Official BWE Experience Thread
SpencerForHire
Clawson, MI
Post your experiences good and bad here. I would love to hear what will keep you coming back or what will drive you away. Is there anything our organization as a playgroup can help with? Server thoughts? Anything? Do tell!
My personal experience that I found most refreshing was how I kept "accidenting" upon things. Outside of the "Heart" events there are NPCs all over the world. Many of these NPCs when talked to can start little games, mini-events and more. Just realizing that the map isn't going to show me the only points of interest really excited me.
Second, I love-love-love how difficult this game is. I am so sick and tired of gaming communities catering to the concept of "casual" where casual player actually means bad player. Having to try for a specific event or personal story event made it all the more rewarding when I finally completed it.
On the negative side of things, like many of you, I was very annoyed with the overflow map. There has been a lot of commentary from everyone who played the beta about it so I foresee a fix in the near future.
My personal experience that I found most refreshing was how I kept "accidenting" upon things. Outside of the "Heart" events there are NPCs all over the world. Many of these NPCs when talked to can start little games, mini-events and more. Just realizing that the map isn't going to show me the only points of interest really excited me.
Second, I love-love-love how difficult this game is. I am so sick and tired of gaming communities catering to the concept of "casual" where casual player actually means bad player. Having to try for a specific event or personal story event made it all the more rewarding when I finally completed it.
On the negative side of things, like many of you, I was very annoyed with the overflow map. There has been a lot of commentary from everyone who played the beta about it so I foresee a fix in the near future.
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Other than that, I enjoyed the classes I played (guardian up to 13, ranger up to 7 or 8, elementalist for a <10 mins but liked it) and look forward to the future beta weekends and fixes.
I didn't try to do level 10 quests at character level 6, and there was always at least 15 people on dynamic events, so that may alter my opinion.
Kite and cast/attack. Pretty much the mechanic
I played as a Engineer, Thief, Ranger, Elementalist
-Dynamic combat on par with a single-player RPG. I didn't think it was possible, but they've done it. Real-time dodging of attacks? WHATTHEFUCK
-I don't have to compete with players for mobs or resources. The game doesn't make me actively hate humanity.
-Stumbling upon things to do all over the world, seemingly no matter where I am, was awesome. I'm not sure how this will play out in the long run, but it's awesome for now.
-Every class is entertaining. When I went into EverQuest and World of Warcraft, there was a definite feeling that classes were separated into "more fun" or "less fun" by virtue of their abilities and power vs. the game world. Some classes needed to rely on someone else at all times, and were totally hopeless to play by yourself. I went into GW2 wanting to whittle down my list of classes for Live, but I ended up having more questions than answers in many respects.
-DAT ART DIRECTION. The game looks incredible. The art team did an absolutely wonderful job. It's beautiful.
-The game "feels" good to play. This is impossible to fully articulate, but some games (coughquake3cough) just felt "wrong" compared to competitors or predecessors. From movement, to travel, to questing, this game feels awesome.
-And the big numero uno: GW2 single-handedly shaves the rough edges off of every MMO that's come before it. By taking the best bits of its contemporaries and mixing in a huge dose of homegrown ingenuity, ArenaNet has created an MMO that neither annoys nor abuses the players with nonsensical restrictions: No inter-faction communication barriers. No Skinner Boxes. No laboriously repetitive quests. No feeling of "grinding" for levels. No nasty EXP curves. No daunting travel.
-The rally and rez systems. Amazing.
-PVP will prove to be the most fascinatingly complicated game of rock paper scissors ever played. The theorycrafters are going to spend the next 8 years arguing until their piss is bloody about which of the 20+ different weapon/combo chains are best in a match versus a given opponent, who also has 20+ different weapon/comb chains.
-Unlocking all your abilities by level 10 or 11, which lets you get a feel for a class without sinking 50 levels into it (hello, WoW), is the greatest story ever told.
BAD:
-The dialog can be a little stilted or awkward. I don't know how to articulate it, but the script-writing just isn't all that convincing. It pulled me out of the gameworld on more than one occasion.
-The voice acting needs some help. Actually, I don't care if the game has voice acting or not, but if you're going to put it there, I wanted it to be better.
-Damage reduction via AC from non-plate classes is embarrassingly unbalanced. Whereas a level 10 Guardian can solo 4-5 level 10 mobs, a level 20 Thief could easily die to two of them if he's not careful.
