Have to admit it . . . GW2 may replace COH for me

Nah, you won't.

All this time I thought you were speaking from experience - so you are making all of your statements based on other sources of info? sigh...

My description never mentioned xp. Teleporting waypoints are available from anywhere in GW2 anyway.

I wish everyone would follow this advice.

I was talking about how you can't herd a bunch of lowlevels. I think we got tongue twister here.

I am speaking from experience. A friend of mine is a huge Guild Wars 2 fan, but doesn't own his own PC, so he installed it on my laptop. He plays the game when he comes over to visit, but that's a fairly rare occurrence due to his work schedule, say two or three times a week, if that. He has shared his full account info with me and we have it installed on my gaming rig, as well, so if I want to play the game, I can do so without actually buying it.

And I have. I played a Norn up to a decent level, I forget which. I also spend a lot of time hovering over my friend's head, because he doesn't speak English very well and sometimes gets confused by spacial orientation puzzles. I'll often have to parse the text of quests for him since the "objectives" don't always convey a complete idea of exactly what to do, and I've had to basically co-pilot for him looking for a path to several vista points, since the game makes some of those very roundabout to get. I'm an old PC gamer and Guild Wars uses a world traversing mechanic that's very similar to old Half-Life titles and the like, which my friend wasn't that into back in the day for lack of a computer. He's more an RPG/MMO gamer, basically.

I don't have Guild Wars 2 installed on the PC I'm at now, because right now I'm at work (the whole department is out of the office on a conference save for me and, like, two other people). At home, however, if I want to play Guild Wars 2, I can. And I have. What I played didn't interest me. Not only that, but even if I DON'T play Guild Wars, my friend is playing it on a screen that's within my field of view as I'm using my gaming rig, and involves me with it pretty much constantly, so I'm basically watching an uncut let's play where I can ask questions. I know as much about Guild Wars 2 as I do about Champions Online at this point, and I'm actually subscribed to Champions for a month (game's not worth touching for free, far as I'm concerned).

And yes, I would buy Guild Wars 2 just to be contrary, even if I wouldn't actually play it. You ought to know me well enough by now.

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 recall having arguments similar to this about City of Heroes. Why not make the game level-less? Why not make all enemies just use the GM code so no-one would ever be too high level or too low level? Wouldn't that be better?

Well... No. Not to the extent of what I want out of the game. To me, what matters in an RPG more than anything else in terms of gameplay is a sense of progression. I want to meet enemies I have no hope of defeating so that I can one day level up and defeat them. Then, some time later when I've grown even more powerful, I want to be able to go back to those enemies and find that they are no longer even worth my attention. I fought the Skulls. I fell to the Bone Daddies. Now that I'm level 50, yes, I do want to see them show up as trash mobs and patsies for the Malta Group. I do want to go back to Kings Row and wipe the floor with their faces and feel like there's nothing these guys could ever do to hurt me. For my level 50 hero who just got done cutting her way out of Mot's guts by hand to go to Kings Row and get seriously damaged by a Skull just kills any sense of progression I might have had.

Static enemy levels and static player levels help establish a "base" by which we compare ourselves to the world. Numbers are empty. They tell me nothing. It doesn't matter if I do 100, 1000 or 10 000 damage, what matters is how much health my enemies have and how hard I have to fight to bring them down. It's the ease or difficulty of fighting that tells me how far I've gone, and by forcibly level-scaling me, the game is effectively moving the goal posts. There's a very visceral, instinctive kind of feedback in this sort of static system that I just don't get when I can be level-scaled on a whim.

Sure, City of Heroes also does this on teams, but that only happens if I choose for it to happen.

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.

Come on now, Sam... if you want to pretend GW2 is a Steampunk Epic and not just another fantasy game, you needed to play an Asura! Playing a Norn is just going to make you feel like it's Skyrim Online!

I disagree for this reason: loot, skill unlocks, and traits do have a major impact on performance, even with being leveled down to the area you're in. It's much easier going back to a level 6 zone as a level 80 character with all the phat lewt, traits, and skills you have earned over time.

Yeah, GW2 is more skill based than any other mmo I've played. Basically, levels and professions don't matter, it's how you build and play the character, which makes for a better experience, especially for pvp.

