(GW2) Guild Wars 2 Beta Impressions
So I got in time with the Guild Wars 2 "open" beta over the weekend. I didn't spend any obsessive amount of time, but got a sampling of gameplay and all. Three of the five races were playable, and I only did anything with two of them, so there's plenty I haven't seen even in the starting zones. And, of course, there were the usual beta issues with servers being brought down a few times and "overflow" zones pretty much never emptying into normal ones. And when I wrapped for the night Sunday, I tried to bid guild members a good night only to be told I didn't belong to a guild (in spite of still seeing it in the guild panel and having been on guild chat successfully earlier). So, what do I think?
Most of my impressions are based on how a game feels to me, and I can't always back that up with reasons why.
First, let me say that it feels like an improvement over the original to me in almost every way possible. Something as simple as being able to jump down a steep slope rather than having to go around is liberating. Combat is more involved. I actually like that it feels like an MMO now, and ended up just helping out things already in progress with other people multiple times - and still got credit regardless of timing or grouping. I only killed a couple things in a lake, and the underwater combat shift is interesting at least. Unlocking weapon skills encourages sampling different weapon types, but I'm not really sure if it's suitably rewarding/fun really.
I also give points for a good number of options for details in character design. There's more option in body scaling, body shape, adjustments to features and so on than I've seen in any MMO chargen that comes to mind. That's pretty cool.
I actually really like being able to heal downed/dead people in the field. This was more frequent and rewarding than I've seen in order games, though perhaps that's just because dying in the main-world area of WoW is relatively uncommon and people release rather than waiting for strangers to resurrect most of the time.
On the flip side...
There are some elements of chargen that started feeling repetitious after the first couple characters. Apparently you choose one of three startings item like helm or shoulders (and a small boost to a certain attribute corresponding), and your choices are based on class. The charr get to choose their favorite friend in their warband, but the choices are the same regardless of what class or legion you're playing as (defining these NPCs as "your" legion, whatever that may be). Not a real big issue, and arguably you can still fit all the pieces together in a unique way, but somehow not as individual as it seemed like at first glance.
Movement/pathing/geometry is so much better to me than the first one, even without the click-to-move, but it's still not quite up to what I consider "par." There were a couple areas I tried to jump-climb that looked like they were doable, but proved either impassible or so tricky that I just couldn't do it. My charr felt slow when running around, like a lumbering beast rather than fierce warrior, and my human didn't strike me as much better, even "gliding" a little when moving between diagonals. Nothing struck me as wrong about the character animations themselves, but movement in the world did not feel as smooth to me as WoW or SWTOR for example.
Tangentially, the maps are still... sometimes not very helpful. Artistically, the "well this is an overhead view of the area" maps are great and all, but isn't always useful at telling you where a path/gate may be from one section of a city (for example) to another. It's not nearly as bad as GW was, but I still found myself running into some dead ends at the charr home town. Lion's Arch seemed less prone to this problem.
I found myself desperately wanting an area loot system. SWTOR has it. WoW is getting it. If there's an auto loot (ie. one-click looting), and I just missed the setting somewhere, even that would be better, but you can end up with a lot of bodies on the ground and relatively little indication which have anything for you, especially while fights are still going. This may be the single feature I most wish the game had so far.
My biggest complaint overall is the prevailing sense of "WTF am I doing?" I experienced so frequently while playing. The game is not very good at explaining itself, especially right out the gate. Some levels unlock things like switching between alternate weapon sets, which may be explained in a popup when you hit that level, but there are a lot of details I wish were covered in some sort of tutorial.
- Okay, characters have Charm, Dignity, and Ferocity and... uhh... some conversational options increase one of them, but what do any of them do?
- Bundle (temporary items like a bottle you pick up or a mortar you use) skills are touched on briefly, but still disorienting to use - not unlike vehicle skills in WoW, only more common. Rogues even have a steal skill that is temporarily replaced by something stolen.
- Some skills change into completely different skills after being used (?) or successfully hitting (?) or something. These chain skills are only on your bar briefly when available. They don't seem to appear in the character's list of skills. So I only had a vague idea of what skill I was actually using at the time.
- Similarly, you get a set of four skills to use when you're downed/dying. Usually that's in the middle of a hectic fight, with no time to familiarize yourself with what your options are so you know what to do in order to increase your odds of survival. This is the exact sort of thing that could be fixed by having a trainer put you in a downed state in a "safe" environment and teach you how to save yourself.
- Quest flow seems to be a matter of doing a personal storyline quest, then going and gaining a couple levels doing something else before the next one. And that something else is... vague. Help someone here, participate in an ongoing even there, kills themselves don't seem to give a lot of experience. I works okay, but left me thinking "what am I doing again?" a lot, especially when coming back to the game after doing something else.
