Guild Wars 2 reviewed: A fast, fun and polished MMO, but an MMO nonetheless
By Patrick Vuleta on September 12, 2012 at 11:39 am
Every MMO has a honeymoon. The world is new, lauded by critics and fans alike. Then… cracks appear. The hype wears off. The game goes free to play, and EA announces that it tanked.
Guild Wars 2 launched two weeks ago, and yet in many ways is well past its honeymoon. With the length of its beta test rivalling Longcat himself, many have already been playing the game for months. And honestly, in all this time, the game’s barely changed.
So when I loaded Guild Wars 2 on release, my first impressions were laced with cynicism. Fortunately, I’m now enjoying the game, even if it’s not the promised, overhyped revolution. Let’s look at what Guild Wars 2 brings to the MMO table.
Polished to a fault
What first hits you is how incredibly smooth the game is. Everything works, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a single bug in the gameplay. Guild Wars 2 is a great example of how an MMO should be launched — held back until it’s ready to go, not released early from running out of funds.
Of course, there were some issues at launch. Many players complained of connection issues — almost over nine thousand, in fact. And it took a whole week before I could actually use the marketplace.
But these problems have been fixed, so if you’re just getting into the game (after waiting to read this review, of course), you won’t have them. You’ll be able to focus on enjoying the game, not struggle against bugs. This is a refreshing change, and potentially the greatest advancement over other MMO releases.
A living, breathing, generic world
Guild Wars 2 lets you explore a huge living world. The world is enormous, and running around, there’s always something to discover without any artificial constraints placed on your choices. If you want to quest normally, you can do that. Explore like you’re playing Skyrim… that’s here too. PvP all day without even levelling up… you’re given top level gear to do this.
Complimenting this is the excellent art style. Guild Wars 2 pulls off the ‘living painting’ look quite well, with lots of strokes and colours. Just wandering around is really quite charming, all in all, and the game manages to look so much better in motion than it does in screenshots.
However, my enthusiasm for exploration is often dampened by the same old fantasy setting that we’ve seen in MMOS for the past two decades. This is a lost opportunity. Guild Wars 2 advances the timeline of Guild Wars, bringing in gunpowder weapons and other steampunk elements. However, rather than take advantage of this to provide a truly unique setting, the game stops short, and ends up with steampunk plastered into a generic fantasy world. Oh well.
Responsive combat from the start
One of the great improvements promised by Guild Wars 2 is that you should be having fun right from the start, not simply biding your time preparing for an ‘endgame’. ArenaNet’s design manifesto was critical of the traditional hamster wheel approach to MMO design. From talking to many before the game’s release, this was one of the game’s biggest selling points.
The good news is that Guild Wars 2 actually lives up to this promise. You unlock the majority of the skills you’ll be using during the game very quickly, and there is no waiting to get powerful. Rather than ping away at rats with magic missiles, you’ll be hurling firestorms at centaurs from day one.
Further boosting the combat is the lack of a global cooldown. A global cooldown is a common MMO system where every skill, no matter what, has to wait one second after the previous skill was activated. As such, combat will often move along at a dull, one second beat. Guild Wars 2 does away with this, and the result is combat that just feels more responsive than other MMOs.
But no real depth
Unfortunately, you can’t redesign MMO combat without breaking a few orcs. ‘Easy to learn, hard to master’ should carry a warning: ‘difficult to achieve’. Fans of Guild Wars enjoyed the extreme amounts of skill combinations that could be used to create a truly unique character. That, sadly, has been done away with in the sequel, making characters much less unique.
A major problem is that the skill system locks you into certain choices, as many skills, traits, and gear are only suitable for certain weapon types. For example, my thief has weapons, such as the sword, that do instant direct damage. Her shortbow, on the other hand, is almost pure condition damage over time.
Now, if I spend my gear and traits on buffing direct damage, I won’t be able to use the shortbow effectively. If I buff condition damage, my sword will hit like a wet noodle. And if I go half and half, I’ll be terribad at both.
Wearing any direct damage gear, therefore, locks me out of the shortbow and many other condition damage options. When you get down to it, if you really like the feel of a certain weapon, your build choices are actually rather limited.
Another issue comes from the sheer importance of the dodge roll. By making combat so dependent on mobility, high responsiveness is achieved, but it also makes auto attack spam the top tactic. My thief can blow through just about every combat situation, PvE or PvP, by maxing out her dodge endurance, rolling all over the place so nothing can hit her, and spamming ‘1’.
This is a double-edged sword. It’s a real joy to have the traditional arcade gaming skills be important in an MMO. But at the same time, it sucks that theorycrafting and skill knowledge is much less important. As long as you can dodge roll, you don’t need to learn anything.
Story is a bit… lacking
While we’re talking about problems, we need to have words about the story. Serious words. While it does work in a sort of ‘choose your own adventure’ style, with plenty of branching paths, the game’s telling of it is not particularly compelling.
The story is advanced by limited cutscenes of two people talking, and the quality of the dialogue is mixed — sometimes good, sometimes downright tragic. In the above scene we see Miss Chambers being told she looks good in tight pants, which means I must give the story credit for accuracy. But I do miss the detailed cutscenes that you’ll find in The Old Republic or The Secret World. Two motionless people talking just doesn’t have the same pull.
