Amusing GW2 review - light profanity

gawd, what a waste of limited resources.

They mean voice-work in game. There isn't built-in ventrillo/gamechat like LOTRO.

However, they WERE trying to put in a tone slider before launch, and I hope they add it. Some of my characters should have way higher/deeper voices than the voice actor.

It really isn't. I love the fact that the choices you make actually change the direction the story goes in and the specific scenes you see. I've got 2 charr and 2 norn characters and they've chosen different backstories and picked different directions during the cutscenes, and have radically different stories.

It would be nice if you could feel your choices made more of a difference in general questing in most MMOs. What if when you failed to rescue the Rikti negotiator hostage, it actually meant you went into the next mission totally blind? Or that you had to sneak in instead of engaging in any combat?

Personally, I like the *system* - just as an RPer, I don't care to have my backstory handed to my by the devs, and then to have that story in common with everyone else. Taken as entertainment though, it's highly enjoyable.

To be fair, every race get two sets of three story hooks. And if you think those are bad, they only occupy the first 16 (-ish) levels. So it's not like your secret regret of never joining a circus will overshadow everything for 80 levels.

Well said. Also, it's possible to be critical of certain aspects of the game while still liking the game. Like, elsewhere, I was mumbling about really wishing you could use crafting materials directly from your bank without retrieving it first (which is just a minor convenience, but it'd be nice), and immediately everyone jumped on me like I was the Antichrist. And lo! This weekend, that's exactly what they added. Now, if only they would fix auto-attack for engineer kits.

I don't think GW2 is fantastic, but it's pretty good and I have to give ArenaNet props for fixing, and adding, stuff at the pace they are. I just wish they'd be less secretive about what they are adding (why is every NPC suddenly carrying sticks of butter?? )

It is true that certain stats are more important than others in D2, but that isn't the issue. In Diablo 2, your stats are allocated by points you get when you level, while in D3 they are derrived almost entirely from your items. It is that combination of factors that makes it imperative that you stick to certain specific affixes on your equipment. If you don't, you will be absolutely slaughtered. While D2 wasn't perfect, it did at least allow you some ability to branch out.

FYI it turns out I was wrong about part of how weapon DPS works. It is random, but not as variable as I thought at first. The weapon damage calculations are incredibly convoluted. I don't remember being that overwhelmed by D2, and D2s weapons were actually somewhat interesting, where the only attractive thing about D3 weapons is this weapon gives 150 intelligence and the next one gives 160. You're looking for the same characteristics on every upgrade. At least Blizzard has acknoweldged this and plans (sort of) to fix it, although in this game I doubt it matters. The auction house basically took away a reason to play for any length of time, since the drop rates are horrendous and you will be eaten alive if you step foot into late game content without the "correct" gear.

Also Diablo 2 is like twelve years old. I expect Diablo 3 to at least improve on it. There were pre-teens alive when Diablo 2 was released who are now legally able to drink.



ADDENDUM: On a whim, I just decided to log in to scan over my equipment and kill a few enemies. An enemy with the tags Vampiric Mortar Reflects Damage Jailer made me change my mind quickly. If it hits me, it gets life back. If I hit it, I lose life. Meanwhile it throws fire bombs at me I'm supposed to dodge, but I can't dodge because it can hold me in place. I'm supposed to deal with this somehow, but haven't stacked up enough of the right stats via equipment. What a humorous experience that game is.

I'm sorry Fey, but I don't find it the least bit odd that a game that (by the devs own admission) has a community that is overwhelmingly PvE oriented hasn't mentioned PvP until someone who is actually interested in that playstyle shows up and mentions it.

<Looks knowingly at someones forum avatar>

Why it's because lobster tastes better smothered in melted butter Silly.

Well, let me compromise

I can agree to keeping the busywork of foraging and inventory management if it were the ENTIRETY of what passes for crafting. OK, fine, include foraging as a significantly cheaper alternative to buying the resources you need, but make crafting itself a game.

