Belghast

I had something happen this weekend that made me realize something about me and Guild Wars 2. I am having a blast right now and even though it took me ten years to really get the hang of things, I do now firmly believe that the game is something more people should play. However I have come to the realization that it isn’t really something that I can recommend without a lot of asterisks behind that statement. With Final Fantasy XIV I could openly suggest that game to new players knowing that so long as they followed the Main Story Quest that they would be fine. The game is structured in a way and the community has been set up to create the optimal experience for on-boarding someone who knows nothing about the experience. While it does not guarantee that every player is going to fall in love, it does sorta put its best foot forward in both the story and the content design. Guild Wars 2 however does not do this. It is an obstacle that needs to be conquered and your knowledge of the game feels hard fought. The contrarian design ethics feel like the deck is stacked against anyone who is not extremely motivated to learn the game. The recent Siege Turtle nonsense has exposed that there is a deep rift in the community between those who have attained mastery over the mechanics and those who are just sorta doing their own thing and expecting it to work. The problem is that there is this gulf of information that can only be obtained if the player is motivated enough to dig for it. There is a good reason why the /wiki command exists, because the official Guild Wars 2 wiki is for better or worse required reading. All of this adds up to an experience that makes it extremely hard to gain new players without the scaffolding of a preexisting community that is bought into holding their hand through the rough spots. This morning I thought I would talk about some of those “asterisks” that I have when it comes to suggesting Guild Wars 2 to a new player. Don’t get me wrong I now feel firmly that it is worth the effort, but there is a large amount of “buy-in” required for the player to really get to a point of enjoying this game fully. Essentially there is a good reason why the lions share of the “WoW Exodus” found a home in Final Fantasy XIV and not Guild Wars 2.

The Missing Story

This one is probably the single biggest issue for me personally. There is a chunk of much needed story and characterization that is just forever gone to the sands of time. When Guild Wars 2 initially released it wanted to change the way in which we play games, namely it wanted to present an ever changing world. This meant that its long tailed story delivery was done through a series of permanent content updates that changed the state of the world. The easiest example of this is that the Lion’s Arch that you see in the personal story for example is wildly different from the Lion’s Arch that you walk into on the map. The reasons behind this and the sacking of Lion’s Arch and subsequent rebuilding all took place during this first “Season” of the Living World content. The bigger problem for me however is that your personal story is very much about you coming up through the ranks of this new world order and operating in and around the members of Destiny’s Edge. These were all established in universe heroes, and Season 1 was also the time of setting up the NEXT group of heroes… the folks that would eventually become known as Dragon’s Watch. The problem that happens now however is you go from having your personal story and interacting with Destiny’s Edge and then zoom forward at the beginning of Living World 2 to already having an established band of characters that follow in your wake with no real explanation of who the hell any of them are. All of that time spent getting to know Braham, Gorrik, Taimi, Rox, Kasmeer, and Majory took place during this missing first season of content. What exists now instead is a sort of narrative history lesson about Scarlet Briar and her “War” on Tyria. However the story content just doesn’t exist because it was not initially told in the manner that Living World season 2 was told, with a series of repeatable instanced content. However the end result is that there is this giant hole in the story that just cannot reasonably be bridged and leads the players to struggle to really care about this cast of characters. I know it took me until the end of Heart of Thorns before I finally felt like I had enough of an understanding of current events to get hooked on the story elements. Essentially Season 1 is never going to come back unless serious effort is put in place by ArenaNet to recreate all of this content and present it in a manner that allows for the players to experience it. I am not sure if that is going to happen, but so long as this gap happens it will always be an obstacle to new players.

Lack of Direction

This next bit is both a positive and a negative. Guild Wars 2 really doesn’t give you any hand holding when it comes to leveling or progressing through the game. You have your personal story which is derived from the choices you made during character creation, and it acts as a vague scaffolding to move you through the game. However it is space out enough that the player is going to be left to fend for themselves for large chunks of time. Upon creating a brand new character you are directed to find a Scout, and so long as you remember this advice it is going to keep pushing you towards new objectives. However there lacks a general sense of focus that moves you through a zone, and for someone coming from a more traditional MMORPG experience it is going to feel completely rudderless. I know I struggled with this starting in alpha where I could not figure out where the “quests” were. The “hearts” didn’t feel like a reasonable replacement for that experience and while the open world events felt great, they also didn’t seem to be what I was seeking either. What I was ultimately looking for was something that moved me through a zone and told me the story of what was happening there. That more or less does not exist without a lot of reading between the lines. I think that maybe Guild Wars 2 takes the training wheels off a bit too soon and doesn’t wait until the player is already grounded in the experience of playing the game. However again since the entire design of Guild Wars 2 is contrarian in nature… it is absolutely fitting what the initial goals were.

