GW2 Impressions Part 3
Well, I've reached level 34 or so with my thief, and I feel I have a pretty good sense of the game overall with a couple exceptions. I have not done any PVP, and may not. I have not run any dungeons, though I have heard second-hand that the first one (Ascalonian Catacombs) is both difficult and time-consuming, making it sound like something I'd rant to tackle with a full group of guild members and an evening to spare. I've done relatively little crafting. And if there's anything else to the "end game" then I'm not there yet. With that out of the way...
The game is good, but it's not everything it was hyped to be. Pretty much as I expected.
The absolute best, funnest point for me is this: when running around in the world, you can seemlessly join in anything going on and be rewarded for it. Every MMORPG should try to adapt this concept right now.
Unfortunately, the key word there is "adapt." This works so well partly because of the zone-specific down-leveling. A level 80 character stomping around a starting zone can help, but doesn't trivialize an event like they would is almost any other MMO I can point at. Without that scaling, the system doesn't really work so well, but designers still should look at this and try to take pointers from this because it really does make the game more enjoyable.
At the other end of things, the worst part of my experience has probably been the uneven flow of progression.
If you find several active events in a row, you can go up a level or two without problem. If you don't, however, you can find yourself stumbling around between "heart" areas two or three levels above you, begging for more XP. A certain amount of event-based XP seems to be expected, placing your leveling experience at the mercy of a random number generator. Zone-hopping can help give things to do that aren't too difficult, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem. And yet when I have seen several events in a row, they're often repeats, which makes me less inclined to participate.
I've had a similar experience with crafting skills, where I so quickly leveled out of the starting areas that I was gathering second-tier materials (iron, for instance) long before I have advanced my crafting to that point (still needs copper). So the choice is to either go back and specifically gather resources in lower-level zones or to let crafting fall by the wayside.
Graphics are generally good, as I've said before. The style is more realistic and detailed than WoW in most cases, but it just doesn't move as well. There are some awesome little touches (like the weight-shifting on a slope, which seems area geometry-based), but they are not consistently implimented.
Sound is fine. I'm not a connoisseur of game audio, so I can't say much other than it's pleasant most of the time in the background without being overwhelming.
Underwater combat is implimented a little better than I've seen before. It still sort of reminds me of Vashj'ir, though - functional and a little neat, but feeling like an afterthought that doesn't fully mesh with the rest of the game.
Extensive use of "bundle" skills (that temporarily replace your normal action bar) has both ups and downs.
Everything feels so fast. Too fast a lot of the time. Maybe I'm not enough of a twitch player? Buffs are either always-on powers (that can usually be temporarily downed for a brief bonus) or last for a few seconds. I want my thief to be able to sneak around, but with the right set of skills (and probably not moving much), I'd be hard-pressed to spend even close to ten seconds in stealth. I really like the thief sword skill that evades, then strikes, but it is rare that an enemy has a move so telegraphed that it can actually be avoided deliberately - the same can be said of active dodges.
Melee, especially, feels frantic. And while that may be good in some ways, in any large fight it's really hard to tell what's going on. Especially with all the flashy lights and area effect, and there's really no time to consider what a field effect is doing and how to best combo with it - most last for just a few seconds. I really like the idea of combos, but they're tricky and fleeting, which isn't very satisfying. Plus it's hard to tell what's a friendly field and what's not when there's a lot going on. Red circles seem to be bad, but that seems more indicative of cave-ins and artillery than boss bursts, which might down a person in one hit.
I'm not particularly enamored with the Downed system. It isn't terrible, but it's not all that good either. I may have been able to fight back and rally by myself all of once. Usually getting back up is going to require help. The fact that every can assist downed players is nice, I do like that aspect. But I found that I ended up in this state mostly while outclassed. I either pulled a couple higher-level enemies that I wasn't going to be able to defeat, or got caught by an event boss' ability (some of which were so bad as to down everyone in melee range, which wasn't much fun). In either case, being able to teleport a short distance (severely limited by the low camera angle) is basically no help. Being able to stealth for a few seconds is pretty useless as well unless there's someone else to take up attention, and that's on a long cooldown. The basic attack is rarely enough and the self-heal is easily interrupted. Overall, being downed pretty much sucks. It works okay as a mild buffer before "death" and gives other people a chance to help, but I'd probably be happier with no downed state and less insta-gibbing on the part of event bosses.
