Guild Wars 2

[crazyroosterman]

when I say screw it up I meant balance wise I've seen people play it(mostly tb) and I like what I see from it although I probably won't play it since it looks like it would melt my laptop btw balance now I don't know about heroes lately since I haven't played that for a while(my friend who played it stopped playing and I find playing with random a bore so bleh) but when I was playing it it seemed they were doing a decant ish job with it but then of course there's hearthstone were instead of real balance and interesting mechanics they insisted on making it stupid and wacky and the few times they have tried to balance it they fallen flat on their ass btw it seems like they've bothered to put some real care into over watch so even I'm weary of it I'm hopeful they mess it up.

[crazyroosterman]

and yes it should interesting to see what the other nerds here think of that game is like when it becomes available for sale.

[Aklyon]

From what I've seen of overwatch, it'll be an interesting game to see other people play. Not all that interested in playing it myself after hearing about Black Desert (and watching a fair number of videos about that).

[Misery]

Black Desert?  What is that?

[Aklyon]

From what I've seen of it so far, a giant sandbox-style sorta fighting game-like action combat non-tabtarget mmo from korea, with an absurdly detailed character creator and no fast travel besides 'you have an alt in that spot so you can jump over there using that character and do stuff with their inventory or certain shared things, like buy pet food for your dog/cat/hawk'. Its also not f2p in its western release (though it apparently is in korea/russia), its b2p. Though it still has a cash shop of course.

And it is not trying to defeat WoW by copying it as far as I can tell, its probably the furthest away from it I've seen. You've got a giant open world, a similarly-giant pile of things you could do, and next to no instances (which has apparently confused many people expecting to dungeon their way to the soft cap and beyond). Most of the quests apparently don't even directly level you if what I've heard is correct, they give you stuff that lets you level other things, or do stuff, or expand your inventory. It sounds promising, despite the promise of grinding involved in it being a korean mmo.

[Misery]

Wow.  This looks like a modern MMO that isnt terrible! 

But... yes, I'm a bit put off by the fact that it's a Korean MMO due to grinding.  I usually cant tolerate grinding.   So that's unfortunate.  I guess it's not time to jump back into the genre yet after all.  Feh.

I miss the old days, when the genre wasnt awful.

[Aklyon]

Well, theres a game pass thread on reddit if you want to try and pick up a week free trial of it, but I'm not sure how reliable that is. I got a pass from a friend instead.

[Mánagarmr]

I'm late to the reply, but the MASSIVE power creep that happened in WoW was a big problem with it. When you went from having 5000-ish HP in late game raiding gear in vanilla to over 30k in BC...you knew there would be problems. Then came Wrath...and by the time of Cataclysm, even HEALERS were soaring over 120k health. WTF?

[TheVampire100]

I just want to say, the "grinding" aspect in MMOs is wanted. Especially in F2P ones. But even Pay to Play games have this.
The reason is obvious: This games shall keep the player hooked over a long playing time. Normal games have an average gaming time of 20-30 hours. This may rise or fall depending on the game. Sandbox games have often a lot higher gaming time compared to story driven games.
MMOs however are aiming to have the highest gaming time of all genres for the obvious reason of keeping the players in the game. MMOs differ from normal games that they don't benefit from single purchases. They could aim towards this but this would mean they have to release a sequel or new MMO every three years. Also they have to keep the servers running 24H a day for thousands of people, this costs TONS of money. So you HAVE to keep the palyers int he game, otherwise the whole system would fail. Grinding is a good way fromt he developers point of view to keep players trapped. The player want to reach the end game content (which is obviously the best in the game, just look at the WoW example) but this takes a lot of gaming time. On a subsription service, players will pay every month just in hope to reach the end of the game eventually.
In F2P it works differently but is the same reason. You want the end game conent, grinding will take a long time. But F2P systems bait you with ingame purchases to ease the grinding, so you get faster what you want.
The different gaming models use different tactics but the goal is the same, to keep the player in the system.

[Cyborg]

Vocabulary and definitions.

Grinding is defined by repetitive tasks given to a player to make progress, often with no new challenge or variety.

An example of grinding would be farming the same mobs for three hours because they give the best experience or some drop needed for progress. MMORPG gets a lot of flak for this kind of gameplay.

An example of MMORPG gameplay that is not grinding would be something like PVP, which offers the behaviors of human players to add variety. World of Warcraft combat actually got better over time, adding new skills, customizations, and game types to make PVP have enough variety.

What we really need are emergent gameplay opportunities in the PvE area. I don't know of any MMORPG games that are doing that.

[Wingflier]

What we really need are emergent gameplay opportunities in the PvE area. I don't know of any MMORPG games that are doing that.

