(GW2) State of the Game
Time to look at the other big game at the moment...
Let's start off on some bright notes. I've hit level 80 with my rogue and begun obtaining exotic weapons and armor. We got in a dungeon run Sunday night, which I hadn't seen and was interesting in that it started off in a social setting (though got into more standard fare soon after). I managed to get through almost the entire personal story (I'll get back to that). Recent experience has taught me a few things I didn't know/realize. All good.
I still feel a bit squishy in the endgame zones, so I'm hoping to round out equipment with a little more toughness/vitality in addition to offense. Gearing up with endgame stuff can be expensive, though, and I'm finding it difficult to break even financially with all the waypoint hopping I've been doing lately.
In general, the game itself still has a habit of annoying me. It's still not very good at explaining things and while the heart-activity system is more organic than standard quest givers, I heard someone else recently sum up the aspect that bothered me about it with: "I run around and I'm not sure why I'm doing things other than becaue they appear in the corner of my screen."
Nearer the end of the game, it's remarkably more difficult to get around. Through most of the game, I've been able to run to waypoints, occasionally stealth-zerging to get some of the ones through more hostile territory. The last few zones, however, are dense with hostile mobs. Even with stealth, it's difficult to get anywhere without pulling one (or, more often, several). On top of that, many of the waypoints are often contested on and off. Unable to use them to get around, I've had to hoof it back and forth across full zones to just get to my personal story quests. Heart-quests also cease to exist, leaving all the action out in those areas to dynamic events and personal story (which are instanced anyway).
There also seems to be this design factor (be it choice or limitation) where anytime the designers want to make something more challenging, the answer seems to be to throw more mobs at the player. That technique, which was frequently used in the first game as well, usually ends up striking me as either boring or frustrating - somehow there's no middle ground where I feel "challenged" without being "overwhelmed." As such, even if I survive against bad odds, I feel relief that it's over, not accomplishment at having won. Maybe that's a personal issue, as I can't explain exactly why that is.
The personal story warrants its own topic. It starts off strong, with background choices made during chargen having a bearing on events and options along the way. Some of the divergences (and where they come back to overlap) are very obvious, but some are less so. Playing up through the Orders is fun (from what I've seen - I find it hard to imagine choosing another order and not getting to partner with Tybalt).
Claw Island is a turning point, though. We're given a major story event that... just isn't handled very well, in my opinion. And a few more lines of dialogue about a plan or something could have greatly improved the moment.
After that, there's a lot of Pact questline that I felt was lackluster. The "personal story" suddenly felt like it was more focused on NPC Trahearne, and the player suddenly becomes a sidekick. I've heard the argument "but if the player were in charge, it wouldn't make sense for him to run around on missions and that would be boring," but it doesn't hold much water with me because Trahearne frequently was on the mission himself. I can see value in going that route from a greater narrative standpoint, but it still took a lot out of it as a game experience for me. On top of that, previous choices of background and order don't get much more than occasional token references for most of the latter part of the storyline, when I wanted the Order of Whispers and it's philosophy to play some sort of role. There's also a branch based on an in-mission answer you give the Pale Tree in one quest - a choice that came out of nowhere for me and was... sort of forgetable, really.
There are some missions in there that feel better - usually the ones lacking Trahearne. There's a series of order-based missions toward the end that felt cool to me, but it's based on your choice of plans at the time, not which order you joined.
And then there's the final mission. The final mission which... I can't comment on because I haven't done it. I would have, but... it's a dungeon. ... ... Now, I can understand the impulse to take the personal story (the gathering of forces against Zhaitan) and the dungeon story (the trials and hopefully reunification of a group that failed to bring Zhaitan down previously) together in a showdown against said dragon. Narratively, that makes a good capstone to both stories. But again, it's not a very good decision for a game. A solo-player can go through the entire personal story and suddenly be roadblocked from completion. It's not necessarily that hard to get a group (though I don't know how had the dungeon is), but it seems wrong to me to abruptly force someone to shift play styles, especially right then. It would have been better to pick different dragons for the two plotlines or something so they didn't share an endpoint.
So... there's some good experiences there, but also some missteps that seem like obvious bad choices to me. Strange.
My guild experience is a little odd. For me, there's sort of two groups in the guild.
There's the "old guard" from GW, many of whom I didn't really connect with, but I saw them frequently. Only now, I'm seeing them in new names/aliases and have trouble keeping track of who was who. And since I don't see and talk to them all that often, I don't really have a good "mental file" on any of them save our guild leader(s).
Then there's a second group of players who are mostly "former" WoW players, people I see a lot on the MUCK, and more heavily invested in PVP/WVW play (which I haven't really done yet so can't comment on) and they're on virtually every day. That's a whole different can of worms because on any given night they might be encouraging me to join them in play there or on the MUCK, usually with their concentration split between the two in some fashion. And if we're not in sync, that's... sorta bad. So one person might really want to go stomp some players and another might really want to run an RP scene, and it's just not possible to please everyone. Aiee.
There's some overlap, for an occasional dungeon for instance, but the two groups are largely distinct in my mind.
I think this is all more... friendly/appealing to me than the guild dynamics of the previous game, but it's difficult to try to keep up with everyone sometimes.