Guild Wars 2 also fails to solve that age-old problem in MMOs — making you feel like your actions matter, instead of just being a cog in a machine. What passes for quests in Guild Wars 2 are dynamic events where many players work together to achieve an outcome. These are supposed to influence the world by having different dynamic events spawn off each other in a chain, making your actions consequential.
However, because the outcome of events across the world is influenced by hundreds of other players, it’s more akin to watching the flow of a river that only all of you working together could change. This is especially so given that the quests are some of the most basic you’ll find in any MMO. For the most part you’ll simply be fighting off waves of enemies, over and over and over again. At the end of the day, it’s really just grinding.
Has Guild Wars 2 achieved its aims?
According to ArenaNet’s Manifesto, Guild Wars 2 wants to be the MMO for people who hate MMOs — and taking on WoW demands such a mainstream approach. It is a lot of fun, and breaks the MMO mould by having responsive combat with no global cooldowns. It’s sure to be a success, too, because the game’s launched in such a polished state. If you’re worried that the game will lose half its players after the first month, then worry not, for Guild Wars 2 is here to stay.
But in many ways, Guild Wars 2 feels safe, and doesn’t take the steps needed to advance the genre beyond the traditional MMO audience. The setting is generic fantasy, and the limited cutscenes are uninspired. Auto attack spam is alive and well. Questing is a random collection of generic events that fail to give a true feeling of meaningful consequence.
Guild Wars 2, then, is still an MMO. It succeeds at being a really fun one, granted — maybe even the best one yet — but the core of the game remains an MMO. If you want a great online game to have fun with, then Guild Wars 2 will fit the bill. But if you want to seduce Kelly Chambers as Femshep, or see how your actions matter as Geralt of Rivia, you’re still better off with single player RPGs.
Good:
- Released when it was actually ready
- Charming art style
- Combat is extremely fluid and action-oriented
- Vibrant, living world with so much to do and explore
- Entertaining from day one
- No level restrictions on what you can do
- You can make your character look exactly like Kelly Chambers
Bad:
- World is the same old fantasy
- Skill choice is less flexible than initially appears
- Cutscenes are awful
- No real story consequences for your actions
- It’s still an MMO
- Kelly Chambers when she was sixteen years old, that is
Guild Wars 2 is available through the official site for $59.99 USD.
ArenaNet permanently lowering price of Guild Wars 2
Starting at $50.
Custom arenas and spectator mode coming to GW2
ArenaNet announces beta for new Guild Wars 2 features.
World vs. World culling soon to be a thing of the past in Guild Wars 2
Various WvW-specific graphics options to be introduced to compensate.
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If you’re going to play GW2 without WorldvWorldvWorld, you’re going to have a bad time.
Would be nice if there was local servers.
Good review. Although I wouldn’t really class still being an MMO as a bad. It would be silly for anybody to buy the game expecting something other.
Nice review Patrick. Good to see your views have changed a bit from your last piece. Maybe you were in just a bit of “the secret world is the best” mode back then.
I must say that I am enjoying the game a lot, and I definitely see myself getting my $50 worth. Yeah, it’s just another fantasy MMO looking for a piece of the pie – but I have not had this much fun since day one of WoW and I think I have dappled in almost every MMO since then without much longevity.
So far I see myself sticking around with GW2 at least for a year or two.
Dodge rolling is still uber! My favourite tactic in WvW is to skirt around the outskirts, take someone apart with auto attacks, and roll backwards whenever anyone tries to hit me.
Yeah, but GW2 is trying to take on WoW, they’ve said as much, and they’re chosen method for doing so is to appeal to the players who normally wouldn’t play an MMO. So I felt compelled to discuss that.
So does it have an end game? I’m guessing with no sub it doesn’t really have any responsibility to have an end game anyway?
You could probably count the various dungeons as endgame because they’re extreamly hard compared to normal PvE. Otherwise the only endgame (that I can see) is getting a legendary item/epic gear, which is really just a shitload of grind.
The “end-game” currently is 3 dungeons, and a few large world events, which never seem to finish because people are terrible and don’t understand if we don’t guard the guy instead of trying to kill everything in the vicinity we’ll fail the event and revert back to the previous “checkpoint”.
Also this isn’t helped by ArenaNet limiting the amount of characters on the screen via a draw distance that’s scaled with the amount of people in the area which you don’t seem to be able to change. So alot of times in these massive events you can’t even see the mobs/guy you’re supposed to be guarding because nothing is drawn unless you’re standing on top of the enemies/npc
so
*bad
-End game poor?
Also I have to say most of the “bad” things aren’t “bad” at all?
“World is the same old fantasy”
Funny, I don’t remember Asura, Sylvari and Charr in any other mmo/rpg. And putting down “Fantasy” as a bad thing is a bit weird, if you don’t like it, that’s fine, but putting it as a “bad” point? What?
But I agree the only real bad point for me is the end-game, to me it isn’t really end-game. The dungeons are pointless in doing as you get better/same gear from crafting the exotics, and you can’t really go around as a guild doing the world events because they are “dynamic” in that they aren’t always up. The only thing you can constantly do and is somewhat worth doing is WvW
No mention in your review of WvW? Also, the ‘same old fantasy’ may be true for the Human or Norn, but Asura and Charr have distinctly new and unique ‘fantasy’ characteristics. Did you play these?
