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[Column] Guild Wars 2: No Game is Perfect
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Often times when someone really loves a game, they are negatively accused of being a "fanboi". This isn't always a fair assessment as most fans of a game can also see its flaws. In today's Guild Wars 2 column, we take a look at some of the things that raise our eyebrows. See what you think and then add your thoughts in the comments.
No matter how hard you try, and no matter how many sleepless nights you pour into making a game, it will never be perfect. Sure the reviews can be good, and millions of players will enjoy playing the game, but there will always be things that players don’t like. We all have opinions and we love to share them, and I’m no exception. I love Guild Wars 2. I wouldn’t be writing a weekly column about my experiences in the game if I didn’t. I feel ArenaNet did an amazing job creating an MMO that many people wanted. But being a normal human, I still find things that bug the crap out of me. Let me share a few this week.
Read more of David North's Guild Wars 2: No Game is Perfect.
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The rage you get when the last skill challenge is bugged.
Comments
Wait, your horns just vanish when you put a helmet on? Really? Oh wow.. that is pretty bad lol. Horns aren't exactly flexible like ears are. Unless the horns are made of tissue instead of bone, but I doubt that's the case. Maybe they're inflatable and can simply deflate when a helmet is equipped? I'm being facetious of course
The armor situation is odd. GW1, even early on, had a nice variety of armors as I recall. I remember there being several looks for each class and armor type.
As for the "no game being perfect" subject of the article - of course not. No reasonable person would expect it to be. Just don't tell that to some of the more zealous folk, or you're likely to lose your head. Several times over.
No reasonable person would expect to lose their head over pointing out a shortcoming of a game, either. But again, try telling that to the more zealous among us... if you haven't already lost your head from the previous remark that is.
But... these forums tell me that GW2 is the worst game ever made and a huge flop and it is completely boring and buggy and full of bots and hackers?!?
Oh, wait.. these forums ALSO tell me GW2 is perfect and will make you, the player, capable of shining rays of beautiful white holy light directly from between your buttocks.
All kidding aside, nice article - a good read. I love the cartoons ya'll draw for these things.
Of course GW2 has problems. Every MMO does. Hell, you can still find bugs in EQ and UO and those games have been out for 12+ years!
Was GW2 "ready" to be released? Good question. Month of extra polish goes a LONG, LONG way.
But at the end of the day, gaming is a business for the developers as much as a passion, they HAD to release before MoP I think.
Another month and GW2 will be sitting real, real pretty.
Difference between GW2 and other recent launches though?
GW2 is actually fun and (I believe) has enough content that it is/was launch-ready.
TOR - tons of content, none of it very good - especially PvP content (awful)
TSW - extreme lack of content, what was there was pretty good (so they say, unless you like PvP you had nothing good)
GW2 - tons of content, most of it is pretty good. Both PvE and PvP represented well. Check + mate
Whilst were on the topic of negative things about GW2 (And I love GW2 for the record!), I think the WvWvW needs improving with more to instill a sense of server pride as well as guild recognition. Guilds put up their flags on keeps, but I have no idea who they are!
Perhaps each week the guilds on a server are ranked according to how many WvWvW events their members were involved with..
Thats my main gripe anyway.
Well, WvW has many issues design wise.
The game is well made, I just don't think it's designed well as an MMORPG. For me, the lack (or feeling) of progression makes the character playthrough seem tired past the early levels. While I commend the whole notion of quest givers coming to you and the group dynamic of them, in the end I feel as if they are minor changes to something that has already been done before (TR, WAR, Rift)
What I really like is the notion of skills tied to weapons. This is almost "duh" feeling afterwards..why didnt MMO designers think of this before? Also, the exlusive rights to nodes is a great welcome. (These two elements is what I think will influence coming games).
Aside from those elements, I think the game shines because it is B2P. If I take away those three features, I'm not left with a very involving game. It's most fun in short bursts, like an arcade game might be. It just doesn't have the staying power of a modern MMO.
ANET came up with a brilliant beginning to the game...the game truly shines like few others in the earlier parts. But it seems once you get past that beginning area, it falls apart. Did they only have great ideas for the beginning? DId they forget about the rest of the game? It feels like that.
I had much more fun in recent releases:
TOR - Fantastic story and interesting quests.
TSW - Great Lore.
Even TERA, although shortlived for me, offered intense moments of bliss in its actiony combat and PVP mayhem.
