Poll: Guild Wars 2 Beta Thoughts?

[Korten12]

[HEADING=2]The poll doesn't seem to be adding my choices... Wtf..? I had accidently pressed Post before putting in, Meh, Bad, and Terrible![/HEADING]

So what's your guys thoughts so far?

So far I think it's better then any MMO I have played thus far (and that's a lot of MMO's.) It tight and the controls work flawlessly and the combat is fun and fluid. It's a faster pace MMO then most games with it's flat leveling curve (200 exp more each level so far and you get 60 exp from exploring and 100 from discovering way points which there is a lot of. At level 15 I need like 7800 I believe.) and dynamic events.

Since you don't need to be in a party and everyone gets exp from enemies and from beating the event (which only if you partake in the event and not just stand there) you begin to work with other players and welcome them. No longer do you need to worry about others stealing your kills but you begin to want other players to arrive to work with.

The Personal Story is good, not many choices, but it's a lot of fun with good VO, and cool stuff to do. Plus you get good exp and gear from it. Plus how you make your character, even from the same race can have radically different missions to go on. (Confirmed via Friend who was over)

Plsu the scenery is just full of screenshot worthy pictures. Each place looks great and it has quite a good atmosphere that doesn't get ruined by other players.

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So thoughts so far?

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Tale of two betas. My first experience with it was...not good. The lag was crippling. People and mobs were rubber banding, there was 1-5 seconds of input lag on everything, combat was an indecipherable mess, etc, etc. Then they brought the servers down and patched them, and since then it's been running smooth.

Random thoughts...

1. Character creation is quite lovely. There's a limited range of options, and some of them are quite same-y, but unlike say...TOR, or Warhammer, it's not a question of picking one of the two faces that don't look awful. It's very easy to make an attractive looking character, and pretty much every hairstyle and face is appealing in its own way. Best CC since Aion in that respect.

2. The "personal story" is pretty lightweight, and not even remotely close to the polish/depth of what's on offer in TOR as far as storytelling goes. Voice acting is by and large fairly atrocious too. Improvement over GW1 to be certain, but that's not saying much. I really wish they'd shelled out for a few more high quality VO's, but I do appreciate that can get expensive.

3. Combat has a reasonable sense of weight and impact. Could be better, could be much worse. Animations are also "alright". Could be better, could be worse. Early levels of combat are quite spammy, but that's to be expected.

4. Graphics are lovely. I'm running everything maxed out quite smoothly, and it's a gorgeous looking game for a MMO. We're not talking Witcher 2 levels of pretty, but it's a damn sight better looking than the majority of its contemporaries.

5. Early in beta still, but the game needs more robust tutorials in the worst way. It's a total fucking mystery what's going on half the time.

6. The "dynamic events" feel an awful lot like public quests to me. I've been on this ride before. Fortunately, I also happen to enjoy said ride, so I'm not really complaining, but they feel more familiar than cutting edge. They also aren't really scaling sufficiently to match the MOBS of people storming them in the newbie areas, but I expect things will ratchet up as people level and spread out.

7. Only seen the Human city so far but it's absolutely massive. Comically huge. Very impressive looking too. I really hope some of those carnivals and games open up and become interactive.

 

[JWRosser]

Hmmm I've had to stop playing. I've had horrible frame rate issues. My computer's powerful, so should be able to run it fine...but it still didn't work even after I turned the graphics right down - made no difference. So I turned them back up and it was exactly the same.

Relating to graphics, the textures don't appear to be that great at the moment. I'm assuming it's just due to the beta though.

5. Early in beta still, but the game needs more robust tutorials in the worst way. It's a total fucking mystery what's going on half the time.

Definitely this. Even though I've played A LOT of Guild Wars, I still needed to know what to do...as in, all the new skill styles etc. They didn't really explain any of it. Additionally, is there a shortcut to just...target and run and attack enemies? I've assigned a key to target nearest enemy, and in GW1 I could press the space key and my character would run up and attack, but now space is jump...so it seems that I have to manually run right up to my enemy, and my character doesn't attack unless I use a skill?? I'm sure I'm missing something here.

