First of all, I appreciate you don’t think I’m a troll :)
It’s not that I can’t see how not being impressed with GW2 and speaking my mind about it can be seen as trollish. It’s like I want to ruin the fun of other people.
But I’m really just the kind of person who thinks a lot about games and how they work, and especially the kind of games that have the potential to make an impact on the industry.
This is why I like to understand a game like GW2 - and though I’m pretty sure it’s not for me at this point, I’m still ready to be wrong. It’s happened before.
I was completely wrong about games like Hellgate, MYST, Diablo (first one), and others. I just didn’t “get” them - and suddenly I saw it.
GW2 FEELS like a game I should be getting (the level of hype is out of this world) - and I’m honestly wondering what the hell I’m not seeing.
Should I just keep my thoughts to myself? Maybe. But I really like exchanging thoughts and ideas - and I think it’s very appropriate on a forum like this.
Anyway:
I think you’re right. I’m generally very focused on the evolution of my character in these games - and that includes everything from skills and gear to housing and mounts. The more options I have available - the more interesting my player horizon.
I consider the evolution of myself as a player a natural part of any interesting game. I’m not sure how GW2 sets itself apart here, other than not having much in the way of character evolution.
Well, I say not having much - but I should say not having much that I - personally - consider interesting character evolution.
Even from the BWEs you can find some videos that showcase how much more there is to playing a successful game than rotating 4 different attacks - for example just find someone playing an elementalist that’s jumping back and forth using 25 different abilities and always seems to have the right one available at the right time for optimal asskickery.
Yes, I’ve seen some videos of the Elementalist. Everyone seems to mention that particular class when demonstrating the complexity of the combat system.
I have to admit that the Elementalist arsenal looks very varied - and I might have a very different opinion of the game if the class appealed to me.
But I NEVER play a caster - and I’m almost positive the Thief is the only class that truly appeals to me. Maybe the Ranger - though I’m not a big fan of pets.
So, it’s possible that a lot of the complexity is reserved for particular classes - which I consider a very odd design choice - because a class should always be about aesthetics and playstyle - not level of complexity. Well, maybe to some degree - but not to THIS degree.
Also, the sPvP area has vendors that you can pick up Sigils and Runes at, which are the set bonus/proc/weirdness gear stuff you were referencing. Right now there’s about 30 different sets for armor and about 25 for weapons. On my warrior I was running a sigil in my rifle that made it so that the next attack I made after switching to it was a guaranteed crit. I put a different sigil in my greatsword that made it so that when I weapon-switched to that it applied an 2s AoE chill. In combat I would generally start with the rifle and attempt to apply cripple/vulnerable conditions, then once I got to melee range I would pull out the Greatsword which chilled them and let me get some more attacks off. If they managed to get some distance I swapped back to my rifle and unleashed a guaranteed crit Level 3 Adrenaline Sniper Shot. I think my armor’s set bonus had a chance to proc a might buff any time I crit’d as well. On my elementalist I equipped a set bonus that made me freeze solid if I dropped below 10% life (can’t move or attack but gained invuln for 4s). This worked well because it gave me time to apply Mist Form and escape if somebody tried to burst me down - I was using a glass cannon build that absolutely melted if I got focused.
Now, this is news to me. That actually sounds very interesting. I could have sworn I’d checked out most vendors in the PvP areas - but I must have missed these guys.
It could be enough to make me interested in trying it out again. Thanks for this information.
I think the low-level PvE really doesn’t do a great job of being challenging or requiring much more than a basic rotation of basic weapon abilities. From the BWE’s it’s the sPvP where you’ve got all the level 80 options open to you and the Explorable Dungeon that highlights what’s expected of you as a player to succeed at this game.
Yeah, and that’s pretty standard for most MMOs. It’s not that I expected a big challenge - I just needed a “hint” of what’s to come. After having played RPGs for many, many years - you learn to pick up on what’s coming and how complex/challenging a game is LIKELY to get (though obviously, sometimes you’re dead wrong).
I never tried a dungeon. I just tried PvE and both kinds of PvP. The PvP was the biggest disappointment - but I could be missing something. I just really hate long fights - and it seems to be how the game was designed.
That’s fully subjective - and I know a LOT of people hate the shorter fights.
My experience with MMOs coupled with my impression of what I played are what told me the game seems like a numbers game, primarily. As in, one person will be defeated by two persons in all but the most rare cases. I like games where personal skill matters A LOT, and where having 1-2 more people with you isn’t a guarenteed win.
Grinding is what happens when you’re doing an unchallenging activity that you cannot actually improve yourself at doing, and doing it again and again simply because it’s necessary to progress. If it’s something you can actually get better at by doing, that’s called “practice.” That’s something exceedingly rare to find these days in any MMO.
Well, that’s one definition - and it’s a reasonable one.
I tend to think of grinding simply as a boring activity that takes too much time. But, just like I think human beings NEED work or need to apply themselves to something, to function - I think any long-term entertainment experience NEEDS to pace content delivery. Because the human mind gets oversaturated surprisingly fast - and we have what I would call an enjoyment threshold.
That’s why a game like Call of Duty needs to last no more than 10 hours. Basically, if you provided players with a content-heavy game that constantly exposed you to an “experience” - for 100 hours, it would NOT be a better game than one that lasted 10 hours. That’s because we just can’t take that much exposure without our brains filtering out a lot of it. We need breaks in the “fun” and we need time to reflect upon what we’ve experienced.
So, you have to stretch out content in a BALANCED way, that provides players with a long-term perspective and horizon. This is what a good MMO does - and it’s what a good long-term singleplayer game does.
A bad MMO stretches it out too far - and even worse, often doesn’t have much to stretch. Most MMOs have become bad - not because they’re necessarily bad designs, but because players are sated. We’ve had enough of the themepark design - and the stretching isn’t really the problem.
GW2 is trying to NOT stretch content - and it’s trying to just provide most of it as soon as possible. I understand that - and I understand why a lot of people would find it refreshing.
Problem is that I don’t think it provides the kind of underpinning necessary to make the content perpetually interesting. There’s not enough of a “reason” to play long-term.
So, it could just be short-term? Sure. But I need a long-term horizon to enjoy a short-term experience IF the game doesn’t have an ending or some kind of closure.
Ending a personal story might provide that, but the problem is that what I’ve seen of the writing tells me it won’t. I’m not trying to be unfair - but I found the writing (as much as I’ve seen of it) really amateur and bad. Horrible dialogue and uinteresting characters.
With a game like Secret World - I know the game will probably not be a long-term experience. I expect it will last 1-2 months at best. The reason I’m willing to invest myself is that I find the story/atmosphere incredibly strong. So, that’s most of the underpinning. The skill system is interesting - but ultimately I don’t think it’s varied enough (the amount is great, but the actual variety between skills and what they do seems quite limited).
That’s where I come out, anyway.