I think this was the whole idea of "RIFT", a game in which while you were casually farming or traveling across some random PvE zone, a giant inter-dimensional portal could open up, and tons of dangerous monsters spilled out, prompting people to come from all over to shut it again. Unfortunately I think this mechanic was too gimmicky to have any merit.

Personally I agree with you. The whole point of GW2 was to have this kind of emergent PvE gameplay, but it turned out to be hilariously disappointing in execution. Your actions literally have zero effect on the world. Though I suppose, in retrospect, that it was stupid to expect them to. I mean we're talking about a game with millions of players. If each individual player had the kind of power to change the universe forever, it would probably cause massive lore problems and/or the servers to crash frequently.

The closest you'll probably even come to that is Eve Online, where specific people can become the CEO of these massive interstellar corporations, owning large parts of the galaxy and having a huge effect on the game's universe.

Well anyway, what ANET did was nothing like that, it was much more mundane. In the end, it's just another "Theme Park" MMO, wrapped in pretty packaging. I was really hoping they'd take the incredible innovation that was Guild Wars 1 and build upon that, but to my surprise it plays a lot more like WoW than it does the original game. I'd be interested to know how that happened. I thought GW1 was pretty successful.

[Misery]

I just want to say, the "grinding" aspect in MMOs is wanted.

What.

Grinding is defined by repetitive tasks given to a player to make progress, often with no new challenge or variety.

An example of grinding would be farming the same mobs for three hours because they give the best experience or some drop needed for progress. MMORPG gets a lot of flak for this kind of gameplay.

Exactly.  And the thing is, these games dont HAVE to do it that way.  They do it that way because most devs arent creative enough to think of something better.

I keep bringing up City of Heroes, and I'll do so here again, because again, it was the one that got this right.  You still had to constantly clobber things to get experience, but the way it worked meant that you didn't have to just pound easy rats over and over and over.  You could get a constant CHALLENGE out of it.  In most MMOs, grinding is necessary in part because it tends to be suicide to attack even a single foe that's at all higher level than you.  But in CoH, this wasnt the case.  You were EXPECTED to constantly take on challenging, and DANGEROUS foes.  If you tried to grind against repetetive easy things?  Your experience bar would fill so ridiculously slowly that you could be there for decades.  Enemies either were capable of constantly being a real threat to you, or they offered no experience.  In addition, every mission you did always had a boss at the end, and bosses were dangerous even by themselves, yet always had friends backing them up.  Considering though that this game actually involved skill, instead of repetition of ability strings, you could overcome these challenges, and maybe even take on harder missions (enemies that were even higher level, compared to yours), for even more XP.  This is one reason why I stuck with that game until it's demise:  there WAS NO BORING PARTS.  There was no "the REAL game starts at level 60!".  No.  The real game started at level ONE.  And just kept getting better. 

Guild Wars 1 was like that too.  You could get to the super awesome stuff IMMEDIATELY, and it didn't STOP being super awesome.  The real game started right away.  It was the OTHER game that got this right.

But WoW and it's brethren?  No.  The SLOG begins at level one.  The fun begins a thousand hours later.  How these games ever became popular, I'll never understand.

I'd be interested to know how that happened. I thought GW1 was pretty successful.

I can tell you exactly how it happened:  Guild Wars 1, and WoW, released within a VERY short window of each other.  GW1 had been in development a long time before WoW's release.   In other words, the trend of copying WoW hadnt begun yet, and WoW hadnt had time to inflate yet.

But now?  It's been a LONG time since WoW achieved absolute domination of the genre, and the trend of copying it was already set in stone... so the always-derpy suits decided THAT was the thing to do, instead of being innovative again, because if WoW prints money, CLEARLY copying it would let them print money too.  Exasperated sigh.   And then they stand around like concussed chickens wondering what went wrong.

[Mánagarmr]

What we really need are emergent gameplay opportunities in the PvE area. I don't know of any MMORPG games that are doing that.

EVE?

[Wingflier]

I keep bringing up City of Heroes, and I'll do so here again, because again, it was the one that got this right.  You still had to constantly clobber things to get experience, but the way it worked meant that you didn't have to just pound easy rats over and over and over.  You could get a constant CHALLENGE out of it.  In most MMOs, grinding is necessary in part because it tends to be suicide to attack even a single foe that's at all higher level than you.  But in CoH, this wasnt the case.  You were EXPECTED to constantly take on challenging, and DANGEROUS foes.  If you tried to grind against repetetive easy things?  Your experience bar would fill so ridiculously slowly that you could be there for decades.  Enemies either were capable of constantly being a real threat to you, or they offered no experience.  In addition, every mission you did always had a boss at the end, and bosses were dangerous even by themselves, yet always had friends backing them up.  Considering though that this game actually involved skill, instead of repetition of ability strings, you could overcome these challenges, and maybe even take on harder missions (enemies that were even higher level, compared to yours), for even more XP.  This is one reason why I stuck with that game until it's demise:  there WAS NO BORING PARTS.  There was no "the REAL game starts at level 60!".  No.  The real game started at level ONE.  And just kept getting better. 

