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So I decided to try Guild Wars 2 again.
Quizzical
Member LegendaryPosts: 25,483
in Guild Wars 2
I played for a while in 2013. I don't recall the exact dates, but I think it was a period of several months. It was before the game had any purchasable content apart from the game itself, though there were various other things in the item mall that you wouldn't call content packs akin to the expansions available today.
What's remarkable today is not how much the game has changed, but how little. Most of the things that I've encountered are not so much "oh, that's new" as "oh, that's still the way it was". Maybe it's "oh, that's different from other games I've played more recently", but it's still the same as it was in 2013. That's not how it goes for most MMORPGs that release expansions.
And that's not a bad thing. It means that the game didn't try to reinvent itself and discard its original playerbase in pursuit of some other. As if such a transformation ever works well. Some people who played Star Wars Galaxies are still sore about what that game got changed into.
I use a controller, and for a while, the game felt more awkward than I recalled. Then I tinkered with settings for a while, and found the "action camera", which probably didn't exist in 2013, and that made controller play a lot more comfortable.
Back in 2013, I played at a resolution of 1280x1024. Now I play at 4320x2560. The game does scale the UI, but it doesn't scale it very much. Lots of things are very small at 4320x2560. I find it peculiar that they offer four sizes of scaling the UI, but the smallest isn't very different from the largest. If they have the capability to scale the UI, then why not actually scale to resolutions higher than about 2560x1440?
The game's wonky physics is as annoying as ever. There are trade-offs between fancy graphics and being able to make the physics match the graphics. Guild Wars 2 goes heavily for the former. A recent look at WoW made it obvious why I hadn't noticed physics problems there: the polygons that the ground consists of are enormous, so that the game can get the physics right.
To be fair, GW2 likely isn't worse than a lot of other games in this regard. The problem is that unlike most other games that are kind of sloppy with the physics, GW2 made it matter. Some vistas are a pain to get to, and some jumping puzzles are just awful. You have to know where you can fall through the ground or stand in mid-air, and whether you can jump from this spot to that one or if the height difference is just too much. And the way to find out is to try it--and perhaps fall to an instant death if it turns out that you can't. Sloppy physics is fine for some genres, but definitely not for a platformer.
The game world is still populated, and if anything, the outdoor zones seem more populated than before. If you've got enough players to fill one instance of a zone, then you can make it look populated just by scaling the number of instances up or down as needed. GW2 is now more aggressive about closing old instances than it used to be, even warning you that they want to close your instance. It didn't used to do that.
Renown hearts are still a nifty mechanic. They're much better than the old questing approach of run to an NPC to pick up a quest, then run to where you do the quest and do it, and then run back to the NPC. Instead, you just run from one area to the next and do whatever it is that there is to do in each area. ArenaNet has also done a good job of making the tasks varied.
Another underrated part of the renown hearts is that they usually offer multiple things that will get you progress. If one option is poorly tuned to make progress way too slow, or even completely broken and uncompletable, then you can just ignore it and do another. For the completionist, that's a huge improvement over being stuck at 99% completion because the other 1% is bugged. And there will be bugs, because welcome to computer programming.
Upon returning, the game wanted me to find out about Scarlet's War. It really didn't have a good transition into the post-Zhaitan storyline. You've rallied to slay Zhaitan and save the world, and then we're going to tell you about this huge war that happened after that but is already over so that you can't experience it. Except that while it was going on, it was breaking various parts of the world that interfered with you heading out to kill Zhaitan in the first place. But it's still some epic event that everyone in the world believes happened. It's kind of like what it might be like to be comatose for several years and then awaken to learn what happened while you were sleeping. And it doesn't make for good storytelling.
And then you get shipped off to the Crystal Desert so that you can pick up a mount and unlock masteries to help you with the content on the way to slay Zhaitan for the first time. Apparently Balthazar is evil now and some unknown character is inside your head talking to you or something. And everyone expects you to just know this. Maybe it makes sense if you go through the story in order, except that they've now added game mechanics to discourage you from doing so. And also you can't, because season 1 got lost almost as quickly as it was created, but is still canon for whatever reason. Or maybe it wouldn't make sense in order, like how Eye of the North was so incoherent. I'll probably find out eventually.
