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Currently I'd rate the leveling in this game as the third most fun in my experience
FrodoFragins
Member EpicPosts: 5,903
in Guild Wars 2
My favorite leveling experience in an MMO, for the first character, was SWTOR. If they had incorporated the questing system of GW2 it would have been even better.
I really enjoyed leveling in classic WOW. At this point it's terribly dated but at the time I loved it.
GW2 is great to explore in, but it's just not nearly as addicting at the moment. It definitely feel more grindy to me than the first two.
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Personally it doesn't feel grindy at all to me. Vanilla WoW had a bit of a grind, but still very minimal. A lot of people don't know what grinding is anymore.
Asheron's Call, now that was grinding! It took well over a year for the first person in that game to hit the lvl cap of 126.
Kids!
I'm far from a kid. And it's just more grindy to me than the first two on the list, not in general.
I've played grindy MMOs but discount them as trash designs.
From beta, i felt it was the best in recent mmorpg years, with TSW from beta being close second. While not blown away by them, the combat system, dynamic events, and world design, vistas, jumping puzzles and so one combine together very well to make for a great exploration/leveling experince IMO.
Sometimes, i felt like there was a certain lack of direction and story and variety in DE. A more linear element to it to give meaning, but when it opened up, i felt it was good.
Guess we all have different experiences.
I am really enjoying playing the game because of the lack of grind-iness. You have all your weapon skills unlocked quickly and from there it is about broadening your power and having more options rather then actual power increase, which slows down my need to add more powers like in most games. And it has a good balance of tab-targeting vs freeform FPS type targeting, and a dash of twitch gaming with the dodges thrown-in.
It is funny, I can look at certain professions and know how unpleasant they are going to be to face in pvp (engineer for one), knowing that I physically cannot play them to that skill level, and this is a good thing as I can respect that the game rewards mastery.
The actual leveling experience though...not in any way. I barely notice my xp bar, and sometimes I gain levels without even realizing I was close.
I disagree. I feel absolutely no grind in GW2 leveling. I mean heck I logged in quick last night just to get to the next waypoint and ended up finishing the zone some 4-5 hearts, 6 poi's, 3 vista's, and a handful of events later. If all you want is your xp bar to go up then you might be missing the point of the game. GW2 has so much variety that it never feels grindy to me. From throwing bottles of rum at pirates, smashing rats, killing bosses, repelling invasions, picking up ettin refuse, etc. They have done a nice job of breaking things up so you don't feel like you're always doing the same thing.
SWTOR was incredibly grindy leveling. The only thing that made it even passable was the personal story, but with only 3-4 of those quests a planet it was a long hard slog through each world. Not the mention the quest variety in SWTOR was non-existent.
Vanilla WoW was a better leveling experience than other games at the time, but by today's standards, it was grindy. Do you remember leveling prior to the zone/xp revamps? Leveling past 40 was grindtacular, on my mage I skipped the quests and did the maraudon slimes because I couldn't take quests anymore. BC had a few interesting quests but mostly just more of the same.
If I had to rate MMO level experiences, I would say: #1 GW2, #2 The Chronicles of Spellborn #3 Warhammer(oddly enough).
This is how I feel. It's crazy how some people find some games grindy, and others not. Me I find SW:TOR a classic grinders game. Quest hub here, grab 5, complete all, next quest literally leads you to the next set of hubs. Always making sure you gain enough exp or else go farm some mobs to catch up.
GW2 is the opposite for me. I'm an Asura and I havent even done their starting zone yet. I've got Human and Norn almost all the way done, and Charr over 50%. Now i'm just running around Gendarren fields looking for hearts vendors, I NEED cherries to level up my cook skill haha, so that's what i'm looking for, just leveling on the way.
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If you want to be pretty much guaranteed to be about the right levels at just the right time, TOR did the best job of that. But that guarantee came at the cost of an(IMO) super-ultra-mega controlled experience. It also came at the cost of making the planets all but obsolete upon completion. If you enjoyed those planets, there was no content left for you to run, or even repeat.
TSW allows you to advance in a much less linear way. Upon first playing, I was especially impressed at how I could just run in any direction and find quests to do. And the majority of them could be repeated. Earlier quests, however yielded much less XP as you tried to rerun them as a higher skill character.
GW2 gives you so much freedom you're really not sure what to do. I kept thinking that if I chose to go a particular way, like try to run the starter zones, that it would be dull/yield no XP/be a waste of time, much like it would be to go from finishing Archet to go to Thorin's Hall in LotRO. But it wasn't.
