So far it's definitely been a... different, experience. Good points and bad points, naturally.
So, the questing system. In this first zone at low level there's not much to the events. Every zone has "hearts" which act as your normal questing experience, except they are added to your quest list automatically as you approach. So far it's just kill, loot, pick up, nothing particularly interesting. In addition you have the dynamic event system which is the random things that pop up from time to time that chain and swing like a pendulum, at one end winning, at the other losing. They've been pretty sparse so far, and are generally not dissimilar to the heart system, just presented in a different way.
My main problem with the heart quests is that I don't feel any emotional connection to what I'm doing. So you approach a farm, it pops up to say "help by doing x, y and z". Once the bar is full it's ticked off as complete. Ok goody, but what was the reason for doing that? There doesn't seem to be a overall story arc for the zone to guide you through. As it is, I have no idea why the world is as it is or why things are attacking. There is something still to be said about WoW's quests - you get guided through, and if you care to read the text, you know why you're doing it and what the story of the NPCs is. Early on in WoW, yes it's just a random farmer in trouble, with no relation to the greater story, but that bit of text engages you (or at least me). You can go up to NPCs and they'll give you some flavour info, but if you need to talk to them to experience that then it makes the whole automatic nature of acquiring the quests pointless. I'm worried they've just put the entire story into the personal story quest line, and made everything in the open world meaningless random events. The caveat to all this is that it could all be different in the later zones and stronger narrative may be present. I mean, it'd be heard to believe that there is no story as you advance through the world. However, this is what they've provided for testing so this what I shall gain my impressions from.
So once you've filled in a heart you're not meant to repeat it, although you can if you wish. As I said, the dynamic events, the real key feature were a bit sparse. Once you complete one, you're meant to stick around and wait to see what happens next, although it's not immediately obvious, and I frequently ran straight off. A couple of times I encountered the same stage, and was not particulary interested in repeating it. One of the big selling points is that because these things are always going on, and that you get leveled down, you simply need to venture into the world and play. Again though I feel there's something to be said about static quests. So you've just logged in, and you want to do some events, there's no way to tell which are active before you actually get near and if you've done that part before you'll likely skip it and wonder where to plod off to next, which is a bit of a chore. At least with static quests you know where you're up to and where to go.
I'm not defending the old style or bashing the new style, but I need to stress that in my opinion there's is nothing revolutionary here, it's just different. I liked questing in WoW, and if I had the choice of which to do I'd choose WoW based on the low level beginner zones in GW. My gripe with WoW, as is most people's, is that once you've done all the quests in a zone that's it, never to go back, but the actual questing was just fine.
Last thing to note in terms of leveling is I've found myself under leveled for most of it so far, and enemies 1-2 levels harder are quite hard, especially for melee. This is probably due to not doing or not being presented with enough dynamic events.
I wrote far more than I meant to on that (mostly ranting I fear) so I'll leave other thoughts for another post.
Wars Of Guild 2
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Sheriff Fatman
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Re: Wars Of Guild 2
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Home_server#Home_worldDog Pants wrote:Oh! I thought of a couple of questions:
Does it have the same server system as GW? I.e., you can swap between shards at will rather than being stuck on one server?
You will be able jump between servers but you'll only get realm bonuses (from the WvWvW) from your home server. Another nifty thing is you can join as many guilds as you want.
Re: Wars Of Guild 2
I've had a much nicer experience today. I've moved on the higher and less populated part of the first zone and I've found dynamic events a lot more. I guess at the start there was so many people that they ended soon after they began. I've also changed my mentality of playing a beta. I was trying to rush most things just to get an overall flavour of the game, but after all, MMORPGs required a large time investment to get comfortable with the game, its mechanics etc. So basically I've slowed right down, taken the time to talk to NPCs and explore everything and I've felt more reason for being out in the world killing and maiming my way to a happier life.
I've seen many threads on the quite fanboy-ish site GW2G completing hating on the game, depsite glowing reports from the media going back a year or so, and everyone gushing at every video. Personally I didn't raise my expectations and went in with an open mind and knew it might be hard to adjust to. Even so my first impressions weren't great, but after a bit of time I'm picking it up and starting to see it's excellent qualities. When you start a new game like this you need to give it time, it's hard be instantly gratified in the first couple of hours when you only know how to do a fraction of the things possible, from questing to combat to crafting to PvP to socialising.