This is where my complaint about "races" comes in. After seeing my friend play with his Asura character up to quite high level, I got the sense that that's what I should have done... But I didn't want to play a little fish guy. The character concept I had in mind required a very large, very heavy-set type of build, hence the Norn.

This is also where, I feel, one of City of Heroes' greatest strengths lay - in both dissociating the various pieces of concept from each other and in presenting an environment where shockingly different themes could coexist. Yes, your average D&D Party may have "disparate" characters in it, like barbarians fighting alongside high-class erudite wizards or assassins buddying up with paladins, but...

Consider an average chance team-up between City of Heroes characters. It might go something like this: A reptile from the stone age teams up with a computer nerd who got super powers from a game, a time-travelling high wizard from another land, a green space babe from Mars and a cop who moonlights as a vigilante, led by the avatar of an eldritch god here on holiday. How can this NOT be awesome?

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.

Oh, HECK yeah, see--that's what you call a great team-up. To say, "I'm gonna miss this place terribly," is such an understatement.

And I'm going to miss reading your posts, Samuel, a lot.

It's a shame you didn't like being a giant awesome heavy-set tiger monster. Charr > Asura when it comes to "steampunk" tech, they're much more magic-tech.

Also, they're reptiles, not fish!

Same difference *edit* This sounds mean. I just mean I don't know any better.

If I have to be honest, the Char are probably the biggest source of disappointment for me in Guild Wars 2, largely because character design is usually my biggest source of enjoyment in most games. By FAR the most fun I've had with my characters here in City of Heroes has been with the weird and wonderful, ambitious characters like my hive queen from another planet, my literal cow girl or that creature made up of toxins, radiation and reanimated body parts. I should LOVE the Char to bits! They're giant cat people with horns, tusks and mohawks, for cryin' out loud! I should be all over those things...

But they look like crap! The Asura re weird, sure, but at least they're expressive, and they emote like people would, but the Char? They have a zillion body and face sliders, and yet they all look the same to me. It may sound... Racist? Maybe, I don't know, but there's a reason for this. As a human being, my brain has an entire subsection devoted to perceiving and reading human faces. I can spot even the minutest differences and facial expressions. I didn't need to train this, I was born with it. I don't have nearly as advanced an apparatus in reading the expressions of cats, nor the body postures hulking hunchbacks.

A little secret of artistry that I picked up after eight years of experimenting with character designs is something Guild Wars 2 simply doesn't have: A good "weird" character is one who looks as little like a human as possible while being as much like a human as you can get away with. You want to break up the character's silhouette, face and body structure as much as you can, but still retain key body lines and vital facial features. To this day, I find Praxis to be one of my best designs, simple though it may be, because it works on just that principle - she looks like a person at first glance, until you notice there isn't a face behind the mask. It's just a mask over blackness.

To me, the trick to making weird characters isn't to make them completely unrecognisable and unsympathetic, so much as it is to weave into them a sense of cognitive dissonance. They need to look and feel both familiar and alien at the same time, because it's this conflict that makes them at once compelling, strange and interesting. Guild Wars NAILS this with the Silvari. Words cannot describe how happy I am with their mix of normalcy and weirdness. You can't see that from static screenshots. You need to see them move around, emote and look at you with those glowing eyes. But the rest? Fail. They look too weird for me to accept them, yet not weird enough to be interesting.

I get that this is just my personal opinion and not an objective fact. If you like the Char or the Asura, then I don't want to take away from that. It's just that to me, their design is not very good, and that keeps me from playing them. City of Heroes taught me a basic point about gaming in general - if I don't like the look of my player character, I can't play the game for any real stretch of 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.

That's a bummer. Me, I adore big cats, so the Charr are totally dreamy. As someone who is a huge fan of anamorphic animal characters, I'm overjoyed by them, especially that they run on all fours when they don't have weapons out, and have a hunched and non-human silhouette. To me, Tauren are the disappointment of wanting to play an animalistic race, and having them be basically humans in fursuits. Charr step at least one more step away from that, which makes me happy.

Honestly, I love your design on Praxis (she's gorgeous!!) but I find her far more creepy and unrelatable, personally, than I do Charr.

Sidenote: Honestly, the giant spider race in LOTRO's PvP made me so happy. A completely non-bipedal, non-human race to play! The wargs were ok too, I liked that they were wolves that NEVER turned into humans.