 

[Random Fella]

Love it
Seriously, half the people on the beta would complain about lag and slow frame rate, and the other half were fine
There was some major server lag moments however where everyone lagged, but it is to be expected by the beta
I'd imagine a lot of the slow frame rate problems were specific to the users pc and/or internet but whatever

Great combat and questline, whenever it asked me how I was enjoying it I'd almost always give the fun level a 4 or a 5

Pvp was excellent (In non world pvp)
Very fun to play indeed
Why I wouldn't call world pvp excellent is how they balanced the servers
My server was about the second lowest in number, and we were up against a full server and another
So we were outnumbered seemingly at least 3 to 1, which made it quite unfair
But obviously, this is the start, and the whole ranking system has yet to be implemented so I will wait before putting the game down just for that reason

Great graphics, the best i've seen in a mmo for a while
It was honestly like I was playing a normal rpg

So right now I'd give it a 5, met and even surpassed some of my expectations of it

 

[Fishyash]

Played it for about 20 minutes but it was far too laggy to enjoy, I'm about to give it another go today though.

Honestly though, despite the lag and performance issues I have been having, I am impresed.

 

[ShadowsofHope]

I voted "good" due to being disconnected from my server 5 times yesterday, which also caused a few elastic band "lag deaths" during one of the last starter area story quests. :/

Besides that, I'm quite enjoying it. Still can't bring myself to play any male characters beyond a male Charr Warrior and a male Charr Engineer though. My Norn Warrior is a female, and so is my human Elementalist..

Btw: Norn and Charr are my most favorite races so far, I don't really like the humans as much, but I will play them. Too bad Asura and Sylvari are locked right now, though, I really want to try out an Asura Engineer and a Sylvari Ranger.

 

[Korten12]

Played it for about 20 minutes but it was far too laggy to enjoy, I'm about to give it another go today though.

Honestly though, despite the lag and performance issues I have been having, I am impresed.

The lag has been less today. At least for me.

 

[That Guy Ya Know]

My lag cooled down a lot today too, well until I got kicked out 3 hours ago and now it wont let me back in. Meh, did the same thing yesterday but it let me back in today so I guess I'll play more tomorrow. Loving the game but I do have 1 gripe, the way it makes you unlock skills on each new weapon. It seems like a system designed to prevent you from experimenting with new weapons. Sure my ranger could try replacing her longbow with that shiny new shortbow but it means being seriously gimped for quite a while. I went out of my way to unlock all the weapons on my ranger but I really can't be bothered with it on my other characters so I just picked out the weapons which looked like they had the best skills and unlocked those.

Also it seems to be a bit generous when giving out event participation medals, sneezing in the direction of an enemy generally qualifies you for gold it seems. I believe the only time I managed to get a bronze was when I happened to walk past an npc which was part of an escort event. I didn't even interact with them or fight I just happened to be in the same area and then a few minutes later I got a bronze medal.

 

[someonehairy-ish]

I've assigned a key to target nearest enemy, and in GW1 I could press the space key and my character would run up and attack, but now space is jump...so it seems that I have to manually run right up to my enemy, and my character doesn't attack unless I use a skill?? I'm sure I'm missing something here.

There's no auto attack that I know of, so yeah, your character won't attack unless you're using a skill of some sort.
As for having a run-to-the-enemy button, that seems fairly unlikely. I know melee classes get charges and leaps and things to close the gap, but I don't know of any way to automatically move into attack range.

 

[JWRosser]

I've assigned a key to target nearest enemy, and in GW1 I could press the space key and my character would run up and attack, but now space is jump...so it seems that I have to manually run right up to my enemy, and my character doesn't attack unless I use a skill?? I'm sure I'm missing something here.

There's no auto attack that I know of, so yeah, your character won't attack unless you're using a skill of some sort.
As for having a run-to-the-enemy button, that seems fairly unlikely. I know melee classes get charges and leaps and things to close the gap, but I don't know of any way to automatically move into attack range.

Really? So you can't do a 'standard' attack? Hmm that's a little annoying...oh well. I'll get used to it.

 

[Chairman Miaow]

I'm not too keen. I like the ideas, but the lack of clear roles and parties means that the whole thing just feels like one big uncooperative every man for himself cluster fuck. It's a lot more dynamic and the skills are fun, and if I ever play it enough to get into high level play with a guild, I imagine these problems will become non-existent. I've had no lag or performance problems, but holy hell the problems with connection errors have been ridiculous, so many disconnects. They have done stress tests and they new the exact numbers of potential beta testers so these kinds of problems shouldn't have happened.

 

[someonehairy-ish]

Really? So you can't do a 'standard' attack? Hmm that's a little annoying...oh well. I'll get used to it.

I think the reasoning was that for combat to really be a test of skill, as much as possible needs to be in the player's control. You can't just run and gun it with a ranged class without some decent multitasking, and the same goes for keeping ground on people in melee.

Oooh, 1000th post!

