Ok I actually had to look up the release dates. The game was released end of August and the Lost Shores were released mid of November. So 2 and a half months later.
I am really not someone to rush content - I do like taking my time. I remember slowing myself down because I wanted to finish zones first before moving on closer to Orr.
But yeah 2 and a half months on the most casual and fast leveling mmo I ever played... Even just playing your personal story which (back then) was available every 3 levels would get you a level up.
So when you speak of what they did in practice I hope you are aware that this is extremely subjective of you.
Talk about more subjective statements: The Puppet fight in the mountains was one of the best open world events I ever experienced on any mmo and far from the "biggest blunder".
I enjoyed GW2 for what it was, but I know now that I will never enjoy a game with such a chaotic combat system. Trinity or bust for me.
City of Villains approach to the no trinity was better and if you played it you would appreciate the merits of a system like that.
I was balls deep in WOW at the time COH/COV was a thing. Its one of my biggest MMO regrets never playing. I read something last night though that the source code of the game was released or some shit...
My last take away from GW2 was one of the best leveling experience's in the genre with a absolutely pointless and boring endgame.
Depends on how you look at it.
If your goal was purely for more Character Power, I can see how it would be seen as pointless.
For me, one the best parts of GW2, was that originally, getting to max level and equipping BiS gear was rather easy, and like a stepping stone to explore the rest of the game, to go back, do jump puzzles, map completion, collections, maybe trying to finish some of the extra rewards for personal story and living world, as well as doing guild events, PvP, WvW, Crafting.. maybe spend some time getting a Legendary Weapon (Which was Originally just a skin on a exotic weapon).
Then you know, they wanted to make people like you happy, they put in Ascended, so we would have massive sinks for gear crafting, or just hope for the best with RNG, and to help this along they put in Fractals, which gave the best chance at Ascended.. finally.. adding in Legendary back Items, and armors, just for people like you that wanted a more myopic grind at "End Game"
I encourage you to head on back.. it may have transformed into the exact game you were looking for, then again, maybe not.
Which would be a crying shame really that they went and twisted the game into something my demographic no longer likes, and not at least get some people back for that.
Egotism is the anesthetic that dullens the pain of stupidity, this is why when I try to beat my head against the stupidity of other people, I only hurt myself.
Ok I actually had to look up the release dates. The game was released end of August and the Lost Shores were released mid of November. So 2 and a half months later.
I am really not someone to rush content - I do like taking my time. I remember slowing myself down because I wanted to finish zones first before moving on closer to Orr.
But yeah 2 and a half months on the most casual and fast leveling mmo I ever played... Even just playing your personal story which (back then) was available every 3 levels would get you a level up.
So when you speak of what they did in practice I hope you are aware that this is extremely subjective of you.
Talk about more subjective statements: The Puppet fight in the mountains was one of the best open world events I ever experienced on any mmo and far from the "biggest blunder".
The problem is that you're implicitly assuming that people would pick up a game at launch and play through everything that there is to do in the game in the first 2 1/2 months. And then after that, they wouldn't quit the game, but would hang around so that whenever some small chunk of new content dribbles out, they can jump on it and play it immediately, or at least within two weeks. And that they would consistently do that without exception for more than a year, without quitting to go do something else, even though most of the time, there's basically nothing left to do because they've finished the latest event.
That gameplay pattern is unusual, to say the least. But the few people who did that are the only ones for which living world season 1 worked at all as storyline. And even they were ill-served by it, as they can't go see it again later on an alt.
My primary argument here is not that season 1 was pretty terrible as content--though it was. If they had released Nightfall as a series of seasonal events with virtually every chunk deleted two weeks after it was introduced to the game, then Nightfall would have been a huge blunder, too. And Nightfall was actually good.
The problem isn't just that they deleted new content almost as soon as it was added. The problem is much deeper than that. It's that they structured the new content so that in most cases, they were forced to delete it almost immediately. Rather than adding a new zone or a new instance or something, they dropped the seasonal events on top of older content, often breaking it. If they didn't revert that, then they would have left much of their game in a broken state.
Nor could they even have an alternate instance version of the zones that maintain the content. A lot of the events relied on having a lot of players actively doing them at once. The threshold was set high enough that even when it was the new thing and the game had a much larger playerbase, some events still couldn't get enough participation to make the event work properly. Tossing out an instance version of that today would mean just adding some dead instances where you can't do anything unless you really organize a ton of players to go do it at once. It would have all of the problems of big raids, but without any of the upside.
So it makes sense that they deleted the content as they went, and then didn't bring it back later. They had painted themselves into a corner such that they didn't really have any other options. It is the sort of thing that you look at and say, someone seems to have thought that this was a good idea, and I have no clue how that could have happened. Even more baffling is that it took them more than a year to realize their blunder and change course. I sure hope that whoever was responsible for that decision was fired for incompetence, as they flushed about a year worth of work by the studio down the drain by doing something that it was obvious and predictable that it would have that effect.
Season 1 was an all-around mess, but I still liked it better than their current system. Obviously, the delivery was abysmal.