For me, if you want HUMANOID characters, you get that in every single solitary game out there. Finding places where that gets stretched is harder.

And yeah, to me the Sylvari are really close to perfect in being both alien and relatable. I'd have made every single character of mine a Sylvari if my RP partner would have been amenable to it, I just love them THAT much. But seriously, I personally <3 Charr and can't get into Asura at all, so I get where you're coming from. To me, if I can't find my character at least a little "attractive" (not sexually, but in where you like the way they look and find it pleasing) then I can't get into it. It's why I almost never play male characters, I hate the way male toons look most of the time. That's why I had an Asura for about 8 levels and then rerolled another Sylvari. Couldn't do it.

Though personally, I think if you're going on a scale of actual attractiveness, Norn females are the top. Hotcha!

Agreed, although I have to admit I prefer the Norn over the human females because they carry just that little bit more weight on them that I like on my real world women...

Yes indeedy.

I was actually a bit disappointed with the female Norn. I think it's fantastic that they've actually dared to go outside the 'sexy norm' with the female models for Charr and Asura. You have no idea how rare that is in a fantasy setting. Or maybe you do. Anyway... the norn women, however, just look like super models. Super models with one heck of a six-pack granted, but I find them way too pretty. The male norn actually look like the giant-kin they are supposed to be. The females look like pretty humans that got stretched to Norn heights (and had a 'muscle skin tone' added to them when people complained).

I know sometime during the development cycle, the Sylvari was re-designed from being 'sexy green elves' to the attractive, but ultimately alien, plant creatures we have today. I think the Norn women could have used a bit of that make-over magic too.

Wait, are you admitting to being a troll just to irritate people here?

I actually had an argument regarding anthropomorphic characters somewhat recently, and it got bogged down in semantics, which is why I didn't bring up the term. But where you appreciate deviating from the human norm considerably, I find that to be demotivating, at least for my enjoyment. I just don't believe "true monsters" are good enough at emoting, and the reason for this is my brain is programmed to read human emotions through the human apparatus for delivering them. When you break the mould too much, you end up with something that's just not comprehensible enough for me.

Sure, in a Pixar movie, that might work, because you have a whole team of talented animators that perfect body language and a plot to depict this, but in a game, the characters have to speak for themselves, and if they don't represent humans enough, I just find them uncanny. I'm a great lover of cats, myself, and I have a knack for telling the expressions of actual house cats (yes, they have a few), but - and maybe this is racist/specist of me to say, but I really can't "see" them as people. I don't really consider them lesser beings. Hell, I loved my cats when they were still alive. But I like to see my characters as someone I can sit down and have a conversation with. Limiting, yes, but that's just what I like.

A snarling, toothy snout and a constant slouch just doesn't lend itself to that. Yes, their designs are great as "other people," but just not as "my characters," if that makes sense. I can see them as part of a broader world, but not as something I'd like to work with. They don't have the right balance of monstrosity and humanity, because honestly... Even in the weirdest of my characters, it's the aspect of humanity I'm ultimately after. I just enjoy finding that in the weirdest of places.

Well, to be fair, that's the aim of her design Praxis is a villain, a higher-reality god that sees life as meaningless and enough power to blink-out all of existence, were she not trapped by the very creators of all things. The Avatar of Praxis, which is what you see in the pic, is less of a person and more of an... Idol, so to speak. It's an incomprehensible alien consciousness' facsimile of a person. I made her with the express intention to be uncanny, sort of like sticking a porcelain mask on a slime monster.

She's probably not the perfect example, so let's try again. Let's try Stardiver. She's an automaton from the beginning of time, made by a rogue creator who wanted to prove that life was not "special" and could be emulated by an intricate using of the natural laws they'd created. She is not a "robot" per se, but more a living statue, composed of dense, solid matter involved in complex reaction. She's as far from human as you can get... Yet I still took the time to make Stardiver a "she" and make her just that bit more relatable. She has no face, her figure is mostly masked by complexity and her whole frame is bathed in auras (pity Champions can't do that), yet she still looks like a person.

Or how about 13, the experimental robot who developed sentience and a sense of self? The Praetorian Clockwork gear is AWESOME, in the sense that it's clearly robotic, with the exposed spine and all, but at the same time very shapely and "person-looking." I'm a big fan of the Battle Angel Alita design of a person who has just the right features of "a person," but just enough "wrong" with them to where they're clearly not, and it's through this lens that I view the Guild Wars races. The Silvari are on-the-nose exact, but the others... Not so much. And the humans are actually too plain.

