It was fun. It was a really great sequel to Guild Wars, had some interesting changes to combat, added a bit more intensity and control to combat, and was overall very fun.
It, however, was not really much of what they said it was.
First, I want to offer up my complaints about the skill system. 5 of your skills are determined by your weapons, and will never change beyond weapon swaps. Now, you can do some slick things, like (as a necromancer) equip a dagger, drop down some status effects, then switch to a scepter, drop poison and consume them for massive damage. But you can’t do some of the crazier things from GW, nor can you really invent your own combos. These are all set for you.
Your heal also seems pretty much set, though perhaps there exist a few options here. Your utility skills are the only place you can make major alterations, and there are only 4 of these. So they’ve given up a great deal of the customization of classes. Also, the attribute system has been…altered. In GW you had a set of attributes per class, so your character had attributes from two classes: your primary (along with the special attribute) and your secondary class. Each attribute improved skills associated with that attribute. That’s all gone now. Instead, you have 6 basic attributes, shared by all classes. They helpfully highlight attributes useful to your class, but all the attributes are standard RPG Strength, Stamina, Intelligence, etc. It’s a bit more difficult to determine what they effect, and they provide across the board bonuses. None of the narrow specialization of GW survived.
Now, the Event system that heralds a new dawn of quests? Let me describe what I quickly learned to do in order to level through the event system. I entered an area with an event. As soon as I did, text popped up, telling me a new event was available nearby. I brought up the map, which showed icons for completed and uncompleted events; finding the nearest uncompleted event, I skedaddled in that direction. Upon arrival, a box appeared in the upper right telling me what to do and how close to completion this task was. I would then do the thing, fill the completion bar, get my reward, and bring the map back up.
Yes, you could explore for events. But why would you, when they are shown on your map? You’ve just traded out the dreaded hunt for exclamation points with a hunt for icons on a map. Worse, GW2 never explains what you are supposed to do when you arrive. That box in the upper right? It says helpful things like “Help the farmer”. There were three different potential tasks I found, which included watering plants, feeding cows, and killing worms infesting the place (I know, sounds fun, right?), none of which was told to me up front. I had to go randomly click on shit till I found something to do. They didn’t even have a way to click on the box in the upper right to bring up some short description.
Events are basically an attempt to get rid of the quest journal. Quest text is a result of the quest journal, not a necessity of quests. However, they want events to reward your participation, so they need a way to tell you how close to completion the event is. Otherwise, I’m liable to never figure out when I might get rewarded, might leave early, or might never take part because I don’t know exactly what to do. That’s frustrating; it means the people in the know get to do what are effectively quests (since they involve completing an objective for a reward), while people not in the know have to go grind mobs. Ok, so we need a way to communicate this to the player; PQs in WAR had boxes in the top right, and those worked; we’ll put those in! Well, I’ll tell you what you’ve just done. You’ve made a public quest. It’s a quest with no quest text, which means it’s still un-contextualized. You’re just doing random BS because it’s there to be done and you get a reward for filling the completion bar.
To top it off, they added the further convenience of showing the location of events on the map.
This leads to a cluttered UI…and fucking quests. I was doing quests, except I wasn’t sure why or who they related to or what the fuck was going on. I was just doing shit and getting rewards for filling completion bars or killing big monsters. It was very noisy and very…uncoordinated.
I’ll buy and play this game…but I don’t know for how long. Really, it was just GW advanced, with less class specialization, but more responsive combat.
This is what passes for innovation these days.
Reshuffling deckchairs indeed.
Very interesting, I wonder if they are dumbing it down too much.
I find it ironic, per Scarybooster’s comment, that I wonder this as well – except that after watching the GDC presentation on Dynamic Events I’m not sure ArenaNet had much choice. As Colin stated (and whether he can be believed or not, I cannot say), when the events were not telegraphed in some sort of measurable way, people simply ignored them, looking for someone to give them a quest. In addition, completionists who wanted a checklist of things to do in an area became extremely frustrated and wanted to stop playing.
So here you have a situation where ANet wants to get rid of traditional quests, and one where players are actively not understanding how to play without traditional quests. So now the Scout system with “hearts” to fill, and small text boxes (because everyone hates reading quest text, or so they say) starts to look like NPC !s, and we wonder how far from quests Events truly are.
I would have been happy to explore the world without a “New Event Nearby” indicator, but I do want to eventually be able to share the world with more than a few other people exactly like myself. I can only hope that the game weans off this kind of behavior as the game goes on.
Question: did you try to level through the Personal Story at all? As I understood it, both the PS and the events are supposed to complement each other (and PvP as well, which of course was not available in the demo). Also, from what I could tell, rewards for taking part in events were given out upon completion even if you left an event mid-way – it would just pop up on the UI for collection.