If I had to compare the longevity of GW2, I would say it most likely rivals TERA. Sure it's B2P and I can come back to it at any time, but unless they do something to make me feel compelled to jump back in for later levels, I'm probably not going to.
I do think GW2 is a fun game; it's just not fun for very long.
Fanboi to me isn't someone who likes a game, its someone who likes it and acts blind to faults and typicalyl will give it praise far beyond what it deserves and use rather hilarious points about why its good, often times giving very generick points able to be used by other games or highly opinionated ones.
I love ragnarok Online and I can pick it up and play it on and off over the years without any issue, but I'm not ignorant or 'fanboii' about it. Sure Its one of my favorite MMOs of all times but I'd be a fool to say its not without faults and to not realize my favoritsm of the game is in many parts opinionated.
I must agree wasnt fun howling over to one part of the content to find out the skill point event wasnt active.
I do see the lack of Details in the Armor for each profession. That said iam hoping they dig a little deeper to changing these as they did last night with the skill points event=they got fixed!.
So flaws are expected, but what makes them great?= their post patches and hotfixes.
I really agree with the respawn speeds being out of control. You kill in a tight area and you will be killing the same spawn at least twice while you are there. Also I think we all hate the broken skill challenges which seem to be present in quite a few zones. I also think the Asura and Sylvari got the short end of the stick as they have what 4 zones total?
Also why does WvW have repair costs? It's largely a zergfest anyway, so getting yourself killing is not some rare event.
With all that said, I'm still really enjoying the PvE portion of the game and will for some time as I have altitis.
well wait -if u guys are talking abt the ORR zone -By then you are level 80= and it should be difficult, i welcome this!
I keep reading on these forums how bad and borring the game is on one hand, then on the other hand i read how great it is.
Then we get articles like these in the middle of the raod that really tell the truth of the matter. It was a good read thanks.
I'm talking about every zone in the game. The respawn rates need to be adjusted as a whole. They should not have respawns being the difficulty it should be mob density ala Blue Mountain in TSW.
Too often (on these boards, specifically) people become polarized with opposite extremes. These tend to erupt from some sort of emotional investment the player gets with the idea of how a game should be rather than the game itself.
I find that the more hype a game gets, the more profound this effect has. In the end, all these games are pretty good. If they weren't, no one would play any of them. For every "THIS GAME SUCKS" there is a "BEST GAME EVER!" post. It's weeding through those to find out the good elements and legitmate gripes people have.
Best to remember no game is going to be fun forever. Just keep your expectations in check and you'll end up enjoying things more.
Bad media personal agenda titles and hype doesn't stop there though. We are not permitted to speak politics here, unless.... Unless it matches the liberal views at mmorpg, then its just fine.
And you are fanboi and anti fanboi and they both exist we all know it. This article was put up for damage control. I can't help but notice since I know there are a lot of anti wow fan boi at mmorpg that little to no wow articles are up that really give mists a fair shake. They all make a mockery or negative connotation in some fashion.
Folks just take it all in with a grain of salt. This happens in the real world too and I don't blame mmorpg for pushing thier bias opinions out we all do it naturally in one way or another and this is thier board to do so on. I can't help get rowd up about hypocrites though, not that we all arnt in one way or another but at least I'm not masking it and asking you to believe I'm not.
A good read, OP. Some valid points made and in a very "non-threatening" way
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
No game in history or in the futture will have a perfect release.
So many codes so many variables.
There is only 1 major flaw Arenanet has made in my opnion and thats free server transfers.
They should have been locked the moment the game went live.
Other then that the game is realy epic.
What any other guy or girl might say, you either like a game or you dont.
Played wow since her launch and quited due to pandarian race, bought GW2 and never looked back to any other mmo.
THis might change in the future offcourse as there will come a moment where you are bored.
Good thing is you dont pay a sub so you can hop back in anytime you like
Let haters hate, if the real arguments are no end game or stuff like that then i can only laugh real hard in their face.
To start ... I am a fan of GW and GW2. Anet is one of few companies out there that strive very hard to make games that players can enjoy. They work hard to remove exploiters and gold sellers (which should show by the thousands of bans in the first month of GW2). That being said there are a few things similar to the posts that frustrate me about the game also.
-I have been frustrated by the MANY and OFTEN occurences of bugged events and skill challenges through out the game. There have been some on zones I previously leveled fine through, but had them break on a second run thru with a different character.
