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The Impact of Guild Wars 2 - MMORPG.com
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The Impact of Guild Wars 2 - MMORPG.com
As we transition into the 2020s, we're taking a look back at some of the more popular MMOs of the 2010s. Join Robin as she explores the impact of Guild Wars 2.
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Sadly GW2 took another direction.. pvp was solo based.. no group play involved or teamwork nothing..
I gave it fair shot @ the start... but it got boring very quickly..
--GW2 White Knights
Dynamic content
Friendly community facilitated by game design (personal loot and resource nodes, soft grouping, shared mob tagging, shared contribution to events, etc.) I actually do not want to play another MMO that does not have these things.
Ensuring that all content is valid through level downscaling and reward upscaling.
Visual customization is through the roof (despite the unfortunate lack of weapon dyes).
Though to me, it's unfortunate legacy lies in proving that buildcrafting depth is dead and open worlds rarely improve game design.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Linear combat is something that ESO and now even WoW has taken from GW2. Also World bosses were a thing LONG before L2 hell they were a thing before L1
It took them years to reach a steady content cadence that was both feasible to develop and acceptable to the community.
Season 1's "every 2 weeks" content cadence was completely unsustainable, hell on the developers, and resulted in wildly inconsistent content quality. It produced some memorably positive updates (Tower of Nightmares, Zephyr Sanctum, Queen's Jubilee, Battle of Lion's Arch), but mostly fell into unsatisfactory updates. Plus, the entire thing suffered from the misguided concept of temporary content. Why did anyone think this was a good idea?
Season 2 was a transitionary period, and it was clear that the live game's update cadence was suffering due to the in-development expansion. They couldn't even provide time tables for most of these patches. And frankly, the new maps that arose from this weren't great and had no longevity outside of the resources exclusive to them. These maps don't even function properly anymore due to lack of players.
And then it didn't help that Heart of Thorns wasn't a great expansion. It had a lot of welcome features, but it was content lite, the maps sucked, and all of it felt alienating.
Season 3 was when they hit their stride. Entire maps every few months with new story. And then they'd have a new (much better) expansion in 2 years time to reinvigorate the community at large.
Season 4 should have been more of the same, but I think Season 3 and Path of Fire were basically too late. The damage is done.
But my assertion is this. Season 3, Season 4, and Path of Fire represent the content cadence the game always should have had. And if the game had always maintained that 3-4 month new map cadence, perhaps people wouldn't have been complaining about the lack of endgame in the first place.
They WoWized their world in order to make more money and killed one of the best pvp game in the process.
I loved to hunt for elite skills by killing bosses. I loved to spend hours in high end PvE for cosmetic in order for my character to look good on GWTV.
I loved the hours spent to discuss and practice various strategies...
I loved to hold the Hall of Heroes...
Yes because in GW1, before twitch.tv existed, by the simple press of a button you could access the games conducted by the top 100 guilds. That was amazing.
No, sorry. They just promised a bunch and didn't deliver. There is nothing wrong with GW2. It is what it is.
A.Net put the info out, it was the game players that hyped the heck out of it.
The PvE side was just as amazing. It offered Normal and Hard versions of everything. It offered challenges not possible in an open world, such as Vanquishing. It used instances to make teams adapt to all potential enemies before entering a zone. It offered the best horizontal progression with its cosmetics and skill hunting.
That and their "Manifesto" They made all these promises and half-assedly delivered on them.
That manifesto was little more than a Sales 101 Features / Benefits analysis.
Here's the feature and the benefit to you is....
They made sure the features were technically in the game, but the benefits they were supposed to create didn't work as intended, or if they did, they also introduced their own set of issues along with it.
Innovation is needed to overcome hard-stops. Innovation for it's own sake brought little to the table except another "also-ran"
I mean, sure GW2 is a fun game. I had lots of fun with it on and off over the years, but it was nothing that revolutionized the genre.
With that in mind, interpreting the Guild Wars 2 manifesto involves understanding that the two main voices, Colin and Ree, are talking about two separate parts of the game. Everything Colin says is meant to apply to the greater open world. Everything Ree says is meant to apply to the game's personal story and narrative.
1. Everything you loved about Guild Wars 1 in a persistent world.
Yeah..... no. Everything that made Guild Wars 1 the game it was is not possible in a persistent world.
2. More active combat
From a mechanical standpoint, yes. From an intellectual standpoint, no.
And very little content actually tests your mastery of said combat. Though in fairness, this might not actually be Arenanet's fault. The game as a whole was much more difficult in CBT1, and it was made far easier after a vocal segment of the community cried about it.
3. Fully branching personalized storyline
Yes and no. The storyline is essentially a funnel. It starts out fully branching and becomes less so as it progresses. I'm actually going to call this one delivered, at least to the extent that integrity is concerned. It's clear to me that they intended to deliver on this feature, but that said feature directly reduced that quality of the game's writing and made delivering on a satisfying overall narrative implausible.
Basically, this was a good idea on paper that was a bad idea in practice. They would have had to entirely focus on this one thing to the expense of everything else to maintain it, and the game would be worse for it.
4. A new event system to get people playing together
Yes.
5. No monthly fees
Yes.