I also found this (partially quoted here) comment on a Kill Ten Rats article by someone who also played the demo interesting (article at http://www.killtenrats.com/2010/09/09/guild-wars-2-completionist-hearts/):
“[snip]Events aren’t special because they don’t have a ! icon, but because of the way you do them or don’t do them, the way you get involved to them instead of “clicking accept”, the way you get stimulated to play with other people (instead of asking on what quest step they are or fighting for spawns), the way the rewards work, the way the world changes around you depending on the outcome and by much other ways…[snip]
“The thing I loved most is how I spontanious grouped (cluttered around) with people from the one event to the next. We didn’t knew what would happen, we didn’t knew where our adventure would take us to, we didn’t knew each other at all but started to take care of each other… we adventured together, more then I ever experienced in a formed group of any other MMO, and we weren’t even in a group[snip]“
[...] World of Discourse was at PAX and he has a very disheartening outlook on GW2. He says this about the Event system: ” You’ve just traded out the dreaded hunt for exclamation points with a hunt for icons on a map. Worse, GW2 never explains what you are supposed to do when you arrive.” [...]
@Randomessa: I didn’t play the personal story, beyond the tutorial bit, which has already been shown in vids at gametrailers. Instead, I just rolled with the what I’d do, were I coming at this as a newly purchased game I were playing. I rapidly fell into the pattern of viewing Events as quests, and began playing it as a standard MMO which wouldn’t tell me what I was supposed to do.
I agree that the process you described is probably pretty much exactly how events evolved into the form they exhibit now. As I’d predicted way back in the wayback time, they’re Public Quests with branching endings that can trigger other PQs. I just realized they hadn’t really resolved any of the issues of PQs.
I know the joy of PQs. Seriously, WAR did them first and did them reasonably well. The problem WAR had was it also had quests, which in turn meant people were incentivized to do things other than PQs, things that didn’t involve other people. Inevitably you ended up in places where no one at all was doing the PQ you wanted to do, and it was prohibitively tedious (or impossible, depending on the PQ) to actually complete the thing. The result was emptier and emptier PQs as time passed (leaving aside population declines). GW2 is forced to remove quests in order to have any shot at keeping enough people interested in Events to do them.
But then you rely on all the faults of PQs: the dependency on having other people around to help, the huge reliance on unknowns, and the difficulty of consistently explaining what the deal is. A good quest chain slowly leads a player through all the steps, explains the narrative context, and draws them in.
In response to the KTT comment, I agree. All that can be really fun. I had the exact same experience in WAR. But you also had the people who would want to group with you, regardless of the need to, whether you wanted the actual group or not. Even though it didn’t matter. You had the standard jerks you run into in any WoW random heroic (or random Halo game). It can be really neat when it works, but is heavily reliant on it working. There’s no back up in GW2, from what I’ve seen.
And if they don’t make the events heavily group reliant, then there’s every chance they give pre-made groups a huge advantage in being able to farm events. That’s a balance and content consumption issue. Even ignoring that, it still devolves into a single-player hunting the map for icons and running the quests…or you run into the problem where people don’t know what they should do to advance…so they grind monsters and get bored.
Honestly, there are options for improvement. First, remove final participation rewards. Really, you want events to be a flavor, where people can choose whether they want to do them or not. Incentivizing them to participate is simply a backdoor method of removing the choice; get rid of that. Instead, incentivize players to explore. Use the personal quest system to drive levelling…and use exploration of the world, participation in conflict of any kind, and community building to drive the collection of secondary advancement systems.
Guild Wars 1 actually had a good system in place with the skill searching system, though ultimately their implementation didn’t work terribly well. Pepper skills throughout the world in places, have those places move, or be discoverable by secondary skills. Then people will naturally move through events. Events will be the places where people “mine” for crafting goods or new items. Those, in turn, can be recycled back into the community by dedicated crafters and resellers. That way you incentivize actual exploration and participation, so the choice to take part in events or go on your way isn’t a choice between reward or not, but different rewards.
Then you can peel the various “game” elements out of the UI around events. Basically, people go out and take part in the world, regardless of what or where, and they get to find SOMETHING for it.
I’m a bit concerned that implementing your suggestions about “findable” skills would just make those skills “necessities” to be “ground” (grinded?), and especially if they are associated with certain events, that people will play certain events for the specific reward rather than just any reward.
I adored PQs as they were implemented in Warhammer…at first… but I know that as time went on, I stopped playing PQs so much for fun and started playing in order to complete influence sets, especially if I hadn’t been fortunate enough to have gotten in on a keep raid small enough to enable me to get a good drop from the Keep Lord. I hated that I had begun to do that, and that it was incentivized by the way PQs (and, in fact, RvR) were rewarded.
And if you make the skill rewards occasionally move locations in GW2, that further penalizes casual players who don’t have the time to chase down wherever the latest hot spot is, just as I was penalized for not being able to get the full Sovereign sets because I wasn’t able to be in on every keep raid.
Perhaps I’m misreading you, but what you describe doesn’t sound like I’d have much fun doing; that may be the goal, but from what I understand, ANet is trying to keep casual players very much in the loop.