Additionally, you mustn’t have played much tournament sPvP at all, a dodge-roll thief spamming the ’1′ against any competent opposition will have no success whatsoever. Not to mention the wide range of builds already in use after two weeks – which would run contrary to your ‘limited skill choices’ claim.
It really feels like you’ve only reviewed half of the game!
He means same old fantasy as in it is fantasy, which has been done to death regardless of the flavor. Maybe not necessarily a bad thing but not something that innately sparks interest. Like if a new WWII fps came out you have to roll your eyes a little even if the game is very good because we’ve all played that setting 500x before.
minkelz,
Don’t agree given I love WW2 games and think anyone who complains about them being overdone is crazy.
This is what I mean, you can’t have the setting of the game (this goes for any game) as a negative thing, as it’s a very personal thing, I would be happy to play nothing but Fantasy games, but obviously not everyone likes the same things, I don’t think it belongs in either category.
Sure if the game is good I could spend hours shooting nazis in the head with an M1 but it is nice to see some variety. How about some WWII MMORPGs? Or historically accurate medieval ones? Stone age hunter gatherer MMO? Why not some games based on animals – wth is my Animals of Farthing Wood MMO? Dibs on the owl class.
Good review Patrick, sums up my feelings on GW2 almost exactly.
It’s a great MMO but in the end it is just another MMO.
Also I am yet to really start enjoying WvWvW it seems to have a lot of zerging and then a lot of travel time to return to battle after death, think I am still missing something with this so will continue to give it a go.
I still think, as in your 48hr piece, that you need to spend more time in WvW.
It’s easily one of the biggest highlights of the game for me, and something I find myself engrossed most in.
The second short bow skill (for thief) benefits greatly from power and crit. Gearing/specialising your thief for “direct damage” is not going to lock you out of using the short bow, especially considering that the SB makes the thief the most mobile class in the game.
No they don’t, Asura are the stereotypical short, weak, smart magic users and Charr are the stereotypical animalistic Hierarchical combat types, all the races are essentially pulled straight from generic fantasy stereotypes… that’s what he meant.
Personally I’ve found that while some of the dungeons are interesting, they aren’t really conductive to quick play sessions or to full group pugging, if I log on and the world events aren’t up and none of my guildies are keen for a dungeon then there’s no so much to do.
There’s also the fact that the “responsive combat” system is boring as fuck… right from the start. There are only so many skills that you can actually USE in PvE due to the necessity of having condition removers up all the time and I tend to find myself just using the same ones over and over, I don’t think my play style has changed AT ALL since about level 20.
TBH It feels too much like I’m being spoonfed content, any world events are just a massive spam fest with zero skills required and half the time the dungeon bosses are totally out of order in terms of difficulty scaling, after a night in a dungeon/s i end up feeling like I’m playing whack-a-mole with the dodge keys and just spamming for hours, the combat just isn’t satisfying in any way and the skill cap is spectacularly low for an MMO.
wtb: edit button…
I should also note that if it wasn’t F2P then I probably would have canceled my sub within a week of hitting 80, with so many people raving about how subscription based MMO’s are dead post GW2 I find myself a little sad, I’d happily day a monthly sub for an MMO again if it actually had quality, reasonable length content.
I feel like the guys who designed the world did a FANTASTIC job of it and the game was let down by the dungeons and combat design, the outside world is easily the most spectacular I’ve experienced in an MMO and it almost feels like it was made by a different team to the rest of the game.
Being mostly bug free and having good server uptime isn’t my definition of an MMO, where’s the content?
I get really over ‘the game begins at X’ crap.
You’ve got 80 levels to enjoy the experience and a plethora of pvp content besides. You wouldn’t know it.
review seems fair, if jaded.
some fairly broad generalisations in the combat explanation.
debatable as to whether reviewer actually participated in pvp/world v world.
dungeon discussion is missing.
crafting discussion is missing.
also missed a good opportunity to poke fun at the inclusion of magic find gear.
i give this review a 6.5/10.
You do realise this is a ’2′ game right? Following on from the Guild Wars world, which is a fantasy world? There is plenty of MMO variety, for example go play World of Tanks if you want WWII MMO, but this IP already has a set course to follow and fanbase to please.
Marking a game that has SPECIFICALLY stated it was fantasy down because it was fantasy…well, that defies logic. That is the issue with this review – it’s like he wanted GW2 to be similar to The Secret World or APB, and marked it down when it wasn’t. That, and some of the best ‘pros’ of the game aren’t there because he’s only reviewed (and probably played) PvE, which makes up only a portion of the whole game.
Cluster bomb? That’s far more powerful as a condition damage skill. And the number four skill is all condition damage, and perhaps the main reason to use the shortbow.
I’ve tried it, and sPvP too, I just don’t see how it will change my opinion from “This is a fun game, the most polished MMO yet, and deserving of its success, but not a true step forward in MMO design as intended”.
Regardless, if extensive WvW is *required* to enjoy GW2 to its full potential, then I think the game failed at its stated aims, which are to not put any restrictions on the player.