Do you remember my old "things to DO vs. things to EARN" argument from when Incarnates came out? Same idea here. What I don't like about MMOs is that they all too often supplement "doing" with "having." The entire game concept revolves around getting and having stuff and the "playing" part of the whole thing gets downgraded to "the obstacle between you and loot." MMOs are never as hostile to the player as when they make me resent playing them and turn themselves into a chore - a cost to pay for having loot.

When it comes to MMOs, my question is never what I can get out of a task. No, my question is two-fold: What must I do for the task and what can I do with the reward that I couldn't do without it? Do, do, do - that's what my issue comes down to. I want MMOs to become more about doing than about having, with the having being only a gateway to the doing. Right now, it's the other way around, and that just seems backwards to me.

Back to crafting: It's not that I dislike foraging and inventory management... I do, but it's not JUST about that. The problem is that there's nothing to crafting in most games BEYOND foraging and inventory management. There's not "game" to it. The "game" is in finding the resources. The actual crafting is nothing more than a button press. To me, that's as bad as reducing MMO combat to My Brute, where you plan your build, gather the gear, then let the computer fight it out while you sit back and watch a bar fill in. You know, like in a Civilisation game. To me, that would be dreadfully boring, and it's why I find crafting to be boring - because it doesn't require me to do anything in the actual process of crafting. I just toss my salvage onto an anvil and smash it with a hammer. Sure, stats come into play, but "stats" aren't "doing."

I don't know... MMOs of the past weren't what I'd call "games," in the same sense as I wouldn't call Second Life a game. They were worlds first, with some gameplay elements to them. I keep hoping that, as the genre moves forward, they'd start turning more and more into games, and it just doesn't seem to be happening as fast as I'd like. I guess why I find Guild Wars so disappointing is what was advertised was something completely different and innovative whereas what came out was a by-the-numbers MMO, just a very very good one. There are new ideas in the mix, sure, but they serve prop up an old model, rather than innovating on it.

To me, Guild Wars 2 is a WW2 battleship. It may be the biggest and the most powerful with the heaviest guns... But it's fighting in a changing battlefield where air power and carriers are becoming order of the day. It's trying to create a game to a very old model, and as good as it might make it (and what's there IS very good), it's still an old model. I firmly believe that in order for MMOs as a market to survive, they need to change on a fundamental level and look past the whole "crafting/gear/raids/pvp" framework. Guild Wars 2 strains the limits of its model, but it never really breaks model, which is what I find the most disappointing.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

It's probably just personal preference in how we arrange things. I bind anything that isn't an attack to a key and never click anything on the power trays unless it's something I won't need to use in combat. I played a Mercs/Traps/Leadership Mastermind, and I still didn't use more than three trays, but that's because I don't make much use of temporary powers. I HAVE temporary powers, but I keep them on hidden tabs that I flip to only when I need the powers.

I don't see why teleports have to induce bloat, however, and I REALLY don't see how Masterminds need more space than non-Masterminds. Unless you make lots of macros, but that's just... Ugh! I can't imagine playing this game by clicking on my power tray in combat. Maybe if your mouse aim is perfect, but mine is sloppy, so I'm always misclicking and dragging powers by accident, plus I almost always lose track of where my mouse pointer is, ESPECIALLY on a Mastermind.

Honestly, I "get" temporary powers, but what do you have that you have to use in battle all the time?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I frequently played on a laptop where I used a thumb pad instead of a mouse, and I personally prefer to click powers than use shortcuts. A bit of a masochist, I guess. But I guess that's why I never played melees much in CoH.

PvP isn't something I'm interested in. Not having a big emphasis on it is one of the reasons I stuck with City of Heroes.

Well, City of Heroes doesn't have "mines," and normal loot only drops to one person on a team when the drop table at all decides to drop it, but that doesn't work like this in the Incarnate system. When Incarnate Drops occur - Shards and Threads - each person has his own separate chance to drop one, and an enemy can drop a Shard or a Thread for every person on a team if they're all lucky enough.