Decisions without Adequate Advisement

While leveling through the game you have a lot of decisions thrown at you, and at any given step it is very hard to understand how many of those things are actually important. What happens to many players is that they level their way to 80 and end up with a mixed set of orange and yellow gear, that and some choices made… that don’t actually equate to a “Build”. So unless you are extremely lucky it is pretty easy to create something that is nigh unplayable when it comes to more serious and organized content. Admittedly this is also the problem with a game like Diablo, where you are asked to make a number of decisions without much explanation given to the consequences to any of those choices. This was also a huge problem with Rift, in that there were so many possible options that it was extremely easy to create something that was mostly unplayable. Over time that game developed a template library with a handful of suggested builds, and so long as you followed one of those you wound up in a pretty good place. I would love to see Guild Wars 2 develop something similar where a build template not only tells you what abilities you should favor but also the types of gear that you should be seeking. Fixing your abilities is extremely quick and does not cost anything, but completely changing your gear is a wholly different proposition. I get that the general answer is to “go to the wiki” but that is the WRONG answer when it comes to on-boarding a new player into your game. Wikis are things for players who are already bought into the experience of playing your game, not a training vehicle.

So Many Currencies

Guild Wars 2 is an extremely overwhelming experience to play cold. There is a truly staggering amount of content to complete in this game, and with it a whole bunch of systems that only make sense within the context of a specific zone. Along with this are a staggering number of items and currencies that you will collect along the way. Sure there is an endorphin hit each time you see something scroll past that you have looted… but most of the time you have no clue what any of it is actually used for. Again the stock answer is to go to the wiki and in fact you can Shift Click an item and feed it into the /wiki command to make it easier to look things up. However still getting used to all of these currencies and how they interact with each other is… “A LOT”. Part of the whole process of getting into Guild Wars 2 is learning what is useful, what is valuable, and what are things that you should just instantly salvage. For the most part all of the currencies that you get will have a specific purpose, but also be something that you can ignore until you realize what that purpose is. However it does feel weird when the game feeds you things like Mystic Coins and Laurels without really explaining why these are useful things to be obtaining. With Mystic Coins I am pretty sure that a lot of players get these and immediately cash them in given that they were worth a chunk of gold… not realizing that there is going to be a time when they need large quantities of them later. Similarly you can buy a lot of cheap things with Laurels without understanding that they become your single best way of obtaining Ascended quality accessories. Guild Wars 2 throws a lot of seemingly random things at the player, and that in itself can be a massive turn off. Especially when you consider how limited your bag space, and how relatively expensive it is to do something about that. Again this is one of those things when you really need a veteran player at your disposal that can answer your random questions, rather than being expected to go to the wiki for everything.

The Cash Shop

I have mostly made my peace with the cash shop and Guild Wars 2, but upon experiencing it for the first time it can be a bit of a turn off. It is this weird mix of completely useless things, extremely valuable things, and a bunch of traps that you should never purchase. For example there is a thing called a Black Lion Chest that you are going to need to purchase keys to unlock. You should never do this. Buying keys is a complete waste of money and you are almost never going to get anything useful from them. Completing content is going to give you a smattering of keys so that you can experience this on your own for free. Sure I managed to pull a unicorn from one of mine and got the Permanent Bank contract… but you are not going to have that luck and are instead going to pull a bunch junk that is going to clog your bank. Then there are things that you absolutely do need… but are charged an exorbitant price for like individual shared inventory slots, build/equipment templates that are on a per character basis instead of account wide, and more bank storage. One of the saving graces of the Black Lion Trading Company or “Gem Store” as it is more colloquially known… is that everything can be purchased with in game currency. There is an exchange rate that lets you trade gold for gems and gems for gold, so if you find a way to farm gold you can ultimately buy anything you want from the store without spending a dime. I had a realization the other day that I had never seen a gold spammer in game, and effectively it is due to this conversion going both ways and the legitimate price of gold driving third party sellers out of business. The biggest problem that I have with the cash shop however is that even if you guy deluxe boxed editions of the games… you are going to ultimately need to purchase Living World content. Granted if you purchase the Ultimate Edition of the game they give you more than enough cash shop currency to buy all of it… but the game doesn’t exactly indicate that maybe this is your best use of that windfall rather than buying other junk. If you are actively playing when new Living World content is released, you get access to it for free. However if you are playing catch up it is usually 200 gems per episode within a season or roughly $2.50 per story chunk. Again not too bad considering there is no subscription fee, but it also doesn’t feel great either.

