4241

I did the free weekend and really liked it, and plan on getting it (perhaps this weekend when it’s 50% off). I finally decided on GW2 due to the fantastic praise it was getting and the lack of a monthly fee. I’m not sorry I did. I expect to play GW2 off and on for quite some time, but it never grabbed me the way it apparently grabbed a lot of others.

I think the free weekend of Secret World actually made me appreciate GW2 less. For all the innovation in GW2 one of the things they really didn’t do much with was quest types. All I’ve seen or quest types that I’ve seen in previous MMOs. Secret World is much fresher in this regard.

4242

You’re spot-on about Secret World’s quests, but you’re also dead wrong about the dynamic quests in Guild Wars 2.

There is no MMO out that has done the sort of dynamic events that you get in Guild Wars 2. Not Warhammer Online, not Rift, and I seriously doubt World of Warcraft. Mark, you’ve described the rote activity you have to do for the heart events, but you neglect to mention the chained dynamic events, how they lead you to different parts of the map, how they tell little stories, and how they break up the gameplay flow dramatically. And it sounds like you haven’t seen any of the advanced areas where the entire region is basically one big dynamic event.

I get that you’re burned out on MMOs, but you’re making generalizations about Guild Wars 2 that simply aren’t accurate.

-Tom
4243

P.S. Plumb some dungeons already (i.e. story mode, then explore mode)! I just had an incredibly gratifying run through Ascalon Catacombs tonight that would bring a smile to the face of even a jaded cynic like Mark Asher!

-Tom

4244

Tonight, just for one small part of one zone, I found a set of Dynamic Events that offer a completely different perspective on another series of DE’s I had done a number of times leveling my first character. No huge change or vast difference in plot, but one that allowed you to take a totally separate path to end up in the same DE series I had previously played through.

The manner in which the individual DE’s chain together is without peer in the MMO space. People are finally starting to get that if you stick around, follow the NPCs for a little bit, or listen to the dialogue going on between NPCs, things can open up for you that you never would have found on your own. It’s the next step in MMO/PC gaming mechanics evolution but at the same time a huge leap from even recent MMO releases.

While there may be issues here and there, GW2 offers an incredibly rich MMO experience that I haven’t seen in quite some time. I love TSW, though, and would still be playing daily if not for GW2.

4245

Like Tom, I also immensely enjoyed Ascalon Catacomb run tonight. I think the planning/conversation on RaidCall makes all the difference and it is gratifying to see a plan executed well.

It is the difference between a cohesive group of five people vs 5 persons being grouped together.

-Joe

4246

Man, Orr is a mess. The Orr zones are built entirely around Dynamic Events, and DEs seem to approach a rate of about 30% global failure over time.They really need to be rebooting the servers nightly until they can get their events working.

I’d sure like to buy my Karma armor, but that requires players hold the temple from which it is sold, and that requires an event chain complete, and that requires an escort NPC do something other than stare at a wall for eternity.

I’m almost positive at this point some upper level manager has a goal/bonus tied to server uptime, and is not permitting server restarts. The event rot on some servers is tremendous, and it gets worse each day.

4247

Nice video showing the consequences of hanging around and poking about beyond the mapped items. Not saying this sort of thing happens every time, but the point is it’s surprising how often it does happen.

There’s a lot of stuff tucked away that rewards exploration, hanging around places, and talking to NPCs. It’s one of the things that’s won me over (quite against my expectations).

I’ve found DEs to be like this too. It takes a while for one’s appreciation for DEs to kick in, because at the moment, in the early levels of the game the starts of chains are being zerged by hordes of players. But things start shifting as the population is more balanced in zones. Whole areas (along with their teleport points) can change hands if a DE somewhere, that a single player can initiate by talking to an NPC, is beaten or failed.

And the thing that some critics are forgetting is that, this being an MMO, the game is going to evolve and improve. The DE system is already well done, it can only get better and better as Anet get more experienced.