-The lack of class and race specific armor that cosmetically fits and is appropriate to the race and class frustates me also. The cosmetic option is weak compared to say Rift's feature and LOTRO's (which I enjoy very much to make my character look different in those games).
-I do not play on a super high end machine so this is for those out there like me.... the graphics for low end machines gets very extreme compared to higher options. Sometimes things seem like a 3yr old colored them in and other times, like with water, it is amazingly beautiful at low end settings, The graphic engine seems to be needing balance for all players. I still read of fps issues and lag from low end system users to high end ones.
I have played many MMOs over the years and could point out other little issues in GW2 I don't like, but in my opinion (from someone who has beta tested a good bit over the years) GW2 was ready for launch. There have been few games that played as nice as GW2 at launch. It seemed most of Anet's issues with the game popped up after the launch. Maybe some are related to the Mac implementation (?). All in all I have and will continue to enjoy myelf in Tyria, knowing that Anet pours out a lot of love into their games. I know they will fix issues. I know they will rid Tyria of botters and gold sellers (well, reduce them at least). I know GW2 will only get better, because Anet never rests with "good enough". I do not say that as a fanbio, but as a player of their games who has seen firsthand their love for what they create.
Articles like this really bother me. I'm in no way saying that there should be perfect games, nor do I expect them, but to write off the things you're talking about as though they're so impossible, or whatever the reason you want to use to claim that it's ok that things like this aren't fixed before release in a game, is not only ridiculous but hypocritical. Any other game that would have these kind of issues, especially WoW, would get a stupid amount of criticism, yet when GW2 does it then it's ok because they'll get around to fixing it.
This kind of bias is supposed to stay out of articles written by people you pay on this site. Otherwise your articles lose their credibility when one game gets away with something like this while another may not and be heavily scrutinized for it. I can accept bugs being in a game, but some of these things should have been fixed well before release. To claim otherwise is to do nothing but claim bias for GW2.
You compeletly ignored the 1999 UI the game has. You cannot move, resize, change transparency or colour the bits of the UI. Infact the only part you can move is the chat box and the mini-map with very limited results.
Trying to see the tiny buff/debuff icons is an effort in futility for me. I do not even bother these days.
Why in this day and age we have a UI so archaic is beyond me. Yes, it "works" but so did my 1977 caprice.
We have a great RvR game. We do not have to fight for nodes, or "killing blows" but we have to deal with a "fixed" UI is that about as non-intuitive as you can possibly get. Even in EQ, around 2000 (I forget the exact year RoK release) you could change location/size/transparency.
http://www.greycouncil.org/
I really dont understand those that talk about lack of progression.
Is it just gear progression? because I get better gear, with better stats, and my dmg goes up, its not super significant, but it is noticable,
is it feeling more powerful? I feel pretty badass in some of the later story quests, and being part of the DE campaign to invade orr was pretty intense.
Is it rotflstomping lower lvl enemies? I can go back to lower areas and mow through mobs (3x grenade engineer ftw).
Is it pvp where you cant just curbstomp other players because you dont have gear that makes you significantly better than they could ever be?
Is it new abilities? would it have been better to have the unlocks be level based rather than skill point based?
And yet here you are criticising it.. GW2 is getting plenty of criticism, like any other game. I'm not sure where you are getting the idea that GW2 is getting special treatment when the forum is full of (IMO mostly unreasonable) complaints.
I'd go as far as to say that GW2 gets unfairly treated in the opposite direction (but im not going to make a big thing of it - people are entitled to their opinions), so get off your high horse and stop being so biased.
Sorry - What game released didn't have bugs when released. Name one? Some things are impossible to fix - due to the way the game was designed (all designs are compromises after all) or is a nit pick complaint that just bothers people (like a fly or a mosquito).
He said he was a fan of the game and these are his opinions. It is not a REVIEW, it is HIS list of things that need to be fixed. What is wrong with that.
Please really COMPREHEND the article before commenting.
All of these issue are maybe non-issue but are not that important to me. Maybe because I am sick of ThemeParks, I dont know, but I wish I could play an MMORPG where your action had consequences and you the players controlled the world rather than the devs controlling it and just taking you for a ride.
I mean I could log off one day with the WvW map in one state and then log on the other day with the map in another state and it barely matters beside some small bonuses. Win or lose, does not really change anything...
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It is about being able to see and do different things. Not just damage but abilities that look and behave differently. Upping dmg or armor is just a number, which is nice, but imo is not enough of a feeling of progression from lvl 50-80.
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