User:Lania Elderfire/BWE1

1st BWE impressions

These are the thoughts that I had about the first beta weekend event. What I did:

• Played the personal story to the demo limit, and PvE to level 23 doing as many different dynamic events that I came acrossed
• Played the ranger, mesmer, warrior and elementalist in various PvP
• Explored everywhere that I can with my elementalist

Overall it was a fun experience but there were things about the game that didn't sit well with me.

1. Combat

   I seem to be the minority in saying that the combat for me feels sluggish. Most people seem to feel that it is too difficult and too much work. It's a huge change from GW1 but it falls short of other MMO's coming out like Tera online and Blade and soul when it comes to "dynamic" combat. Compared to Vindictus and Dragon Nest, the PvE experience in GW2 feels like trying to run through molassas... here is why.

   • Dodging in GW2 is slow. Sure the attacks are also slow but the dodging motion it self isn't much faster than running. So kiting around is almost as effective as dodging. Dodging isn't very spammable unless you have the endurance regen buffed. It also doesn't have any evasion or invulnerability frames like with other action MMO dodging skills. I would like a faster but shorter and more spammable dodge with a 0.3-0.5 second evasion/invulnerability frame. Also everyone dodges the same way. Why not have the mesmer dodge be something more mesmerish like a short distortion like effect or a illusion copy and teleport a short distance to the side... or the Necro turn into a black mist momentarily... or elementalist blinking etc. The ranger can do something like a acrobatic slide for a dodge, or a warrior parrying the attack away instead.
   • There is no real sense of "aiming". You still target enemies, and what you shoot will auto lead the target. Most ranged attacks don't have homing capacity but it can lead very well, and hit things easily without any real aiming. Some things like spread shot feels like it should just fire in the direction you are facing instead of taking additional time to place the attack with your mouse. I'm not asking something extreme like crosshairs and make it a 3rd person shooter, but at least make it so that you'd need to aim something.
   • Jumping seems to have no utiliy in combat other than to jump over things to take cover or something similar. As far as I can tell there are no skills that take advantage of jumping. Yeah I know there is the jump shot... I mean something more like jump->activate aerial combos.
   • Attacking in this game is slow. Melee characters swing too slowly making it too easy to move out of the way or dodge. At the moment it is still very easy for warriors to pwn PvP because a lot of people don't bother to move around while attacking. But against someone who knows how to kite, dodge, and move... hitting as a melee is annoying, while hitting as a ranged character takes no skill.
   • The AoE circles are just stupid. Red circles - hostile AoE. White circles - friendly AoE. I don't see the need for these things... especially the red circle. AoE activation is slow enough as it is... why make it so obvious and give away a early warning so that players can move out of AoE? This makes a lot of different kinds of AoE skills nearly useless in PvP. Though I am still thoroughly surprised how many people don't bother to move.
   • The game is too stat dependent and not on actual player skill. A difference in 1 level is a huge different in damage dealt and taken... skill can over take enemies up to about 4-5 levels above you, but beyond that forget it. All it takes is just one mistake and you are dead.

2. gameplay design choices

   • Unusual weapon choices... Mesmers using two handed swords to shoot lasers?? Rangers can't use rifles, caster classes using daggers but not for stabbing, why not pistols for elementalists to fire elemental bullets?
   • daggers aren't really viable in many caster classes due to the short range, low armor, low HP, and lack or not enough defensive skills.
   • Once you do about a dozen or so dynamic events, everything else just seems the same. The same events gets recycled with different enemies, bosses, locations, etc and it doesn't feel dynamic anymore.
   • Enemy respawn rate is too fast, especially when it's just two level 19's taking on level 23 mobs. Enemies definitely should not respawn until a event is finished, because a mob popping out of thin air as a base is raided just feels unrealistic. When they need to scale the encounter cause of new people joining in, the spawns should arrive outside of the area so it looks like enemy reinforcements rather than them appearing all of a sudden.

3. Animation

   • The animation in the game is very unnatural. It feels like the upperbody and the lowerbody is disconnected from each other when it comes to swinging swords, casting spells, etc etc. It makes em look kinda retarded.
   • No physics or ragdoll effects. I seems like a lot of new MMO games are taking advantage of physics in their animations and add ragdoll effects, gravity on clothing, and various other enhancements that make the characters look and move more naturally in the world.
   • No motion capture. Just about every other new game coming out and already out uses motion capture technology to make the animations look smooth and natural.

4. Clothing/armor selection, customization

   • I really hope that there will be a much larger pool of armor and clothing to choose from because just the few that I've seen just isn't doing it for me
   • Character customization feels very limited. Only about 18 faces and 20 hairs to choose from for all the professions per race. Even GW1 had more faces though, they were professions specific. The faces all look too similar, and it doesn't have a lot of ways to really make someone look very unique. The sliders make a fairly small change in how the character looks.
   • Dye color is per character rather than account wide. I love coloring my armor but why did they make it character specific rather than account wide? I don't know.

5. PvP

   • At the moment, PvP is horribly unbalanced. Certain professions are clearly much better suited for taking down just about anyone.
   • Pacing of WvWvW is too slow. It takes forever to take down gates, kill keep lords, etc. The WvW gameplay just isn't something I like spending hours to do, as there really isn't that many different things you can do. Spending over an hour being stalemated at the gate? no thank you.

6. Story and Characters

   • I was a bit disappointed by the personal stories. It has the platform for an intriguing story with deep (believable) characters because of the instanced system it uses for the personal story. But what I experienced was a second rate story akin to a poorly written novel with uninteresting characters. The story line was quite predictable with little to no surprises. I also don't want to see "bandits" anymore. Just use some other word than bandit, but seeing bandit right after bandit in the same sentence or bandit on the sentence right after and then more bandit, bandit, bandit... really? can't you do better?
   • Anet can really learn from asian game developers on how to create characters that people will remember forever (I still remember characters from FF7, 10 even though it's been over 14 years since I last played FF7). None of the characters that I've encountered so far in GW2 is memorable. Everyone is a overdone cliche character... the noble hero, the typical anti hero, etc etc... It doesn't have to be new, it just had to be interesting. Now yes it has only been 2 days of beta, but I've come across more interesting characters in 30 minutes of some asian MMO's.
   • The instanced platform for story telling in GW2 could have produced something as compelling as stories found in the final fantasy series. Lets hope that the last 3/4 of the story is more interesting than the first 1/4 of it.

Now there are some things I did like...

1. The landscape is actually very pretty. The cities are huge and there is a lot to explore. In the beta I spent more time exploring and taking pictures than killing or doing dynamic events.
2. The Marketplace is probably one of the best implementation of a marketboard I have ever seen. It tracks lowest price, list things with asking prices, average price etc etc. no more Spamadan!
3. Underwater combat is pretty fun. The gameplay is almost like a different game, and reminds me a little of Space combat games like xwing alliance, and freespace 2 since it’s a 3D combat environment with a Z axis.
4. Although the map is ugly, I think the color is way over saturated, it is easy to read, and find things. Regions within zones are explored all at once, so no more scraping the walls to clear up every little bit of the map.
5. The guild system is amazing. So many things that you can do, guild bank, guild armor, guild weapons, guild specific bonuses, and after the launch, guild halls that are more than just pit stops.
6. Some of the epic bosses are massively huge. Probably too big? I do like that it is big... but I don’t like that it just sits there most of the time... like the final mission in nightfall to kill abbadon.
7. The game isn’t grindy when it comes to leveling or anything. Nothing like go kill 100 of x mob and return for a paltry reward.

more later