 

[Chairman Miaow]

I've assigned a key to target nearest enemy, and in GW1 I could press the space key and my character would run up and attack, but now space is jump...so it seems that I have to manually run right up to my enemy, and my character doesn't attack unless I use a skill?? I'm sure I'm missing something here.

There's no auto attack that I know of, so yeah, your character won't attack unless you're using a skill of some sort.
As for having a run-to-the-enemy button, that seems fairly unlikely. I know melee classes get charges and leaps and things to close the gap, but I don't know of any way to automatically move into attack range.

Really? So you can't do a 'standard' attack? Hmm that's a little annoying...oh well. I'll get used to it.

You can set which ability becomes your "auto attack" by holding control and right clicking on it. That way, whenever you are between abilities, you will automatically use that ability, provided it isn't on cooldown/you have enough initiative etc. So far, I haven't found a use for this, as I haven't played a class which has an ability other than their "1" ability which can be repeated often.

My favourite ability so far has to be a utility ability "scorpiion spear" that pulls an enemy towards you. Makes me want to yell "GET OVER HERE!" every time.

 

[That Guy Ya Know]

Really? So you can't do a 'standard' attack? Hmm that's a little annoying...oh well. I'll get used to it.

Actually the first attack on any weapon should serve as an auto attack, there's an option to toggle auto attacking on and off, so if you have it on your character will the spam their weapons primary skill/skill-chain.

 

[BENZOOKA]

Haven't tried the beta.

I have grown to dislike all MMO's (haven't really played, but WoW in 2006 for a couple of months) because they offer nothing enjoyable.

Then again, Guild Wars 2 seems really promising. I'll consider it once it's released.

 

[someonehairy-ish]

Really? So you can't do a 'standard' attack? Hmm that's a little annoying...oh well. I'll get used to it.

Actually the first attack on any weapon should serve as an auto attack, there's an option to toggle auto attacking on and off, so if you have it on your character will the spam their weapons primary skill/skill-chain.

Oh ok. Haven't got the beta, just a friend who's obsessed enough to tell me every little bit of info he finds. Hm...

 

[Tanakh]

Oh ok. Haven't got the beta, just a friend who's obsessed enough to tell me every little bit of info he finds. Hm...

Actually you can assing auto cast to any targeted skill, not just the first. So if you want your armour shattering attack to be cast each time its off the CD, just assignt that to atuo attack.

You can only have 1 skill as auto afaik, and it won't work with skills that target an area, not a NPC.

The Personal Story is good, not many choices, but it's a lot of fun with good VO, and cool stuff to do.

So far, at level 12 on two toons and 3 on other 2, i have found 2 "story choices" (kill that guy or let him live style) and 2 "mechanic choices" (choose between very different NPCs that serve you as party member in the personal story areas of the game). Also you can actually RP to some extent your toon, you love cows? Help the cause by taking care of them instead of killing mobs, want to help the humans instead of your race, go and do it, no penalty whatsoever and it's very easy to do.

I wouln't say there are no choices, rather they are different than choosing betwing 2 dialog options that lead to the same resoult. Here you choose how to help the cause and which cause, in the classic Bioware game you choose by pressing one or two, both almost always have no effect in the gameworld barring changing a bit a couple of NPC lines; TBH i don't care about neither way to choose, but this feels fresh at least.

2. The "personal story" is pretty lightweight, and not even remotely close to the polish/depth of what's on offer in TOR as far as storytelling goes.

7. Only seen the Human city so far but it's absolutely massive. Comically huge. Very impressive looking too. I really hope some of those carnivals and games open up and become interactive.

I think it's a different approach, in ToR you have more voiceover (also not sure if voiceover and mmo repetable events should be mixed) just to be trown at a lifeless hobo looking fleet as your capital city, or to have mostly forgettable monsters trown at you. Talking about the human campaign, just the first mission there shows a mob more impressive that what you will be killing in ToR for the first month (i wouldnt know if raids improve on that, because i quitted).

 

[Korten12]

Haven't tried the beta.

I have grown to dislike all MMO's (haven't really played, but WoW in 2006 for a couple of months) because they offer nothing enjoyable.

Then again, Guild Wars 2 seems really promising. I'll consider it once it's released.

The nice thing about GW2 is that it has no subscription fee, which is why I will probably buy it.

I am not a big MMO fan either, but occasionally I get the itch to do a raid or play some PvP. When that happens, that itch usually goes unscratched, because I refuse to buy a month of WoW subscription to play PvP for 3 hours. In GW2 that wont happen. Woot!

Well PvP is really good, but there is no raiding.