the reader to be engaged, and that entails structures and scenarios that echo real world things like behavior and culture. If a story lacks these things to a significant degree, it essentially becomes an unrecognizable jumble of random events.

There have been a lot of people complaining that the LS doesn’t actually change anything in the world. Apparently there are people who complain when it actually DOES change something.

Vexander.9850:

What would you all add?

A steam ogre

I’m no video game developer but i’ve run tabletop rpgs (like D&D) for years and the one huge lesson i’ve learned as a gamemaster/storyteller is related to that #1 point: you can’t beat around the bush trying to lead your players along with subtle hints and obscure clues with the promise of a shocking reveal down the line. It simply needs to be interesting and engaging right off the bat. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of handing out tiny morsels of info or foreshadowing without giving enough to really allow the players to infer anything relevant because you, as the writer/gamemaster, are the only one who sees the bigger picture and knows it all leads to something big.

The solution is that a threat needs to be identified early on, be meaningful to the players (characters), and evolve with the plot. Those are really the big 3 elements for this type of story, IMO. Some kind of villain needed to be presented early in the LS, they needed to do something genuinely villainous that means something to our characters, and the villain needed to develop as the plot went on. Said villain could eventually become redeemed, come into conflict with other villains (aka anti-villain/frenemy) or have a background story revealed that makes them a sympathetic figure. We didn’t really get any of that outside of some awkwardly added text windows and internet posts.

The main thing though is that they need to stop holding back and start firing the big guns. If players have to wait multiple years before getting to fight a new dragon, they’re going to stretch the patience of the playerbase thin.

If it’s champ created a whole player race, then it’s clearly one of the most important dragons.

SaltyDave.7346:

reducing a specific build’s effectiveness for the sake of build diversity won’t change anything as long as the content we fight against requires no other builds.

Are you reading this, Anet?

“We decided that our boring big-sack-of-hit-points bosses went down too quickly so what we decided to do for the community is to reduce everyone’s damage so that boss fights are longer and more tedious.”

- Anet

In real life I’ve been disgusted when people celebrate someone’s death and I would have liked the option to express the same in-game. People mentioned Bin Laden and, yeah, my stomach turned when i heard some people I know cheer at his death (people who supposedly follow a religion based on “love thy neighbor”). When someone kills your countrymen, allies or innocents, it’s horrible and people get mad. Often times the result is that people throw the values they espouse out the window and start elevating petty revenge and bloodlust over human life. It doesn’t bring anyone back to life or set things right; it’s just more death.

That said, in context of this game, it’s patently absurd to get mad over someone joking about the death of one person. Why? Because, as a matter of course, we go around slaughtering bandits, pirates, orges, skritt and a thousand other sentient beings without a second thought, just for a few XP. Sure, you killed a tyrant and made a joke, but that’s nothing compared to the epic genocide that you wreak as you roam the world mindlessly killing everyone in villages everywhere.

Did you make a joke about spiking Scarlet? Well, did you just kill 20 skritt that were just hanging out in their little cave minding their own business?

Deified.7520:

To be fair a vast majority of the community wanted her dead, didn’t like her, didn’t like her as the main baddie. Basically didn’t respect her. The characters reflect the community if you think about it. Like how Braham and them didn’t want to learn why Scarlet did it. They just wanted her dead. Why it may not be true for everyone, I saw a vast majority of people talking in this way. The characters didn’t respect her, so why should they treat her death with respect?

I agree. I think most people won’t be offended because they don’t see Scarlet as a person, per se, but as an artificial plot element that they don’t like. There’s a level of investment required for a viewer to see a fictitious character as a person instead of an abstract game construct and i don’t think the LS really achieved that for Scarlet.

In RL, i would have sympathy for a mentally ill killer being killed. In the context of this game, Scarlet didn’t really register enough as a “person” for me to care.

Getefix.9150:

DiamondMeteor.8345:

The same reason you see Risen in nearly every map. Not everyone finished the game/ experienced Kessex getting nuked. I assume these events would give people a taste of content.

but this is living story, even if the spores are still there, why is the toxic alliance still there? they should be broken

If we killed Bin Laden, why are there still terrorists?