The crafting system is still terrible. There used to be two useful professions: jeweler and chef. The others let you craft stuff only after you'd leveled so far past it that it was useless to you. Now there is only one, as with ascended jewelery readily available for laurels, we can strike jeweler off of that list. The others may eventually be useful to craft a legendary or something. But grind something stupid to 500 to craft the one thing that you care about is completely stupid. At least crafting doesn't actually wreck anything.
What's remarkable today is not how much the game has changed, but how little. Most of the things that I've encountered are not so much "oh, that's new" as "oh, that's still the way it was". Maybe it's "oh, that's different from other games I've played more recently", but it's still the same as it was in 2013. That's not how it goes for most MMORPGs that release expansions.
And that's not a bad thing. It means that the game didn't try to reinvent itself and discard its original playerbase in pursuit of some other. As if such a transformation ever works well. Some people who played Star Wars Galaxies are still sore about what that game got changed into.
I use a controller, and for a while, the game felt more awkward than I recalled. Then I tinkered with settings for a while, and found the "action camera", which probably didn't exist in 2013, and that made controller play a lot more comfortable.
Back in 2013, I played at a resolution of 1280x1024. Now I play at 4320x2560. The game does scale the UI, but it doesn't scale it very much. Lots of things are very small at 4320x2560. I find it peculiar that they offer four sizes of scaling the UI, but the smallest isn't very different from the largest. If they have the capability to scale the UI, then why not actually scale to resolutions higher than about 2560x1440?
The game's wonky physics is as annoying as ever. There are trade-offs between fancy graphics and being able to make the physics match the graphics. Guild Wars 2 goes heavily for the former. A recent look at WoW made it obvious why I hadn't noticed physics problems there: the polygons that the ground consists of are enormous, so that the game can get the physics right.
To be fair, GW2 likely isn't worse than a lot of other games in this regard. The problem is that unlike most other games that are kind of sloppy with the physics, GW2 made it matter. Some vistas are a pain to get to, and some jumping puzzles are just awful. You have to know where you can fall through the ground or stand in mid-air, and whether you can jump from this spot to that one or if the height difference is just too much. And the way to find out is to try it--and perhaps fall to an instant death if it turns out that you can't. Sloppy physics is fine for some genres, but definitely not for a platformer.
The game world is still populated, and if anything, the outdoor zones seem more populated than before. If you've got enough players to fill one instance of a zone, then you can make it look populated just by scaling the number of instances up or down as needed. GW2 is now more aggressive about closing old instances than it used to be, even warning you that they want to close your instance. It didn't used to do that.
Renown hearts are still a nifty mechanic. They're much better than the old questing approach of run to an NPC to pick up a quest, then run to where you do the quest and do it, and then run back to the NPC. Instead, you just run from one area to the next and do whatever it is that there is to do in each area. ArenaNet has also done a good job of making the tasks varied.
Another underrated part of the renown hearts is that they usually offer multiple things that will get you progress. If one option is poorly tuned to make progress way too slow, or even completely broken and uncompletable, then you can just ignore it and do another. For the completionist, that's a huge improvement over being stuck at 99% completion because the other 1% is bugged. And there will be bugs, because welcome to computer programming.
Upon returning, the game wanted me to find out about Scarlet's War. It really didn't have a good transition into the post-Zhaitan storyline. You've rallied to slay Zhaitan and save the world, and then we're going to tell you about this huge war that happened after that but is already over so that you can't experience it. Except that while it was going on, it was breaking various parts of the world that interfered with you heading out to kill Zhaitan in the first place. But it's still some epic event that everyone in the world believes happened. It's kind of like what it might be like to be comatose for several years and then awaken to learn what happened while you were sleeping. And it doesn't make for good storytelling.
And then you get shipped off to the Crystal Desert so that you can pick up a mount and unlock masteries to help you with the content on the way to slay Zhaitan for the first time. Apparently Balthazar is evil now and some unknown character is inside your head talking to you or something. And everyone expects you to just know this. Maybe it makes sense if you go through the story in order, except that they've now added game mechanics to discourage you from doing so. And also you can't, because season 1 got lost almost as quickly as it was created, but is still canon for whatever reason. Or maybe it wouldn't make sense in order, like how Eye of the North was so incoherent. I'll probably find out eventually.