I don't think you understand. "People" wouldn't want to have any story they come up with come with full voice overs and cutscenes. Browse the forums for a bit and you'll note a distinct lack of love for voice overs and cutscenes. As far as I'm concerned, voice overs in general are a mistake, and cutscenes are unnecessary. The reason City of Heroes manages to encompass so many concepts is doesn't design content that hinges on specific aspects of the player character. Even in the rare few instances that it does - such as Bane Spider Ruben and the player running the danger of being mind-controlled - the game does its best to explain it away. Ruben, for instance, relies on the logic that if you have enough sentience to speak with him in the first place, you have enough to be affected. It's weak, but it's an honest attempt so it gets a pass.

Voice overs and "personal storylines" are the HD graphics of storytelling. Have you noticed how FPS games have been getting shorter, simpler and showing increasing signs of reusing assets? It's because as graphics become more complex, it takes more and more work and time to make a game, thus it costs more and can do less with a regular development cycle. It's why some AAA games are said to need to sell millions of copies just to break even. I thing the Star Wars MMO needed to sell, like, two million copies to make back the costs or something like that. Same thing with voiceovers - the more you try to incorporate them, the more you limit your storytelling abilities because now stories cost more to make and they have to be very specific. You can't insert player names into voice-overs, after all.

To me, plain text is just fine, even in this day and age of digital excess. It gives developers (and players, as Architect Entertainment showed us) simple, cheap tools for content creation. When I can fill in a few text boxes, drop in some context variable and fiddle with mission creation a tad and manage to churn out content that's decent enough for others to praise me on, then to me, voice acting is nothing more than a boat anchor around a storyteller's neck. It's a cost you pay that ties your hands. When you can only make a few paths and they have to be linear to account for the voice acting, OF COURSE you'll force players into one of those few paths.

But you know what? I'd rather have a game with more freedom than one with voice-acting. Because - and this is a simple truth that not many seem to get - what I create will always be "better" than what a game provides me with, because what I create is mine and I will naturally value it more. It's tailored to my tastes and it has my "scent" on it. It's impossible for a game to give me exactly what I want because developers are not psychic, but if it gives me the tools to MAKE what I want and lets me fit my experience to what I think it should be, then that's better than any amount of production values.

I don't like Guild Wars 2 because it's not to my taste. But here's a shocker - neither is City of Heroes. Only in City of Heroes, I can tweak almost every aspect of my experience and MAKE it to my taste. Don't like the theme? I can make characters of a different theme. Don't like the story? I can make my own. Even if the game is old and ugly and clunky, it's a game that lets me make it what I want. And the simple fact is I don't like the look of any of the Guild Wars races, I don't like any of the base character stories, I don't like the setting and I don't like the theme. And I can't change any of that.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I sound like Boris the Russian, basically. It seems like most of the Slavic-language-speaking peoples basically speak English the same way, which is to say hard and without much of the flow. So, yeah, definitely not appropriate to a suave female bounty-hunter

Though, to be fair, I don't really need either voice acting or voice chat coming out of my character. Even when it's very good, as is the case of Saints Row The Third, it really limits my options. I mean, seriously, why would I want to make another character with the same voice? It would just feel weird, since I now have a face attached to the voice.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I know that, but it was related to your post, and is the reason for the difference. You want a big disconnect from your own story vs what you do in the world - I get that.

Which one is now?

The quoted parts you are replying to were not in response to you, but I can tell from the history in this thread how hard you seek out chances at cutting the game title down at every opportunity. There is nothing that you can't ignore in either title to continue believing your own personal story and be perfectly happy with it, so that point is moot. The act of insulting the title is so addicting, that all these pages in, after making the point perfectly clear multiple times, you seek out other conversations to interject insults into. At no point are you forced to PVP in GW2 just like in CoH. Some do find enjoyment in crafting the art of an argument and can even find that addictive.

