What will keep me from buying this game will be anything resembling the first game. I bought the first game and found it wanting, mainly due to horrible community and no seamless world. Nothing but instances and zones on rails. Not my favorite. I liked the rest of the game for the most part, but due to lack of any immersion factors, I didn't really get "addicted" to the game in any way.
Hopefully part 2 crushes this and makes it a world and immersive and MASSIVE.
and have millions upon millions of skills, let alone combinations.
Beyond that, it'd be nice to not have arena-style PVP (ALA team, random team, GVG, etc). That style of gameplay never appealed to me. However, the map Fort Aspenwood was always fun for me, since it had a fun objective and required much thought by the attackers and defenders to both defend and attack it, requiring proper balance and objectives.
As long as PVP is objective based, and not "kill the other team dead", and the skill system isn't hyper-bloated, GW2 looks to be a shoe-in for an awesome game for my repertoire.
As pointed out before, there won't be any secondary professions. And they are cutting down the number of skills by a lot.
The next point will disappoint you though. There is going to be arena style pvp, they are going for the competitive e-sport type nature of the game. However, there will be the world versus world realm, the mists, that might cater more to your preferences of pvp.
It will have to beat out FFXIV since they alluded to both systems being very similar ala weapons determining skills/abilities etc.
I would like to open beta both, but aside from FFXIV, just time obligations with other MMO's that I'm expected to be heavily interested in. I believe this year and the next are going to be huge years for the industry in terms of releases as opposed to how 2009 was more of a redefining what MMO actually is and many MMO's just fixing themselves.
Earthrise, WoW: Cataclysm, even EVE Online could possibly suck me back (even though I left due to lack of time ultimately). Then, theres other big monsters like Star Wars ToR, CCP's World of Darkness, Funcom's The Secret World and I'm sure plenty more left unnamed. Its going to start becoming a tough market out there after this year and the next.
EDIT: Not to mention the games that are already established, which these games might draw away, but the usual trend is that most come back to their prospective game unless the new ones are really that good to make up for the time invested in the older games.
It will have to beat out FFXIV since they alluded to both systems being very similar ala weapons determining skills/abilities etc.
Now that you mention it there are a lot of similarities in the skill systems between GW2 and FFXIV. XIV has a restricted hotbar as well that only lets you use a certain number of skills at any one time. The major difference though is that XIV allows you to level all classes on one character and access any skills you've learnt regardless of current class, so it's more sandboxy in that regard I guess.
You disliked the multi-classes? That is what made the PVP in GW so great. Hear yourself, you dont want it because it offers too much variation? You really want to be able to statisticly decide a pvp match? REALLY? I dont know but i think you miss the point of video games. It is boring if there is a best setup for each class, it makes the pvp static and statistic and kills the fun overall. It is the intuitive and smart combo's that players/guilds come up with that makes PvP interesting. How boring is it when you can predict outcomes of a match because you can predict what setup the foe uses.
edit* Bah, just saw that there will be no sec.profs You win i guess...
Yes, it was a con. I'm not against any individual class having, say, 80 skills (arbitrary number). I don't mind having varience within classes. That doesn't bother me. What bothers me is, by the end of the game, you had 10 classes with some having ~140 skills, others no less than...I want to say 80, with skills spread out to the 4 corners of the world if you were lucky, requiring entire databases just to find what skills there were and where they ended up actually being. Then, combined with multiclassing, ended up having one ~140 class skill to mix with any of the other 9 classes, allowing for potentially infinite combinations of skills with a combined skill pool of well beyond 200-250 (numbers semi-arbitrary) skills to choose from, with the potential option at any time to swap out from the secondary pool to yet another 200-250 skill pool.
There are 3 primary problems associated with this. The first is, the game's economy for people not in the know made getting new skills ultimately restrictive. 1 plat skill prices on another, say, 20 skills, can be a lot of money for people who either don't know how to farm, or don't want to farm. You can ignore PVP chars in this case for me, since I didn't wish to use PVP chars, I preferred PVE ones. A farm was still there for PVP regardless, just less pronounced. Nevermind having to XP up (usually gotten while farming), trying new builds in myriad situations, and it became an expensive, grindy, time-consuming game of trial and error.