The transmutation stones may be the best implimentation of appearance/stat-combining I've seen yet, but it'd be nice if they were a bit more available in-game (rather than as store purchases). Combining the items feels a little cleaner than SWTOR's item mods or WoW's transmogrification, though they all work out about the same. On the other hand, I haven't seen much variety in gear models, though that might just be due to not having worked through all the content.
Waypoint travel is a mixed bag. Relatively convenient, a mild money-sink, but reduces the sense of space in the world. Overall a net positive in my book, though I still wish the game had mounts and flight.
Connected to that is the zone-instancing. While the zones aren't small, hitting an instance portal upon leaving Divinity's Reach (for instance) does break the atmosphere for me in a way that having to take a ship from Stormwind doesn't. But I suppose allowances have to be made somewhere for technological limitations.
The guild setup has some good things. Being able to have the same guild exist across multiple servers is nice. Being able to be a member of multiple guilds, selecting the one you're active in, is nice. Being able to choose the build order of guild upgrades is nice.
On the other hand, having guild upgrades (and the influence earned to buy them) be server-specific is a little disorienting. There don't seem to be any guild halls. A large number of the guild upgrades seem to be temporary boosts to XP/gathering/PVP stats/etc., which is disappointing to me (though I guess it gives something to spend points on after permanent stuff like shared storage has been unlocked).
The personal story quests are done pretty well, progressing a step every three levels or so, and the branching is more "real" than seen in most other games. I doubt there's a lot of variety in changes to things, but there are choices that will send you to one or another location, completely missing the other (unless you accompany someone else through their version of it). So at least there's the repercussion of having to choose your path. SWTOR did that too in many cases, though it didn't feel quite as divergent there most of the time.
The in-game mail introducing the Destiny's Edge plot (the story of a pan-racial guild made up of several major story characters) was somewhat mystifying, but once I reached the point of seeing the beginning of it where one member tries to bring the group back together was pretty well-done. Actually, it was clinched before the meeting, seeing a trio of children playing as "Destiny's Edge versus one of the dragons." That scene gave the public views on the members, and what happened when they broke up, and offered some neat opportunity to read between the lines.
My thief has also embarked on the path of working for the Order of Whispers. I'm only a few parts into this chain, but it's quite well done so far. And I absolutely love my "mentor" here, Tybalt Leftpaw. The charr has a great sense of humor and is just a fun character to be around. Memorable and awesome - probably my favorite character so far. I wish I could take him as a companion for non-story adventuring, too.
The game is good, but it's not everything it was hyped to be. Pretty much as I expected.
The absolute best, funnest point for me is this: when running around in the world, you can seemlessly join in anything going on and be rewarded for it. Every MMORPG should try to adapt this concept right now.
Unfortunately, the key word there is "adapt." This works so well partly because of the zone-specific down-leveling. A level 80 character stomping around a starting zone can help, but doesn't trivialize an event like they would is almost any other MMO I can point at. Without that scaling, the system doesn't really work so well, but designers still should look at this and try to take pointers from this because it really does make the game more enjoyable.
At the other end of things, the worst part of my experience has probably been the uneven flow of progression.
If you find several active events in a row, you can go up a level or two without problem. If you don't, however, you can find yourself stumbling around between "heart" areas two or three levels above you, begging for more XP. A certain amount of event-based XP seems to be expected, placing your leveling experience at the mercy of a random number generator. Zone-hopping can help give things to do that aren't too difficult, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem. And yet when I have seen several events in a row, they're often repeats, which makes me less inclined to participate.
I've had a similar experience with crafting skills, where I so quickly leveled out of the starting areas that I was gathering second-tier materials (iron, for instance) long before I have advanced my crafting to that point (still needs copper). So the choice is to either go back and specifically gather resources in lower-level zones or to let crafting fall by the wayside.
Graphics are generally good, as I've said before. The style is more realistic and detailed than WoW in most cases, but it just doesn't move as well. There are some awesome little touches (like the weight-shifting on a slope, which seems area geometry-based), but they are not consistently implimented.
Sound is fine. I'm not a connoisseur of game audio, so I can't say much other than it's pleasant most of the time in the background without being overwhelming.
Underwater combat is implimented a little better than I've seen before. It still sort of reminds me of Vashj'ir, though - functional and a little neat, but feeling like an afterthought that doesn't fully mesh with the rest of the game.
Extensive use of "bundle" skills (that temporarily replace your normal action bar) has both ups and downs.