The reason I marked that down was because the game was meant to be a revolution in the MMO genre. You can’t be a revolution if you just copy the setting of every other game. Guild Wars 2 didn’t copy GW1 in its setting either, so don’t think it was bound to a particular course.
And as for PvP, I did try it, and found that I could use the same sort of spammy tactics as in PvE, as mentioned in the review. It’s fun, but not fantastic.
But again, if playing PvP all day is quasi-required to enjoy GW2, then the game failed at its goals.
^ I lol’d.
Not even gonna bother, I’ll just remember to steer clear of your “reviews”.
PvP was an integral part of the original – and one of the biggest drawcards. It’s the same in 2 – if you’re discounting that, then you’re seriously doing it wrong.
All I can say to that is I’m not sure where I actually had all this negative stuff to say about the game. The article concludes with a statement that it’s possibly the best MMO yet. What else do people want?
I also said it was great that you could do PvP without the PvE side, and included the no restrictions on that as a pro in the ‘good’ column.
As far as I’m aware, one of the big drawcards of GW1 was that same system.
However, the game clearly wants to expand beyond that audience. I think it’s fair to talk about the game from the perspective of those people as well.
Lol you don’t have an issue with the fact he ‘marked it down’ for being an MMO then? …
The specific reason for that is that ArenaNet has stated that if you hate traditional MMOs, you will love GW2, because it is up there with traditional single player RPGs.
It’s not just aimed at the MMO audience, or the PvP audience, or just the GW1 fans. :) One purpose of a review, as I see it, is to compare the finished product against the promises and hype.
I’m unaware they stated that every single part of the game was going to be different.
I’ve personally never seen a game like GW2. Sure it has a few similarities but to say it is still the same as the traditional MMO is very inaccurate.
It is definitely up there with traditional single player RPGs. Perhaps not the ‘best’ or most unique single player RPGs but then I would hardly call those ‘traditional’. You would be insane to class GW2 as a traditional MMO as it has a massive number of differences that are not in traditional MMOs, some never even seen before in an MMO. Having a few similarities to the traditional MMO means nothing. It’s like marking half life 2 down saying, well it’s still just a FPS like Doom was.
This review basically sums up my feelings on the game. It’s really solid, heaps of fun but no where near the absolute game changer it was billed to be. Honestly, I think you’ve been a bit generous =p.
nekosan,
This game is clearly not for you. The only thing that will satisfy you is an endless supply of grinding for items to keep getting more and more powerful as you have stated before as ‘the lacking feature in other MMOs’. Only one game really supplies that, which is WoW and is likely exactly where you belong.
I find it funny that you even tried Guild Wars 2 to begin with tbh. Guild Wars has always been against that idea.
WTB Edit button too:
Also, I am so tired of looking pretty much the same. The gear’s visual progression is pretty poor.
It does make three critical advancements over traditional MMOs that I stated in the review:
1. It was released in such a polished state.
2. No global cooldown in the combat.
3. You can do everything from level one, including group PvE, solo PvE, crafting, sPvP, and WvWvW.
Those I feel are the main positives of the game. In particular, I feel that the “Must play PvP more” essentially boils down to point three. Most MMOs force you to grind PvE to do well in PvP, but GW2 doesn’t. That’s what I think many who love GW2 PvP really enjoy, and it was a point I made sure to cover in the review.
I’m sorry what? There’s a global cooldown… It’s just not evident on the hotbar, When you cast a skill you can’t mash other skills, and there IS a delay before you can cast something else.
You forgot one thing.
4. Ditches the monthly subscription fee that is typically associated with MMOs. *cough*WoW*cough*
Grrrr…..where’s the damn edit button already?
How was the lag given that we’re connecting to US servers?
Same as every other MMO, the good lag though, not the bad that some have. Generally you don’t have lag, stuff is pretty instant, can dodge outta the way fairly easily.
Global cooldown means a universal cooldown so that every skill has the same animation speed. You can see this in SWTOR and The Secret World.
But in GW2, they do away with this.
You can see this in practice where if you chain together three skills with different animation speeds, there is no enforced delay between them.
This is a very good thing and contributes to the extreme fluidity of the combat that I feel is one of the game’s biggest strengths.
Nice review.
Funny, I thought GW2 fanboys would be smarter than WoW fanboys, but it seems it’s much for muchness, like BF3 vs CoD. Lolwut is global cooldown WOW SUXORZ and so forth.
Good review, though :)
To me, releasing in a polished state isn’t exactly something that advances the game over others. In the end the ones that aren’t polished will have their bugs and flaws fixed anyway (with decent support) which is where the comparison truly begins. You can never honestly judge an MMO in full by the way it launches, although I can understand the importance of that in a new release review which is what you are giving.
But there are other things that move the genre in a bit of a different direction, like enabling dual skill builds (so you aren’t just plainly outmatched by a class that is built for killing yours) the lack of the holy trinity (no tanks/healers/DPS specific classes required to play any of the group content), sure there are ‘support classes’ but they are not required like other MMOs.
There is the partly action orientated combat system where any skill can be cast while moving and also avoided by dodging while embracing the typical RPG style skill bars (no more having to choose between positioning or standing around and mashing skills which does a lot more for the ‘responsiveness’ than a lack of cooldown). There is a map with 4 zones entirely built for the sole purpose of a constant, never-ending PvP war including a well developed siege warfare and defensive supply system that is not purely reliant on standard currency but rather mostly toward the worlds PvP efforts.
