Amusing GW2 review - light profanity

Yeah I tend to hate doing multi-quotes - such a pain over several pages of replies. I deleted the image to help for now.

No problem.

There's nothing at all wrong with third-person platformers. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was a massively successful game pretty much on the strength of its climbing and jumping puzzles.

That said, I don't think Guild Wars used those puzzles in the best way. What I mean by this if that'll be a major part of the game - and it looks like it is - I'd have expected there to be special mechanics involved with it. At the very least, I'd have expected mantling of some sort. The completely repugnant Unreal 2 had it. Commander Keen had it. It just makes climbing and jumping puzzles a tad more forgiving and a tad less annoying.

Instead, what the game got was something a little too reminiscent of 90s FPS games. What I mean by this is... OK, a friend of mine was trying to climb a number of tall things, and every time he failed to find a way up, I'd quickly point to a thin ledge he could walk on, or a protruding rock he could step on, or any of the other number of things I picked up from games like Sin, the old Half-Life, the various Quake games and so on. Because your collision box is a BOX, you can stand on a ledge a micron wide, because any space is space enough for your collision box to technically stand "on." Sure, City of Heroes does have this to certain extent, but there are no jumping puzzles in the game built around that.

To me, platforming in Guild Wars 2 - and I tried a lot of it - is kind of like plaforming in Rune, in the sense that it works just fine and is perfectly serviceable, but seems to operate more on glitchy terrain and very stiff controls than actual climbing mechanics. It makes me feel I'm exploiting terrain and climbing over background details, rather than using an intended way to go up. It reminds me, in actual fact, of Half-Life and climbing walls with sticky mines. That was fun.

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.

They're about as major a part of the game as street sweeping is in COH. Which is to say, not very and eminently avoidable if you want to (and I do.) The only ones that are even mildly required are the ones which go up to vistas, which 1. are not very hard or puzzly, and 2. only necessary if you're the kind of person who NEEDS 100% completion in every map. (I do, QQ)

But that is not new. That existed in GW1.

Guild Wars are the first MMO that I have played, and I have like it. Thing is that if you are not into PVP once that you finish all quests/missions there were not much to do. And I did that. Finished everything solo, finished everything in groups, made character on every possible class got bored and went to find new game after just 1 year of playing. (I even did some PvP - and enjoyed Halloween event costume brawl). New game that I have found was CoH. Never got bored and never left.
I am currently mad at NCsoft, so won't be buying GW2 soon, but if game survive test of time I might give it a try in 2-3 years (but only if it is possible to skip jumping platforms part). I have never joined game right at the start anyway (GW were 3 years old and CoH 4 years old - next one I am thinking of joining is 5 years old ).

- Il Numero Uno (The Number One)

OK, time to bring up my stock response to this, it seems.

You weren't replying to me but I replied to your post. So? There's no rule that says I can only reply to people who are replying to me. I see someone who has said something which seems relevant to something else I want to say, so I quote it and go from there. If it feels like what I said didn't cover what you were trying to say, then it probably wasn't. Just because I quoted your post doesn't mean I was specifically replying to you. Unless I address you by name, I'm usually not talking to any person in particular. I'm making a point and using what people say as jumping-on point.

You've made it a point to insult me, repeatedly now, and for what? What do you gain out of this? I have no idea what you're even asking me. "Which game have you been talking about?" What? What does this have to do with the price of tea in China? Could you please stop it with the personal attacks and actually address at least one of the points I'm making?

If you have problems with my arguments, address them, offer counter-arguments and I will politely indulge you in an argument. I can't promise I'll agree, but I can promise I'll explain why either way. This shouldn't be as hard as you're making it. If your problem is with me personally, then you can feel free to go to hell, because this is the last personal attack I'm going to respond to. If you can't police your own behaviour enough to behave, then I want nothing to do with you.

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 still wish you could use items directly from your storage when crafting, personally. Having to take them out just seems like an unnecessary intermediary step. Nevertheless, that's a very good system which I welcome heartily. One of my BIGGEST problem with inventory management nonsense busy work is... Well, the inventory management. I have to carry too much crafting crap if I want to craft, and it always clutters up my inventory. It's like the original Diablo having money occupy an inventory slot and limiting each stack to 5000. I ended up spraying money piles all over Tristram just so I had room in my backpack for the vendor trash I was picking up.

Guild Wars solves this problem entirely by more or less eliminating clutter from the ground up. Yes, gear still clutters up, that's to be expected. It's how gear-driven games are. But if I don't have to carry all the flowers and sticks of wood pig penises and whatever else random assortment of trinkets I need to craft with, then that's one BIG problem solved.

As I said, Guild Wars is innovative on the technical level, and quite a bit so. The only reason I have a problem with it is I wish it channelled its innovation towards reworking age-old MMO concepts entirely, rather than just giving them better support systems. Because, at the end of the day, that games is a very polished, very refined classic EverQuest style MMO. It has all the basics, they just work a lot better than they ever have. The trouble is that I just never liked the basics to begin with. It's a "green eggs and ham" thing - as appealing as you make them - and they are appealing - I still don't like green eggs and ham.