No, you can't. You're simply blinded by your bias against me. Look at what I quoted. "I'm sure someone will post to say..." So I posted and said. I could have just made it a joke post by saying "I'm not interested in PvP" and left it at that, but I enjoy making even my joke posts have meaning. Please look up from your myopia for a moment and understand that I have nothing against Guild Wars 2 as a game, beyond that it's not my thing. If you can't discuss MMO concepts without taking it as an attack to the game, then please just stop responding to me. Mudslinging putdowns are unproductive because... What, exactly, do you think you're achieving by continually accusing me of whatever is convenient to you at the time? If you feel like you're never going to agree with what I'm saying, then simply start ignoring me. Because if you keep doing this, I'll ignore you, as what you're doing is completely pointless and goes nowhere every time. I try to argue MMO mechanics, you try to argue me. Pointless.

And what does "insulting the title" mean? The title of what? What insults are you even talking about? Can you quote me where I "injected insults?" What are you even talking about? Why must you turn a discussion into a personal vendetta against me?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I disagree with this to a point. "People" want effect storytelling that conveys their involvement and importance and personality in the events presented to them. Voice overs and cutscenes are features, like any other, to serve this purpose. They can be done well or poorly, or at the proper amount or to excess. They can absolutely be used nicely to help convey personality and depth in a character.

SWTOR isn't bad at it - because you don't just make a selection and there is a voice... your character has facial expression and body language. I find myself seeking to drive those actions, not just the voice choice. But, Bioware has always been good at that...

That said, their stand alone games are better at it than SWOTR. The ME series, for instance, often provides more selections than 'the standard three' which pushes the interaction tree more broadly and feels richer. The Dragon Age line offers different voice choices (in character creation), as I recall to provide personality. Now, I do think SWOTR pushed to include voice/cutscene interaction with every contact dialogue when they didn't need to, but in for a penny in for a pound I guess.

Yes, I agree with this too, in many situations. But that is, as with the voice overs, about effective tool use.

See, this I can't argue with, not with the heart of your argument. The reason I put "people" in quotes is because I know none of us can speak for all people. I just meant to say that voice overs and cutscenes themselves aren't the one-stop-shot solution to immersion, and very often what people want out of a game isn't for the game to cater to them, but rather for the game to not EXCLUDE them. This is a very important distinction to make.

Historically, one of the things I've been accused of the most is wanting the game to be written to suit my own stories and then being told it's impossible. That's not the point, nor was it ever. The game CAN'T cater to everybody. That's a scientific fact. It can try to cater to as many as possible by making either broadly-defined stories or including multiple choices, but it can never please everyone. That's why I feel the games need to stop trying to "cater" to people and simply leave character interpretation open for players to fill in the blanks.

More specifically - don't ask me to choose what I did when I got drunk and let me choose between losing a fight, passing out or losing an heirloom. Just don't bring it up. I know you then can't tell a story about it, but that's fine. I can tell that story, myself. You just need to give me the tools. Because if you try to define a story rigidly, then you're not really passing me through character CREATION, you're passing me through character SELECTION, and I really don't like any of the options. What if I wanted to play a Norn runt who has an inferiority complex and is really sensitive about his weight? What if I wanted to play an Asura bruiser who don't care 'bout them sciences and just wants to break with tradition and be a bounty hunter?

Who would do that? Well, I have a character like that - Leningrad. He started life as a high elf, living in a society of high culture, high society and high eyebrows, but he was dissatisfied with it. He was not high-born, so he could never attain a rank, and thus the man turned to more socialist ideas, trying to earn rights for the lower classes in a society with rigid hierarchy, shunning magic in favour of engineering and so on. Eventually, he left his society by building a time/space machine and translocating himself to the Soviet Union circa 1944. There, his socialist ideals found fertile ground, and even after the demise of communism, Leningrad still searches for a way to bring forth communist ideology without falling into the trap of a totalitarian society.

That's not what an elf does or how an elf behaves, and that's WHY I like the idea. Bit if a game had exactly three paths to choose per side, do you honestly think "communism" would be one of the paths elves get? That sort of thing. When I'm free to fill in the blanks, I can let my imagination go and make the ludicrous seem plausible. When I'm constraint to choices, I pick the ones I hate the least and never replay.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Some are being so defensive, they consider "I don't like it" or "the game is not for me because of these aspects" to be an insult.

