Holy crap, that lava is well-done. O_o
---------- Post added 2012-08-03 at 04:25 PM ----------
Though I would belatedly mention: Nothing is very epic the 10th time going through it.
But the first time going through it? I thought it was pretty epic. Not like suddenly spawning in Durotar, standing on top of a dozen other level 1 Orcs, half of which were gold spammers, with my first task being "Go kill 10 boars to prove your worth as a Warrior!"
I think Issormir felt more epic, though.
Last edited by DrakeWurrum; 2012-08-03 at 09:26 PM.
I hope you haven't forgotten my role in this little story. I'm the leading man. You know what they say about the leading man? He never dies.
If you give in to your impulses in this world, the price is that it changes your personality in the real world. The player and character are one and the same.
Because: It's better than cluttering up a thread with useless posts about whether or not somebody is trolling.
I hope you haven't forgotten my role in this little story. I'm the leading man. You know what they say about the leading man? He never dies.
If you give in to your impulses in this world, the price is that it changes your personality in the real world. The player and character are one and the same.
I agree that some zones in WoW are totally crap. It looks like Blizzard agrees on that because zones like Swamp of Sorrows are boring as hell and there is not much action going on there and the zone is skipped most of the time. And by the way I am pretty sure it was designed in 2003, which is 9 years ago!
The screenshot you have posted... you know whats the problem? They want it to look fairly realistic but can't give it enough quality (since it is a MMO, not "Crysis" of some sort). This is one of the reasons Lotro failed, though I liked it at first, but the more the developers of MMOs try to get to realistic graphics, the easier it is to see flaws. Like the mountains on the background. A single tree? A rock at least? No? Totally believable! Again, I see 2 colors - blue and green. Isnt it boring?
But if we leave colorful gamma of WoW and reference to something less saturated, lets take Skyrim! Some parts of the worlds and literally blue-black-white, and it looks very rich and atmospheric. Even on videos and screenshots.
Anyways, it is pointless discussion After all, it is gameplay that makes a game good. There was huge buzz around swtor which as we can see fails miserably, I hope GW2 will be decent so Blizzard will actually start feeling another MMO breathing just behind their back.
I haven't really looked at GW2 a great deal, but the idea of the hype over dynamic events has always confused me. Unless I'm missing something, they're basically just a more expanded, less frequent equivalent to the area quests of warhammer online, or the rift system of rift.
I will admit I haven't looked into it a great deal.
So perhaps someone could explain where I'm mistaken.
I hope you haven't forgotten my role in this little story. I'm the leading man. You know what they say about the leading man? He never dies.
If you give in to your impulses in this world, the price is that it changes your personality in the real world. The player and character are one and the same.
Such pessimism. Other games failed because they were WoW but they traded the endless boring grinding endgame that everyone seems so attached to (similar to Stockholm Syndrome) for a gimmick. Some games failed cause they were WoW but in a different settings (Let's face it, people aren't going to leave a game they have an account established on for something else that's the same but without the charm they've become accustomed to) or they're like SWTOR and are just WoW with a gimmick (Storytelling, in SWTOR's instance)
GW2 isn't WoW, people say it'll fail or bleed players because of its lack of an endgame (We don't even know if it does lack an endgame yet) or because of 'lack of progression' (God forbid you take out a challenging enemy at level 1, it's not like you're actually a hero before that or anything. Nope, definitely not.) and lack of the gear treadmill. All that, to me, makes me more willing to play for longer.
Raids bore me. Doing the same thing for a few hours a week and then spamming dailies and farming mats when I've run out of things to do just bored me. I couldn't go out and quest, there wasn't anything to do. I've collected so many bear arses that bears are now extinct and the remaining bears seem to have already been robbed of their arses since killing a bear may not even yield an arse despite the fact I can clearly see the bear has an arse and I didn't ruin it by hitting the bear there.
Really, I don't see why people want to repeat boring content and react harshly when a game lacks that boring content.
Worth noting: GW2's endgame seems largely to be about getting those legendary weapons and other truly amazing pieces of gear.
Good news is that getting exp for those skill points isn't restricted to one specific instanced form of content. You could even do PvP content and still get skill points.
I hope you haven't forgotten my role in this little story. I'm the leading man. You know what they say about the leading man? He never dies.
If you give in to your impulses in this world, the price is that it changes your personality in the real world. The player and character are one and the same.
You can't compare cartoonish with asian style art in MMO.
That said GW2 get's owned by both Tera and Aion (Aion is the most powerfull one here) on graphics.