Mind you, I'm not saying other RPGs are "better." The only reason I like Tera over Guild Wars 2 is because I plain like the combat in Tera more, plus the animations are slower and more fluent. Plus, I like combat rooting and will always chafe at games that remove it. It makes things feel too "floaty." But the exact same problems I have with Guild Wars 2, I have with Tera ten-fold because it's still a Korean Grindfest MMO.

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.

You can! They fixed that on... Saturday, I think. The only time you have to take mats out is for discovering new recipes through experimentation, because you have to move things in/out of the crafting table to see which ones work together. And they're working on making THAT something you can do out of the bank as well.

Honestly, I agree that there's a lot of systems I wish they entirely reworked. But I see the game as an important step forward in getting out of the WOW-lockstep the genre's been mired in for the past 7 years and going to a more innovative place again.

Wait... you LIKE combat rooting?? O.O

Oh Sam, sometimes I just dunno about you!!

Well... That's actually very good news. These guys are doing logical things and implementing QOL changes on the fast track. Most development studios don't do that. Well, now that makes me even less gung-ho with the whole idea that ArenaNet are somehow guilty by association and must be tanked. These guys do good work. Even if I don't like their product, I can appreciate their eye for quality.

Someone described the game as I've heard the Queen Mary being compared to the Normandie: "evolutionary vs. revolutionary." When City of Heroes first launched, it was a pretty revolutionary game, with side-kicking, instances, and later global chat and so on. That's what made it a great game. Guild Wars 2 seems to me bore evolutionary, taking flawed designs and making them better, taking bad designs and making them good. That's what makes it a great game, as well, just in a different way.

For as much as people troll me about it, I don't hate Guild Wars 2. What I said - and what I stand by - is that it has nothing which interests me, because it's simply not the kind of game I want to play. That's not a dig against the game, it's a simple matter of preference and an explanation why I'm not buying the game despite not being gung-ho about the whole boycott thing.

I do, and for a few reasons. Rooting enforces a certain element of strategy and judgement on combat, because if you miss, the game asks you to commit more than just the cost of the attack. You waste time and opportunity, as well as leaving yourself vulnerable. Moreover, it means that attack animations can be better because they can involve the whole body, rather than just the torso. Champions tries to skirt around this by having your combat movement just be you sliding around in full-body attack animation, but that just looks bad. And I lost track of how many times I fired my guns sideways of where my character was pointing them.

A large reason for why I don't like Guild Wars 2 is I just don't like how combat looks. Attacks are fast and spastic and there's too much strafing around. Now, obviously, trading punches isn't realistic in terms of combat, but at least the animations themselves can look good. But seeing people circle-strafing while swinging swords just kickbans me out of my sense of immersion.

Tera, for instance, has combat rooting. On everything. Even firing a bow. Yes, it's more restrictive and slower-paced, but I actually like slow-paced battles that give me time to think. They let me time my blocks, plan my counter-attacks and, most importantly, they let me dodge out of the way of an attack and beat on an enemy as he's recovering from his animation.

To me, rooting combat just looks and feels better. I don't need ultimate bunny-hopping freedom, and I'm not a fan of fast-flying shooters like Unreal or Tribes. I prefer slower, more restrictive combat systems that don't rely fast, repetitive actions because it's both too fast for me to see and too fast for me to actually do it. Again, try World of Tanks and you'll see what I mean about "slow, plodding combat."

But yes, I like combat rooting, and highly dislike games that think removing it makes the game better. If you HAVE to have running attacks, go the route of Oni and have separate attacks for when you're running.

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.

What? Where?

Good news: the default camera in GW2 is third person.

Why does it have to be pig penises? Why not pig vaginas? Those'd only take up half an inventory spot because you can store something inside one.

And I though, by the end of the story, Sam-I-am ended up getting us to like green eggs and ham. Bad analogy?



*hands Jayb the Ironik Ballbuster Boot*

IBB for short...

Gonna need more than a week for these bad boys.

clang clang

clang clang

Ironik does not care. Ironik thinks that jumping in 1st or 3rd person (my bad for not being explicit) games is moronic and he hates it.

You may like it, that's fine. I don't. There has never, ever, been a game I've tried it in where I've enjoyed it. It's a colossally pustulant PITA. Jumping. Sucks.

That's all I'm saying.

And just to be clear, this is my personal opinion that I own for myself while speaking OF no one else's attitude or belief on this matter nor usurping the godvoice and pretending to speak FOR anyone else.

...oh my....

This isn't a George Takei moment. Don't be using his line inappropriately

As I mentioned further up thread, they fixed that issue.

The inventory management is pretty neat. And the shared bank is nice. I really wish each character also had their own individual bank though. I collect all kinds of stuff, like armour with neat skins I may transmute later, my lucky pistol, whatever. And that stuff... first, if I put it in my shared bank, it becomes a confusing mess (and it's already filled with those stupid tonics ). If I keep it in my backpack it takes up a lot of space, and I will probably end up selling it by accident at some point. This wasn't an issue in GW1 because it didn't have much in the ways of personalized gear. It is an issue in GW2 though. To me at least.