The crafting system is still terrible. There used to be two useful professions: jeweler and chef. The others let you craft stuff only after you'd leveled so far past it that it was useless to you. Now there is only one, as with ascended jewelery readily available for laurels, we can strike jeweler off of that list. The others may eventually be useful to craft a legendary or something. But grind something stupid to 500 to craft the one thing that you care about is completely stupid. At least crafting doesn't actually wreck anything.
Comments
Ascended and legendary gear is still quite a grind. But also important is that such gear is now account bound, not character bound. If you have six characters that need something, then rather than going through the grind six times, you can do it once and pass it around.
Speaking of picking up your complimentary exotic gear, the game's auction house is by far the best I've seen. The ability to list both buy and sell offers, and to have all of the offers for a particular item globally sorted, is quite a slick way to do it. Comparing it to, for example, WoW's auction house as it is today is a night and day difference.
And more generally, ArenaNet is still very alt-friendly. They charge money for character slots, but that's the only way that they discourage alts at all. From a shared bank to critical things being account-bound to switching characters being only slightly slower than zoning to heavy horizontal progression to the option to buy a lot of character slots, they actively try not to put any unnecessary roadblocks in the way of playing alts. They're hardly the only alt-friendly game studio in the world, but there are more than a few that just don't get alts and find stupid ways to make playing alts into a nuisance.
Even buying the character slot in the item mall was a nice experience. It cost 800 gems. So I was able to buy exactly 800 gems for $10, buy what I wanted, and have nothing left over. Even if I hadn't been, you can trade the extra gems for gold, or vice versa. So many item malls try to make the granularity with which you buy the currency not match the items you buy with it so that you'll have something left over. ArenaNet doesn't, and I'm glad that they didn't. Even if the character slot had cost 795 gems, that would be less satisfying than being able to buy exactly what I wanted and nothing more.
Overall, I'm happy with what I've seen so far. While the game isn't that different from what it was in 2013, poor UI scaling to high resolutions is the only way that it feels dated. The graphics still stand up well as compared to newer games. And they've updated the graphics engine some, too. For example, back in 2013, they offered FXAA. Today, they still do, but they also offer the newer SMAA.
Off topic, one thing that used to really annoy me about GW2 was the framerate drop in Lions Arch (right at that overpass before the big fountain) no matter what setting it was on. The game ran like a charm outside of that.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't remember exactly why I stopped logging on. I never really took to the idea of joining multiple guilds and barely dabbled in the PvP. I know GW2 was the first MMO I played that felt like it was taking direction from single-player open world games, in that it was a huge map filled with icons and collectibles I always felt compelled to check off. Maybe I was getting too much of that in my console experiences and I wanted something different from my PC gaming.
I also remember the botting and hacking was out of control in that game, and the Public Events were always just a giant zerg of spell effects with little idea of what the heck was going on. And then they'd restart in 5 minutes and do it all over again. At any rate, at some point I logged out my main character in Lion's Arch and didn't log back in for years, only to find Lion's Arch completely different. I had no clue what was going on or what all the junk in my inventory was for.
And now I'm subscribed to WoW again. Funny how things go.
Or you could start with game A, and then over the course of the next two years, make game B, a sequel to supplement A. Then make C as another sequel, and then D. And then someone who comes along today gets his pick of whether he wants to play A, B, C, or D.
Even if you prefer D and have no interest in the others, the sequel approach is makes you no worse off than completely deprecating all of the old content. And if you want to play A, B, or C, or were enjoying them when the sequel came out, you can keep playing them and keep enjoying them. Having the option to play any of the games indefinitely is far better than for each of the games to effectively only be out for two years before they pull the plug because they're turning it into a totally different game.
There's a lot to see, if you're coming back. One of my main issues when returning is getting overwhelmed. It's really easy to do so, to the point of exhaustion. You may question what you should be keeping in terms of loot, or how to get started on ascended items, or in terms of expansions, what the specializations and mastery points are and how can you earn them?
Lots of stuff... and it's the reason why I can't bring myself to go back to games after several years... it's just too much stuff to try and do to get to the stuff I might want to do.
