Intro
I had an opportunity to try the GW2 on the weekend and will try to put my impressions I have got from it. As all impressions are, it this will be kind of subjective despite all my efforts to keep things objective. Also it will not contain all praises and daisies of a fanboy, so if you cannot stomach some constructive(hopefully constructive enough) critique, please stop reading here. I might repeat the stuff you might have already seen in videos and/or read somewhere else - because what you see and what you get is not exactly the same.
Graphics.
This actually is pretty good. I was fortunate enough not to get problems with frame rate drop when 10+ other players are doing the event, but my friend complained about it, so there might be problems if you have certain card or somewhat older computer. If to compare it to GW2's newest competitor - Tera, then Tera wins on graphics fidelity and on optimization (well not a big surprise on second part as Tera is actually already working project in Asia, so they had some more time for such things). The style of the game is more westernized and contain less tits and asses stuff, so pick you poison . If taking a look on surroundings and landscapes - Tera leave GW2 in the dust, however in cities GW2 takes the upper hand. Overall good work on the graphic ArenaNet. My main complaint is about the rough brush type of messages/buttons that appear on the screen(this is highly personal taste) - if has this feel of lazy work. Slap with the brush on the screen - "have at ya stupid user, get lost". It just does not fit with the rest of pretty polished look.
Personal story.
Like in SWTOR you have personal story. It is competent and enjoyable - overall, pretty good. It certainly is incapable to compete with SWTOR's personal story, but since it is not advertised as absolutely main feature we can cut some slack. If you have ever played SWTOR you will instantly see the difference. First of all - no acting. it’s just 2 characters(never more) shown on a screen with a butt ugly background which looks totally out of place for those clean and shiny models in the front, Most of the conversations are voice-acted(yes, sometimes you get weird pauses where no sound is coming out but text keeps going, but that’s just beta - you bugs tend to happen) - which is really good! Although that s if for acting - characters won’t take any actions in cutscene apart from random conversational gestures in order not to appear like barbie - dolls, but that's the extent. Also you will see that in cutscenes there are no conversation options. You do not influence the flow in the slightest. In certain cases(never in the cutscenes actually) when you are questing you might get a chance for conversational option - but outcome is absolutely the same no matter what you pick. Sometimes they have fail condition depending on one of your stats - ferocity, charm, dignity, but it does not have any difference for the plot.
How many storylines are there? Remember your character creation. when you create character you are given an opportunity to select from 3 choices. Those choices actually affect what you will see in storyline. I.e. i have taken a commoner and my first story arc was about my friend which was working in the inn and her father which escalated to some arrests in the ministry. Have i taken street rat - i got the covering the gang arc. On the second arc it was dependant on what i have picked as second choice - in this case it was about my sister which was murdered by centaurs. So if you want to experience all storyline modes you need to create characters with completely different choices. Calculating like that there will be about 15 unique story lines(3 per race). However due pretty short time of beta i cannot say if they stay unique - or if they merge into the same story line at some point. Hopefully they don't.
One last immersion breaking thing is the random line character say when you select him. In the story mode it cascades into character sprouting random nonsense at the start of cutscene which sounds awfully ridiculous. This is small thing and I think they can fix this easily.
Questing.
There are 2 types of quests outside of personal story: dynamic events and static quests. Now static quests are kind of area quest alike in SWTOR - you wonder in the area marked by a heart on the map, the quest appears on the tracking list, you finish it(you usually have several options how to do it), you get the reward. In 2 days i have never seen the heart quest reset, so i am guessing it is permanent. Unlike SWTOR area quest, heart quests is always 1 stage. They do not progress anywhere.
Now dynamic events is where things go sour. Maybe i had too big expectations, but it feels like ArenaNet took a magnificent idea, had enormous opportunity to improve it - and totally squandered it. Remember them saying - dynamic event kind of progress from one to another - succeeding one will further the goal it spawn new events in the end you get the huge confrontation with the boss appearing? Well it's kind of not happening. At least not in first 20 levels anyway. There are 2 dynamic events which i have seen: single stage quest on timer. Perfect example would be - Leroy Jenkins runs out of the fortress and all the guys in the vicinity need to protect him(mostly this is protection and escort quests). Nothing fancy - just repeatable quest on a timer. If that's an innovation then it's the most pathetic innovation ever. Some other dynamic events actually spawn several stages(so far no more than 1 additional stage, but i am sincerely hoping this is not the limit) This might be nice but it still is the same SWTOR area quest just repeatable and on timer. Nothing fancy. Some quests have obnoxious design. For example: there is a staged dynamic event where in stage 2 you need to defend encampment against waves of centaurs. Its all nice and cool but centaur group of 8-9 centaurs appears waaay away from the encampments and rushes to it. Problem is if you are a normal person which has no idea about this stage, just moving along or gathering resources for the crafting - they jump on you, cripple so you barely can move and murder you in like 3 seconds. Lame design if i ever saw one.
Scaling.