Everything feels so fast. Too fast a lot of the time. Maybe I'm not enough of a twitch player? Buffs are either always-on powers (that can usually be temporarily downed for a brief bonus) or last for a few seconds. I want my thief to be able to sneak around, but with the right set of skills (and probably not moving much), I'd be hard-pressed to spend even close to ten seconds in stealth. I really like the thief sword skill that evades, then strikes, but it is rare that an enemy has a move so telegraphed that it can actually be avoided deliberately - the same can be said of active dodges.
Melee, especially, feels frantic. And while that may be good in some ways, in any large fight it's really hard to tell what's going on. Especially with all the flashy lights and area effect, and there's really no time to consider what a field effect is doing and how to best combo with it - most last for just a few seconds. I really like the idea of combos, but they're tricky and fleeting, which isn't very satisfying. Plus it's hard to tell what's a friendly field and what's not when there's a lot going on. Red circles seem to be bad, but that seems more indicative of cave-ins and artillery than boss bursts, which might down a person in one hit.
I'm not particularly enamored with the Downed system. It isn't terrible, but it's not all that good either. I may have been able to fight back and rally by myself all of once. Usually getting back up is going to require help. The fact that every can assist downed players is nice, I do like that aspect. But I found that I ended up in this state mostly while outclassed. I either pulled a couple higher-level enemies that I wasn't going to be able to defeat, or got caught by an event boss' ability (some of which were so bad as to down everyone in melee range, which wasn't much fun). In either case, being able to teleport a short distance (severely limited by the low camera angle) is basically no help. Being able to stealth for a few seconds is pretty useless as well unless there's someone else to take up attention, and that's on a long cooldown. The basic attack is rarely enough and the self-heal is easily interrupted. Overall, being downed pretty much sucks. It works okay as a mild buffer before "death" and gives other people a chance to help, but I'd probably be happier with no downed state and less insta-gibbing on the part of event bosses.
The transmutation stones may be the best implimentation of appearance/stat-combining I've seen yet, but it'd be nice if they were a bit more available in-game (rather than as store purchases). Combining the items feels a little cleaner than SWTOR's item mods or WoW's transmogrification, though they all work out about the same. On the other hand, I haven't seen much variety in gear models, though that might just be due to not having worked through all the content.
Waypoint travel is a mixed bag. Relatively convenient, a mild money-sink, but reduces the sense of space in the world. Overall a net positive in my book, though I still wish the game had mounts and flight.
Connected to that is the zone-instancing. While the zones aren't small, hitting an instance portal upon leaving Divinity's Reach (for instance) does break the atmosphere for me in a way that having to take a ship from Stormwind doesn't. But I suppose allowances have to be made somewhere for technological limitations.
The guild setup has some good things. Being able to have the same guild exist across multiple servers is nice. Being able to be a member of multiple guilds, selecting the one you're active in, is nice. Being able to choose the build order of guild upgrades is nice.
On the other hand, having guild upgrades (and the influence earned to buy them) be server-specific is a little disorienting. There don't seem to be any guild halls. A large number of the guild upgrades seem to be temporary boosts to XP/gathering/PVP stats/etc., which is disappointing to me (though I guess it gives something to spend points on after permanent stuff like shared storage has been unlocked).
The personal story quests are done pretty well, progressing a step every three levels or so, and the branching is more "real" than seen in most other games. I doubt there's a lot of variety in changes to things, but there are choices that will send you to one or another location, completely missing the other (unless you accompany someone else through their version of it). So at least there's the repercussion of having to choose your path. SWTOR did that too in many cases, though it didn't feel quite as divergent there most of the time.
The in-game mail introducing the Destiny's Edge plot (the story of a pan-racial guild made up of several major story characters) was somewhat mystifying, but once I reached the point of seeing the beginning of it where one member tries to bring the group back together was pretty well-done. Actually, it was clinched before the meeting, seeing a trio of children playing as "Destiny's Edge versus one of the dragons." That scene gave the public views on the members, and what happened when they broke up, and offered some neat opportunity to read between the lines.
My thief has also embarked on the path of working for the Order of Whispers. I'm only a few parts into this chain, but it's quite well done so far. And I absolutely love my "mentor" here, Tybalt Leftpaw. The charr has a great sense of humor and is just a fun character to be around. Memorable and awesome - probably my favorite character so far. I wish I could take him as a companion for non-story adventuring, too.
I fear any character named "Tybalt" is doomed.
ReplyDeleteThink it's reference to Romeo and Juliet's Tybalt? Or, like that character, a reference to Tybalt the cat in Renard the Fox? Not that I've read the latter, and the former is far, far from fresh in my mind so I can't really draw comparisons...
ReplyDelete