6. The look of Guild Wars 2 is stylized. We're going for a painterly, illustrated aesthetic. Everything in our world feels hand-crafted and artisanal. We treat our environments as if they are characters themselves.
Art is subjective. But YES.
7. Most games, you have fun tasks that you get to occasionally do, and the rest of the game is this boring grind to get to the fun stuff. I swung a sword, I swung it again. Hey, I swung it again!
I suppose this depends on what you consider "the fun stuff." If you consider the open world content and dynamic events to be "the fun stuff," then they absolutely, 100% delivered. This is the camp I fall in. So to me, yes, the game fulfilled this promise.
If you consider dungeons, fractals, and raids to be the fun stuff, then they did not deliver.
8. We don't want our players to grind in Guild Wars 2.
Is optional grind still grind? That's the question. I find that the game currently leans too heavily on optional grinds, and it has a multiplicative effect. The more simultaneous objectives you set for yourself, the worse it becomes.
I think the problem is largely that they are afraid of rare mob drops (with the exception of precursors, which are far TOO rare). Almost every valuable item is based around grinding excessive amounts of materials, which is neither fun nor exciting. And I can personally say that every time I finished a legendary, I didn't feel excited or fulfilled; I felt exhausted.
9. Everyone is doing the same thing you are doing, the boss you just killed respawns 10 minutes later.
Well, I suppose a few hours isn't 10 minutes. LOL.
10. You get quest text that tells you "I'm being attacked by these horrible things and it's not actually happening. We don't think that's okay.
Well, dynamic events certainly make the game feel more alive. But then they caved to players asking for direction and added renown hearts, which actively make the game look less dynamic and lively than it actually is. And that's a problem.
11. In Guild Wars 2, it's your world and your story. You effect things around you in a very permanent way.
Remember that Ree's lines only apply to the personal story. It would be extremely impressive if they applied to the open world, but that wasn't the intention of the manifesto, and I think this is where the single largest misconception with the trailer is.
12. Cause and effect. A single decision made by a player cascades out.
This refers to dynamic events. Problem is, it's actually false. Dynamic events chain and cascade out, by they don't really involve decisions other than "do or don't." There are no branching paths.
If this were a Ree line, this would actually be correct... sort of. Personal story is lumped into a few archs and decisions made within that arch cascade out for the following chapters of that arch.
But because this line is coming from Colin Johanson, it's false.
13. You're meeting people who you will then see again.
Yes. This is a Ree line. The personal story is full of recurring characters (even obscure ones from early chapters).
14. You're rescuing a village who will stay rescued and will then remember you.
Yes. This is a Ree line. And in a literal sense, this happens with the Quaggan, Skritt, Ogre, or Hylek villages in the personal story.
The crafting system was a let down. I assume the level requirements for crafted objects reflected the game design earlier on in GW2's lifespan? I came to it late and leveling crafting was grindy....my level was permanently ahead of my crafting and I had far better drops from adventuring anyway. Crafting felt really unnecessary outside of occassionally helping me min/max a tiny bit.
The game did a great job with being flexible around class fantasy and abilities though. Having the options to be things like a tanky caster or melee as a traditionally ranged class was a breath of fresh air. Sadly community and meta's will always get in the way of real freedom but when just playing alone doing my own thing the options were excellent.
Gw2 is a fine game. I love the freedom of the combat system and movement. The story is decent and many of the games environments are beautiful and diverse.
I love doing dungeons and fractals either solo or duo. The raids are well done, spvp can be a cluster fuck sometimes, but once you understand everything its pretty fun and very intense. WvW is still fun to jump into once youve figured everything out and know when to back away from a fight and when to charge forward. Solo roaming can be intense. Alwhile with no sub fee or a real need to spend any kind of money outside of the expansions.
I dont think its perfect, far from it. But its no where near bad. Its in the middle. Ive played way worse. Im sure most people here have.
While some games may have due to GW2s existence adopted some minor qualities none of those pillars exist full out in any other mmo I'm aware of.
As an overall design vision, it feels like an evolutionary dead end. Everquest next seemed to be taking atleast some of GW2's vision forward but that didn't pan out.
Which to me is saddening, i really loved GW2 perhaps more so of the design vision then actual game itself, I played it more or less with the same vigor I did my first mmo vanilla wow for it's first two years. However I knew it also contained many (from my pov) faults and I always saw it as a step in the right direction, a prototype for what I imagined truly next gen mmo's could be not the final MMO. But here we are 7 years later and MMO's are for the most part just raiding simulators or asian p2w gankfests with nothing really on the horizon.
Shallow game play, no team work required, 4 years in for GvG and its garbage.
I actually was hyped for GW2 to try something other than quests, but sadly the lack of quests made the world feel empty and dull to me. Even with generic quest text, it can sometimes bring the world alive. GW2 story always felt far and few between while leveling. Zones meshed, and I just really could never get over the emptiness I felt while playing. I have a few friends who play MMOs, but have never tried GW2. For whatever reason, GW2 seems to have it's own community, and it rarely spills into the mainstream other than this site. In my opinion, GW2 has not left much of a legacy, but I am super happy for all of the people that love this game and are addicted to it. I always hope we can keep as many MMO worlds alive as possible.