Zero Punctuation: Guild Wars 2

[juangarcia2007]

Guild Wars 2

This week, Zero Punctuation reviews Guild Wars 2.

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Oh look everyone, Yahtzee's doing a review of a mmorpger again!!! BING!!! Thank you hero of the hour! Here's a pile of experience and money now piss off!! LOL

 

[GenGenners]

Very circus themed this week. Did he meet a clown at the expo?

You can actually choose that circucs thing as a backstory, when you're making a character.

Wait.........seriously?

Given your avatar I know what you are about to go do ;D

Kefka is more than a mere clown!

it is entirely possible to make a mesmer or elementalist, dress them up in a set called Conjurer's x (where x is the piece of clothing, like conjurer's mantle), dye each piece infdividually to give them a jester style colour palette, and make choices in dialog trees that give your character the personality of kefka.

I know it's possible because I've done it on my mesmer
homicidally insane giant cat stage magicians FTW

I'm going to be a massive fanboy now and ask whether you based your design on his original Yoshitaka Amano artwork/Dissidia render, or his FFVI in-game appearance?

 

[mattaui]

I've got characters of all races and all professions (hooray for cheap gems and farming crafting mats), and the charr seem to do the best job in the early levels of hooking you into the lore. I'd dabbled in GW1, so I knew the basics, but it's very interesting to see the previous 'bad guys' presented in a sympathetic light. So you come to understand the conflict between the humans and the charr, and how you've got a human-charr alliance (in effect) that wants peace, but also humans (separatists) and charr (renegades) who want to continue the war.

Perhaps the charr pull you in because they're a little more front and center, beset by the ghosts of Ascalon from the start, while the human starting areas do feel a little safe and inconsequential. Could be also that the charr are just more interesting, being giant hulking beasts that defeated their own false gods, invented the printing press and love explosives (like the charrzooka).

I don't think enough was said about the much more dynamic and action-oriented gameplay, either. I know it's not the first to implement such a thing, but it's just a lot more entertaining and visceral. It made it very hard to go back to standing still and mashing buttons in more traditional MMOs.

But like others noted, this was a somewhat positive review, even if I felt it was more of a review of a first impression of one part of a much bigger game.

 

[AdamG3691]

Very circus themed this week. Did he meet a clown at the expo?

You can actually choose that circucs thing as a backstory, when you're making a character.

Wait.........seriously?

Given your avatar I know what you are about to go do ;D

Kefka is more than a mere clown!

it is entirely possible to make a mesmer or elementalist, dress them up in a set called Conjurer's x (where x is the piece of clothing, like conjurer's mantle), dye each piece infdividually to give them a jester style colour palette, and make choices in dialog trees that give your character the personality of kefka.

I know it's possible because I've done it on my mesmer
homicidally insane giant cat stage magicians FTW

I'm going to be a massive fanboy now and ask whether you based your design on his original Yoshitaka Amano artwork/Dissidia render, or his FFVI in-game appearance?

a bit of both, it's difficult to get a match with the sprite since there is so little detail compared to the models in GW2, but at the same time, the detail on the dissidia one makes it hard to match the armour as well, also the RPing personality is based on the dissidia version, it's hard to RP as an insane god of magic when you aren't actually one, it's impossible to get it looking exactly like it (obvoiusly, after all, they can't just put in "kefka armour"), but you can get pretty close with the right combination, and things like the spiky collar from the sprite are there if you know where to find them, but it's more of a question of "can you get the colours you want?" because they change depending on material and lighting, for example, gold dye on cloth is just a golden yellow, but on metals it's actually golden metal, and this can cause problems, on my necro it works great, because what looks like a dark green ends up looking like a greenish oil slick and matches the colour of the spell effects perfectly when using cabalist's gear (skulls, summoning circles, it's really good looking on necros), but it just looks silly when not using it because it doesn't have the right reflections on other materials. I could get Abyss, which is a VERY dark blue/green/black, and considered the darkest black available, but it costs about three gold, which takes DAYS of grinding to get, same problem with things like white, or any desirable colour


I will also say this:
see the hat the red mage in my avatar is wearing?
it's ingame as a medium armour piece
(unfortunately, I haven't been able to find one that also has the mask from the original sprite T_T)

 

[scw55]

I play GW2. I agree with Yahtzee, I still will carry on playing it.