I don't actually have a problem with spider creatures, but with a few caveats in much the same vein. For instance, I really like Smite's Arachne, and not because she's basically a cheesecake. I like that they've managed to combine a spider and a person in such a way as to almost make you forget about the weirdness... Right up until you remember, and THAT'S what makes her work. Plus, I love her walking animation

Agreed. I was disappointed to find that they had access to basically three models - skinny, normal and fat. And I don't mean "big" - the last model basically has giant hips and junk in the trunk, so to speak, but still has tiny narrow shoulders and relatively small arms. I don't get why there are so few games that give us choices in this regard. Even Champions Online really drops the ball because while you may be able to make a broad-shouldered woman with arms like pipes, you can't control her waist so she ends up looking like this. No, I don't like it, but I've had to learn to live with it.

Lineage II, amusingly enough, is the only game that "got" this that's an MMO. Saints Row: The Third kind of did, as well. But most games simply don't dare go there. Take Darksiders, for instance. This is a game of weird anatomy. The "Old Ones" are a race of mutant musclemen wider than they are tall, with shoulders so big they come up over their heads and hands several times the size of their heads. Darksiders 2 gives us Old One women and they look like... Well, check out a comparison.

So yes, the Norn are, ultimately, a disappointment to me. They do make an effort to portray a more realistic build for women, but they only go as far as "not skinny underwear models," which while admirable, doesn't really go where I think a race of giants should. Point is, they don't look like giants. You can only tell they're supposed to be big when you run across other people, but they themselves don't look big. In fact, they look kind of skinny.

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.

That was exactly my gripe with my first female Norn alt. She looks so normal (and all of Norn lands are scaled to their sizes) that I just plain forgot she was supposed to be huge. Her body shape certainly doesn't betray it. Then I went to the human area to play with a friend, and realized I was, literally, twice as tall as his warrior. It was... a very jarring moment. Particular because the body model doesn't look gigantic.

These days, my female Norn are shortstuff. Which still makes them abominably tall, but it's less weird. If it wasn't for their absolutely fantastic cultural gear, I don't think I could bring myself to play a Norn.

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.

That's why I say Guild Wars 2's approach of "no need to team, just be in the same area as other people." On the one hand, it's convenient for those who want to team for the mechanical benefits but don't want any of the social aspects of it, but by trusting social interaction pretty much entirely on a machine means you train people to delegate this, and so fall out of the habit of communicating with words.

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.

Female player here... yeah, I do. You have NO IDEA how refreshed I was to have 2/5 of the races have NO BREASTS at all (I still don't know why Sylvari have them, except that the Pale Tree is essentially churning out human simulacra made of plants) and 90% of the armor models are shared between males and females... which means, while you CAN dress your females skimpy, there's lots of options not to... and you can dress your males skimpy (or not!) as you like, as well! Whee!

Except they're not giant-kin. I've never seen that claimed anywhere. They appear to be "large humans" according to the official wiki, thought cross-breeding isn't viable. There's not a single word about giants in it. Not to mention, every actual GIANT I've come across (not the Jotan, but the guys that are city-tall) are proportioned exactly like very large humans.

Well, diff'rent strokes and all that. To me, there's PLENTY of opportunity in every game out there to enjoy human characters. The fact that Anet put THREE out of FIVE races in the game with some sort of inhumanity in varying degrees is, to me, breathtaking and happymaking. I was never happy with the level of "unhuman" I could achieve with COH's character creator - over half my characters had some level of animalistic or fairy-ness, and all of them were still, in the end, completely people-shaped. (with funky, deformed legs, because the artists screwed up the joints on the animal legs SO BADLY)

I'm really happy with all the races. They're all very unique, all have their own signature silhouette, all have very distinct racial features. The humans are extremely pretty, the Norns are a big freakishly superheroic, and the Sylvari are weirdly uncanny-valley pretty, Charr are big and bestial and Asura are small and creepy.


Haha, no. That's not what I meant. THAT is my spider-queen from LOTRO. She's a SPIDER. Not a cheesecake Drider :P My spiders don't need boobs or faces, thank you!!


