Guild Wars 2

Ukerric_sl said:

And we all know why the Heart system exists. Because, at one point, someone in design became afraid that "players may not know what to do! How do we give them something to do?".

The answer in WoW is the yellow "!" sign, and being told explicitly "go there now" (and, in various expansion, being absolutely unable to go there until told. I'm looking at you, Cataclysm). The answer in GW2 is "look at your map, and find a heart that's empty".


Yep. Because that shit is done in your Personal Story. You know, the thing that has a real quest journal, tells a story in which YOU are the hero, yadda, yadda? In which you follow a story, just like the WoW quest lines? Where you infiltrate a Dredge city disguised in a Mining Suit, try to keep alive the defenders against a massive onslaught of undead on Claw Island off Lion City, etc? You see, those kind of things exist in GW2. Just not on the map, in an instance.

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And I mentioned the story quests, Most of those are STILL of the tedious kill shit variety, there are a FEW that are really neat, like drinking contests and stuff. The story quests are well done. Why are there only a handful of those in the game to do? Why defend hearts? They fucking blow. The story quests in this are still not as good as Star Wars, Wildstar, Secret World, or even the neater WoW stuff, either in presentation (talking heads) or in content (by and large the same shit, just with voiceover happening).

TheYanger_sl said:

And I mentioned the story quests, Most of those are STILL of the tedious kill shit variety, there are a FEW that are really neat, like drinking contests and stuff. The story quests are well done. Why are there only a handful of those in the game to do? Why defend hearts? They fucking blow. The story quests in this are still not as good as Star Wars, Wildstar, Secret World, or even the neater WoW stuff, either in presentation (talking heads) or in content (by and large the same shit, just with voiceover happening).

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There are only few engaging quests/personal stories/hearts in GW2 and WoW and probably all games in between because the boring shit is easier and faster to make and the masses gobble it up. I subbed WoW in Nov/Dec'13 and went through WotLK, Cata and into MoP for the first time, and all of them had a shit ton of boring kill quests. WotLK most blatantly, maybe it's been too long for you. Northrend in general was nice, the story-heavy quests were too, but sooo much filler... and I assume I was enjoying increased xp gains because the expansion is old. Next up Cataclysm, and it was terrible and on rails like nothing I've ever seen before. I nearly threw the towel because of that but luckily I was halfway to MoP-level after Hyjal and that was bearable out of nostalgia. MoP was the best leveling of those expansions by a mile. I guess that bodes well for the next WoW exansion but the point is, you are holding your bias up like a battle standard when you make those claims about WoW. It's not nearly as rosy as you make it sound, and my experience with it is pretty recent and through the eyes of someone doing that stuff for the first time. And TOR class stories are the same fucking thing as the personal story of GW2, better only by virtue of having 8 different ones while GW2 merges each chapter down from 5 races to 3 orders to Trahearne's way or the highway. The rest of TOR is textbook WoW'04.

One strength of the GW2 setup that they are failing hard to capitalize on is their ability to instance any part of the world for story purposes (WoW's phasing). They could make additional story chapters with the scope of the better WoW quest chains and easily utilize their existing zones to have different events unfold there as part of your story. Personal story did that a bit but since then all they use it for is talking to some npcs at the start and end of living story bits. So yea, the sum of hearts, living story and personal story is mediocre with some gems. I just dont think that's any better or worse then what I've seen in WoW or TOR (didnt play Secret World, TESO, FF14 or WS past a couple of hours if at all, so no opinion).


Imo combat is fine in both WoW clones and TERA style, with GW2 being some kind of middle-ground. I wouldnt say either approach is shit, just different. Although GW2 PVE is pretty tame when it comes to abilities, but I dont blame their system for that, I blame PVP balance. It would be much more fun with less reliance on dodge and stronger control abilities and a couple of really big hitters for players, but cant have that because PVP.

TheYanger_sl said:

And I mentioned the story quests, Most of those are STILL of the tedious kill shit variety, there are a FEW that are really neat, like drinking contests and stuff. The story quests are well done. Why are there only a handful of those in the game to do? Why defend hearts? They fucking blow. The story quests in this are still not as good as Star Wars, Wildstar, Secret World, or even the neater WoW stuff, either in presentation (talking heads) or in content (by and large the same shit, just with voiceover happening).

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Kill shit quests are great, because you can usually do them at your own pace. Story quests are fun the first time around, but when you have to repeat that shit and wait for the NPC to walk their butt to predetermined location, or for enemies to finally spawn, I wish I could just aoe few mobs at my own pace.