The large amount of bonuses you can earn and acquire for your worlds PvE related content by fighting alongside the people in your world, effectively tying PvP and PvE into one single system and combining everybody’s efforts on a server into a single team effort to benefit everybody.
If I could access my damn account again and play some more I could probably refresh my memory on a fair few other things too xD fucking Anet security flaws…
Oh, I guess that’s another revelation! They’ve managed to lower the security standard of MMO’s too lol. Sadly the game has even less working security than Guild Wars 1 :O
You know nothing about me or my preferences in MMO’s obviously.
Gear progression is not the same thing as grinding and this game has virtually zero gear progression once you hit level 80. My crafted orange bow (which I had waiting in my inventory when I dinged) does EXACTLY the same damage as every single PvE bow except ONE (which has shit stats), I now find myself looking at a run through each path of the exploration modes and then the game just filters down to farming gear appearances that you like…
I purchased GW2 (like most people) because:
a) it’s free to play so it’s low risk
b) they promised revolutionary pve and pvp content
Telling me “this game isn’t for you” makes you an elitist fanboi, I’m quite enjoying running around with a group of friends for the moment and i’ll probably continue to do so until we get sick of it DESPITE the fact that it has a bunch of flaws.
it’s so easy to tell the fanboi’s for an MMO, they’re the ones who get massively butthurt the instant someone has anything even remotely critical to say about the game… I’m with Vencha regarding the review, solid review, perhaps a little too generous.
Those of you who got snarky because he didn’t mention crafting… I’ll sum up crafting quite simply for you: ” it only provides the illusion of choice, the crafting system has dramatically less bells and whistles than many MMO’s and while it appears to be complex it just isn’t, it’s boring, painful to level and provides very little rewards (and this is from someone who has 3 maxed tradeskills).
The crafting didn’t get much of a mention because it doesn’t rate one.
At the end of the day I feel like I’m playing Lineage 2012, not entirely a bad thing but hardly revolutionary in any sense, apparently the cost of making a “revolutionary MMO” like Guild Wars 2 is making everything feel generic and samey… and apparently a lot of people like it.
Uhh… that was exactly my point. I know exactly what you want as you have stated it before, you want to be able to get better gear past the maximum level. Again, Guild Wars has always been against this and promotes an even playing field, so I don’t know what you were thinking by getting this one and hoping for something other.
The definition of grinding is doing the same thing over and over, unless you expect a game that 100% guarantees you better items for your character every single time you perform a single dungeon you will be running them multiple times in search of what you want, hence my comment: grinding for better items.
As for your fanboi comment well, all i can do is laugh at that. I have plenty of criticisms about Guild Wars 2, some which I have already stated on these boards. Boring cutscenes, lack of story objective ( like just looking for the nearest task with the most appropriate level number on it instead of naturally coming across things as you follow a main objective), huge lack of security (I actually refuse to play the game until this is under control), WvWvW being more of a numbers game than anything else, being unable to track party members completed/open tasks, having to pay silver to return to a main city just to access storage (encouraging real money purchases by inaccessibility) just to name a few.
An “even playing field” usually involves giving everyone the same chance to get gear if they put the work in, not “making all top level gear exactly the same” like GW2 has done.
What exactly do you think hitting max level should be about in an MMO? Shopping for fashionable outfits?
The funny thing is that GW2 is dramatically MORE GRINDY than an MMO like WoW is/was, in fact grinding is all there is to do at max level… and it’s not even western style grinding, it’s terribad Asian style “good luck with your random loot attribute generation” grinding.
I don’t understand what you think max level should be about, are we meant to stand around looking pretty? Spam the same world events over and over to farm pretty gear? What?
In a game called Guild Wars, I would expect the end game to be… you know… Guild Wars?
If you’re seriously arguing that I’m unreasonable for wanting character and loot progression after max level then you need to get back on whatever meds it is you’ve stopped taking, the very nature of the genre dictates that there HAS to be content at max level… THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT!
Okay, so the end game is guild versus guild pvp or WvW…. what’s the point of having PvE content? You’re nuts.
nekosan,
PvE in Guild Wars was never anything more than a way to earn cosmetics, titles and alternate skills. Not items, never was, never will be. Well, the original one had the added benefit of unlocking skills which unfortunately is another one of the things I was really disappointed that they removed from GW2.
In the end when it comes to PvE imo, the game should be fun in itself. Relying on having to unlock items or shinys to enjoy it is just a cheap way of hooking players.
Rest assured that they will bring in expansions, while you may not enjoy them due to a lack of item progression, many others will enjoy them purely due to the well designed dungeons and actual fun gameplay that they create with it.
I honestly do not know what they will do as an unlockable incentive now that they have removed the skill system that provided this so well in the original though. But I highly doubt they would have made the game like it is without some idea in that area.
a little advice for PvE in GW2 if you are not enjoying it,
explore more, forget the point of interests… stop being fixated on them, and explore…
the number of hidden locations and exploration areas and jumping puzzle in the game is quite significant, though some of them are designed by someone fully intent on killing you it seems, like the jumping puzzle on the ruined tower on ascalon where ghosts are about to murder you and ghostly trebuchet are positioned JUST SO IT CAN KNOCK YOU OFF the jumping puzzle to your death.
and no, many of the exploration hidden areas have ZERO point of interest marker on them so you either find them yourself or you google it… but where’s the fun in that with google aye?