RIght now you can play the super adventure box, get to in through lions arch, it might be something you'd enjoy.
You have been gone for years so it is indeed like you have been in a coma.
And while I agree with you that this cutscene sucks, I can't come up with a better way to bring people up to par on the story and right into the latest expansion, which probably is what they are returning for.
And to the people who are jumping on the stagnation train:
I have been playing this game daily since release and I am really happy that Anet is catering to its core community and not content locusts.
But instead, they had to say, unless you do something way out of order, you'll never get the central Tyria masteries and so forever be crippled. And everything up to Path of Fire will be harder because you lack a mount that everyone else has.
Oh, and living world season 1 is so awful that we deleted it so that you can't see it if you missed it. Though that's not new, as it was also awful while it was new. I was there for much of that.
But here it really sounds like you don't know what you are talking about.
I am not a returner but I am rather sure that you just have to open your story panel.
Then look for the next one in line and set it as your active story.
Back on track - off you go.
And season 1 was never a removed.
Season 1 was a series of open world events with 150 man raid-like boss fights.
And I am not talking about the "everyone just pew pew the boss" nonsense the following seasons have become but a really great experience that demanded strategical setup.
But there were too many people complaining "Omg I missed season 1 - Anet is ripping me off of content I paid for" so seasons were changed to the bland solo missions they are now.
Another reason why I do not want Anet to listen to people who only play the game every now and then.
Also bring a few friends for that end fight, it is the embodiment of Long Drawn Out Big Ugly Bag of Hit Points.. fight.
However, unlike HoT and PoF, not having the masteries in Core, is not crippling, or even an issue really, they are handy, I mean the Auto-loot feature is super handy, but not nearly as crippling as say not having Gliding maxed in HoT (In the early days), or how the various Lore Tracks stonewalled your progression.. or how it felt like you only got half the use out of your mount if you were not at least tier 3, such is thankfully not the case with the Core masteries.
So there is that.
Also. Living World 1, was a test to make the game world itself move, to give the feeling of time passing, events passing, and the world progressing. The main problem with this, is that is was out of place with the Personal Story, and all these "world Altering Events" were very localized to specific zones, like Lions Arch gets blown apart, but everyone in Gendarran fields is totally unaffected even tho it is just one zone over. So it felt like.. something was way off, especially now, with how they linked the Living story to be a continuation of the Personal Story.
I am not sure if I would call it better or worse.. but it was what it was.
And what it was is possibly the biggest mistake ArenaNet has ever made. It wasn't storyline. It wasn't carefully scripted content. It wasn't even coherent. It was a jumbled mess of seasonal events.
The basic idea of living world season 1 is that they'd pick some pre-existing zone that had actual content. And then they'd drop something else on top of the normal content to prevent you from playing it. I'm not sure if the mobs were super strong, or if the events were just scaled to require a lot more people than would actually play them. Regardless, it was awful. Good riddance.
The basic theme of the events was, here's something stupid that you can farm, but only for two weeks, and then it will be gone. And then there will be something else in the next event to temporarily wreck some other zone.
It's not that season 1 was removed all at once. It was removed piecemeal, with each piece removed two weeks after it was added to the game. It was basically seasonal events, except that it didn't have seasonal themes and didn't come back the next year.
At some point, they added a new zone, Southsun Cove, for some living world events, rather than continuing to break old zones. Farming something stupid in that zone was the big new thing for the content locusts to do a little before I quit the game. For whatever reason, they left Southsun Cove around, while not still offering instanced versions of the other modified zones that were part of season 1.
There have been some other IPs that has some episodes that the IP owners would like to pretend never happened. Star Trek once had an animated series. There were Mario and Zelda games on the Phillips CD-i. Living world season 1 is basically the Guild Wars universe equivalent of those brain farts. Except that ArenaNet decided to make it canon, in spite of yanking it so that you can't still see it.
In the Guild Wars universe, time is mostly a function of location. If you're at Thunderhead Keep, then the events of Sanctum Cay have already happened. If you're at Divinity Coast, then the events of Sanctum Cay have not yet happened. And so it is with many other things. It's not quite a total order on events, but for most pairs of zones in the entire series, you can sort them such that this one chronologically happened before that one.