That said, I haven't played GW2 yet and I hope I will enjoy it...but I won't be playing for graphics as I can find better ones in other free MMO's.
Thanks a lot for these reasons, but when I started to look at those beta screenshots I started to shake, I just got the same feeling I had when I was at school waiting to come home to play Runescape. man if I smoked I'd probably need one now haha, going to be some seriously long weeks until launch ^^
RIFT's Rift system is somewhat like DE but the HUGE difference is that no DE is the same. In Rift you would see the same Rift over and over again. I thinks its also important to say that i have not had to repeat a DE for leveling purposes. I would go back to them for fun! haha
Well, two rather important aspects of the franchise is the non-bimodal endgame and power plateau.
So there is no actual endgame in the EQ/Warcraft derived sense in any of the Guild Wars games; 5 of them at this point. End of game referring specifically to actions in an MMO to progress beyond the level cap of power.
Since we are now talking about endgame, how much content does GW2 offer and what kind of repeatable tasks do players have to keep doing after they have finished starter things?
I'm not saying WoW had bad artstyle, it actually had it good, especially after TBC.
The part where you're wrong is, GW2 isn't going for the all-out realistic style. It has a painterly artstyle of its own, and how the world feels living and flows reflects that incredibly well. However, it sometimes looks dull in the screenshots. As someone else mentioned, there were several moments which I took a screenshot because the environment was beautiful, soon to realize it looks boring in the screenshot. You really have to play it to see how incredible it looks in motion. Even the videos don't do it justice.
The hype around dynamic events, is because they make you feel that the world is living. The PQs in Warhammer Online were there constantly, and it just felt scripted and static. And they were. Rift tried to make it a bit more random and dynamic, however the concept was extremely repetitive and again, felt static.
It's much different in GW2. Since almost all the important content is the DEs, it feels amazing. A commonly used example is this:
In WoW, you get a quest from a farmer that says that centaurs have kidnapped his daughter. You go to the centaur outpost, rescue the girl and complete the quest.
In GW2, while you're walking around the farm, maybe doing the heart there, a bunch of centaurs assault the farm. The failure state is them capturing the girl. If you can't defend the farm and the girl, she gets kidnapped and the DE advances to the point that the farmer wants you to rescue the girl. You go to the centaur camp, all naturally mind you, and try to rescue the girl. It feels incredibly natural and flows extremely well. You actually feel that you're doing this, with all other people that you do it with.
Another point of DEs is that, they are absolutely everywhere. Even when you think a DE ends, if you follow down an NPC which may seem uninteresting, he/she may start up another DE. Something I saw during BWE1 was this: I saw a hut in the middle of the Norn starting zone. There was this Blacksmith apprentice, and when I talked to her she said "You must be looking for Sven, he went out to the dredge caverns to collect ore for weapons and armor". I didn't think much at first. But then when I was walking around, I found the dredge cave she mentioned. Sven was there, asking players to collect ore as part of a dynamic event. After completing the event, everyone spread around, minding their own business, I actually followed Sven. He ran to the hut I mentioned before, and said to the apprentice something in the lines of "I got some good quality ores today", and then went inside and started crafting stuff. Soon after, he got up, and became a weapon vendor that sold blue quality weapons for a short period of time. When I saw this, I was shocked. It was incredibly fitting and the world felt living moreso than in any MMO I've played before (and believe me, I played my fair share of MMOs in the past).
tl;dr The DEs make the world feel living, and they completely immerse you.
Defining part of DEs is that certain (and most) have success and failure chains. You couldn't stop the centaurs assault on this town? Well they made camp and started to invade the neighboring town by setting up siege catapults. Didn't stop them? Now two towns are under Centaur control. Now not all DEs are like this, some are very simple "Kill this spawned angry monster" or "escort this guy", but I've experienced more chain DEs than one-step DEs.
And the biggest DEs, the big, zone wide, "meta" DEs, we know nothing about. So we don't really have a true sense of scale for what DEs could achieve.
But expansiveness of the system aside, it's still the same static of WAR's system isn't it?
It's just not on the same time scale.
That is, the farm given in your example, is going to be attacked by centaurs. And after the full DE is done, it will eventually get attacked by centaurs again.
This is what I meant by just a more expansive version of previously seen systems.
I'm not saying it isn't still a cool thing, but it certainly isn't as open ended an endless, or as new and original as fans seem to make it out.
Edit:
It should be noted that I am a wow player, but don't have any sort of dislike towards GW2.
I just wish to understand its appeal better.
Last edited by Hitei; 2012-08-03 at 10:10 PM.