Guild Wars 2 Reviews in Progress

Since the last time we checked quite a few impression/review-in-progress articles have popped up for Guild Wars 2, offering seemingly positive impressions for the MMO sequel, but with a few caveats.

GameSpy has a 2-page review-in progress:

The way heart quests just pop up might lead you to believe that you can redo them in the style of a daily quest, but since they’re Guild Wars 2’s take on the traditional MMORPG quest, they’re done forever once you finish them. You’ll get a letter in the mail with some cash, a good chunk of XP, some “karma” points, and that’s it. The assigning NPC then becomes a a karma vendor, where you can buy level-appropriate gear with karma points that usually has much better models than the junk you find out in the world itself, but the only reward you’ll get from helping a friend through the heart is the XP from enemy kills. That wouldn’t be much of a problem in a traditional MMORPG, but it hurts Guild Wars 2’s downscaling system that’s aimed at letting you enjoy content with your low-level friends if you’ve already outleveled them.

…

That’s why Guild Wars 2 dynamic events are such a major part of its appeal: they encourage replayability and sprinkle variety into its open-world PvE gameplay. As I’ve played through the live release, I’ve been continually surprised by how often these overlap with the hearts, often allowing you to complete both at once. While I was running through the Bloodfields mentioned above, a nearby dynamic event popped up that called for players to defend a fortification called Nebo Terrace from successive waves of centaur attacks, and my participation in that dynamic event also counted toward the completion of the heart for the healing the soldiers. I ended up completing both at the same time. Elsewhere, a heart demanded that I fight in a “battle pit” that locked me in a small arena with a difficult animal adversary of my choice, but occasionally a group-oriented dynamic event would pop up that would also award completion toward the heart through participation. In this case, we had to battle against a Norn called Vollym the Fierce and beat him within five minutes, after he bragged that he could take on all of us. (He couldn’t.)

The “we” is important. Dynamic events are highly social events, which bring dozens of players out of the woodwork much like Rift’s titular rifts did in the first month or so of its release. Sometimes dynamic events have multiple stages which can end up taking you all the way across a zone’s map if you follow them all the way. Each step awards a hefty chunk of experience and karma points based on your participation (decided by gold, silver, or bronze medals), and unlike hearts, they’re repeatable and thus a good way to continue enjoying a zone after you’ve finished all of its hearts.

And so does PC Gamer, which has added a few more thoughts to its own “review as it happens”:

Every time I’ve decided to wander off without a particular reward in mind I’ve found something interesting, and that’s a very exciting thing to say about an MMO. However, watching general chat, I still don’t think the game does enough in its early hours to explain how it is best played, both to those players with prior MMO experience and those without.

A common question is (I’ve run out of quests, how do I level up?) Normally, this is scoffed at by more experienced Guild Wars 2 players who know that the game gives you XP for almost everything, from WvW PvP to events, crafting and exploring. (There’s always something you can do,) is the frequent reply. (Just go do things.)

The problem stems from how personal story missions are structured. Other games have taught us to see ‘˜the story’ as the most important thing to finish, the means by which you beat the game. In Guild Wars 2, there’s often a gap of several levels between missions which it hopes you’ll fill by going and doing other things. Many players don’t see it that way: they want to see the next bit of story now, so why aren’t there any quests to help them level up? We’ve been taught that games will hold our hands, and when they let us go, far from being freed, players remain single-minded and goal-orientated: like a child in a supermarket looking for their parents. I don’t know what the solution is: I suspect it might be a box that pops up when the game detects that you’re grinding out the same thing over and over, yelling (WHY ARE YOU STILL HERE?) and providing a bullet-point list of everything else you could be doing.

Finally, Rock, Paper, Shotgun has another impressions article, that notes that the game’s most glaring design fault is its inability to let you play easily with friends:

Here’s the colossal, incredible folly of Guild Wars 2, though: I can’t play it with my friends.

This is mainly because the servers are too busy in this first weekend of play, so even though we’re all on the same sever whenever we switch zone we get dumped into the ‘˜overflow’ area, which is a sharded netherworld with all the same contents (mobs, quests, NPCs, etc you can play completely as normal) but containing players from assorted servers rather than yours, all queuing to get into the real zone on their own server. So, I’d be there while my chums were in the zone proper. Server loads can’t suffer the only blame for this, however: it your game has been designed in such a way that people who want to play it together cannot be in the same place despite being on the same server, you have done something very, very wrong indeed at a fundamental level. This shouldn’t happen at all, whether or not it’s an alternative to queuing to get onto the server in the first place. Friends cannot play together. Madness.

Eventually, I’d be told there was a space ready for me, but by that point my chums had often moved onto a different area, which entailed their being dumped into another overflow thinger, and so were no longer on the same shard is me. Time and again this happened, this often fruitless attempt for multiple players to play a multiplayer game together. We could be in the exact same spot, we could talk to each other in party chat, but we could not play together. Occasionally, double-sixes would come up and we’d all be reintegrated into the ‘˜real’ zone at roughly the same time, but as soon as, for one reason or another, we needed to change area, that was that again.

As seems to be GW2’²s wont, this is barely documented and poorly explained, so it might be that there is some arcane way for a party to actually play together consistently. Right now, we’ve given up on even trying especially as the game won’t let us join each other on our ‘˜personal storylines’, which is a string of scripted quests, interspersed with flat, tedious cutscenes, tailored to your choices in character creation. We can be in a group, but as soon as one player starts one he disappears into his own instance leaving the rest of us behind. Well, not always. Sometimes it’s worked. It makes no sense, and it’s become a gamble not worth taking. So right now I guess we’re all working on levelling up until such time as we can do high-level stuff together or the servers calm down so we can stick in a pack.