There are some exceptions to this when there are different, instanced versions of the "same" zone. Sometimes Guild Wars 1 and 2 have separate zones with the same name, that each exist at their own moment in time. But for the most part, an instance (including open world) is at a particular time in the history of the game.
That allows a new player to still experience the story at his own pace. For the brand new character created today, Zhaitan hasn't yet been slain. It's still out there for you to gather allies and go kill it. And that's hugely important, as it means that the games (plural, as you can still play Guild Wars 1 today) can accumulate a lot of content, rather than everything that was added more than two years ago being deprecated.
Living world season 1 is the huge exception to that. By place, it happened before killing Zhaitan, apart from a little bit that happened in Southsun Cove. It was dropping junk on people trying to play the game when they were level 40 or 60, and couldn't kill Zhaitan yet, but eventually would. Most of season 1 thus happened while by storyline, the playable races were all panicking about Zhaitan, and the living world events were a minor sideshow.
The practical effect in-game of living world season 1 is that some super powerful mobs would show up and slow players who were working their way toward the ultimate showdown with Zhaitan. Scarlet was a de-facto ally of Zhaitan, in the "enemy of my enemies" sense. But ultimately, she was just a minor nuisance, like some random champion or bandits. She wasn't some epic boss for which you'd gather allies and eventually take down. That wasn't the story that ArenaNet intended to tell with living world. But it was the story that they did tell. What a mess.
The other practical effect of living world season 1 was much worse. They paid a bunch of employees to spend a bunch of time creating nothing. New artwork, new programming, and you can't play it. For a game that relies on selling new content as the way to get money beyond the initial box sale, a year or so of not actually creating new content is catastrophic.
Fortunately, ArenaNet eventually figured that out and corrected that blunder. Living world seasons 2, 3, and 4 have some actual content, as do the two expansions. It might be good or it might not (I haven't tried it yet), but at least there's something there. Season 1 is a non-entity.
as soon as the game changes from its roots (provided it was successful because of its roots) it will lose the people who wanted that game in the first place. They are then doomed to constantly figure out what they are about.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
However, it's F2P, so you would lose nothing to log back in for a try.
Without quoting all that:
The story was coherent in the sense that it's all about Scarlet looking for Modremoth.
For that reason she was messing with leylines which stirred up the ley-sensitive Karkas.
The Karkas then became frenzied and attacked Lion's Arch and in return by tracing them back the home islands of the Karkas were found.
Scarlet was not an ally of Zhaitan because Zhaitan was already dead by the time she became active so I feel your memory isn't serving you well here.
I fully agree that Southsun Cove was a mess but that is because it was an event that took place for only a few hours, so the servers were so overloaded it wasn't even funny.
Additionally I agree that the Consortium plot was bad and probably only served to introduce Kiel and Canach.
Consider a lore-conscious player who takes great care to play through the content in order. That's the best chance that the storyline will ever have to make sense as experienced in the game. The player fights through various zones on the way to kill Zhaitan.
As he travels, he gets attacked by various Scarlet minions in one zone, and after a while, they vanish. Then he gets attacked by Scarlet minions in another zone. After a while, they also vanish. At some point along his journey, Scarlet vanishes from the game entirely, never to return.
Meanwhile, the player still hasn't killed Zhaitan. He's not even level 80 yet. Eventually, he gets all the way through the story and slays Zhaitan in a remarkably anti-climactic battle. Because in the Guild Wars universe, only Shiro is allowed to have an epic end-boss battle.
So as the lore-conscious player experienced the game, which happened first? Scarlet's attack or killing Zhaitan? In a sense, they were both concurrent attacks. But the threat from Scarlet was ended before that of Zhaitan. If one happened before the other, it was Scarlet before Zhaitan and not the other way around. The new character I created so that I could have a revenant hasn't yet killed Zhaitan, but Scarlet is as long gone as Abaddon.
As I said, that's not the story that ArenaNet intended to tell. But it's the one that, in practice, they did. That's why living world season 1 was awful storytelling, and more broadly, awful game mechanics. As I said, it's possibly the biggest blunder ArenaNet has ever made. They had much of their studio spend about a year or so to do exactly nothing of interest.