Guild Wars 2

I don’t know why anyone would expect chapter one to be chock full of content. It needed to be splashy and have some wow factor, but it couldn’t possibly be clearer that this is meant as the first part of a much longer content release. Personally, I thought this was an example of the kind of direction I was hoping the game was going to go in, which is exactly what I was expecting and hoping for.

Well, if you have an existing character, all traits will be unlocked for you, no worries. It only counts for characters created after April.

BobbyStein.2315:

Mister Midnight.9837:

Why does the game have to be open world at the expense of the PC? That’s a complete cop-out.

Actually, it’s the reality of game development. You have limited budget and time to work with, so scope must be adjusted to fit. Features must be prioritized, and sometimes that means cutting content or systems.

http://www.ambysoft.com/artwork/ironTriangle.jpg

The part left out of the diagram is expectations of the end user and the relationship between which features will make different people happy, and it’s not even close to a straight line, it’s a scatter chart, all you can do is just try to position that triangle to fit as many people as possible.

Which, let’s all be fair, is what they’re trying to do. I’m sure it really sucks for them to see the people that they couldn’t fit in.

Of course, the issue with all this is that most likely, the first time stories could actually be tweaked would be months from now because of programming and what not. But a few tweaks in dialogue could probably be done, and anything that makes the PC seem more like the leader of the group would be a really good idea.

BobbyStein.2315:

Thalador.4218:

BobbyStein.2315:

The best is yet to come.

So more massacres, mayhem, and destruction in your words. Why is that since the start of this Living World (although I may risk saying that there were signs of this in the vanilla game as well) the only way you guys seem to be able to drive the story forward is through mass killings and calamities (that often draw parallels with real life modern attacks on innocents)?

Remember this picture attached to the Story Journal reveal page? I can’t decide whether it’s hilarious, ridiculous, or outrageously imbecile and depressing that it’s a spot-on summary of your entire storytelling to date…

What sort of stories would you like to see?

My favorite stories from the personal story and from a lot of other games are the ones in which the stakes get smaller but more personal. I don’t mean to be mean and I definitely don’t want to denigrate the improvements that have been made in living story, but I think my favorite quest I’ve done in the entire game was helping an Asuran merge into a golem so he could be with his true love. It’s cute, unique and (relatively) simple. Some of the coolest world encounters you have are with ghosts that have sad stories to tell and in at least one case, helping them find redemption. I would really like an update that was nothing but adding one-off stories of different characters in a way that didn’t necessarily do anything other than tell a story. If it needed to be characters from Destiny’s Edge, I’d be fine with that so long as it was stuff that focused on adding more to the characters rather than relying on what is already there (like the story between Belinda and Marjory, I don’t feel enough stakes yet to actually want them to be together).

To be honest, I’m not sure how that would work in practice in a way that wouldn’t feel like it was too small of an update, so I sympathize quite a bit. But I think the vast majority of complaints come from people who feel like the game started as your character being a big fish in a small pond and ultimately became about being a tiny fish in an enormous pond, incapable of changing or improving the world around you while NPCs did exactly that. So maybe if your character was helping the world around you in tiny bits, that would be a cool change of pace.

With all that being said, if you read this and think, “but that’s what we tried to improve on”, I completely agree and I really responded to this last chapter in a way I didn’t with most of the previous content. I blazed through the story because I wanted to see what was next, and the stuff with Scarlett hidden almost like an easter egg was absolutely brilliant. I just really hope that this is the permanent direction that we are going and not just a side road on the way to an ultimate story between two characters that are not ones I’ve created. :-)

I’m the type of person who just accepts that there are parts of the game (and most games) I’m not very good at by default, so the mechanics don’t really bother me, it’s just something new to learn.

That said, the mechanics were never an issue with season one, in fact, that was the only part that felt interesting. The problem was the story was both bad and depersonalized, so you had zero interest in how things went and it felt like you had no real input. They improved on both of those things, ironically, by completely removing choice from the story. And why not, they can’t actually afford to customize the game in real-time, so it’s always going to have to force you into situations.