Depending on how many people are in the area mobs are scaled accordingly. Now hare they also managed to screw up. Mobs are scaled in LEVEL. WTF? you go to the area where on the map it say lv 15 and get ambushed by mobs lv 20 if the action of main group of happy-go-round killers are on the other side, you are practically getting wasted by the mobs. C'mon - being 3-shoted by a mob with zero-to-none chance of escape due dot/poison/immobilize effects is not what I call "fun". Plus their agro range increases by the look of it - you can easily get jumped by 2 of them at the same time. It is not how i imagine scaling. Keep damage the same, increase resistance depending on how many attacks hit in in certain time frame, and expand mobs attack splash range and damage(cleave more splash more but never exceed the normal attack damage), finally add some additional abilities - like auras in case of massive player surge, or good aoe attacks - but dodge able. In this case mobs cannot not obliterate lonely players who stumble upon territory at the wrong time and actually become a thread to concentrated mob of players. Funny thing is - when people mob into a group all this scaling is pointless. Mobs are wasted in couple GCD's via massive AOE. When you are in a group forget your single target abilities - you cannot contribute with them - just AOE, AOE, AOE.
In short - scaling of dynamic events depending on player amount in the territory design is poor.
Looting.
Now here is the good stuff. Loot distribution system seems to be one of the best and do lots of good to promote cooperation between players. You do not get irritated because another player tagged mob you were waiting for - you go and help him - and you get the reward. Good design with a small drawback which could easily be fixed. Looting corpses themselves - you go and loot each mob individually. Now this is in all games - but unlike in the rest of the games aoe killing here is the king of the hill so you then have to click on each corpse. Urgh. Thank you for the "search" button when you stand on a corpse, but if there are NPC's wondering around it gets replaced randomly by "talk" button - not so fun. Implementing area looting similar to one in SWTOR would solve this problem perfectly.
Combat.
You come with the memories still fresh from Tera beta, you are left with impression - oh, back to WoW again. It is not WoW, but it does not innovate WoW combat by much. After Tera controls seem clunky, and combat tedious. First of all - the target switching works pretty poorly. Second - it is same WoW-ish select enemy start autoattack thing. Yes, disappointingly, game has autoattack. Then you have about 15 skill keybinds.5 of those are determined by your weapons, 6 are determined by utility skills, 2 by healing skill and 2 by your elite skill. Most of the classes have no resource of any description to maintain. if some professions have any - i haven't tried those. I will appreciate if someone can comment on the ones who actually have. It’s mainly cooldowns and 90% of the time you want them all to be on cooldown as soon as they are up. The only difference is utility stuff - bullet blocking skills and stuff - skills that are useful only in certain situations. Oh but you can DODGE. Yes there is a dodge mechanic in the game - it can be used to get away from channelled aoe swiftly and can be used to dodge certain attacks. Problem is most of the attacks are not even telegraphed to you - forget dodging. Dodge aoe? if you are in the group there is so much shit on the ground you cannot tell if you should dodge now or not. Is this circle beneficial? Irrelevant? Harmful? Who knows... Attacks that are telegraphed as well can be missed easily due... Yes! The status effects on the mob. At times mob is reduced ball of flaming - icy - and whatever other sparkly conditions and all this telegraphing is not even visible any more. Great.
Seriously in telegraphing mob intent the best mmo I have ever seen was Tera. GW2 tries to do it - but not even close. Put more effort guys, put more effort.
Among all the bad things there are some good as well. Combat at least feels mobile. all casting and changeling i have experienced can be done on the move. Nice little touch. Not new stuff - but still nice.
Weapon skill design: Some weapons have really dumb skill choices: like rifle for engineers - autoattack is a long range attack, second skill is immobilize 2s - good, third skill is close range burst damage when enemy gets close, fourth attack is the gap opener with a knockdown effect on enemy - also pretty good and finally the last attack - jump to the enemy dealing damage?? Seriously? all the rest is based on getting as far as possible - even the close range burst is designed with the idea that is will be used when enemy is trying to get close and instantly followed by gap opener. Skill 5 is almost entirely useless. It’s worse with pistols - their 5 skill is aoe snare for 6 seconds. the only exception is that it does not work. Like does not work at all - it is a waste of space and time at the moment. Hopefully they will fix it pretty soon. Or healing skill one - drink potion and restore some health and get random buff for a few seconds, second mode - aoe effect giving randomly speed, resilience or regeneration, again, for a few seconds. Randomly??? what the FFFFFFF.... It is practically useless. If everyone is dying and i try to save them and they get speed buff - i want resilience buff screw the speed. or at least aoe regen.... CD for the skill is not short as well. First impression - there are quite a number of skills that are entirely pointless. No idea why they are added at all to the game? Fillers?
Levelling up.
Now here it is somewhat interesting mix. Levelling up gives you flat increase in skills effect(skills scale with level), flat increase in main stats and HP pool. At certain levels you get utility/ elite slot unlocks. At level 10 in addition you get access to trait system, which seems to be somewhat alike to WAR. You put points in one of 5 areas of focus, where each trait point is supposed to increase 2 secondary stats. I.e. putting trait points in elixirs increases your hp and regen, in your usage of tools – crit chance and condition effects In additions reaching certain amount of points in certain area unlocks special bonus – like 5 trait points in toolbelt grants you when using toolbelt skills you regen in addition 10% stamina – so more dodgy dodgy. Problem is that it did not work in this beta, at least not for me. I could not put a single point nor bulk of 5 or 10 points in any area. Big + sign did not do anything. Maybe this needs some more polish. Or it is still under development.
