Since the general release is tomorrow I thought that it was best to ditch the previous thread and start anew.
The game is huge and at this point the wiki is still being fleshed out. Here we can discuss WvW, personal story lines and various in-game subjects.
I feel that we may also be able to help each other out even though we are in different guilds on different servers.
I finally got some time to play yesterday, but I didn’t progress very far. I got sidetracked trying to each every vista I came across, and generally just running around exploring. The world seems *big *to me; I’m not sure how it compares to other games (or if it’s even possible to make such a comparison), but it looks like there’s a ton of stuff to discover.
I’m liking the dynamic events so far; they give a nice feel of flow to the game. The event chains are particularly nice, as they give the impression that there’s actually something going on in the world outside your quest…and the world doesn’t necessarily stop and wait for you to show up.
I haven’t really progressed far enough in the personal story to comment on that.
I’m wondering how fast to push that personal story, as I was outlevelled the last time I went through. I managed to get it done by reviving the NPC guy with me, but I died 3-4 times in the process.
Oh, and those Vistas are demon-spawned time sinks that I can’t resist. Damn you Arenasoft! I can’t believe you’re making me pay all those monthly fees to…
Oh. Heh.
Carry on.
I played for an ungodly amount of time yesterday. We’d just come off a several day span with houseguests, and I was so ready to not socialize, not leave the house, and basically just goof off that I played just about every waking hour.
Boy, it’s been a LONG time since a game was that engrossing. I make these plans all the time - tell Mr. Athena that such-and-such game is being released, and I’m reserving release day to play ALL DAY LONG. Typically what happens is I play for 2-3 hours and then I’m sick of it. Not GW2. It’s crack… which is both good and bad.
The big deal is that there’s always something to do. Sick of fighting? Go track down waypoints and vistas. Tired of that? Tradeskills are actually fun, something that seems to be a rarity for me. The world is huge and beautiful, the cities are so big that you have to learn your way through, and the gameplay is just hard enough to be challenging but not frustrating.
About my only complaint is the overflow system made it pretty much impossible to play with my buddies. It’s one thing to wait until you’re all on the “real” server, but zoning, using a waypoint, and dying & waypointing all seem to throw you back on an overflow server. Very frustrating, but that was pretty much the only issue I’ve had, making it one of the smoothest MMO releases I’ve ever taken part in.
[QUOTE=Athena]
About my only complaint is the overflow system made it pretty much impossible to play with my buddies. It’s one thing to wait until you’re all on the “real” server, but zoning, using a waypoint, and dying & waypointing all seem to throw you back on an overflow server. Very frustrating, but that was pretty much the only issue I’ve had, making it one of the smoothest MMO releases I’ve ever taken part in.
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If you and your buddies are put in different overflow servers you can right click on their name and choose “Join In”. It’ll put you in their server so you can continue to play together.
I’m having a blast and loving the heritage skins from my Hall of Monuments. I really hate running around looking like I’m wearing a quilt I stole from my grandma. Haven’t played as much as I wanted to, but I blame going on vacation the day after the headstart.
I know about that and I’ve tried it, but it’s never available as an options. I think it has something to do with which zone you’re in, but not sure.
We figured out one thing about grouping and overflow servers last night that I thought I’d share.
If you’re in a party but some of you are on overflow servers, eventually they will get the option to move to the “real” server, but you still don’t see them - their profile is still just a black outline, you don’t see them moving on the map, and sometimes their profile still says they’re on an overflow even though their own mini-map indicates they’re not.
If they waypoint somewhere, that seemed to fix it. We got our entire party together that way.
(and, for the record, nobody in our party saw the “join” option, though we tried in several different zones. I’m not sure what’s going on with that.)
Are the auction houses up? This last weekend, when I wanted to try to put some crafted gear up on the AH, it was unavailable.
Nope, not as of this morning at least. Which is really annoying, as I’m spending a LOT of time in the newbie areas gathering newbie mats to get my skill up. I’d much rather be collecting money in a level-appropriate area and buying the newbie mats.
Yeah, the TP hasn’t worked at. It was up for a bit during the headstart, but not for too long.
There are a few other bugs, notably the mail system is down as well but that may be part of the TP issues.
I wish I had more resources for crafting. Cooking is going to be fun to do but it is pretty expensive.