-With respect to world encounters, I'm not certain if dying is supposed to play as large a role that it does, but you die an awful lot. One of two things are possible here: 1) My view of survival is tainted by EQ and WoW, where living is the #1 objective. - OR - 2) Damage output is simply too high vs the healing you and other classes can supply, or vice versa, in that the healing isn't tuned to be high enough. Why does a 6-point skill only do 88 healing on the Guardian, with that being its only purpose? Some of these bosses contemplate a sneeze with more damage than that.
-Targeted AOEs are an anachronistic and awkward spell mechanic that sucked in WoW, and they suck here. It's even worse when targeted AOEs are half your cast bar. The fast-cast ground targeting option should drop the AOE on your current target, rather than simply skipping the click at your cursor.
-I was hoping for a few more quests. There are the world events and your character story, but the early game seemed very directionless to a new player. Sometimes the game would say that there's an event nearby, but wouldn't show up on your map until you got much closer. Sometimes the objectives weren't super clear. Having some way to guide newer players into the game--even if a tutorial system--would be a tremendous help.
I'll contrast it with SWTOR, because it's the only other MMO I've really played: when progressing your story in SWTOR, there are other side missions right around that area, and that encourages you to do them. When you do, you level right alongside your story quests. In my time with GW2, I get thrown into a situation (the centaurs are attacking Shaemoor!) with no backstory or motivation to do anything about it, and I immediately get a quest that I'm not leveled for if I don't go around killing everything in sight (first quest post the "main event" is a level 3 event, and I don't think I was that after the earth hands). Everything continued from there - fill in a heart, go do a story quest, next story quest is 1-3 levels away. Go back out to the countryside, fill in some more hearts, continue story in the city. Go back out to the countryside, fill in more hearts, etc., etc., etc....
It also feels somewhat troublesome to decide to try a new weapon combo mid-game. Example: I decided dual daggers was my primary combo (thief class), and rocked it. Later I got rewarded with a pistol, so made a secondary dagger + pistol combo - and was suddenly back to two attacks while I tried to get enough kills to unlock the dagger + pistol slots 3, 4, and 5. It really limited my options, and this was when I was level 8 or 9 (and still dying a ton, as has been mentioned).
I like the group quest mechanic, and I like that you basically always end up in an arbitrary group, and I like that everybody gets XP from kills that occur around you, and spontaneous groups form around activities (I triggered a couple skill point quests that were above me, but 5 other people immediately jumped in). That kind of stuff is cool. I think, however, that I tend to play games for the story, and this is just not doing anything for me in the story department.
A lot of what I've heard seems to indicate that there is a lot of 'random' sort of groupings of players when things are going down. Is one 'forced' to team up with strangers? Can a group create a party and leave it at that?
I am totally uninterested in grouping up with strangers.
@CB: to echo what Snark said, you can group up with your 4-5 (not sure what max group size is) but I did all of it without a group and just jumped into the "events" with other people, rezzing when I could and being rezzed when I fell.
never is anyone "forced" into your group during these events
I really couldn't care less about the MMO part. I just want a fun co-op game to play with my friends, and GW1 was that for us, maybe GW2 has changed the formula enough that it can't fill that role for us...
Edit: saw this after my above comment. That sounds a little better. No one has even mentioned 'dungeons' yet, so I assumed that the game was played entirely in these 'events' instead, which sounded dumb.
So, is there no way to play the world events without interacting with strangers? Is it possible to just not do the 'events'?
And how does the story split up? Are we all going to have to make careful choices at the beginning in order to play together? I seriously long for the day an MMO comes out that doesn' make me play through a bunch of other crap before I'm allowed to join up with my friendss...
2) I don't know how it works across races, but across storylines for the same race, you play a few levels of your own content, and then the storylines converge.
As awesome as GW2 is, and listening to what you want, it might be better for your group to get Guild Wars: Nightfall and Eye of the North and play those (if you haven't already) for the "this is my world, get off my lawn" game play.
There are instances/dungeons in GW2 like Thrax said, but the World AND Towns are populated with everyone.
There is some pretty awesome stuff in the water near the hub. I highly recommend exploring it! Some familiar ruins and some cute residents of a new race you'll be running into some.
Beta characters have not been deleted, so carry forth!
http://www.arena.net/blog/announcing-the-next-guild-wars-2-beta-weekend
which will probably not be in beta