Misunderstanding of the Skill Points thing but that's fair enough as I didn't know about the end game thingy later on.
-
He forgot to mention if you roll a Charr and use the Heritage Light Armour set and dye it appropriately, you're a Feline Phantom of the Opera.

 

[AdamG3691]

I play GW2. I agree with Yahtzee, I still will carry on playing it.

Misunderstanding of the Skill Points thing but that's fair enough as I didn't know about the end game thingy later on.
-
He forgot to mention if you roll a Charr and use the Heritage Light Armour set and dye it appropriately, you're a Feline Phantom of the Opera.

Heritage armour looks GREAT on charr, it's one of the few easily accessible* light armours that you can get in the early game that doesn't look ridiculous on a charr.
glory/orchid with antique gold or autumn trim is great for mesmers, ebony with green trim is great for necros, and autumn with antique gold trim is great for elementalists (I tried it out on a friends account who has heritage armour, it was GLORIOUS)

*(I say easy in the context of "if you played GW1, it is easy to get in GW2, if you didn't play GW1, it's impossible")

 

[GenGenners]

Very circus themed this week. Did he meet a clown at the expo?

You can actually choose that circucs thing as a backstory, when you're making a character.

Wait.........seriously?

Given your avatar I know what you are about to go do ;D

Kefka is more than a mere clown!

it is entirely possible to make a mesmer or elementalist, dress them up in a set called Conjurer's x (where x is the piece of clothing, like conjurer's mantle), dye each piece infdividually to give them a jester style colour palette, and make choices in dialog trees that give your character the personality of kefka.

I know it's possible because I've done it on my mesmer
homicidally insane giant cat stage magicians FTW

I'm going to be a massive fanboy now and ask whether you based your design on his original Yoshitaka Amano artwork/Dissidia render, or his FFVI in-game appearance?

a bit of both, it's difficult to get a match with the sprite since there is so little detail compared to the models in GW2, but at the same time, the detail on the dissidia one makes it hard to match the armour as well, also the RPing personality is based on the dissidia version, it's hard to RP as an insane god of magic when you aren't actually one, it's impossible to get it looking exactly like it (obvoiusly, after all, they can't just put in "kefka armour"), but you can get pretty close with the right combination, and things like the spiky collar from the sprite are there if you know where to find them, but it's more of a question of "can you get the colours you want?" because they change depending on material and lighting, for example, gold dye on cloth is just a golden yellow, but on metals it's actually golden metal, and this can cause problems, on my necro it works great, because what looks like a dark green ends up looking like a greenish oil slick and matches the colour of the spell effects perfectly when using cabalist's gear (skulls, summoning circles, it's really good looking on necros), but it just looks silly when not using it because it doesn't have the right reflections on other materials. I could get Abyss, which is a VERY dark blue/green/black, and considered the darkest black available, but it costs about three gold, which takes DAYS of grinding to get, same problem with things like white, or any desirable colour


I will also say this:
see the hat the red mage in my avatar is wearing?
it's ingame as a medium armour piece
(unfortunately, I haven't been able to find one that also has the mask from the original sprite T_T)

Yeah, I know what you mean by colours on different materials. It's impossible to make things look just right. I try my best though

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

M'kay, I try to give Yahtzee some leeway, and I'll admit of his MMO reviews, this one is definitely the least scathing. However as someone who's playing GW2, I think his criticism that there is no plot is a complete load. GW2 has just as much plot as WoW did at the start of its release. Yahtzee says the only thing resembling a plot was the fact the elder dragons have woken up and are threatening the world, but outside of that there's no real sense of what your role in it is. Well what did the base WoW game start you out with? Hell, I don't even remember them announcing the primary antagonist with that one, you were just supposed to follow the quest lines until you eventually were lead up to Ragnaros, or whatever his name was. It wasn't until the expansions they began letting you know who you would ultimately be fighting at the end.

