Guild Wars 2: Impressions From The Closed Beta

[Nekosan]

that based on?

i mean let's be realistic here but when a game is made for widespread audience, and no specific method is devised to target them then expecting any sort of degree of role playing is probably a moot point because pubs are pubs and they generally can't be expected to bother with it.

It goes beyond just the lack of RP IMO, everything in the game is just pigeonholed, the crafting system is worthless/silly and endagme there's very little to do. They tried to make an MMO and they ended up with a single player game that has a chatroom.

[Marius]

oh i don't doubt u can find some, i just don't see it as a viable thing overall in such game...

i mean the ranged class back on launch was murdering ppl around not so much because they are in character and what not (they'd kill anyone they can regardless of the race), but more so that they can and you can't realistically expect ppl to RP given there's no way to enforce it.

remember that island where you for the 1st time got complete freedom to kill other players?

yeah... not so RP there...

RP will never be embraced by a majority in a commercial MMO.

But that still doesn't negate that I found hundreds of hours of high quality RP in AoC. And my efforts to find such in TOR were disappointing at best.

Maybe it was the people I played with, though in part, TORs environments aren't designed to support it, whereas AoC has RP hubs built in. But I'm going to just stick with Funcom games, since I know a lot of people who RPd in AoC will switch over to TSW. It has the same vibe. The graphics even look the same, and a big part of AoC lore has been the Cthulu stuff that TSW is picking up again.

As a RP environment, it's so much more interesting than swishing lightsabers.

[Bronze_D]

hmm fair point...

were there no good RP guild though in TOR?

somewhat surprising given the SW background.

[Marius]

There probably is... somewhere... but there's a limit to how much **** I can put up with while searching. After 2 months I said stuff it. And I just felt really restricted. You pretty much know how Jedi and Sith are going to act in most situations, and they form the majority of the player base.

Best way to put it is RP in SWTOR involves acting within a set of lore constraints, rather than inventing something cool and unique. And the game design doesn't exactly help that. People do most of their RPing in single player mode going through the story, then figure out there's not much to do at end game.

And looking at TSW, I already know that's what I want to play, so I'm not going to put more effort into TOR.

And as for GW2... well I'll probably get it. I wonder if the RP will be good...

[Bronze_D]

i don't think RP potential is going to be a strong point of GW ...

not discounting the possibility of course given the new features and addition GW2 is sporting over GW1, just that i wouldn't count on it.

but it was certainly the most entertaining and robust game PvP wise in GW1, which i expect them to continue in GW2 and expand.

[TRB]

I don't think any MMO will out-do Ultima Online or Wurm Online for RP.
None that I've seen anyway.

games like SWtoR are far too generic and restrictive.

[Slazza]

https://beta.guildwars2.com/

yay!

[Attiq]

https://beta.guildwars2.com/

yay!

And a YippYooooo too

[IIIMystIII]

This review really confuses me. There is a lot of concern by the reviewer about lag but it seems unclear if he is talking about network lag or FPS issues as he keeps going back and forth between the two and almost seems to muddy the issues with one another. Add to this the AusGamers review actually praised the demo for it's low lag and commented about the network being "rock solid".

It is rather perplexing how two Australian reviews of the lag situation seem to be complete polar opposites. I am suspecting some hardware issues may be involved.

[Tim Colwill]

Hi!

It's honestly hard to tell them apart, and I apologise if it's not clear in the article because I guess it wasn't really clear to me either.

What I can say for sure is: the more people in one area (for PVP, for city events, for world events, etc) the worse the frame-rate and the lag between input and result became, from half-a-second to a full second in some of the worst cases. In some of the WvW battles and in the final party at the end it was basically a slideshow.

When I was solo'ing quests the game was as playable as a normal MMO like WoW or whathaveyou, and pretty much the same in small groups. The game defaulted my game to High on nearly all the settings and I had no trouble running at all until encountering large groups, but even then turning all the settings down/off made no difference. So I'm reasonably sure it's not a hardware issue (at least on my end).

All I can say for sure is in its present state, Arena's claim that this is going to be a valid esports title is just not going to hold up for Australians unless we get closer servers.

Perhaps the Ausgamers guy had a different experience to me, but it felt like there was, if nothing else, a bit of optimisation left to do in large-scale battles. I really wouldn't describe the network code as 'rock solid', unfortunately

[Nekosan]

It's probably like Wintergrasp was in WoW, terrible, terrible coding. They change the rules and lowerd the population but it wasn't till they actually addressed the memory leaks etc that it became playable.

[Giblet1]

All I can say for sure is in its present state, Arena's claim that this is going to be a valid esports title is just not going to hold up for Australians unless we get closer servers.

^ This. I don't know how people can be so dismissive of this simple fact. The combat is not like your standard MMO, which ping does not matter that greatly, as apposed to dodging and maneuvering real time vs people who have pings of less than 100. Like I said, go play Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter against an American that's hosting (which is more like what GW2 combat will be like in a sense), absolutely no way you will win (unless he is terrible) simply due to the distance lag.


Won't get much better than that for a ping to the US(west coast) from Aus(east coast).

[Attiq]

The possibility of using smoothping or wowtunnels exists tho, I used wowtunnels for Aion which improved my ping from 650+ (PVP Unplayable) to 250 (allowed me to hold my own in pvp) and I always found that Guild Wars generally had better ping than any other MMO.

However that could be related to the fact that the area's are instanced, but if it does have good ping and you use Smoothping or Wowtunnels and it makes it better then all the good.....

[pickupsticks]

[Tas]

I dont see how its an issue, I used to play Tribes 1 an 2 on dialup an I was a reasonably good player if I do say so.....
250 ping is fine. Wouldn't wanna go too much higher but its definitely playable... just dont melle toon