One nice thing about GW2 is that you are happy when you meet another player, because they removed all the mob/loot/kill stealing, so I guess they are reluctant to wall off important stuff into instances. The game is at its strongest point when you just randomly run into a few people and you take down a whole event chain including a champion.

TheYanger_sl said:

Draegan: combat..I don't even. It's literally impossible to think that combat in GW2 is superior to Wildstar. I mean they're SO similar in design with one having strictly functionally superior execution. It's like saying FF14 combat is better than wow or something - they might as well be the same, but one has a longer GCD and shitty animation delays and stuff. GW2 claims action combat but the only action it really involves is using invincible rolling and otherwise running bosses around like retards in dungeons while you aggro swap them back and forth.

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Dunno about WOW's quests these days, but I still hate having to pick up quests and doing a list of them, even if they are 2 or 3 in phases.

I liked GW2 combat better than Wildstar because I really don't like telegraphs. I like how in GW2 I can "autoattack" one of my attacks. Just the little things honestly.

edit: someone mentioned Wildstar's mobs have autoattack/white damage. That's another I had forgotten.

I'm the kind of player who doesn't mind questing, but sometimes too much is too much.
WoW stramlined a lot and cut down the number of tasks significantly, Wildstar is so fucking bloated it makes me cry. Sometimes I could hand in 3 or 4 quests at once and the xp bar hardly moved, so I started doing only main storylines, then I needed faction to buy stuff and had to do some tasks again.

GW2 was incredibly amazing for me: I had *no* quests but the main one, I just fucked around exploring, killing anything that moved, harvesting materials (not competing with others for materials was also a blessing) and I never once said "fuck, there are other people around" which in Wildstar is pretty much a common occurence, because you can't complete challenges unless you group and 90% of the people don't want to group.
I had events and even after 5 level 80s, there are events I still have to do once, some puzzles I still have to complete, a few zones I really don't know very well and so on and so forth. GW2 is packed with flaws: combat, dungeons, etc. etc. we discussed them and are still doing so, we also know Anet doesn't give a shit about what's right for us (and many others, mind you) and happily goes on its merry way, but for fuck's sake, give props where it's due: GW2 levelling was an extremely fun experience and is (imo) a lot more interesting than Wildstar, where most of the quests are so obnoxious I'd want to punch the designer in the stomach.

TBC was cool, WotLK was a bit vehicle bloated, but I had a lot of fun, Cata was a shit cinematic-infested crap (Uldum was unbeatable) and MoP was decently fun. After 9 years and change of WoW, I still think GW2 was more fun during the levelling part (and the first few times we were totally raped in dungeons). Wildstar has a lot going for it, but levelling is atrocious, I can't even think of doing it a second time.

As I posted a couple days ago, with a few (big) changes GW2 could become my favourite MMO right up there with WoW, but it's lacking too many things to be that good and when even WoW releases more significant (for my taste) content than GW2, something's wrong... so yeah, screw living story and give me full expansions.

TheYanger_sl said:

Why defend hearts? They fucking blow.

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Quest and Hearts both accomplish the same things, give you a reason to kill shit or do shit to get you to travel through the map and get experience and levels. Hearts do it better than quests in my opinion only if at a minimum it's different. I hate questing, it's just a laundry list of shit you have to do no matter what retarded quest line WOW has you do or whatever. At least hearts disguise it better for me. In conjunction with events, sometimes they coincide and I have an enjoyable experience.

I'm with Tuco on this one. Don't give a fuck about the story line or the living story shit. I haven't paid attention to a story in an MMORPG is like.. never. Just give me a world where I can do stuff in.

I haven' finished a single player game in over 7 years I think.

yeah. not a fan of hearts. the dynamic event system. I LOVE.
But hearts were just the standard quest system in these games.

people still talk as if hearts were intended to be the main content. They were not. They were just breadcrumbs to get you into the areas you needed to be for the REAL quests.

Draegan_sl said:

I haven' finished a single player game in over 7 years I think.

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Not even Dragon Age, Fallout 3 or Skyrim?

I out a ton of hours in each of those, but never fix she'd em.

Draegan_sl said:

I haven' finished a single player game in over 7 years I think.

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Fallout New Vegas. My favorite single player game of all time and the only one I finished pretty much everything there was to do.

Guzrog_sl said:

Wildstar does inundate you with a shit load of quests but it feels like its smoothing out a bit as I'm leveling. The first few times in Algoroc were pretty overwhelming quest log wise.

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Whitevale alone killed any replayability in Wildstar for me.