Slowing down has also made me appreciate the sights and sounds a lot more. I was of course going to comment that the graphics are beautiful etc, but I really have to stress that it's one of the most breathtaking games I've played. The aesthetic is just gorgeous, the vistas amazing (I've stood on hills and just panned around a few times now taking in the sights (make sure to turn depth of field off (a pointless graphical feature in games (unless is raises FPS? (c-c-c-c-combo!))))) and the attention to detail is high. The sound is equally great, from the music to effects to ambiance.
Combat next, again something which my experiences and impressions have changed about over the last few hours.
I've seen many threads on the quite fanboy-ish site GW2G completing hating on the game, depsite glowing reports from the media going back a year or so, and everyone gushing at every video. Personally I didn't raise my expectations and went in with an open mind and knew it might be hard to adjust to. Even so my first impressions weren't great, but after a bit of time I'm picking it up and starting to see it's excellent qualities. When you start a new game like this you need to give it time, it's hard be instantly gratified in the first couple of hours when you only know how to do a fraction of the things possible, from questing to combat to crafting to PvP to socialising.
Slowing down has also made me appreciate the sights and sounds a lot more. I was of course going to comment that the graphics are beautiful etc, but I really have to stress that it's one of the most breathtaking games I've played. The aesthetic is just gorgeous, the vistas amazing (I've stood on hills and just panned around a few times now taking in the sights (make sure to turn depth of field off (a pointless graphical feature in games (unless is raises FPS? (c-c-c-c-combo!))))) and the attention to detail is high. The sound is equally great, from the music to effects to ambiance.
Combat next, again something which my experiences and impressions have changed about over the last few hours.
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FatherJack
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Re: Wars Of Guild 2
When is this out, roughly? I want to buy it, but don't want to spend this month's game money on something I can't play for ages. I suppose they don't take the money until it's released, but not knowing when that is could be tricky.
Re: Wars Of Guild 2
2012 is the only confirmation they've given. I'm thinking Jul-Sept but that's only speculation.
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Sheriff Fatman
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Re: Wars Of Guild 2
They've not even dropped any hints at a solid release date yet. Best guesses are sometime towards the end of June, but it's all speculative. If you pre-purchase, you pay full price up front. That gets you into the beta weekends until it is released and a three day head start. Pre-order is the normal deal, as with other games, but that doesn't give guaranteed beta access and only a one day head start.
/gah, b3tan to it.
/gah, b3tan to it.
Re: Wars Of Guild 2
Part 3 of my impressions that probably no one is reading. Combat! I only played a thief for the duration. It's the class I've had my eye on most and I wanted to see how it played.
There was a bit of lag at all times, so it took at least a second to activate skills which was a shame as it prevent proper understanding of the feel of combat. Even with that though I think I'd still have the opinion that playing melee is damn hard to start with. The combat is designed to be action orientated, which is great and it feels good, but with the ability to dodge comes the ability of monsters to hit very hard. Most monsters have a large damage ability with they charge up, these are the ones you need to dodge, you can't dodge every attack but even normal attacks can hit hard, meaning you're often low on health. If you're dodging out of melee range, and always worrying about healing, you're also not DPSing. A challenge from time to time is great, but having to work and focus so hard even for a basic trash mob was wearing thin.
This brings up the issue to melee vs ranged. Currently there are very few negative to playing ranged. Monsters don't have normal aggro, they act on a variety of things, but the most basic is proximity. As ranged then all you have to do is DPS and not worry about much else. Even if you're on your own as ranged, kiting is very easy in most cases, with cripples and the fact that monsters stop to charge up attacks. A common rebuttal from the ranged camp is that yes, melee is harder, but you just need to play ranged if the need arises, but this, while perhaps accurate, is a poor response. Why should playing melee be so much harder? I was always aware that every class could play both ranged and melee, but was never under the impression that someone who perfers melee would have to spend half the time playing at ranged. I dislike ranged combat most of the time, I don't want to play it unless it gives a benefit for a small amount of time. Having the option for every class to play both, is of course, great. They either need to make melee easier to play at a basic level while questings etc, or make ranged have an equal reason to play melee, by punishing them for staying ranged. The former is by far the best option. I did get better, and probably will continue to do so (I intend to stick with Thief), but there's definately an imbalance there, both at early stages and for the... less than competant player.