Nekosan:
I think most of this has been said upthread but it bears repeating: Guild Wars is, well, Guild Wars. It may not fit everyone’s idea of what an MMO is supposed to be about, and that’s fine. If people want to play WoW, they will play WoW instead.
It would be kind of silly for Arenanet to spend a hundred million dollars to slavishly copy WoW and then come out second best. If they tried to create a gear-gated raid progression system, do you think they could do a better job than what WoW has spent 7 years perfecting? No.They would just create an inferior experience, and get slammed by the very people they were trying to cater to (like yourself).
They already have a very successful franchise that has been running for years, of course they’re going to stick with it. I don’t think it’s fair for players to complain about the lack of level 80 gear progression in a game that never had gear progression to begin with.
In case you hadn’t played the original Guild Wars – it was designed primarily as a PVP game (hence the name – Guild Wars). There was a storymode, but many people I know didn’t finish the story or hit the level cap, they just PVPed. The PVP was amazing, by the way – one of the best, I daresay, of any genre I’ve played. My guild was pretty good, we played with / against the top 10 teams in the world – (prize money at the time was $200,000) – before the match the opponent guild ranking and team name would flash on the screen. There was a depth of tactics and strategy in GW that I have never seen replicated in any game so far, and I play and watch a tonne of competitive esports games at a decent level. (got into the top 10 nationals, etc)
IMO anyone who talks Guild Wars without talking about the PVP aspect has completely missed the core of the game. It’s like someone reviewing WoW but never hit the level cap and never raided and never did any instances.
Unfortunately, Guild Wars 2 seems a lot more simplistic than Guild Wars 1 at first glance, but I’ll reserve judgment until I’ve actually played more of it.
The problem is that they promised that it wasn’t “just a pvp game”, it was meant to be a balanced MMO (i was also under the impression that the name “guild wars” comes from the pve history in the game rather than its pvp nature) that would revolutionize the genre. They spouted the same bullshit as every other MMO dev and people just won’t admit it.
The problem is that it isn’t so fun in itself, very little in the dungeon content is actually “fun gameplay”, it’s just boring repetitive crap.
If the game was meant to be almost exclusively about the PvP like you say then what was the point of them crafting a beautiful world and all that leveling content?
They’ve basically shown the will to provide high quality, long term pve content but also the fact that they have no idea how to do it. Going back and doing other races leveling quests isnt my idea of fun end game content.
Nekosan: I don’t understand your stance. So you’re saying that an MMO isn’t complete without end gear progression, even though it has everything else (beautiful world, cooperative gameplay, decent story)
I’m kind of happy that it doesn’t have an end game gear grind the way other MMOs do (Aion, SWTOR, WoW) and I’m sure many people are. We don’t really want to have to compete people who can burn 500+ hours on a single character.
I know you’re more talking to Nekosan, but I want to repeat this anyway:
I did plenty of PvP for this review. But I chose to talk about general combat mechanics because it wasn’t the holy grail of PvP it was hyped up to be. My strongest pvp builds all relied on auto attack spam.
Guild Wars 2 had significant balance problems all up to the end of the beta, and I’m not convinced they resolved them, unfortunately. In GW1 this wasn’t such an issue because you could get around balance by being able to run with two classes, so everyone was OP, and the metagame constantly shifted.
But GW2, with its simplified traits system, does not achieve this. Just my opinion, anyway. :)
auto attack spam? like condition build or something?
i am curious what build is this and what class, so i can test it in the Mist PvP arena.
I am especially interested since i have yet to see someone in the structured PvP that actually… well, primarily auto attack and actually hold his own ground when engaged with someone.
the last time i saw something remotely close to that was the ranger spirit build but they still have to apply their entire range of bow condition damage to actually win direct one on one engagement and any sort of spike AoE smash their spirits to oblivion.
That isn’t ‘The’ problem, that is ‘Your’ problem. If you don’t enjoy it, then once again, not the game for you. There are plenty of titles out there that focus on nothing more than item grinding. Just because a game doesn’t cater to your idea of what fun is, doesn’t mean the game isn’t so, just that it is not for you.
If constant item stat progression is the only thing you can actually enjoy in a game, well I feel rather sorry for you. But never will I say that has anything to do with what makes a game good or bad.
The game isn’t exclusively PvP and I never said it was. However that is what you usually do with your character in any MMO after completing all of the PvE content.
@ Patrick
Wow you replied to my comment. I’m always glad when I get to connect with reviewers =)
I apologize upfront then – at the risk of sounding elitist or trying to tell you something you already know (as I have no knowledge of you extent of your experience) … what sort of PVP did you engage in? I ask this because the dodge+autoattack build sounds like a solo PuG build where you play with randoms.
Guild Wars was very much a game where the team leader decides exactly how his team is going to handle different maps and different enemy teams (metagame) and directly specifies the 64 skills his team is going to bring to the map – everything is painstakingly examined, every skill brought for a specific reason – to exploit a particular map, to counter a particular skill the opponent might bring.
