So, after a whole year of Guild Wars 2...

[zed zebes]

Fencers I don't understand what you find shallow about GW2's play systems.

[Shaede]

I preordered this game because I was sold on the premise of what it was striving to become. When I played it, it clearly wasn't successful. I feel like in their quest to be 'original' they ignored things in other games that worked...like basic social features, interacting with objects (sitting in chairs), etc. Also, the lore is just not at all good, imo. Especially this Scarlet stuff, I feel like it was written by a 5th grader. I never played GW1 so I can't say all around lore is bad, but if it is good then GW2 certainly doesn't convey it properly. The personal story was pretty much a joke. In this instance when learning about lore I'd much rather have the quest hub experience so I can at least read a properly written dialogue of what is going on.

The combat is ok I suppose. Some things don't at all make sense like Rangers can't use rifles and Mesmers can only shoot a pistol in their off hand for some reason and not their other.. Just kinda odd ends, they probably should've just allowed everyone to use everything. Another major gripe is the down mechanic...just so gimmicky. What better way to turn you off then to see your bad ass warrior crawling on the ground like a peasant, throwing rocks and twigs... jeez either win or die with dignity.

I still have it installed on my desktop, but I'd say my play time in Tyria is about an hour a month... and that's mostly just to check to see if I can even get engaged by anything. I respect that this game may appeal to some people, it's just not me.

Even though I would gladly rip apart this game, I won't deny that it's a decent game for the asking price. However, I'd recommend watching a couple vids on it first to get an idea of what you are getting into.

[Fencers]

Fencers I don't understand what you find shallow about GW2's play systems.

They kinda don't do anything with the avenues that the engine has open.

For example, free flying projectiles. There is little which influences or changes the dynamics of a projectile in flight by player input. Such that your arrows or fireballs fly through the air [which is awesome] having their own geometry and travel, but it's largely superfluous from a gameplay standpoint. There is no gameplay difference in having that free flying projectile [sans collision] be a Fireball or Arrow. Bullet or throwing knife.

By contrast, let's look at something like Path of Exile. Where a projectile does fly through the "air" [game space] and is accounted it's own geometry. Now to this a player can speed up a projectile- making some projectiles reach further, some to deliver a secondary payload upon reaching a set velocity or simply reaching the point of impact altogether quicker. Yet more still a projectile can be made to fly faster, split, chain, pierce, bounce, burn, shock, freeze, et cetera.

The dynamic of having a moving piece of geometry is just not really used as deeply as it could in GW2. A large emphasis on dexterity and twitch reaction in the mode of classically Arcade game mechanics only compounds the issue of not leveraging [being unable] the potential of collision and interaction in the play systems of Guild Wars 2.

It makes a lot of stuff binary to a certain extent. Which is kind of a shame because so few MMOs actually have geometry, collision and free space accounted for. Yet GW2 doesn't do much with that environment.

[Vorticough]

I'd probably have more fun with it if I had a guild.

Or if I had my own copy of the game.

Or Kodan!

[zed zebes]

They kinda don't do anything with the avenues that the engine has open.

For example, free flying projectiles. There is little which influences or changes the dynamics of a projectile in flight by player input. Such that your arrows or fireballs fly through the air [which is awesome] having their own geometry and travel, but it's largely superfluous from a gameplay standpoint. There is no gameplay difference in having that free flying projectile [sans collision] be a Fireball or Arrow. Bullet or throwing knife.

By contrast, let's look at something like Path of Exile. Where a projectile does fly through the "air" [game space] and is accounted it's own geometry. Now to this a player can speed up a projectile- making some projectiles reach further, some to deliver a secondary payload upon reaching a set velocity or simply reaching the point of impact altogether quicker. Yet more still a projectile can be made to fly faster, split, chain, pierce, bounce, burn, shock, freeze, et cetera.

The dynamic of having a moving piece of geometry is just not really used as deeply as it could in GW2. A large emphasis on dexterity and twitch reaction in the mode of classically Arcade game mechanics only compounds the issue of not leveraging [being unable] the potential of collision and interaction in the play systems of Guild Wars 2.

It makes a lot of stuff binary to a certain extent. Which is kind of a shame because so few MMOs actually have geometry, collision and free space accounted for. Yet GW2 doesn't do much with that environment.

I see your angle. I think the reason this doesn't exist is mostly a technical limitation. I doubt we're at a point where you can do that sort of thing on a MMO scale. The other reason would be keeping to their unified combat systems. You don't add chilling or burning to an arrow, you just have an arrow that burns or chills or a weapon mod that adds chill or burn, and chill/burn is the same across the game.

Though if you're an Ele, using the geometry and physics can up your DPS output by wall pinning. I think that is probably the one area it pops up in play.

[Zoneseek]

I didn't mean for it to happen but GW2 has replaced wow for me as my primary mmo I play on a daily basis. It had a rocky start, I enjoyed it but didn't get hooked. I dropped it for MoP but got bored of MoP even quicker and because wow is sub based I didn't want to bother keeping the account active if I wasn't going to play much. A few months later I went back to check out some changes in gw2 and have been playing it daily since. It really does grow on you over time but you do have to give it a good long chance, in my experience.