Uh, it causes me so much despair when you bring up City of Heroes. I never got a chance to play it (personally I find superhero games to be like most made-from-movie games, extremely gimmicky and profit-driven). I had no reason to think that a superhero MMO was actually going to somehow be good. When you talk about it though, it sounds like I missed a once in a lifetime experience, and that makes me sad.

Why did the servers close anyway?

But now?  It's been a LONG time since WoW achieved absolute domination of the genre, and the trend of copying it was already set in stone... so the always-derpy suits decided THAT was the thing to do, instead of being innovative again, because if WoW prints money, CLEARLY copying it would let them print money too.  Exasperated sigh.   And then they stand around like concussed chickens wondering what went wrong.

Ugh but the whole f*cking appeal of GW2 was supposed to be this MMO for people who hate MMOs. It was literally in their development trailer. "If you like MMOs, you'll want to check out GW2. If you hate MMOs, you'll DEFINITELY want to check out Guild Wars 2." They spoke as if the entire design goal of the game was to do something spectacular and amazing and new, and what did they really accomplish? What did they add to the formula?

The personal story-driven quests? It has no impact on the world. The "Area exploration mechanic"? Other games had already done that. The "underwater combat feature"? Please. I mean seriously, what is so unique about Guild Wars 2 that you couldn't find, on some level, in any generic Theme Park MMO? You still have to level your character to 60, which takes weeks (maybe days if you were extremely experienced with the game, and had nothing else to do, but not if you're a new player with a life or a low attention span). You still have to take part in these pointless quests. In fact, the quests are integrated into the "Area Exploration" mechanic, so you can't even skip them. Quests are even more integrated into Guild Wars 2 progression structure than they are with WoW. How is that even possible?

Honest to God, if they had just made Guild Wars 2.0, instead of Guild Wars 2, it would have been a billion times better. Guild Wars was a unique idea. 20 was the level cap, even after 3 expansions. You could reach 20 in a day. The game simply wasn't about grinding. All the best gear was available from the start of the game. The only point of even farming for better gear after you hit 20 was the cosmetics. Everything else (such as the rune system) was easy to unlock.

The biggest problems with the original game were just the super outdated engine (you couldn't even jump for Christ's sake), some of the mechanics were a bit wonky, in certain ways the game was unresponsive/frustrating, the UI needed work (most of the problems were probably hardcoded). All of these could have easily been fixed with the engine upgrade.

The instanced world of the game is actually what made is so great, and so different from other MMOs. Why would they remove that? Sure, in cities you could be social and meet tons of other people, but once you left the city area, you got your own private little world just for you and your friends. This made the story so much more believable. You never had to fight for farm. Every big event or plot twist that occurred only happened to your tiny group, and you could believe it because...well there was nobody else there to contest the fourth wall. It made it such a wonderful co-op experience as well. You and your group, changing the entire world of Tyria one quest at a time. It was brilliant. To me, that was story-driven gameplay. When 90% of your experience with the game was just you, your friends, and your hired mercenaries (another wonderful touch). Interaction with large groups of random people was only a click away, but it was almost never forced on you.

And why take out the cross-class combinations? That's another thing that made the game so unique. I don't even know of a single other MMO that allows you to create hybrid classes like that. The vast majority of them are the age-old, pick your class at the start, you're locked in forever and you have same skills at 3 million other people, have fun! Being able to combine the best features of two classes created some truly amazing possibilities. The whole game had to be designed in such a way that every potential combination or build you could create would be balanced (which was tough mind you), which meant that each individual skill had to be carefully looked at, and its effects considered when paired with others.

Somehow Guild Wars 2, even though promising to make the game more unique than any MMO, it was somehow less innovative, less story-driven, more grindy, and more traditional than ever before. That's quite an accomplishment, from my perspective.

[crazyroosterman]

hey a couple of things
1 what you say of guild wars 1 actually sounds like super fun makes me wish I could still have a go at that(I assume its not supported any more)
2 have either of you played the star wars galaxy mmo? I'm sure you remember it was a thing in till Warcraft murdered it BUT apparently a group have brought back to life and you can play It on an emulator although I think you need the disk to install it(I think that's what I was told by my friend who lent me the disk and sent me the instructional videos for it since Id never use an emulator before) I played it for a bit and thought it was pretty neat.