It’s certainly not all about individual performance in kills / deaths, and individual survivability.
It would be as if I was giving advice to people playing DOTA2 – if your sole objective was to “do well” when playing with other random players in solo matchmaking, where you have somehow defined doing well as “killing lots of enemies and dying as little as possible” – then I would say, you should play a hero with an escape mechanism, has good scaling with farm, and just go and play conservatively. Have fun ! Nothing wrong with that. In pugs, it’s likely no one will stop you farming up to an unstoppable level and winning.
But that’s not how the real game is won or played. A team consisting of 5 carries with escape mechs who just spend the first 25 minutes farming is hardly going to work, in fact it’s going to fail miserably. There are a multitude of other roles that need to be filled for a team to be effective – support, ganker, etc. Those playstyles look like they have less success from an individual point of view, but are vital to the success of the team. If I was giving you advice on how to actually win games, I would have to go into the different roles that are required, some of which involve dying a whole lot and not getting many kills, levels or gold.
Maybe it’s just wishful thinking on my part, but I have a hard time imagining that 5 players with simple autoattack spam + dodge is going to be the optimal team composition in this game. In fact, I would imagine the optimal team composition won’t be discovered for another few months.
I agree with you that at first glance Guild Wars 2 has less depth than Guild Wars 1, but I would say it’s far too early to tell how things will pan out.
I found it possible with a thief smoke build. Either swords or daggers with pistol offhand.
Black powder is so incredibly uber because it’s a guaranteed miss for anyone caught in it. It also mindlessly activates blind combos for team members without any real thought as to placement. Just fire and forget and the enemy team gets blinded.
It is possible that my opponents were subpar, of course, but that’s what worked for me. :p
And the point of the auto attack is because using initiative on any other skills but black powder reduces both survivability and group utility a ton. You can even get away with putting a leap with daggers in to go into stealth, but still the primary damage comes from chained auto attacks then, because you black powder, leap, backstab, then bash bash bash while the blind is still on. When you’re not blinding anyone, you dodge.
It’s also true that I didn’t actually go into any guild vs guild pvp, but that’s a bit in-depth for a release game.
In WvW black powder is also the best tactic because an entire army of blind combos is far more effective than anything you can do, which then means you’re stuck with no initiative but to auto attack.
I guess you could say, and you’d be right, that using black powder and even leap as well is not pure auto attack spam, but all the damage comes from it, and it makes the system no real different from The Secret World, say, where you do most damage with builders and occasionally fire off a consumer. So it’s still very MMO-ish.
??? but why would they stay in the black powder? i mean i’ve seen teams using blackpowder and refuge, and to the best of my memory no one is generally dumb enough to stay within the area since that’s equivalent to standing on top of a fire fountain (less painful directly of course).
it’s especially confusing to me since most ppl prefer ranged over melee given the difficulty in tracking ppl through dodges, and frantic fight (doesn’t stop some ppl from still using melee of course but i see way more ranged than melee), so i am not sure why anyone would stay within one area at all unless you root and snare him to death.
I am also puzzled with the WvW, i mean the blackpowder is a PBAoE so if you can actually trigger it directly on them that means you are right next to their mob or pack and… well… somehow still alive which either means they r routed and you guys are running them down, or they just completely unaware of you.
or alternatively you put the blackpowder down and your team somehow are smart enough to actually shoot through them (a level of intelligence i frankly never see so you generally have to position the blackpowder in front of your team firing line and get yourself shot doing so)
Well, it seems to work. :P
PvP is just chaotic, so ‘perfect positioning’ is very rarely achieved.
which is the part i am confused, since positioning something like it on our team never seems to give effective return overall considering how chaotic PvP is, the only real way of getting a good return from the AoE is then to place it on the enemy or as close as possible to the enemy.
in structured PvP, they all will get out of the area, same with WvW too except in WvW you’ll get shot into pin cushion just getting close to them to do it in general…
UNLESS, A. they r routed, B. your team is very brave or foolhardy and engaged them into mass melee, C. the fight scale is small enough (half a dozen per side or so like during objective raids) that you can survive going in and out of the ranged fire.
Please don’t get me wrong, i am not doubting you strictly.. but i am curious how you actually pull it off and get them to stay in it or do it in WvW and lived without being shot into little pieces.
because while PvP is indeed chaotic, most ppl generally will get the heck out of any circle on the ground and while WvW is chaotic to the max indeed, ppl will shoot at anything squishy enough and a thief trying to cast a PBAoE skill on them is pretty high on the list of target that will get shot at.
Hmmm, well in structured PvP it’s also entirely possibly to run a build that gets a constant +40% damage buff to auto attacks. That helps for when black powder is not viable. And sword has the highest damaging auto attacks of any thief weapon. A sword with lead attacks and either the acrobatics skill that adds 10% damage or the critical strikes skill that adds crit damage based on remaining initiative hits like a truck with 15 full initiative. So you can do that and cycle between tactics depending on the situation. Black powder for when you need tanking, lead attacks for when you need damage.
It’s my preferred setup as it’s very flexible, but it is spammy.