As I said before I found myself underleveled quite a lot, which made playing in melee even harder. I struggled to kill an ettin, a brute horse melee creature, in melee when it was two levels above. It took ages are required a lot of healing and running away. However I killed two of them three levels higher using my pistols by just running in circles with the occasional dodge.
I had a fear from watching videos that movement felt a bit floaty and slidey, and it is, but it's not so bad as to put me off. Movement is precise like in WoW, but the animations make it feel not so. The animations are excellent though, with fluidity and subtleties. One thing I love is when standing on a slope, your characters feet will adjust in height to stand on the approriate part of the landscape. Delightful. You also slide down some slopes if the angle is right.
In regards to the actual mechanics and skill types/numbers, it's solid, nothing amazing. You get 5 skills depending on your weapon, but some are situational so it can get a bit repetitive. In addtion to the heal you get three utilities and an elite but they take some time to unlock so I can't comment much. They have realitvely long cooldowns so you can maybe use one per fight. You don't need to target a monsters to attack, and it's not perfected yet. If you don't target anything you will intelligently pick something, but it can also switch your target for you if you look around too much which can be annoying. When I was using my pistols on one tough mini boss, he used a skill that reflected damage, but I could find no way to turn off my auto attack quickly, I had to spin around to face the opposite way.
Another area I have a slight problem with is readability, something which WoW nailed down perfectly. In GW2, what the devs are trying to achieve is less looking at the UI and more looking at the field. There is no target of target and no casting bars. Unfortunately as every monster has unique animations and spell graphics, so when you first encounter a new monster it's hard to tell what it's doing. In WoW if your target started to heal, you'd know about it. Currently the spell effects are way over the top making it hard to tell what's going on but I hear they are addressing that. The other problem is just the general feel of knowing what you are casting, how long till you can use your next ability (not including cooldowns), and what buffs and debuffs you have. There are screen edge effects but I don't like them, they have buff and debuff icons but they're tiny and and all the debuffs are the same red colour. Your health globe is at the bottom and the enemies is at the top which makes it hard to tell at a glance how a fight is going. Your character calls out if low on health and the screen will flash red but again, not liking that. I think they've taken the "not looking at UI" a bit too far.
In closing I have some reservations still, but I think I would still buy it if I had tried the beta for free. I know many of you are fine with dabbling in lots of MMOs but I like to go the long haul with one I truely love, WoW being the only example so far. I was a bit worried to find that I often logged off after a short amount of time, or couldn't be bothered to log in for ages, even if I had nothing else to do. I know that no matter how good the game might be, I will never have those feelings of playing WoW for the first time again, but I was dissappointed to find myself not caring much at all about playing. I think though that that was a combination of it being a throw away beta and the combat grinding me down playing solo. However, near the end of the weekend I decided to go the next zone even though I was well under leveled. I suddenly saw a brand new unexplored area with a few people running around at a higher level with fancy looking gear and I briefly got the twinge to journeying into the unknown again. If nothing else is just a beautiful world to explore. I hope when they game is live and I'm actually playing with others properly that those feelings will fully embrace me again, even if not to the hieght of WoW.
Oh yeah, PvP, didn't do a lot, but looked awesome.
(I'm on IE and boy do I miss Chrome's built in spell checking. I can't be bothered to read back and correct at the moment, so there!)
There was a bit of lag at all times, so it took at least a second to activate skills which was a shame as it prevent proper understanding of the feel of combat. Even with that though I think I'd still have the opinion that playing melee is damn hard to start with. The combat is designed to be action orientated, which is great and it feels good, but with the ability to dodge comes the ability of monsters to hit very hard. Most monsters have a large damage ability with they charge up, these are the ones you need to dodge, you can't dodge every attack but even normal attacks can hit hard, meaning you're often low on health. If you're dodging out of melee range, and always worrying about healing, you're also not DPSing. A challenge from time to time is great, but having to work and focus so hard even for a basic trash mob was wearing thin.