Let's start off on some bright notes. I've hit level 80 with my rogue and begun obtaining exotic weapons and armor. We got in a dungeon run Sunday night, which I hadn't seen and was interesting in that it started off in a social setting (though got into more standard fare soon after). I managed to get through almost the entire personal story (I'll get back to that). Recent experience has taught me a few things I didn't know/realize. All good.
I still feel a bit squishy in the endgame zones, so I'm hoping to round out equipment with a little more toughness/vitality in addition to offense. Gearing up with endgame stuff can be expensive, though, and I'm finding it difficult to break even financially with all the waypoint hopping I've been doing lately.
In general, the game itself still has a habit of annoying me. It's still not very good at explaining things and while the heart-activity system is more organic than standard quest givers, I heard someone else recently sum up the aspect that bothered me about it with: "I run around and I'm not sure why I'm doing things other than becaue they appear in the corner of my screen."
Nearer the end of the game, it's remarkably more difficult to get around. Through most of the game, I've been able to run to waypoints, occasionally stealth-zerging to get some of the ones through more hostile territory. The last few zones, however, are dense with hostile mobs. Even with stealth, it's difficult to get anywhere without pulling one (or, more often, several). On top of that, many of the waypoints are often contested on and off. Unable to use them to get around, I've had to hoof it back and forth across full zones to just get to my personal story quests. Heart-quests also cease to exist, leaving all the action out in those areas to dynamic events and personal story (which are instanced anyway).
There also seems to be this design factor (be it choice or limitation) where anytime the designers want to make something more challenging, the answer seems to be to throw more mobs at the player. That technique, which was frequently used in the first game as well, usually ends up striking me as either boring or frustrating - somehow there's no middle ground where I feel "challenged" without being "overwhelmed." As such, even if I survive against bad odds, I feel relief that it's over, not accomplishment at having won. Maybe that's a personal issue, as I can't explain exactly why that is.
The personal story warrants its own topic. It starts off strong, with background choices made during chargen having a bearing on events and options along the way. Some of the divergences (and where they come back to overlap) are very obvious, but some are less so. Playing up through the Orders is fun (from what I've seen - I find it hard to imagine choosing another order and not getting to partner with Tybalt).
Claw Island is a turning point, though. We're given a major story event that... just isn't handled very well, in my opinion. And a few more lines of dialogue about a plan or something could have greatly improved the moment.
After that, there's a lot of Pact questline that I felt was lackluster. The "personal story" suddenly felt like it was more focused on NPC Trahearne, and the player suddenly becomes a sidekick. I've heard the argument "but if the player were in charge, it wouldn't make sense for him to run around on missions and that would be boring," but it doesn't hold much water with me because Trahearne frequently was on the mission himself. I can see value in going that route from a greater narrative standpoint, but it still took a lot out of it as a game experience for me. On top of that, previous choices of background and order don't get much more than occasional token references for most of the latter part of the storyline, when I wanted the Order of Whispers and it's philosophy to play some sort of role. There's also a branch based on an in-mission answer you give the Pale Tree in one quest - a choice that came out of nowhere for me and was... sort of forgetable, really.
There are some missions in there that feel better - usually the ones lacking Trahearne. There's a series of order-based missions toward the end that felt cool to me, but it's based on your choice of plans at the time, not which order you joined.
And then there's the final mission. The final mission which... I can't comment on because I haven't done it. I would have, but... it's a dungeon. ... ... Now, I can understand the impulse to take the personal story (the gathering of forces against Zhaitan) and the dungeon story (the trials and hopefully reunification of a group that failed to bring Zhaitan down previously) together in a showdown against said dragon. Narratively, that makes a good capstone to both stories. But again, it's not a very good decision for a game. A solo-player can go through the entire personal story and suddenly be roadblocked from completion. It's not necessarily that hard to get a group (though I don't know how had the dungeon is), but it seems wrong to me to abruptly force someone to shift play styles, especially right then. It would have been better to pick different dragons for the two plotlines or something so they didn't share an endpoint.
So... there's some good experiences there, but also some missteps that seem like obvious bad choices to me. Strange.
My guild experience is a little odd. For me, there's sort of two groups in the guild.
There's the "old guard" from GW, many of whom I didn't really connect with, but I saw them frequently. Only now, I'm seeing them in new names/aliases and have trouble keeping track of who was who. And since I don't see and talk to them all that often, I don't really have a good "mental file" on any of them save our guild leader(s).
Then there's a second group of players who are mostly "former" WoW players, people I see a lot on the MUCK, and more heavily invested in PVP/WVW play (which I haven't really done yet so can't comment on) and they're on virtually every day. That's a whole different can of worms because on any given night they might be encouraging me to join them in play there or on the MUCK, usually with their concentration split between the two in some fashion. And if we're not in sync, that's... sorta bad. So one person might really want to go stomp some players and another might really want to run an RP scene, and it's just not possible to please everyone. Aiee.
There's some overlap, for an occasional dungeon for instance, but the two groups are largely distinct in my mind.
I think this is all more... friendly/appealing to me than the guild dynamics of the previous game, but it's difficult to try to keep up with everyone sometimes.
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