In WvW, you don’t actually have to get out the front to use black powder. You can actually just cast it *on* a friendly ranger.
But now we’re getting into theorycrafting that possibly indicates GW2 does have some depth to it. :p
Well yes i can sort of see how it might work on friendly ranger for example, assuming he stands still which for the love of god we either can’t do (because AoE drop on top of our head every 2 seconds on any ground we stand on that is within range of a bow) or if we can actually stand still then they never stand still since they r pubs and pubs generally just do whatever the hell they want.
but actually using blackpowder to it’s most potent strength (ie: lingering blind) thus far in both structured PvP and WvW for me generally have either been ineffective (because they just get out of it almost immediately) or suicidal in WvW because they shoot you full of holes if you get anywhere close to within range in a class as soft as a thief.
so i am very interested to know if there’s something i am missing with my thief since i naturally would like to be able to cast blackpowder right on top of them if possible (where it IS powerful indeed) as opposed to trying to find a ranger that can stand still for once so i don’t have to run after him and stand near him to cast the skill and all that for the chance to get to blind enemiy group for ONE attack, as opposed to lingering blind that needs to be casted point blank on the enemy.
It is really good as a stealth leap, if you can’t get it to work lingering. The stealth combo from it lasts 5 seconds. Just three more initiative required than cloak and dagger, and it has greater range than cloak too.
The other thing is that I think the pistol shot from black powder actually combos with itself, so you can use it as a 900 range blinding shot. Kinda expensive though.
What I’m saying is that once you get to max level and you’ve run each dungeon once there needs to be something for you to do… something to look forward to, pve gear doesn’t transfer to pvp and in my off time from pvp I;m pretty much restricted to an Asian MMO style spam farm for better looking pants/whatever.
My issue is that there’s not actually much to do at max level, jumping puzzles etc are only entertaining the first time through. I’ve never understood the “i don’t want to compete with someone who puts in 500 hours on their character” because no gear progression doesn’t change that aspect… you’re still competing with people who play more than you do and at the end of the day a decent chunk of them are going to beat you, you just have less to look forward to.
Why simplify it all into just a game of Quake?
Well Guild Wars is closer to a competitive PVP game, just like CounterStrike, DOTA2, Starcraft 2, and less like WoW.
The whole point is that everyone competes on equal footing. Having gear progression is antithetical to that idea.
I suppose you might look at DOTA2 and go, well what’s the point of playing, my character doesn’t get any stronger !
Yes, the more skilled player will win, but I’d much rather that he beat me fair and square based on skill rather than beating me purely because he put in 200 hours grinding better gear.
Note: The PVE gear does translate to World vs World.
Patrick Vuleta,
Yep, it does combo with itself as in the bullet it fires when blackshot is triggered does blind the target it’s fired at, either that or the bullet it fires is naturally given blind property not sure which is which but logically it makes sense that the bullet gains the combo field property as well.
Hmmm.. i’ll try using it as a stealth gap closer, though wouldn’t that expend my entire initiative reserve? Blackshot itself is not cheap, plus the gap closer, that would be close to normal initiative total reserve so even with 5 seconds of stealth (i assume this with the stealth duration upgrade trait) i’d have no initiative left to actually do something to them once i am inside much less initiative to get out alive, but i’ll try it anyway and see how it goes from there.
nekosan,
You could always go treasure hunting,
since the chest rewards are scaled to your level (not the whole reward i believe since i’ve gotten some gears not level appropriate from some chests).
Strewn around the world essentially are hidden chests and location, many of them have no point of interests marker so you either have to seek them or well… the lazy way out is to to google it or wiki it and find the location.
But some indication to help you recognize such sites are:
A. the place has a name on the map but no point of interest marker
B. the place has no name but has an elaborate entrance, either concealed or otherwise.
C. there are mobs inside it or guarding the entrance
D. there is an unusual mobs or concentration of mobs (often veterans) that guards the area.
Usually if you find that there are large number of veterans in it, the chest reward is at least a splendid chest.
Or sometimes it’s a difficult location, like one where they put a single veteran troll in a very cramped arena…
It’s basically a continuation of the GW1 treasures concept, except this time around with a fair bit of work required to actually get to the treasures themselves so you don’t just farm the treasures with ease based on it’s cycling timing.
Problem is that once you have a set of crafted oranges there’s a 0% chance of getting upgrades, that makes it basically a money farm (which you can probably do better by spamming a 20 minute exploration mode run).
i’m upping my review of this review to 8.5 given that the author has taken some much time to answer hostile comments.
nekosan,
If the objective is solely money yep, (assuming a guild party of course, not pub because pub exploration mode or pub anything dungeon is frankly just asking for trouble, especially in exploration mode) but i generally do it because treasure hunting itself is fun for me and most importantly doable when i am alone instead of requiring a party that frankly gives me headache when i am not with the guild party. (even though many of the treasure guardians tend to be heavy for solo, they r doable… just takes careful approach and decently configured character)
my typical run with them generally net me a handful of items i want to keep, then the rest i either sell to trade house, salvage into rare mats or crunch into the forge.
For the most part though i spent most of my 80 character time either in the full map war event (level 70-75, and 75-80 map) or in the WvW or the structured PvP.
the treasure hunt is essentially something i do when i wind down.