This brings up the issue to melee vs ranged. Currently there are very few negative to playing ranged. Monsters don't have normal aggro, they act on a variety of things, but the most basic is proximity. As ranged then all you have to do is DPS and not worry about much else. Even if you're on your own as ranged, kiting is very easy in most cases, with cripples and the fact that monsters stop to charge up attacks. A common rebuttal from the ranged camp is that yes, melee is harder, but you just need to play ranged if the need arises, but this, while perhaps accurate, is a poor response. Why should playing melee be so much harder? I was always aware that every class could play both ranged and melee, but was never under the impression that someone who perfers melee would have to spend half the time playing at ranged. I dislike ranged combat most of the time, I don't want to play it unless it gives a benefit for a small amount of time. Having the option for every class to play both, is of course, great. They either need to make melee easier to play at a basic level while questings etc, or make ranged have an equal reason to play melee, by punishing them for staying ranged. The former is by far the best option. I did get better, and probably will continue to do so (I intend to stick with Thief), but there's definately an imbalance there, both at early stages and for the... less than competant player.
As I said before I found myself underleveled quite a lot, which made playing in melee even harder. I struggled to kill an ettin, a brute horse melee creature, in melee when it was two levels above. It took ages are required a lot of healing and running away. However I killed two of them three levels higher using my pistols by just running in circles with the occasional dodge.
I had a fear from watching videos that movement felt a bit floaty and slidey, and it is, but it's not so bad as to put me off. Movement is precise like in WoW, but the animations make it feel not so. The animations are excellent though, with fluidity and subtleties. One thing I love is when standing on a slope, your characters feet will adjust in height to stand on the approriate part of the landscape. Delightful. You also slide down some slopes if the angle is right.
In regards to the actual mechanics and skill types/numbers, it's solid, nothing amazing. You get 5 skills depending on your weapon, but some are situational so it can get a bit repetitive. In addtion to the heal you get three utilities and an elite but they take some time to unlock so I can't comment much. They have realitvely long cooldowns so you can maybe use one per fight. You don't need to target a monsters to attack, and it's not perfected yet. If you don't target anything you will intelligently pick something, but it can also switch your target for you if you look around too much which can be annoying. When I was using my pistols on one tough mini boss, he used a skill that reflected damage, but I could find no way to turn off my auto attack quickly, I had to spin around to face the opposite way.
Another area I have a slight problem with is readability, something which WoW nailed down perfectly. In GW2, what the devs are trying to achieve is less looking at the UI and more looking at the field. There is no target of target and no casting bars. Unfortunately as every monster has unique animations and spell graphics, so when you first encounter a new monster it's hard to tell what it's doing. In WoW if your target started to heal, you'd know about it. Currently the spell effects are way over the top making it hard to tell what's going on but I hear they are addressing that. The other problem is just the general feel of knowing what you are casting, how long till you can use your next ability (not including cooldowns), and what buffs and debuffs you have. There are screen edge effects but I don't like them, they have buff and debuff icons but they're tiny and and all the debuffs are the same red colour. Your health globe is at the bottom and the enemies is at the top which makes it hard to tell at a glance how a fight is going. Your character calls out if low on health and the screen will flash red but again, not liking that. I think they've taken the "not looking at UI" a bit too far.
In closing I have some reservations still, but I think I would still buy it if I had tried the beta for free. I know many of you are fine with dabbling in lots of MMOs but I like to go the long haul with one I truely love, WoW being the only example so far. I was a bit worried to find that I often logged off after a short amount of time, or couldn't be bothered to log in for ages, even if I had nothing else to do. I know that no matter how good the game might be, I will never have those feelings of playing WoW for the first time again, but I was dissappointed to find myself not caring much at all about playing. I think though that that was a combination of it being a throw away beta and the combat grinding me down playing solo. However, near the end of the weekend I decided to go the next zone even though I was well under leveled. I suddenly saw a brand new unexplored area with a few people running around at a higher level with fancy looking gear and I briefly got the twinge to journeying into the unknown again. If nothing else is just a beautiful world to explore. I hope when they game is live and I'm actually playing with others properly that those feelings will fully embrace me again, even if not to the hieght of WoW.
Oh yeah, PvP, didn't do a lot, but looked awesome.