4248

But are the individual parts of the dynamic events all that different from quests in other MMOs? That’s what I’m getting at. It seems to me that the activities I’m asked to do by dynamic events are similar to the activities I’ve done before in other MMOs. Yeah, chaining them together and having a part of an event succeed or fail and then branch off to another part of the chain accordingly is different, but each part of the chain of an event I’ve played is a type of quest I’ve done before. And granted, with my highest character level 31 I’ve probably not experienced some of the better ones.

This shouldn’t be taken as criticism of the game. The dynamic events are a big step forward for these kinds of games. They’re cool. They don’t really refresh the questing experience for me unfortunately. When I’m at a part of a dynamic event and I’m asked to go and kill a bunch of things or collect a bunch of things, it feels like a quest I’ve done before. I’m not sure how Anet could make a kill quest or collection quest feel new and fresh so it’s not them, it’s me.

4249

Yea, given that it’s a RPG, you move with WASD and have a hotbar with abilities, it limits component parts of what you can do in a game. You can kill stuff, you can interact with the environment (pick stuff up, shoot cannons, whatever). So the component pieces and parts are similar to others in the genre, but the way they are assembled makes it feel like a different product to me.

That being said, and understand I’m just having a conversation and I’m not trying to convince you of anything, if all I could do in the game was Dynamic Events I too would be suffering from burnout/fatigue. I’m sick to death of the typical WoW-style grind, but that’s where GW2 shines for me. I don’t feel like I’m on a rail through a themepark hitting quest hub after similar quest hub. I do some exploration and see some truly awesome environment design, I get a level. A couple friends want to go raid supply camps and whatnot in WvW, I gain a few levels. I go harvest some resources and in the process I (accidentally) complete a couple Hearts and a handful of dynamic events, gain a few levels. Now I head back to town to craft… and gain a couple levels. It’s the fluidity and the “do whatever the hell you want” nature of the game that appeals to me and why I find it so much better than typical quest grind in MMOs… because it’s not a quest grind. Hearts/Dynamic events are just a small part of what I do on a typical gaming session. Sometimes it’s more and sometimes it’s less, but I get to decide what I want to do, not the game. Being off that leash is a pretty big deal to me.

4250

I’m still in this boat. I thought I had finally settled on a mesmer (because greatsword? as a ranged weapon? How awesome is that!?), but tagged along behind some guardians in a DE and was fascinated with all the shiny blue stuff. And now I have one of those as well.

Hey - I realize now why I named all my characters after gemstones. I’m constantly distracted by the next shiny thing.

4251

I agree with all that but it’s not enough to make me want to level from 1 to 80, something I haven’t done in any MMO in years. It begins to feel repetitious after I learn the new mechanics in the new MMO I’m playing, be it GW2, Warhammer, Aion, whatever. I think it’s partly the medieval fantasy setting. It’s hard not to be weary of it after so many MMOs have trotted it out.

The saving grace with WoW is that when a new expansion comes out I already have my trio of characters at the level cap, so getting to the new level cap doesn’t take that long. By the time I’m starting to tire of the PvE I’m mostly done with it.

4252

Not just Orr, zones all over the worldmap have DE’s that are bugged. Skill Challenges, too. I agree with a nightly reboot until this is solved. I also understand that they are banning bots, but it really discouraging seeing some areas just overrun with them, many of which I reported days ago.

4253

Did anyone see the cute little Quaggan 404 message: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/blah

4254

I have to ask, what EXACTLY do you want to do in a game? Every game that I can even THINK of does all the same kind of quests. How do you even play games anymore?

And since you are indeed only level 31, you have not even come close to experiencing the best ones. I was once mining in a random area near a castle, when A MASSIVE GHOST SHIP erupted out of the ater next to me and sent waves of minions at the castle I was next too. How much more awesome can you get? Going from centaur camp to centaur camp to the final, large base and fighting a large boss in the Hinterlands is pretty amazing too. Then there is frostgorge sound and pretty much every event.

Instead of analyzing every little thing and being bored about it, just walk around and let things happen around you. Hearts can guide you to a general location, and then let the DE’s roll around you.