Now remember I have mentioned utility and elite skills – they are unlocked not with the level and you need to put skillpoints you earn via various challenges. And then buy a skill from a list of skills ranging in cost from 1 to 6. And straight of the bat kick in the face. Most of the skills costing 6 are straight out better than ones costing less. For example – flame turret loses in every respect to rocket turret, to the point of me scratching my head why flame turret even exists? To waste points upon? Truth to be told some lower cost skills are good utility skills which are useful in certain situations. Like rocket boots – give extra jump away with damage component, goggles give protection from blindness for a while, but a s the rule of the thumb – the more skill costs the more chance it overshadows lower cost one. This and out of the 30 skills to choose in reality you only have like 10 if you do not want to deliberately gimp yourself.
Exploration.
I was told “This game promotes exploration, you wonder into completely unmarked zone and find out something – event, skill point, etc.” Well this was a big fat lie. In truth the only thing you can find in unmarked zone is a resource node – just like in any other mmo. All the rest is clearly marked on your map completely eliminating any need of exploration: heart for static quest, diamond for teleport point, broken line for skill point and general square for point of interest, which as a rule of a thumb marks the area where dynamic event has been scripted to appear at certain points of time. Exploration? I would say even less relevant than in some other mmo’s. All is given chewed out to you.
Crafting.
Well to summarize it - take wow crafting system, make learning receipts extremely tedious, give gathering skills to everyone but gathering tools expiring, give them 2 professions(you can be blacksmith and armorsmith at the same time) and you get the GW2 crafting system in a nutshell. Impression - don't even bother....
Getting new receipt actually involves trying various crafting materials by putting combinations of them in the working station. Like take sole, take peace of leather - maybe something works out add a teeth of the wolf, or claw of the aardvark, or blood of the centaur on PMS, bla bla. Problem is that you will be totting TONS of materials. There are ton of normal droppable materials used in each crafting profession, then you have buyable materials and it culminates with craftable materials. In numbers it an easily exceed hundred for one profession only. To add insult to injury they randomly have different difficult level - adding 2 materials which require 0 or 10 level in skill and skill demand suddenly inflates to like 50.... If you will try to level up crafting - stock up BOTTOMLESS bags. I had 2/3 of the bags littered with crafting materials and i was very careful not to create too many craftable ones after some experience. Also from my experience you cannot use materials in bank for crafting - only ones in the bag. I was told that if you change professions then you still retain the patterns you have learned. It is nice on one hand but in this why not letting to learn all professions at once. It is practically the same anyway. Also this completely removes the point in trading crafted stuff - because everyone can craft everything by just changing crafting professions in the city. Economy in this game won’t last long.
Gathering - well if you enjoy totting 100 axes, 100 picks and 50 scythes - this game is for you. Yes you have heard right - 1 axe for 1 tree. They are that shitty (actually you buy a stack of 100 in one go just i cannot imagine person who could carry 100 pieces at once - it sounds silly). Also various objects can be reduced to crafting components by spending gold and totting - yet again - scavenging kit(25 of those in a stack) This and expiring gathering tools are the only difference from WoW in gathering. Oh have i mentioned that you need to buy more expensive gathering tools of you only get useless junk from the higher nodes, and the ability to equip these higher tools depends actually from your level.
Crafting - this is basically same old wow, just crafting an item gives you certain amount of exp spent on the profession rather a random chance. Even brown patterns usually does not give you 1 level increase - you need to craft several item s to advance. So you usually need 5-10 times more things to craft to get the same increase as in WoW. Good thing - when you craft a lot of the same thing it speeds up crafting time. Bad thing - it feels so much more grindy than WoW if you can even imagine this.
patterns seem to be a complete wow rip-off. Guess what is the first enchantment you learn in leatherworking? Yes, it is HP increase. Good god!
Dungeons.
Now here is my biggest regret that I did not manage to test one. In short – I cannot possibly evaluate them. I will try to focus on a single character in next beta and try to get into a dungeon. Without it, analysis of the PvE of the game holds a HUGE hole.
PvP.
Well this will be the thing I WILL NOT talk about. First of all - i haven’t tried it, Second - I am not a big PvP fan, so my ability to analyse it is not so good. Third - it is not even possible to do any good analysis of PvP in such a short frame rate, and especially playing against equally as green opponents. It might be ass well that it is not professions fault - it's my fault not knowing enemy or my own capabilities that i am getting trashed.
Overall impression: game is solid, it has some enjoyable elements, but do not kid yourself. It does not revolutionize anything, it is merely an amalgam of slightly enhanced features collected from other games. Some in good way, some in not so good. It is not a WoW killer and it is not a second coming of the Christ, but if you research the game and see that those are features you like rather than jumping hype bandwagon, you will have your full share of fun. Research, evaluate, if you like what you see – buy it, just don’t start shit-storm if your rosy visions taken game for what it is not. And pray that cash shop would not fuck game up.