Probably about the most time-wasteful thing you can do in terms of stuff to do or advancement in GW2 is to stay in an area where you've pretty much explored every nook, done every heart and harvested every resource. Even then, DE's have plenty of reward, but you're still better off moving on...
...but unlike, say, Tatooinne, where outside of PvP there's no reason to be there past 28th-ish level, I can see myself even at level 80, heading off to Queensdale to tear apart Centaur caravan raiders... and there will still be plenty of reason and incentive to do it.
same i dunno how people got passed 30 in swtor.. i was falling asleep past 20 world design and classes were just boring me to death.. i was litteraly just playing because i love star wars but even that only went so far... for me feeling apart of a living world makes the leveling experience 100x more enjoyable in so many aspects.. as GW2 is really the only MMO i have played to really provide this sort of experience I will say its the most enjoyable leveling experience I have had in a MMO.
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
Yesterday I gained an entire level without doing any combat. Not once.
Anti-grind.
Exploration, gathering, crafting.
The thing I keep forgetting when exploring is that the world is not all on a single flat plane!
You have to go up/down quite often to really find the good stuff.
Most vertical exploration I've ever seen.
I really didn't find it all that different from a typical Bioware game, standard game-play that is only there to support the story aspects. Smuggler was a fun play through, as well as over beta, I did most of BH, that was also enjoyable. However I could never get past the Jedi/Sith starting areas, none of those stories seemed interesting. Trooper and op never interested me in the first place so I never rolled either.
I'd play them as F2P though.
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I know! I mean, look at all the frothy mouthed replies the OP got! Language so hurtful and terrible that... oh wait...
Its about opinions, no one is telling him he is wrong because he isn't. Grow up would ya...
Exploration seems grindy. I love exploration but this game has over codified it imo.
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I know. He said it felt a little "grindy" and out of the woodwork 5 people said something along the lines of " Nuh uh...it's not grindy! I played lots and U'r wrong!!"
Poor OP is probably second guessing himself as I type this...
If I had to guess, I'd say it depends on what level you are. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the levelling curve isn't very steep for GW2. The levels don't take substantially longer to finish later on than they do earlier in the game. So I could see someone thinking the game is "grindy" in the early levels (grindy sometimes being a euphimism for "slow") because they don't fly by like in other MMOs. It takes longer to reach level 10 in this game than it does in other MMOs, so in that respect, it might feel like more work.
But once you start getting to the mid levels, you start to notice that you are progressing in levels much quicker than other MMOs, because they aren't taking substantially longer than they did earlier in the game. Not to mention, by that time you are fully into crafting, which gives you a ton of XP as well, and also fully comfortable with just going out and earning XP through exploration, which takes some time to learn how to do in this game (breaking old habits).
I think it's all a matter of perception. And I think people generally use the word "grind" in different ways.
Can you explain what you mean by exploration seems grindy? and over codified it?
What I mean is I have no clear goals. Im not exploring to gain map % and achieve some goal. Im doing it because its actually fun and interesting to look at something far away and go to it. In the way run into things because they happened to be on the way not because I was looking for them, it reminds me of how I played Skyrim.
My personal ratings:
1. GW2 - For the mechanics. It is the most accesible and fun-oriented (rather than gear-oriented) MMO I've played.
2. WoW - For the nostalgia. It was (and still is) a very polished and accesible game, although it's lore and general soul has taken a turn for the worse.
3. WAR - For my first time leveling through PvP. Nuff said.
This. The game actually feels like an RPG rather than a gear-a-thon.
I could see that people are used to levels 1-20 flying by and then slowing down a lot in some cases which isn't the case in this game
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
The only provocative thing I saw above was someone saying, "Kids!" I don't think that was necessary.
Other than that I saw people saying they disagree, and politely. Even the "Kids!" post was reasonable up to that point.
Hardly a flame war.
Only thing I've found grindy so far is unlocking all the Elementalist weapon skills. Took forever, and felt like a root canal after a while (3 weapons, 2 offhands, 4 elements = UGH). Sad thing is after I played it a bit more I decided I don't like the class. Even by GW2 standards it's squishy (like wet Jell-O), and many skills are just carbon copies of one another with different elements involved.
Warrior looks to be almost as bad though...
But hey, at least it's not as bad as TSW's skill grind. I like the game but good lord progress is slow-paced.