Well I went ahead and picked this up based on all the frothing GW junkies talking about how great it is. Decided to take a break from D3 and try this out.
So far it feels like every other MMORPG I’ve ever played. Incredibly boring at the beginning. Story is boring. Combat is boring (so far). PvP is surpringly boring too. I thought it would be more fun because everybody is lvl 80 right away but that turned out to make it LESS fun. No way to really pit your character against someone elses to see who’s stronger. You can pretty much only play with a PC boosted toon. That’s not fun. The environment (at least of the little gremlin race that I chose) looks like it’s from 2007 or earlier. So far not impressed.
With that said I am impressed with the stability of the servers for a newly launched online game. Everything worked for me right away and I had no trouble getting into a game with my friend.
Maybe you’re just not into MMOs. Other than PvP (which I haven’t tried) I’ve had the exact opposite experience that you’ve had. GW2 seems an order of magnitude different than every other MMO I’ve played. It’s anything BUT boring to me.
D3, on the other hand, is incredibly boring to me. I picked it up, played it through once, and can’t bring myself to play it again. Same thing over and over. <yawn>
I’m following this thread with a certain amount of interest.
I’ve played a few MMOs (WoW, Old Republic, Star Trek, Champions Online), but only for a few months each. They generally don’t hold my attention for very long but I do tend to enjoy them.
Can anyone comment further on the size and feel of the world? WoW is the only MMO I’ve ever played where the world felt legitimately huge and connected rather than feeling like a bunch of zones stapled together by a world map.
Absolutely huge. The cities alone are huge - they make any city in WoW feel tiny. The main cities I’ve visited (3 of 'em now) all have several waypoints (that is, points that show up on your map that allow auto-travel) within the city to make navigating them easier.
And that’s just the cities. The outlying areas are just as big, and also include lots of waypoints so you don’t have to spend 15 minutes running from one end of the zone to another.
The plant-elf city (Sylvari) and the gnome-thingy (Asuri) city are multi leveled and confusing. The maps are of limited help, because they show what is on your current horizontal plane, with other areas greyed out.
When I looked at the AH last night, it appeared to be up.
I’m finding that I don’t really like MMO’s, despite my initial interest in just baout everyone that comes out.
Hated WoW, for example. The moment I spawned (on top of like 3 other guys, clipping through their bodies) and saw the dated environments I was already unhappy. There was no story, nothing. I was dropped into the world unceremoniously. The immediate quests involved smiting critters for their organs without any reason as to why. Which I didn’t immediately fault the game for, I figured they need to teach you about combat in some way. But after like the 5th such quest I was bored.
The entire novelty of hundreds of people in the same world with me also quickly dissipated. It turned out not to be very interesting as it amounted to a bunch of people standing around quest givers or armies of “heroes” smashing little critters to pulp in order to collect x body part.
The combat is also rather mind numbing. It’s the kind of combat that I LOVE when it’s part of a tactical single player game where you’re controlling a party of characters (Baldur’s gate, Dragon Age), but it’s incredibly boring when you’re controlling just one, single character.
I gave SWTOR a chance as well, precisely because it promised to do away with some of what I didn’t like about WOW. A meaty, personal story that you can tackle by yourself or in co-op! More action oriented combat!
But it fell flat, IMHO. Combat was way to similar to WoW, the story was better, but it still lacked the immersion of a true single player experience, not to mention that most quests devolved into fetch grinds anyway. And of course the weirdness of having a bunch of other people crowding around quest givers and armies desperately hovering about waiting for enemies to respawn in order to harvest body part y, was still ever present.
The graphics were like something out of 2007 to boot!
So maybe MMO’s jsut aren’t for me, but I see guild wars, and the same things that annoyed me about other MMO’s are again supposedly being done away with.
Combat - supposedly more action based.
Story - personal and nuanced, with options that impact your path through it.
Other players - involved in random and interesting dynamic events vs ruining immersion by doing the whole MMO meta game stuff they usually do.
So is this game something I should give a shot? Or should I just give up on the MMO genre?
It’s a good MMO, but it’s still an MMO.
If you find single-character combat dull, I don’t thing GW2 will improve on that. It’s more dynamic than other MMOs in that you have to move around, dodge a lot, and switch weapons a lot. But it’s still single-player combat, you don’t get to pause and tell your healer to heal the tank, choose which spell your wizard will cast, etc. etc.