They made the later stuff replayable/instanced which is great for longevity, but it also killed the entire "Living World" aspect. Things just turned into more instanced personal story, instead of any kind of world-related stuff.
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.
That's the story that ArenaNet intended to tell as you might lay it out on a wiki. But that's not the story that they did tell as experienced by players playing the game. I know. I was there.
..................
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.
With Season 1, the storytelling was so horrible that, even if you were playing, half the time you wouldn't know what was going on in-game.
They were posting articles on their website. You basically had to go read their webpage to know what was actually supposed to be going on.
Their attempt at telling a story in-game was just...
Still, I think a middle-ground would have been much better. Having world events was a good concept, but it being sequentially linked to the personal story was a horrible approach, for the reasons you listed.
An actual Living World system, with proper planning and replayable-instancing -- from the start, could have been a really cool system.
It was a great concept implemented horribly. The problem is that they just couldn't ever accept what a failure it was and just kept linking the entirety of the game to it anyway. They knew the foundation was a mess, but just kept building on it, like a stubborn child.
GameDev 101 -- kill that failed system and move on. Don't keep adding parts and turning it into some Frankenstein's monster.
Optional:
Envision me ranting once again about how clinging to that single-minded LW system has been absolutely horrible for the game.
Such a disappointment compared to GW 1. However, should I try it again, has anything of note changed since the launch or is it still "disappointment, the game"?
It's still for the most part (Till you get to the end game) the game it always was.
However, it's F2P, so you would lose nothing to log back in for a try.
Dude I just saw you in like two other posts talking about how you “forgot” about this game years ago. Clearly not. ??
"God, please help us sinful children of Ivalice.."
Comments
The game was released end of August and the Lost Shores were released mid of November.
So 2 and a half months later.
I am really not someone to rush content - I do like taking my time.
I remember slowing myself down because I wanted to finish zones first before moving on closer to Orr.
But yeah 2 and a half months on the most casual and fast leveling mmo I ever played...
Even just playing your personal story which (back then) was available every 3 levels would get you a level up.
So when you speak of what they did in practice I hope you are aware that this is extremely subjective of you.
Talk about more subjective statements:
The Puppet fight in the mountains was one of the best open world events I ever experienced on any mmo and far from the "biggest blunder".
Aloha Mr Hand !
Aloha Mr Hand !
If your goal was purely for more Character Power, I can see how it would be seen as pointless.
For me, one the best parts of GW2, was that originally, getting to max level and equipping BiS gear was rather easy, and like a stepping stone to explore the rest of the game, to go back, do jump puzzles, map completion, collections, maybe trying to finish some of the extra rewards for personal story and living world, as well as doing guild events, PvP, WvW, Crafting.. maybe spend some time getting a Legendary Weapon (Which was Originally just a skin on a exotic weapon).
Then you know, they wanted to make people like you happy, they put in Ascended, so we would have massive sinks for gear crafting, or just hope for the best with RNG, and to help this along they put in Fractals, which gave the best chance at Ascended.. finally.. adding in Legendary back Items, and armors, just for people like you that wanted a more myopic grind at "End Game"
I encourage you to head on back.. it may have transformed into the exact game you were looking for, then again, maybe not.
Which would be a crying shame really that they went and twisted the game into something my demographic no longer likes, and not at least get some people back for that.
That gameplay pattern is unusual, to say the least. But the few people who did that are the only ones for which living world season 1 worked at all as storyline. And even they were ill-served by it, as they can't go see it again later on an alt.
My primary argument here is not that season 1 was pretty terrible as content--though it was. If they had released Nightfall as a series of seasonal events with virtually every chunk deleted two weeks after it was introduced to the game, then Nightfall would have been a huge blunder, too. And Nightfall was actually good.
The problem isn't just that they deleted new content almost as soon as it was added. The problem is much deeper than that. It's that they structured the new content so that in most cases, they were forced to delete it almost immediately. Rather than adding a new zone or a new instance or something, they dropped the seasonal events on top of older content, often breaking it. If they didn't revert that, then they would have left much of their game in a broken state.
Nor could they even have an alternate instance version of the zones that maintain the content. A lot of the events relied on having a lot of players actively doing them at once. The threshold was set high enough that even when it was the new thing and the game had a much larger playerbase, some events still couldn't get enough participation to make the event work properly. Tossing out an instance version of that today would mean just adding some dead instances where you can't do anything unless you really organize a ton of players to go do it at once. It would have all of the problems of big raids, but without any of the upside.
So it makes sense that they deleted the content as they went, and then didn't bring it back later. They had painted themselves into a corner such that they didn't really have any other options. It is the sort of thing that you look at and say, someone seems to have thought that this was a good idea, and I have no clue how that could have happened. Even more baffling is that it took them more than a year to realize their blunder and change course. I sure hope that whoever was responsible for that decision was fired for incompetence, as they flushed about a year worth of work by the studio down the drain by doing something that it was obvious and predictable that it would have that effect.
"God, please help us sinful children of Ivalice.."
altho the pvp in gw1 was tab target... it was very indept regarding teamplay
i think i played gw2 till level 30 orso... then i uninstalled it