The problem here seems to be Yahtzee is completely ignoring the back story in the game. I wouldn't expect him to read both of the novels they came out with and give a full synopsis of the backstory in his video, but he could at least acknowledge it. He says there's no plot outside the elder dragons, completely ignoring things like the 250 years of conflict between the humans and the charr and the tentative alliance they're now forming, the creation and emergence of the sylvari, the doom of Ascalon, I mean holy crap that's a lot to just gloss over.

Which part of your explanation am I supposed to find reasonable: that I should be willing to wait for future expansions for a plot to emerge(and no, the state of previous games does not excuse this one), or that I should have to buy and read a couple of novels to understand what's going on?

This sounds like the sort of reasoning people use when they try to convince Yahtzee that it's okay for the single player mode of a game to be shit if the multiplayer mode is good.

The story is fine but not great by general standards. There is a plot and the only thing that is left a bit lacking is the explanation of Destiny's Edge's back story but Guild Wars 2 does not deliver its story like a lot of other games. It does it a bit more like Half Life 2. By that I mean you get a solid story that is not great but not bad if you just do the personal story. If you take the time to explore, talk to NPCs read, stuff on statues and listen to NPC conversations you learn a lot about the world that you may or not already know.

Once you get to the level 30 zones the story does become quite urgent as you really start to see the Elder Dragons effects. You start off at the bottom and work your way up. In those areas you see plenty of Branded, Icebrood, Risen, etc which are all servants of Dragons and most quests involve stopping their influence. You even get events dedicated to killing some of the Dragon's Champions and Lieutenants as well as repelling attacks.

I know it' common practice in these games, but having little things to click on to give you an exposition dump, no matter how flowery the words they use, is a terrible way to integrate story into an interactive medium. If every time I want to learn a piece of the story I have to stop playing the game then that's no different from them delivering the pdf's of the book with the game and not letting you start to you get to the last page. The story and game are still basically separate entities.

If Yahtzee got through however much he played without noticing any meaningful story that is the fault of the game not the player and the only "laziness" here is the way the designers chose to integrate the story.

I think understand what you're trying to say I think but it just reminds me of people saying FF XIII was bad because it was linear. It wasn't bad because it was linear it is bad because it was just badly done. I assume you are saying the starting areas are bad because they are boring/give no urgency?

 

[iblis666]

DAMN YOU YAHTZEE!! You are supposed to talk me out of buying video games, but after watching your video a few hours latter having it eating at my insides i just bought it even though i never buy games newly released or even not on sale. I mean what the hell was that video, you usually make it sound like a mutant incestuous twin of its self with dicks sprouting all over it but this game you sounded positive.

 

[DoomBlackDragon]

If you want to see MMO story done right, try out The Secret World.


The rest of the game sucks though.

They have done alot of of work on it. I think it going in the right direction. The game is actully good. People should try it out.

DAMN YOU YAHTZEE!! You are supposed to talk me out of buying video games, but after watching your video a few hours latter having it eating at my insides i just bought it even though i never buy games newly released or even not on sale. I mean what the hell was that video, you usually make it sound like a mutant incestuous twin of its self with dicks sprouting all over it but this game you sounded positive.

Sounds like you are having buyers remorse. Yeah the games not as good as alot of people let on.

 

[Furrama]

A lot of interesting story bits are there, you just have to dig for them. Hidden areas, little NPC conversations you might catch, in game books, funny and sad gravestone markers. I think they were attempting to make it so that if you didn't care about the story it wouldn't really bother you too much if you didn't want it to. If you poke around and look in cracks and read everything there is a lot of information in game. But if you aren't looking you'll miss it, and it's all very easy to miss.

Not sure if I like that approach, but I can kinda understand what they were going for.

Sure but call a spade a spade. A bad approach is still bad no matter how deliberate it is. The whole thing also smacks of a lack of faith in their own story as a major point of interest which to me speaks volumes. I think part of it is the genre. The world is so vast with so many points of interest it's hard to co-ordinate a story through out the actual in game experience. I feel for them but that doesn't mean the end result doesn't suck it only adds a sad inevitability to it.