I don't think you can objectively say that since you doing the exact opposite.

Interesting anecdote that applies here: this weekend I have a conversation with my best friend, again touching ground in this. After a while defending GW2 on every point I said that *I personally* didn’t care for it, he (who is a very objective individual) paused and admitted that he was being overly defensive of a game he did not make. He knows that me not caring for the game won’t kill the game, but he does feel a fanboism (his word not mine) urge to defend it tooth and nail. Amazing the kind of thing that can be resolved easily while you have a face to face conversation.

It would be great if more people in this thread accepted that not everyone will like GW2, that there are mechanics that will be loathed by many gamers, and that City of Heroes may be the most likely MMO community to find that type of player.

And yes, this is a City of Heroes forum, if some one tries to sell a game to us, we are likely to turn around and explain why we just wont buy it.

Coming from my pen & paper RPG background and the greater freedom it allows, I agree in principle with you. However I think we are a long, long way from computers being able to present us a completely open ended playground in a purpose driven story setting. Perhaps things like Second Life reach for this (given what I've read, since I haven't been in that or similar environments) but I don't think it has the objective/adversarial based story telling normal in a super hero or questing game.

edit to clarify: Not that we shouldn't aspire to such freedom, I just think that insisting on it too stringently could lead to more frustration than having realistically patient expectations.

I don't know. The first game had those things and people seemed to like it well enough, and it wound up in the second game. There was a lot of stuff in the first game that sucked and wasn't popular so they scrapped it. This got carried over. So I think even if some people don't like it, it's popular enough that it stayed.

I get the idea of not liking story forced on your character. But CoH did this constantly, and I think any MMO is going to. In GW it's that you're looking for your parents or you participated in the great hunt because you care about fame. In CoH it's that Arachnos broke you out of prison and then you freelanced for Lord Recluse. Sure, that makes sense for my evil necromancer from the middle ages. It also makes sense that my stealthy assassin yells out "I'm coming for you, Fat Tony!" when I enter a mission. Sure, sure.

The new way that stories have been written in CoH is even worse I think. Someone above said "pure text is better" but if you read it you end up having replies from your character, reactions, decisions CONSTANTLY. Your character cracks jokes when it's inappropriate for their character concept, they make decisions they'd never make, they say things or worry about things that they shouldn't. Really no medium is any better at telling you what your character is about when you have your own concept. Thus, all you can really do is ignore it.

That's why I stopped reading text and paying attention to the writing a long time ago.

The only difference is that people got used to ignoring the CoH lore. GW2 is new and the same people are upset that they think the story matters again, when they can ignore it just like how we ignore that our natural characters are awesome because they're incarnates (so much for being natural eh).

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

None at the moment. I'm finishing out City's run before I decide. From what I've heard, I'll probably like TSW or World of Tanks, so I may try those out, but that's a minimum of 3 months from now. I work retail, so I won't have much gaming time til January.

GW2 sounds like a perfectly good game, but one I'd only enjoy as a single player. I'm kind of weird in that I love crafting and smelling roses and gear grinding a lot! ...in single player. And not "Oh, I just ignore everyone around me" single player. I don't want another person on my game, at all. So I play Skyrim, Pokemon, and Runescape 2 to itch my grinding love (I'm not loyal to genres). For my MMOs, I want to blow things up and smashy smashy, with minimal grind time. WoT may be where I end up for a while because I can blow things up as my grinding time. TSW looks like it has some great concepts and stories, and the flexibility I'm looking for in character creation. Whether it delivers remains to be seen.

I'm rather confused by your comments, Jayb. You're basically telling someone to shut up. Why, though? Having a bad week?

But there is no need to get defensive about anything. Expressing an opinion isn't a crime or an insult...and you're replying to Sam, after all

Going off on someone for expressing an opinion usually forfeits being treated the same way and since a lot of the examples brought up to counter GW2 are of no interest to me, they don't matter. Pretty simple.