There is a single-player personal story, and it’s WAY better than the SWTOR one (which I found dull as well. I found all of SWTOR dull, actually), but it’s not the same as a single-player game that’s built around the story.
Grinding and waiting for spawns is way better than any other MMO I’ve played. In fact, I wouldn’t really call anything I’ve seen in GW2 a “grind”. Sure, you can do the same quest over and over if you want, but there’s so much to do in the world that there’s no need to if you don’t want to. And even when redoing it, it doesn’t seem like a grind. GW2 quests are much more dynamic - if you’re in an area where a quest occurs, you just do it, there’s no Quest Log, there’s no running to an NPC to “get” the quest.
An example: a given town is having trouble with bandits. Periodically, it’s raided by bandits. If you happen to be in the area when the bandits attack, you can help drive them off, and you get gold/xp/etc for helping with it. If you don’t want to do it, no big deal - just head on out and do whatever you want.
Same thing with boss fights. Crazy Scary Troll marauding the forest? Join in the hunt to kill him.
The only quest turn-ins make pretty good sense. For example, if you’re raiding a bandit camp, you might come across bandit attack plans that you can turn in to an officer standing outside the camp. But if you don’t want to do that, you don’t - most quests have multiple things you do, like “Raid the bandit camp, killing as many bandits as you can. If you come across bandit attack plans, Sergeant Joe would very much like it if you bring them back to him. Also, here’s a bottle of poison, see if you can manage to poison any water supplies you find.”
You do any or all of the quest things. As you do them, a quest bar fills up, once you’re done with it, you’re done, and you get a letter in the mail thanking you and giving you a bit of money.
Make sense?
I’m having a ton of fun in GW2, so far, after having burned out on SWTOR for being too much like WOW (although I’ll probably go back in free-to-play mode to finish the stories).
I’m playing a Human Ranger. The customization, which is a huge deal for me, was very good. Not Cryptic good, but enough that I can make a character can like. The dye system is really fun.
There’s a story arc, but it’s not as encompassing as the ones in SWTOR. More like something to give a reason to go to different zones. That’s the closest the game has to a traditional quest. Instead of questing (as in WOW or SWTOR), you quest (as in explore and do good deeds).
There are NPCs who stand about who need help. You’re not led to them, you just go and find them. You can help them by doing a number of things unique to that NPC. Like feed cows, water corn, and smite bugs in the garden. Once you do enough, you’re best friends and can buy a few rewards from them.
While doing that, dynamic events happen around you. Things like defending the fort against centaur invaders. Or escorting a caravan. Or taking stolen supplies back from bandits. Once you complete the event you get more rewards. And events can link together. One event failed (we failed to prevent the town water supply from being poisoned), and another event started to fix the failure. It felt very immersive.
While doing all this, there’s no need to officially “party” with other players. Anyone who helps gets credit and loot. So other players are seen as comrades, not competitors for kills, events, etc.
You also get rewards for exploring. The maps are huge! It definitely feels like a world, not a series of zones. And there’s a lot of interesting things to find. I came across an NPC who challenged me to a fight. I found a kennel with war dogs that could be tamed (since I’m a ranger).
And I love how you are down-leveled to whatever zone you’re in. So you’re always challenged and get rewards; you can’t out-level content.
I like the skills system. The weapon(s) you wield determine the skills you have available. It makes the weapon choice more than picking the best stats.
One question I have about guilds. I’ve heard it’s possible to join more than one guild. Anyone know how that works? And guilds can be cross server? Is there any reason we shouldn’t start a SDMB guild?
You can join multiple guilds across multiple servers, but you can only “represent” one at a time. I’m not sure how the cross-server thing works (ie, whether or not the chat and guild bank will carry across servers or if they’re constrained to the server you’re on), but I have seen people on other servers show up in my guild roster (they were offline, so I couldn’t tell if they would show up in guild chat).
I like how there is no longer competition for resource nodes anymore. (For example: copper ore nodes.)
Everybody seems to have a shot at the same node locations, and everyones node timers are independant of each other. (I can mine a copper node, see it dissapear, and watch another player run up and mine the invisible-to-me node.)