Edit: I should also add I don't think the game is bad. I was just responding to someone who said that Yahtzee was wrong because their is a story when I think the fact that he missed it indicates a failing of the way it was told and then I was just highlighting the points that I feel led to that.

Whether or not it sucks is a matter of opinion and what you're looking for. Plenty of people don't care about the story in games, no matter how good/bad it is. They skip cut-scenes, they care little for context, they just want to smash in heads. Some people love the rails, and feel that's what makes a story stronger. Neither are wrong.

If you read up a bit on page two somewhere you'll see I also have my own issues with the story. Mine is not the mechanism in which they deliver the story, but how badly paced it can be in places, and dissonant at times with earlier themes and whatnot. It looks less like they didn't have faith in their story, but that they didn't have time to refine in delivery. It's all there, it just didn't gel very well. The story itself isn't even that bad, it just needed some epicifying at the end and better pacing in the middle.

 

[Darks63]

By the sounds of it he did mostly pve content so it seems like half a review of the game if not 1/3 of one.

 

[FallenMessiah88]

Never really been into MMO's. However, Guild Wars 2 did manage to get my attention, mostly because I thought the world itself as well as the lore was interesting. All in all, if I'm ever going to play an MMORPG, I'm probably going to play this one.

 

[Tippy]

In his WoW:Cata review atleast he TOLD us what level he had reached (60) so we could simply laugh-off the entire review as a joke because WoW is 99% endgame, which 99% of the playerbase has already reached.

But in this review we didn't even get a mention of what level he reached, I wonder why?

I wish the Escapist would just STOP making Yahtzee review MMO's just for the sake of a fucking review. Due to his lack of interest in MMO's (if people couldn't already tell) added with getting jack-all time to play them, he can't even give a first-impressions review. He gets to give like one-tenth of a first-impressions review.

GW2 has a BIG list of strengths (and weaknesses) and Yahtzee touched on maybe 1% of them. Because he really had 2 options: either zerg through the levels and skip exploring so he could atleast get to a decent level (which is NOT how you play GW2) OR take his time exploring but risk only giving a really low-level review. It sounds like he took the first option.

By the sounds of it he did mostly pve content so it seems like half a review of the game if not 1/3 of one.

Yahtzee doesn't PvP.

 

[Volstag9]

Part of me really wants to get Guild Wars 2, the rest of me wants to graduate university Funny review as always.

I feel your pain. I actually got it just before I started school, now it's just sitting on my HDD as I don't want to get sucked in.

 

[Darth_Payn]

DAMN YOU YAHTZEE!! You are supposed to talk me out of buying video games, but after watching your video a few hours latter having it eating at my insides i just bought it even though i never buy games newly released or even not on sale. I mean what the hell was that video, you usually make it sound like a mutant incestuous twin of its self with dicks sprouting all over it but this game you sounded positive.

Yeah, did my eyes and ears decieve me, Yahtzee being nice about a MMORPG? Ok, I think he was somewhat merciful to SW:TOR but he just hates WoW and its ilk. And does WoW really have a story to it? I thought they just add more stuff to do and grind away.
Liked the South Park shout out @ 1:35; Step 1, Begin Quest to Save World Step 2, ??? Step 3, PROFIT!

 

[FalloutJack]

Every time you use that method of advertizing that takes up the whole screen, the video de-syncs and screws up. I'm going to keep pointing this out until you stop doing it.

 

[Vegosiux]

Before people start raging, this is not a negative post. I truly think it's a fantastic thing that it's possible for both crowds to have their cake and eat it. I'll just enjoy my chocolate cake over this side of the table and you can sit across from me and have your strawberry cake.

I would have bought this part of your post if it wasn't for how you worded the rest. You know, about your MMO's getting "polluted" and all. Lot of negativity right there.

 

[TAdamson]

Gammon Socket.... Oh my...

 

[Mr C]

I liked the Red Dwarf reference there with gazpacho soup. Personally I really want to see him do FTL considering his want for more space games.

I chuckled at how he managed to get it in there