180 hours in, and my only complaint is ecto farming and no Z axis teleports, mostly. That’s pretty unusual for me.

4255

Yep you would think as they get reports of quests bugged they would just do reboots, it’s frustrating to go back and see the same stuff not working the following day or 2.

4256

No, they really aren’t different.

Someone who did kill quests and rep grinds in wow will be right at home in guild wars 2, because the game almost entirely focuses on those aspets, albeit mildly improved.

The so called Dynamic event system is hit and miss. It has some cool moments, and sometimes the quests can move to a different phase based on results, which is pretty cool, but for the most part they don’t do that. For the most part they consist of you wandering the wilds until you get a quest popup and then killing some boss (generic kill quest). It also leads to a lot of random following of moving npcs, hoping they end up giving you a quest.

One time i was exploring some troll cave (something like that) with a friendly troll in it, when a gang of etins forced him out of his cave and took it over. After that the troll wanted me to help him reclaim it. It was pretty cool, sadly the effect was somewhat ruined by the etins all being invulnerable until they completed the event setup. Most events i’ve seen are much more… simple than this as well sadly (a giant boar has appeared in the wood, go kill it!).

Really the only major (gw2 does make a variety of minor improvements to these) improvement guild wars 2 makes to the traditional kill quest/rep grind is that it does a VERY good job encouraging solo players to work with other solo players. People are selfish assholes, myself included. Guild wars realizes this and rewards players for helping out in various ways.

As noted a number of pages ago though, it does absolutely nothing to encourage actual grouping and likely actively discourages it.

On a side note, for a game that plays up dynamic events so much, it is pretty crappy that broken dynamic events are still so common.

4257

The number of broken DE’s is really remarkable. In Bloodtide Coast, I hit three in a row that were broken, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. Now, I don’t care, particularly; Much like when I found one of the few in TSW that were broken, I just moved on. When this happened in TSW, however, Funcom was blasted without measure and TSW consigned to an early FTP grave, whereas GW2 and Anet are still the life of the party. And deservedly so; GW2 is an incredible game.

4258

Well, in TSW, when things glitched, you had the double whammy of not being able to tell if it was a glitch or you were just too dense to figure out the puzzles, and the fact that there wasn’t much else to fall back on until the problems got fixed. In GW2, there’s so much going on that you can always go do something else–and it’s always pretty clear that the game, not you, is screwed. I loved TSW for a month, then hit a complete “meh” wall with it.

I think that Funcom missed something about the fun of alts, too. In TSW, there’s really no difference in the factions and everyone’s abilities are the same. Everyone is human, too. So, instead of what you see with GW2, where people are flitting around from race to race and class to class, in TSW the experience was deep but very narrow. Not a bad approach, but not one I think to capture the MMO mainstream mentality.

4259

Since WoW I’ve tended to play new MMOs for 1-3 months and then unsub is how I’ve played them. Some, like Warhammer, I got about three months out of. Others, like Aion, I got tired of during my free month.

WoW I tend to play for a bit longer, probably 3-4 months when a new expansion comes out. I have not leveled a character from start to cap since vanilla WoW, however. The PvE even in WoW tends to get dull after a month or two.

What I’d like to see in an MMO is either more PvP conflict, especially open world stuff, or more innovation in the questing activities. Secret World, with some of its quests, seems to do the latter so it can be done. I’d also like to see settings other than the overused medieval fantasy setting.

I’m a bit disappointed in the WvW in GW2. I think the server vs. server dynamic isn’t nearly as interesting as the three sides in the same world/server we had in DAoC or Alliance vs. Horde in WoW. You actually had enemies that looked different than your allies in those games instead of simply being noted as enemies by red text. And I wish the sPvP had different game types.

4260

I never played DAOC, but surely you’re taking the piss about WvW being disappointing compared to WoW’s PVP “because the enemies looked different”. Jesus, Mark, you really do nitpick to an amazing degree. It’s actually getting tiresome.