(I'm on IE and boy do I miss Chrome's built in spell checking. I can't be bothered to read back and correct at the moment, so there!)
Re: Wars Of Guild 2
I'm reading! I'm glad you're looking at it with a critical eye, and while I find your points a little concerning I find myself pleased that it's doing things differently enough to inspire all that.
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FatherJack
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Re: Wars Of Guild 2
I'm not sure anything will feel as exciting as first playing WoW again, short of a new Half-Life game. I'm looking forward to this, but I don't seem to get as excited about anything as I used to.
It's of course worth noting that WoW during beta was full of bugs and missing many features we now take for granted - and the even now some classes are pretty hard to play without GUI plugins.
Hopefully GW2 has all that to come, as long it shows enough promise on release that people will give it a proper chance.
It's of course worth noting that WoW during beta was full of bugs and missing many features we now take for granted - and the even now some classes are pretty hard to play without GUI plugins.
Hopefully GW2 has all that to come, as long it shows enough promise on release that people will give it a proper chance.
Re: Wars Of Guild 2
I'm reading! Whether as a result of avoiding work or a genuine interest in another MMO is hard to say just yet, but so far you're making it sounds quite fun. I never played GW1 so have no preconceptions. I've been thoroughly jaded by years poured into MMOs from WoW to Eve, tried some really quite appallingly bad F2P stuff (D&D, Fallen Earth and the actually fairly engaging Star Trek Online) and am quite interested in giving a new good one a go, especially if there's going to be a 5punky crowd playing.
Re: Wars Of Guild 2
Reading back I realise how much I've focused on the negative points, but that's just my nature. It's not whining, I just find criticism a more interesting/important point of discussion than praise, but I guess that's common. So I must stress that a lot of what I've complained about are minor to average concerns, nothing to stop me playing and saying it's a great game.
Re: Wars Of Guild 2
Here's a video detailing the dynamic event system. It was really enlightening to me even though I played myself. What a lot of people would have done, including myself, was to join an event half way through when exploring, then leave as soon as it completed. Here he shows the benefit of sticking around for an extended period of time. It addressed my issue of not having any context and story for the things I was doing. He has a thick Swedish accent so you might have to concentrate to make out his words.
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CyqGJHTjes[/media]
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CyqGJHTjes[/media]
Re: Wars Of Guild 2
So GW2 will have the capability to replace in game music with your own playlists. For instance, you can create a playlist that will play music of your choice when you enter a boss battle or go underwater. Pretty fantastic feature although I'm not sure I'd use it myself. I don't have any music I'd want to hear everytime I do a specific thing, properly crafted game music is better for that. If I feel the need for my own music I'll do it manually. Still, though.
It’s actually in and working, but the feature wasn’t publicly documented. Here’s how it currently works:
Under [Your Name]\Documents\Guild Wars Gw2Dev folder, you’ll see that GW2 creates a Music folder next to the Screens folder (where screenshots go). All you need to do to get your external music collection playing in the game is to create a playlist of the appropriate name and type in this folder.
Supported playlist formats are .wpl, .m3u, .pls, .asx, and .wax.
Supported audio types are everything FMOD supports by default, which includes .mp3, .ogg, .flac, .wav. aiff, and a bunch of old-school music formats, like .mid or .it files.
There are eight specific playlists the game recognizes, and these are designated simply by the playlist’s file name. They are: Ambient, Battle, Underwater, City, Crafting, BossBattle, NightTime, and MainMenu. Hopefully these are somewhat self-explanatory in terms of when you might expect to hear them play.
So, for example, if you create a playlist called Ambient.m3u, anything in that playlist will be heard instead of the standard in-game ambient music (the general music you hear when running around in the world).
Each internal playlist can designate a primary and secondary playlist to look for. Most of the playlists will fall back to Ambient if they do not exist. This means that if you’d like to simply replace the majority of the music in the game, you can just create an Ambient playlist, or maybe just Ambient and Battle. However, if you really want to customize your playlist in detail, you can create the more specialized playlists such as NightTime or Crafting.
The easiest (and at the moment, the only) way to test this is with a MainMenu playlist, since that will replace the music at the login screen.
Re: Wars Of Guild 2
GW music was pretty good, but this is a cool feature. Would be awesome if they hooked up with Spotify and you could share playlists too.
