Just letting people know that Guild Wars 2 WASN'T made by Jesus himself, it definitely has it's own list of issues and concerns. For the amount of mind-blowing fun that I've received (and still receiving) for $60 I would still rate it no less than 9.5/10, also the visuals are nothing short of breathtaking. I could amost compare the draw distances, water effects and beach views to what I saw in Crysis (might be exaggerating a bit here but you get the idea). The game genuinely rewards you for teamplay and exploration, and for the first time I've actually WANTED to find out what's just over that hill or inside that cave because I know for sure it will reward me with fun and experience to boot!
As for grouping - even though you're automatically grouped with others and get to run around as a sleek team of 2-3 players or an army of 20+ players (the events/bosses scale dynamically!) the actual COMMUNICATION needed is almost zero. You'll often hear the word "zerg" pop up when it comes to escort/champion events, and that's what they are really, zerg events where you get to fight waves (like they're ants) or champions who have
silly amounts of health (to the point where it took our group of 30+ players almost 10 minutes to kill 1 fucking champion, no skill or dodging, just everyone spamming all their buttons till their fingers bled).
Also for 5 man dungeons (which reward you some decent gear) still require manually forming groups on your own and hoping that nobody in your team is fucking terrible, especially on explorable mode. Because this game has no designated healers/tanks, one person can't pick up the slack for another person (e.g. in WoW you could have 1-2 shit DPS in a 5man and still be totally fine as long as the tank+healer were decent), everyone has to actively mitigate/avoid their own damage AND toss out AoE heals/boons to help the group survive, because everyone has support utilities (there are no "pure" classes).
But I'm just being extremely picky here because overall as a game, it does far more to encourage grouping than any MMO has done. The fights are genuinely hard and encourage proactive and reactive movement/use of abilities.
And again, the amount of fun I've had for $60 really puts every game I have played in the last DECADE (no seriously) to shame. Multiply Skyrim x 100 in terms of content and variety, then do it again as a completely different class.
Don't even get me started on PvP - arena tournament-style maps where you get scaled to max level (and given all talent/trait points), handed out a
standard set of PvP gear (which everyone must use, no more "gear > skill" crap!) but you can still customize colors and stuff, and PvP away to glory! You get rewarded with more sexy-looking gear but it's all cosmetics (and trust me, you will LOVE the cosmetics in this game). You can literally make fashion statements with the amount of customizability that exists with armor,
no two people I have come across in the game have looked exactly the same.
Buy GW2. Buy it now.
IBlackKiteI said:
Wow.
This sort of thing is only happening now? How long have these games been around for again?
I love RPGs and MMORPGs, but after reading this it feels really weird that we tend to only criticise shooters for apparent stagnation and lack of innovation.
Well because MMORPG's are drastically more complicated and generally "bigger" than shooters in most cases, so each one tends to offer something noticeably different even if it has blatantly copy-pasted off Everquest/Lineage/WoW/whatever.