Because they're not a race of giants, and giants are human-proportioned anyway.

As a female player, JUST giving us player models that aren't size 0 is amazingly refreshing. And I like the fact they don't look big in their own places. They shouldn't.

There's an amazing sense of scale in GW2 that I never really felt in COH. 90% of my COH characters are tiny. Like, as small as I could make them. The WORLD never felt too big for them, though occasionally in a crowd I'd have moments of "lol, where's my character? I'm like knee-high on everyone here!"

When I go into human lands on my Charr or Norn, there's a definite sense of SCALE. The world isn't sized for them. They feel huuuuuge. Asura feel perfectly suited for their own zone - bring them to Hoelbrak, and you FEEL freaking TINY! When my Charr ranger walks around and I see a human next to my lynx, I always have a moment of doubletake. That lynx looks TINY next to my Charr, but she's actually quite large - I just never ever see her next to other characters.

I loved that so much!!

Man, all the cultural gear is lovely, except the humans, which is kinda goofy. My Sylvari bought a set of the leafy culture gear ASAP.

No, "you" don't. Maybe YOU personally do, but don't generalize. Lots of us are loving the "levelless" feel to the game.

That is literally the craziest thing I've ever read. Like, I can't get my mind around it. Did you ever PLAY old school EQ??? GW2 is light-years away from that - some swarming undead don't even scratch the surface of it!!

Because there's no need to group out in the world. And as has been pointed out in lots of threads, most recently and eloquently by Arcanaville, most people DON'T WANT to group up with strangers. They want to play the game at their own pace, or with their own friends.

Personally, I found the game extremely social. I RP in /say wherever I'm at, and I now have a friendlist full of RPers, some of whom I've grouped up with for questing simply so we can continue to RP together. It led to an couple in-character guild invite, so now when I want to do dungeons, I have 2 guilds of people that I enjoy spending time with that I can group up with.

I love - LOVE!!! - the fact that the game in no way forces me to group up with strangers in order to complete content (which COH became very bad about when all it added were trials, trials, trials!) but it also doesn't penalize me for not wanting to group up. In previous open-world MMOs, if you don't group up with the other people who are converging on the same quest mob/item, then it becomes a dirty tooth-and-nail fight to tag the mob first, and then NO ONE helps you with it. They stand there and hope you die because you tagged it before them. Now I can converge on a quest mob alongside other people, no one tags it, we all kill it, we all get rewarded and we all go our separate ways.

It's a pretty great balance between allowing you to play at your own pace and at the same time letting you be a contributing part of the world.

Well, to be fair? The humans did it to them first. Ascalon and all that area belongs to the charr before the alien invaders showed up and pushed them out of it. Humans just came out of nowhere, took their land and built a big wall to keep them out. That wasn't "your" starting area :P

Except that doesn't tend to be the case in actual practice. While, yes, people's zone-wide cries of wanting to group up to do overworld tasks tends to go unanswered, people are constantly forming PUGs to do hard tasks and dungeons. I see it all the time - so much so that I usually tune Map chat out completely unless I'm actively looking for a group. There's no dungeon finder, there's no way to "automatically" form a team without interaction, it's the same as COH (minus the DFB group finder instaporter :P) - you call for a PUG and you form it. Or you go in-guild. Like every other game.

Personally, the leveless-ness of the game has lent me a freedom that I'd previously only felt in COH. Because the game is about exploration and crafting and finding things at your own pace, I don't feel any pressure to play any particular character, or to level. In other MMOs, there's been a feeling that I NEED to get at least 1 character to max level asap so I can participate in all the content with my guild or friend group. And playing alts always felt like taking time away from improving my main.

With COH and with GW2, I can pay more attention to "who do I want to be today?" I can enjoy every character equally, and take time to RP them and let them experience the world, because there's no rush. If one of my friends needs help in Metrica Province, I can go help them on ANY character. Yes, the dungeons are level-restricted, but I don't feel in a rush to start doing those either, since they're tweaking rewards right now and I'm not in any burning need to get the dungeon sets for cosmetics just yet. My green gear is fine all the way up through the level 80 dungeons. I can get rare gear if I want it. Right now, my Sylvari is in a full set of rares, transmuted to look like my level 35 cultural gear, so my loot in no way affects my look.

It gives me a happy!