Then there's the most major element of the game that I've been wondering about and... I'm still undecided on whether it's a good or bad thing. The dynamic events in general are disorienting but can be fun too. The ones that actually impact the area have potential. I'm just not sure if they will live up to it. The one I really got to see changes in was while running around in a charr area. And here's how it went:
1) I got a message of an event nearby. Close inspection showed this as a protect/escort thing, so I went over and helped a couple people already there in getting an NPC safely out into the field. There were some big packs of ghosts, but we managed fine.
2) Upon completion of that quest, the NPC and a couple others promptly set up a tent. Like "poof, it's there" promptly. Within the tent is a guy who, upon being talked to, starts another escort mission as he goes out to set bombs in a nearby graveyard.
3) Those of us present (having picked up another player or two) set out around the graveyard. Ghosts are killed. Bombs are set up. Yay! Another quest/event completed, so I head back to the tent to see what's up and if there's more.
4) By the time I get there (and I didn't take side trips), the camp is under heavy attack by ghosts. A second tent that had been set up is destroyed and the few of us present try to hold off the horde, but the camp is wiped out in short order, thus reseting the state of the area back to what it was when I got there.
Net change in the zone to my eye? None. So it was kind of fun to play through. I would like to see if there's more progress that could be made. But overall, it felt like an ephemeral thing that was over quickly and didn't actually matter in any way.
So... there's good and there's bad. With no monthly fee, I'm sure I'll play some. If there was a monthly fee, I'd probably want to play a month or two to see how it is further along. It hasn't dazzled me, though. It seems good, but it doesn't strike me as living up to the really high levels of hype, at least after initial impressions.
Additional Thoughts (as I come up with them):
While I have been planning to play a charr guardian, I'm not altogether sold on that now. The charr starting play was less interesting to me than human. I'm not sure why - maybe because it's so militaristic? And guardians get auras that give some occasional benefit and can be temporarily used/disabled to grant a bonus to your group (or is it allies?) right now - that's okay I guess - but the general guardian effects seem lackluster. Nothing about any of the guardian weapon skills I used felt as neat as as rogue's multi-target dagger throw or their shoot-and-shadowport-backwards manuever. Though I didn't really like that all (but the basic attack, I think) rogue skills seemed to use a resource (while guardian spells seem limited only by cooldowns). I guess I'm still on the fence there.
Lion's Arch is big. Almost realistically and unnecessarily so. Good for immersion, kind of overkill and cumbesome for gameplay.
I died a lot. Like... a lot. Compared to any other MMO I've played, it's really easy to get in over your head against even two or three opponents. Being able to actively dodge isn't all that helpful save for running the heck away (potentially good for any major, telegraphed attacks but I didn't see many of those).
The graphics are good in general, but show something of a pet peeve of mine: as distant areas draw nearer, you reach a point where they very obviously change from low resolution to high. I find that jarring and annoying in games.
This recap by someone else brings up a couple good points. I didn't do any group play, so I didn't really run into any issues with the overflow server setup (unless that's why my guild chat failed), but I can see how it could be a problem to overcome. And in some fights, yes, it's hard to tell what's going on, where your target is, what effect you're having, and all of that (more WTF? factor). I was not often involved in such battles, but there were a couple.
Most of my impressions are based on how a game feels to me, and I can't always back that up with reasons why.
First, let me say that it feels like an improvement over the original to me in almost every way possible. Something as simple as being able to jump down a steep slope rather than having to go around is liberating. Combat is more involved. I actually like that it feels like an MMO now, and ended up just helping out things already in progress with other people multiple times - and still got credit regardless of timing or grouping. I only killed a couple things in a lake, and the underwater combat shift is interesting at least. Unlocking weapon skills encourages sampling different weapon types, but I'm not really sure if it's suitably rewarding/fun really.
I also give points for a good number of options for details in character design. There's more option in body scaling, body shape, adjustments to features and so on than I've seen in any MMO chargen that comes to mind. That's pretty cool.
I actually really like being able to heal downed/dead people in the field. This was more frequent and rewarding than I've seen in order games, though perhaps that's just because dying in the main-world area of WoW is relatively uncommon and people release rather than waiting for strangers to resurrect most of the time.
On the flip side...
There are some elements of chargen that started feeling repetitious after the first couple characters. Apparently you choose one of three startings item like helm or shoulders (and a small boost to a certain attribute corresponding), and your choices are based on class. The charr get to choose their favorite friend in their warband, but the choices are the same regardless of what class or legion you're playing as (defining these NPCs as "your" legion, whatever that may be). Not a real big issue, and arguably you can still fit all the pieces together in a unique way, but somehow not as individual as it seemed like at first glance.