That said, I think they could have made it personal while still giving you choice. Something I would have liked is if they had offered different paths to take from Point A to Point B. It would be more fun to replay on different characters if you could do something that better fit who you consider your character to be. Maybe one path could be the path with Belinda and Marjory and another path could have been staying with Rox down below and having to fight more Inquest or lots of destroyers in a sandstorm, and then making it so that somehow that resulted in finding the same information. Tweaks like that would still not satisfy everybody, but it would be more in line with the original personal story and would make things even more fun.

Frankly, too, the trading post system isn’t NEARLY as broken as the real world markets. The vast majority of people have next to no ability to make a ton of money on the stock market and simply never will because there’s no way for more than a small handful of people to earn millions and millions of dollars. It’s definitely possible to earn lots of gold in GW2, enough so you no longer care about gold.

John Smith 100% right. It’s already possible to get dungeon-specific armor and weapons. Here’s the problem, the people on the trading post can still get those armor/weapons and the people who would want/buy a legendary will still want them.

It’s human nature to want what you can’t have, and that won’t change, if you make one thing more available, then it just makes something else ridiculously valuable. The only other option is to just do away with the trading post, and that’s a terrible idea for SO MANY other reasons.

Maybe another thing they’re planning on doing is making healing not useless. If suddenly healing power got a significant buff, that could be a game-changer in terms of mechanics and viable builds.

If you work under the assumption that there will be a new zone and that the new zone name will be Gates of Maguuma, then absolutely everything makes sense.

I might have to eat these words, but it seems like the only way you can think that there won’t be a new zone is if you assume the idea that we are not getting a new zone is a foregone conclusion. All the evidence points to the contrary.

One of my earlier comments here was perhaps overly negative and didn’t fit the qualification of actually providing helpful suggestions for ways to fix the problem, so I thought I’d add a couple.

First, add more ways to earn points. It should be possible to unlock most, if not all, of your skills without engaging in PvP or WvW.

Second, change the system so that you choose which skill on a trait tier is unlocked after completing an achievement. This will let people play around with the trait systems they want while still making them work to actually level them up.

Again, this is a bad system that discourages new character creation. But it could at least be made tolerable by providing a choice to players.

My question is why would you assume that we WOULDN’T get new zones, new dungeons and new jumping puzzles in Maguuma? Take the content released over the last several months and actually think about what it was in terms of map creation. There have been a LOT of new maps made, it’s just harder because by their own design, you can’t actually go through any of them. If instead they’d have left them up or created new maps instead of rewriting existing ones, I don’t think people would be claiming that new maps are impossible.

Last season was all about blowing up the world they had created, this season is clearly about expanding upon that world.

I’ll add my 2 cents as well. I’m a player that returned after several months and played around with old characters, then decided to try making a new one. Leveling is much, much worse. I don’t have a problem because I’ll probably just find ways to spend the gold to go around it, and I don’t mind map completion. But I suck at doing jumping puzzles, I don’t like doing WvW, and doing group events in Orr is a crapshoot at best.

This new system is so bad, and I seriously can’t believe nobody has said or done anything about it yet. It won’t get better, it just will discourage creating new characters, I can state this definitively because it already discouraged me. After this one, I don’t think I’ll be buying a new character slot anytime soon.

And to reiterate, the lack of response to people in this thread blows my mind. People who never post on the forums are posting just to complain about this, a lot of class guides now feature a disclaimer that post-patch players are just sol, and I haven’t seen a single person say anything more than “it wasn’t as bad as i thought”. This is something universally hated that actually punishes new players to the game who wonder why everyone else is stronger than they are.

IT SUCKS, and it needs to be addressed, even if only to announce that they’re at least hearing the concerns.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I thought it was akin to the short recaps you come across at the beginning of many episodes in serial-type tv programs.

’Here’s what happened last episode…’ /shrug

But in those they show dialogue and action, not a long narration. Show, don’t tell, narrative cardinal rule.

It’s hard to say, really, what the content should be since this doesn’t actually qualify as a teaser, just a summary of what came before. That said, there’s really not much reason for this to exist at this point. Release teasers for Season 2 now and release the ones telling people what happened before shortly before release. You want to attract and/or maintain interest, and telling people what happened in content they either have played or don’t have the ability to play or interact with isn’t going to accomplish that goal.