Finally, a pet peeve of mine that has no relation to the above: Vendor Trash. Grey, "useless" drops that servers no purpose but to be annoying and clog up your inventory 'till you have a chance to sell it to a vendor (usually the baker in Thunder Bluff for some reason ). In TOR, your companion could sell all useless loot automatically while you were out questing, meaning that Bioware acknowledged that trash items are dumb, but still felt it necessary to include it. It baffles me beyond words that GW2, the self-styled MMO Revolution, hasn't done anything more clever than this.

Bad analogy, partially. I'm aware of how the story ends, I just feel very true to the "I will not eat them on a boat, in a coat or with a goat!" part... Though that may have been an episode of Johnny Bravo I'm quoting. Basically, certain things I simply will not like regardless of how well they're presented because certain things I simply don't like.

To each his own. I rather enjoy platforming games, both 2D and 3D, provided they have decent controls and decent camera. I like the old Tomb Raider series for its, um... "Realistic?" climbing physics, and I like games like Gex: Enter the Geko for its more arcade-style jumping puzzles. I even enjoy some of the climbing challenges in Guild Wars 2, I just think more care could have been taken to make these more than just abusing collision detection.

This I agree with, and it's a pet peeve of mine not just for Guild Wars 2, but because it's becoming a general MMO trend. I don't like "shared" storage, at least not as a default option, because I like to see my various characters as different people who often have nothing to do with each other and sometimes even hate each other's guts. To me, this is the meta-game encroaching on my sense of immersion, because it's the idea that... Well, it's me - the player - crafting and baking and inventory-managing and I'm pulling MY resources together.

I don't like that. I prefer to see each of my characters as an individual person with his own "stuff" that he has to earn or find on his own. Sure, I don't mind sharing resources when I need them, I just don't want this to be the default stance. I HATED that Diablo 3 does this, with the chest being cross-character. It just ends up making me feel like a player in control of a "toon," rather than being immersed in the environment. That, along with:

Vendor trash... Those are things I really wish MMOs would move past already. They are too focused on the meta-game stuff that strips the player of his online identity and make-pretend story and reduces him to just that - a player. I, for one, play games as escapism, to get away from ordinary life and feel like someone I'm not, but when a game basically puts an elbow through the fourth wall and says "OK, now for your character to proceed, YOU have to do such and such," I'm just yanked out of the experience.

To me, it seems like MMOs often forget the other half of their genre name - RPG. Too much of what they do is busywork for the PLAYER that doesn't always make sense for the character to do, or when it does, it constitutes just busywork. I don't know if this is because "community" has such a high value in your typical MMO, but far too many of them ruin any sort of immersion or RP by revolving around the meta-game aspects of the experience.

That, actually, is also why I dislike "quests" in most MMOs - they rarely have any immersion or story significance. They're just meta-game tasks to keep people occupied, and they don't have to be. You CAN wrap stories around them, City of Heroes has proven this repeatedly. The simple task of putting a cape on your character got a three-part story to justify it, that drew on multiple source of long-term lore. To me, MMOs these days are focusing too much on mechanics and too little on presentation. I mean, think about it for a moment: You've watched Guild Wars 2 trailers. We all have. But what did they advertise?

*Realm vs. Realm PvP
*"Fight to survive" mechanics
*Weapons skills and weapon-switching
*Customizable classes
*Open-world missions

OK, that's all fine and good, but... What are we fighting for? Where does the game take place? What is the political system? What is the history of the region? All of these things ARE actually in the game, but you wouldn't know the developers even considered them because they don't show up in any of the trailers, at least not that I've seen. Guild Wars 2 has a good story from what I've seen. It's just a shame it was never marketed AS a good story, and the reason for this is it was marketed for being an MMO far more than it should have.

It's the old Crime Craft problem. "Our game has PvP and crafting and an auction house and loot and raids." Um, great, but what is your game ABOUT? "Err... PvP and crafting and an auction house and loot and raids." Yes, but is it fantasy or sci-fi or... "Does it matter? PvP and crafting and an auction house and loot and raids!" A game should be more than the sum of its systems. And though Guild Wars 2 IS more than that, you wouldn't know that from how it was promoted, and that's probably my least favourite side of the MMO market right now. It's all mechanics and no artistry, and when there IS artistry, it's set aside to talk about mechanics some more. If there's enough time, maybe we can talk about how pretty the forest looks.

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 agree. That's why people look at it and see just another fantasy MMO. Because that's what it is. As I said, evolutionary, not revolutionary. The trappings are still there, they just try to make them less annoying.

On the other hand, if you innovate too much, you can sink yourself. Really innovative MMOs don't seem to stick around as long.

As an amusing anecdote, I never actually shared influence between my characters in CoH. Struggling a bit in the low levels, and eventually reaching a point where you're self-sufficient is, to me, a not insignificant portion of the game play.

Being able to afford anything right out the gate cheapens the experience for me. Even if using TOs 'till level 22 can suck on occasion.

You can, but you can't use the mouse wheel to do it, you have to go into the options menu.