Positives Outweigh the Negatives

I would definitely say that in the end the positives of the game outweigh the negatives, but this morning I am largely talking about the obstacles to adoption. What Guild Wars 2 gives you is a choose your own adventure experience, where almost everything that you could be doing is at least somewhat useful. It is also a game that has many different paths that lead to the same equivalent results. If you want gear you can go down the path of Raiding, Open World Bosses, PVP, World Vs World, or just ignore all of that can craft your way to glory. The end result from all of these paths being effectively the same set of gear with the same stats and same potential. It feels really good to know that what you are working towards is not going to be washed away when the next expansion releases. However this also can sorta be a negative to new players as well. I know that I am personally so far behind in the horizontal progression that it can feel bad when you have this mountain of things that you need to do to truly “catch up” to the rest of the players. With a traditional expansion model, every few years there is a reset that takes everyone back to equal footing. That doesn’t really happen in Guild Wars 2, but also you are never going to have a moment when everything you have worked towards is washed away. Everything I have done remains as useful as it was the moment I accomplished it. Every piece of gear that I have put work towards is still viable, and since effectively everything is account bound I can use that to funnel things to other characters making the entire experience extremely “Alt Friendly”. Guild Wars 2 is a game that deserves way more attention than it receives. The challenge however is that it requires a lot of work on the part of the player to really engage with the game fully. It took me ten years of failed starts to finally arrive here, and I am not sure how many people would keep bashing their head against this wall like I have. For some the game clicks immediately and presents them with the experience they have always been wanting. For the large swath of players who view the world through Warcraft colored lenses however… I am not sure if the adoption rate is going to be so quick. GW2 is this immensely rich and varied environment with a truly staggering amount of content, and I just wish it were a little easier to love. For all of these reasons… I am not sure I will ever arrive at a point where recommending Guild Wars 2 won’t come with a long list of caveats. The post Challenges with Guild Wars 2 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good Morning Friends. I am moving in slow motion today because I ended up sleeping in super late. I am technically in vacation mode for the next few days but decided I should probably still blog. In Guild Wars 2 last night I made some movement in Living World Season 3. I also came to a decision with what to do regarding my Perm Auction contract. Ultimately I went with an instant sale and got it over with because just having to think about it was stressing me out. All of the third party ways of trading goods seemed super sketchy and I decided I would rather have “some” money hassle free as opposed to maybe getting zero money and jumping through a bunch of hoops. The first thing I did with the windfall was spend about 500 gold in materials to help the Guild Hall upgrade a little quicker.

This screenshot does not do this justice. I am sorta terrified of deep water, and one of the most horrifying moments in my life for me was traveling to the edge of the continental shelf in a submarine and seeing the seemingly dark endless abyss. As a result games like Subnautica trigger a deep primal fear in me at times, and yesterday Guild Wars 2 absolutely tapped into this. I was swimming through an area in Mount Maelstrom and saw this gigantic fish thing and for reference… I am maybe about half the size of its fin. It is very hard to really appreciate the scale while in a very flattened screenshot and not seeing it in motion. I did my best to avoid it because it was also a champion.

I did have a moment yesterday that made me want to throw my laptop. I was doing this mission where I was supposed to be bonding with Aurene the baby dragon. The final stage was to fight a Mordrem and there is an ability that I had to fire that caused both my character and Aurene to attack at the same time. Problem is we would collectively get the mob down to around 25% health and then it would instantly heal back up. So my original thought process was that I was simply not burning hard enough to be able to defeat it in the hard time limit. I fought this thing for over an hour straight trying to burn harder because it could not kill me, and I clearly could not kill it.

Eventually I AFK’d during the fight and started watching YouTube videos to try and figure out what the gimmick was. It turns out that it is impossible to kill it in one go, and it does this ability that causes it to regenerate health by damaging you and Aurene. However it also gains health for damaging your pets. As a Necromancer on average I have somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to ten pets up at any given time, so to me it seemed like the Modrem was just healing back to full health instantly because it was soaking in tiny bits of health… but from like 12 targets at a time causing it to jump straight back to 100% health. This is one of the frustrating things that can happen in Guild Wars 2 is that there are times… especially with older content that it is really bad at messaging what the hell is actually going on. Unfortunately with a Necromancer I have no control over my pets and once I have summoned them… I can’t dismiss them. So what ended up happening is I had to struggle to find a way to actually die on the encounter, and then restart at the check point and do the fight without my pets. After an hour of failing… the entire fight only took a few minutes once I figured out the gimmick that I had to follow. I really hate gimmick fights regardless of the game, but I hate them even more when it is deeply unclear what is actually going on. The post Rage Quit Averted appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.