Re: Wars Of Guild 2
It is a nice idea, I wish more games would do it. You can always have MP3s playing in the background, or Youtube, but it's not quite the same.
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Mr. Johnson
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Re: Wars Of Guild 2
Yes, I still want to hear danger zone when I enter jets in BEEF. Make it happen, Dice.Dog Pants wrote:It is a nice idea, I wish more games would do it. You can always have MP3s playing in the background, or Youtube, but it's not quite the same.
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Joose
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Re: Wars Of Guild 2
Another beta weekend just started. I'll hopefully be able to actually play at some point for more than 30mins at a time, as I dont *think* its a stress test or anything. Heres hoping!
Re: Wars Of Guild 2
I decided to roll with a Norn Guardian this time, I was suprised to find that I actually liked the gameplay. Though the class looks like it should be a tank I found that the experience playing it was something of a weird hybrid, capable of OK DPS but then able to switch and support or even tank.
I have tried PvP but it seems to be a bit broken:
Your armour in PvP decays as normal, you will take more damage and your armour will break quicker in PvP.
You have to pay to get your armour fixed
You receive NO MONEY for kills in PvP.
All that = cashless character = no BFH = fucking long walk
And don't even think about PvP unless you have good ranged abilities.
World PvP may boost you to level 80 but your weapons and armour are not, the other PvP options do.
The PvE stuff is great, though like Thompy said - the whole "questless MMO" is a bit of a lie, they do exist you just wanded in and out of them, which is still a vast improvement. The only criticism I have for the PvE is that sometimes they cap your level down to something too low to effectively take on more than one mob at a time - and the mobs don't travel in ones.
I have tried PvP but it seems to be a bit broken:
Your armour in PvP decays as normal, you will take more damage and your armour will break quicker in PvP.
You have to pay to get your armour fixed
You receive NO MONEY for kills in PvP.
All that = cashless character = no BFH = fucking long walk
And don't even think about PvP unless you have good ranged abilities.
World PvP may boost you to level 80 but your weapons and armour are not, the other PvP options do.
The PvE stuff is great, though like Thompy said - the whole "questless MMO" is a bit of a lie, they do exist you just wanded in and out of them, which is still a vast improvement. The only criticism I have for the PvE is that sometimes they cap your level down to something too low to effectively take on more than one mob at a time - and the mobs don't travel in ones.
Re: Wars Of Guild 2
I'm not sure I'm totally into this, although it's probably more like I'm fed up of playing MMOs during beta. With all the unfinished bits and pieces, stuff setup for the purposes of testing and the small bugs even from the start. The combat seems fine though, interesting. Knock-down and defeat seems a little random at times, for my engineer anyway. I would have liked to have played with the crafting, but that doesn't seem available at my early level or something. I can't get it to work anyway. At best I can only place one item in the station and other ingredients don't seem to be available.
Re: Wars Of Guild 2
I had similar experiences with the sudden defeats out of nowhere, I think it is because there is no mechanic that shows you how much damage you are taking and from where - that big red orb in the middle tends to get ignored somewhat.spoodie wrote:I'm not sure I'm totally into this, although it's probably more like I'm fed up of playing MMOs during beta. With all the unfinished bits and pieces, stuff setup for the purposes of testing and the small bugs even from the start. The combat seems fine though, interesting. Knock-down and defeat seems a little random at times, for my engineer anyway. I would have liked to have played with the crafting, but that doesn't seem available at my early level or something. I can't get it to work anyway. At best I can only place one item in the station and other ingredients don't seem to be available.
I also attempted the crafting and had a very similar experience. I did manage to create one new recipe by tinkering around but by god it is painful. It seems that throwing raw ingredients like bronze bars (I was armoursmith and weaponsmith) into the recipe just won't cut it, you need to create component piences like jute chest padding and bronze mail chest pieces along with some other bits and bats and then throw them together - not always guaranteed to work and you often end up with bags full of components you can't use yet. But, speaking of bags at least every armoursmith class can construct them, my ele from previous beta was a tailor and could make them and my guardian could make strong-boxes that served the same purpose - I suspect the hunter (leatherworking) side can do the similar with leather.
RPS said this and I tend to agree