Movement/pathing/geometry is so much better to me than the first one, even without the click-to-move, but it's still not quite up to what I consider "par." There were a couple areas I tried to jump-climb that looked like they were doable, but proved either impassible or so tricky that I just couldn't do it. My charr felt slow when running around, like a lumbering beast rather than fierce warrior, and my human didn't strike me as much better, even "gliding" a little when moving between diagonals. Nothing struck me as wrong about the character animations themselves, but movement in the world did not feel as smooth to me as WoW or SWTOR for example.
Tangentially, the maps are still... sometimes not very helpful. Artistically, the "well this is an overhead view of the area" maps are great and all, but isn't always useful at telling you where a path/gate may be from one section of a city (for example) to another. It's not nearly as bad as GW was, but I still found myself running into some dead ends at the charr home town. Lion's Arch seemed less prone to this problem.
I found myself desperately wanting an area loot system. SWTOR has it. WoW is getting it. If there's an auto loot (ie. one-click looting), and I just missed the setting somewhere, even that would be better, but you can end up with a lot of bodies on the ground and relatively little indication which have anything for you, especially while fights are still going. This may be the single feature I most wish the game had so far.
My biggest complaint overall is the prevailing sense of "WTF am I doing?" I experienced so frequently while playing. The game is not very good at explaining itself, especially right out the gate. Some levels unlock things like switching between alternate weapon sets, which may be explained in a popup when you hit that level, but there are a lot of details I wish were covered in some sort of tutorial.
- Okay, characters have Charm, Dignity, and Ferocity and... uhh... some conversational options increase one of them, but what do any of them do?
- Bundle (temporary items like a bottle you pick up or a mortar you use) skills are touched on briefly, but still disorienting to use - not unlike vehicle skills in WoW, only more common. Rogues even have a steal skill that is temporarily replaced by something stolen.
- Some skills change into completely different skills after being used (?) or successfully hitting (?) or something. These chain skills are only on your bar briefly when available. They don't seem to appear in the character's list of skills. So I only had a vague idea of what skill I was actually using at the time.
- Similarly, you get a set of four skills to use when you're downed/dying. Usually that's in the middle of a hectic fight, with no time to familiarize yourself with what your options are so you know what to do in order to increase your odds of survival. This is the exact sort of thing that could be fixed by having a trainer put you in a downed state in a "safe" environment and teach you how to save yourself.
- Quest flow seems to be a matter of doing a personal storyline quest, then going and gaining a couple levels doing something else before the next one. And that something else is... vague. Help someone here, participate in an ongoing even there, kills themselves don't seem to give a lot of experience. I works okay, but left me thinking "what am I doing again?" a lot, especially when coming back to the game after doing something else.
Then there's the most major element of the game that I've been wondering about and... I'm still undecided on whether it's a good or bad thing. The dynamic events in general are disorienting but can be fun too. The ones that actually impact the area have potential. I'm just not sure if they will live up to it. The one I really got to see changes in was while running around in a charr area. And here's how it went:
1) I got a message of an event nearby. Close inspection showed this as a protect/escort thing, so I went over and helped a couple people already there in getting an NPC safely out into the field. There were some big packs of ghosts, but we managed fine.
2) Upon completion of that quest, the NPC and a couple others promptly set up a tent. Like "poof, it's there" promptly. Within the tent is a guy who, upon being talked to, starts another escort mission as he goes out to set bombs in a nearby graveyard.
3) Those of us present (having picked up another player or two) set out around the graveyard. Ghosts are killed. Bombs are set up. Yay! Another quest/event completed, so I head back to the tent to see what's up and if there's more.
4) By the time I get there (and I didn't take side trips), the camp is under heavy attack by ghosts. A second tent that had been set up is destroyed and the few of us present try to hold off the horde, but the camp is wiped out in short order, thus reseting the state of the area back to what it was when I got there.
Net change in the zone to my eye? None. So it was kind of fun to play through. I would like to see if there's more progress that could be made. But overall, it felt like an ephemeral thing that was over quickly and didn't actually matter in any way.
So... there's good and there's bad. With no monthly fee, I'm sure I'll play some. If there was a monthly fee, I'd probably want to play a month or two to see how it is further along. It hasn't dazzled me, though. It seems good, but it doesn't strike me as living up to the really high levels of hype, at least after initial impressions.
Additional Thoughts (as I come up with them):
While I have been planning to play a charr guardian, I'm not altogether sold on that now. The charr starting play was less interesting to me than human. I'm not sure why - maybe because it's so militaristic? And guardians get auras that give some occasional benefit and can be temporarily used/disabled to grant a bonus to your group (or is it allies?) right now - that's okay I guess - but the general guardian effects seem lackluster. Nothing about any of the guardian weapon skills I used felt as neat as as rogue's multi-target dagger throw or their shoot-and-shadowport-backwards manuever. Though I didn't really like that all (but the basic attack, I think) rogue skills seemed to use a resource (while guardian spells seem limited only by cooldowns). I guess I'm still on the fence there.
