User:Lania Elderfire/BWE2
June 8-10th.
Well I will have to say that BWE2 overall was a disappointment. The new explorable area (gendarran fields) was sparse in terms of dynamic events, and the meta event in that area is disappointing. The game performance was also abysmal, even worse than before. Overclocking my Intel core i5-2500k to 4.0 ghz from 3.3 ghz barely made any difference and was stuck at 10-25 fps during heavy combat or in heavily populated areas. The new additions and balance changes to WvW was a welcome change, and made it more enjoyable, but it still has a lot of problems.
They said that they made changes to melee that made it feel more responsive and fluid. The difference/change must have been pretty small since I personally didn’t notice any change from BWE1. Melee is still clunky, and it just feels like I’m just flailing around while circle strafing targets.
The Mystic forge is an interesting idea to get something different from a set of 4 related items. But it seems like what you get isn’t likely going to be better than what you put in, usually worse.
The gem store now officially makes GW2 a game that is not unlike many of Nexon’s offerings. Cash shops in Dragon Nest, Vindictus, Dragon Fighter online, combat arms etc offer a lot of things that change the character cosmetically, and/or improve their effectiveness in combat. At least for Vindictus, none of the cash shop advantages are game breaking or give anyone a gaigantic advantage over the other. At the moment, there aren’t anything in GW2 that will give someone a game breaking advantage, but we’ll see what happens in the future.
Animations don’t really look better. The animations are still overly smoothed key frame animation that lacks any semblance of physics, character bone structure, weight, or anything that makes the animation not look cartoonish. There is no true skeletal animation system in GW2, and no implementation of actual physics in the cloth, hair, or any movable parts. No ragdoll effects when things die... they all die the same way depending on what the final damage type was. Considering the current new MMO’s using unreal engine 3, with skeletal-motion-captured animations, and new emerging engine like square-enix’s luminance that feature realistic skin, face, and muscle animations... GW2 is really behind the curve in terms of animation technology. Devcat’s Mabinogi 2 MMO which is under development also feature realistic muscle and skin animation, in addition to full physics to cloth, armor plates, movement, and body parts that bounce (^_^)...
After about 4 days of playing, with BWE1&2 combined, Dynamic events are really starting to feel very undynamic. Most of these are simply the same as other dynamic events with a very transient change to the world if any. You can’t overtake the centaur base and have a seraph garrison in kessex peak, and you can’t wipe out the centaurs in the base north of nebo terrace. They are always there and they constantly respawn every few minutes after they are killed. Taking a party there and wiping out the centaurs in the base is not possible, because by the time you cleared a part of it, the centaurs in the previous part have already respawned. Other things like “renown hearts” are basically the typical MMO kill X mob Y # of times quest in a different package. The Meta events are also similarly uninteresting. Changes are too transient, and nothing seemed to have changed the world.
WvW is basically a match of who has the biggest army. There is little skill involved, and while there are ways to defend a keep outnumbered 2:1, the opposite is impossible. The defensive aspects are too strong and the offensive aspects are too weak. There are no ways for a small party to sneak in and assassinate the keep/tower lord. There are no ways for a outnumbered force attacking a keep to succeed. You have to break down a wall/door, and invade with a much larger force than the defending force, and there is no real way around it. So, basically, the server with the most population has an overwhelming advantage over servers that aren’t as populated.
Changes to the UI, utility skill tiering, and other “major” things they did seemed a lot less exciting than they made it out to be on their preview. Other than that, BWE2 was basically the same as BWE1, and I had hoped that there was more for them to show in BWE2 considering it was over a month later. Because at this point, I’m kinda sick of playing GW2, and there really isn't anything I can say that is actually positive about BWE2. Hopefully BWE3 is a lot better.