Lion's Arch is big. Almost realistically and unnecessarily so. Good for immersion, kind of overkill and cumbesome for gameplay.
I died a lot. Like... a lot. Compared to any other MMO I've played, it's really easy to get in over your head against even two or three opponents. Being able to actively dodge isn't all that helpful save for running the heck away (potentially good for any major, telegraphed attacks but I didn't see many of those).
The graphics are good in general, but show something of a pet peeve of mine: as distant areas draw nearer, you reach a point where they very obviously change from low resolution to high. I find that jarring and annoying in games.
This recap by someone else brings up a couple good points. I didn't do any group play, so I didn't really run into any issues with the overflow server setup (unless that's why my guild chat failed), but I can see how it could be a problem to overcome. And in some fights, yes, it's hard to tell what's going on, where your target is, what effect you're having, and all of that (more WTF? factor). I was not often involved in such battles, but there were a couple.
I found myself desperately wanting an area loot system. SWTOR has it. WoW is getting it. If there's an auto loot (ie. one-click looting), and I just missed the setting somewhere, even that would be better, but you can end up with a lot of bodies on the ground and relatively little indication which have anything for you, especially while fights are still going. This may be the single feature I most wish the game had so far. There is an autoloot switch you can flick, letting you pick up anything just by hitting the 'f' button over the body, without anything else done. If your sacks are full, you even have the option of mailing items off, or dropping them to be replaced by the item in question. - Okay, characters have Charm, Dignity, and Ferocity and... uhh... some conversational options increase one of them, but what do any of them do? The direct the flow of the personal story, and how you can interact with people - it helps you to select your options for what you can say to people, and also how people react to you. - Quest flow seems to be a matter of doing a personal storyline quest, then going and gaining a couple levels doing something else before the next one. And that something else is... vague. Help someone here, participate in an ongoing even there, kills themselves don't seem to give a lot of experience. I works okay, but left me thinking "what am I doing again?" a lot, especially when coming back to the game after doing something else. On the map, there are people with a spyglass icon. They're the people who will tell you what's going on in the region, thus letting you know what's up and what areas you can go to for helping out the region. That's usually enough to give you things to do for 2-3 levels. Net change in the zone to my eye? None. So it was kind of fun to play through. I would like to see if there's more progress that could be made. But overall, it felt like an ephemeral thing that was over quickly and didn't actually matter in any way. I've seen something like that in the human zone - the trick is being able to hold the area long enough for 'team B' to progress further. It isn't easy in some cases.
ReplyDeleteWell, good to know there's something to make looting easier. I still want area looting, though. ;) I did see the spyglass scouts. I saw the symbols on the map that show where there are things to do (though one skill point marker seemed to be on some hill that I ran around without finding a way up). There is "enough" to do, but there still isn't any real flow to it. I'm accustomed to getting something like "take this message to the next quest hub, then they'll have stuff for you to do there" and I was getting "go here in a few levels, but for now wander around and pick someone to help out." There are some positive aspects to that, but the negative ones (which generate the feeling of aimlessness/cluelessness) struck me more this time around. In my particular example of chained dynamic events, I felt cheated out of the chance to "hold the area long enough" because I went off to help the new NPC that showed up. As I said, the camp was half destroyed by the time I got back to it. That is... poor timing in my book. Players shouldn't really be expected to sit around and guard a place like that when it's not immediately under assault and there's something else to do being offered, because that's boring. Maybe if the assault built up a little more slowly that would have given people more time to return from the bombing mission and get drawn into the defense. That's a relatively minor tweak on paper that would have made it much more enjoyable to me, but if you delay it too long you risk people seeing nothing going on and leaving before the attack even happens. And that's the hard part with these events: finding the sweet spot as far as pacing, timing, and difficulty. My human came across bandits trying to bomb water pipes and people trying to stop them. Two pipes (of, I think, four?) were destroyed by the time I got there, but we prevented any more until the event ended. So as I was getting ready to move on, a bandit poisoner runs up the hill to dump poison in the water. Some of us kill the bandit and I start to leave only to see another one running up the hill... And they seemed to keep coming, one at a time, just about far enough apart that we would gang up and chase one up the hill to kill it, then start to disperse in time for the next one. There was no "event" up for this on the map/quest log, but they kept coming. Frankly, I got tired of that after the first three or four and went on to do the story quest I was going to in the first place, but I have no idea what we were expected to do to stop those seemingly-endless bandits.
ReplyDeleteI'm not positive, but I think they increased the frequency of dynamic events, so people would be able to see them.
ReplyDeleteThat'd be interesting to know for sure. It's also possible that they're designed to shift frequency one way or the other based on current server population. That's something WoW did with mob respawns to help ensure players had enough things to kill for quests.
ReplyDelete