The second comes directly off of how training is done. You ended up with so many skills that they were always scattered to the four corners of the world. You had to go online, since simple exploration would not tell you what skills there were and where. I would end up spending hours on the wikis trying to just find skills I thought I would enjoy, let alone builds and styles, different class combinations, etc. This obsessive over-analyzation ended up undermining the experience because I never got anywhere or did anything, since the grind was obvious, and the skill choices very subtle and trial&error in nature. As I said...somewhere...some skills were almost identical to each other. But, if you went into higher end competetive PVP, a skill that was .5% different from another (arbitrary numbers are fun) could have potential differences of rearranging the entire composition of how your class functions in the game, simply because of a minor timing difference. I'm exaggerating, but this is also how I saw it moreso than anything.
The third is the slightly more obvious one. It A) muddles the classes, where they can all end up feeling very same-y, and creates absolutely massive ballance headaches. To Arena.Net's credit, they tended to address this pretty quickly, but wasn't there a time when many classes ran with a few people running IWAY, and everyone having a ranger secondary (or primary, as the case sometimes was) just to have a pet to proc IWAY?
In the end, too much choice ended up dirtying the waters to the point where the quality of the game suffered to feed the ravenous masses with a quantity of bad or similar abilities that made it a headache for me to even try to come up with individual skill combinations that worked well under any general and/or specific situation. Throwing in a second class just added further fuel to the fire when it was already bloated to begin with.
In short, I'm of the mind of "less is more". You don't need 250 skills to choose from to have a varied, rewarding experience where you can run to an elementalist, know that they at least will cast something, but not know if they'll be area damage, single target damage, control, or survivalist in nature. You can still form strategies based off of these natures, such as "use physical ranged" or "expect these defenses, ready armor penetration abilities" (so to speak, if they're handy) while still keeping some variance to it, without running into, say, an elem/dervish that somehow, with 8 people attacking them, no one had a specific counter that was capable of killing them due to some unknown/unforseen combo that was absolutely broken barring true masters of the game with a full group that knows how they can counter many/any combo with their pre-made group.
Don't even get me started on how to plan entire groups of abilities to include synergy when you have to take into consideration nearly 800 skills, if not more. This is why I brought up how you practically had to be a statistician to really enjoy the system like it was.
Quality > Quantity, and less is more. There tends to be more fun when people work in finite tollerances to make divergent outcomes.
Originally posted by arenasb
*snip*
As pointed out before, there won't be any secondary professions. And they are cutting down the number of skills by a lot.
The next point will disappoint you though. There is going to be arena style pvp, they are going for the competitive e-sport type nature of the game. However, there will be the world versus world realm, the mists, that might cater more to your preferences of pvp.
I don't care if they have arenas in the style of GVG or team v team, and I should clarify more to this point:
I would much rather they had more alternatives, such as the aforementioned Fort Aspenwood, than just the boring goal-less competetive E-Sport style ALA WoW arenas or the original GW system.
More specifically, I prefer, as I said, objective-based PVP, as opposed to wanton gratuitous violence (AKA murdering the enemy, profit). For example, Planetside was more fun than Battlefield 2, because Planetside had actual, overarching goals, it gave a purpose or meaning to the combat beyond inflating one's ego or online standing (or real rewards as the case could be), but instead had you capture bases, push ever-evolving battle lines of large numbers, etc. More specifically, when you captured an objective (base, tower) it meant you could advance the war, instead of just advance to a new map with your prior goal being essentially non-existent.
I'd much rather siege a fort, something that takes planning, thought, and the right strike of offense v defense, than mindlessly beat on a pre-made team over and over and over and over and over...
The only variance there is...what team composition will I be facing? Beyond that, individual maps usually didn't have enough variety beyond "here's a spot I can hide behind as necessary" and "here's random flat spot I can run around on and see the enemy, they can see me, scenery is just frill".
If anything, it's a style of PVP thing, and I prefer objectives.
Comments
What will keep me from buying this game will be anything resembling the first game. I bought the first game and found it wanting, mainly due to horrible community and no seamless world. Nothing but instances and zones on rails. Not my favorite. I liked the rest of the game for the most part, but due to lack of any immersion factors, I didn't really get "addicted" to the game in any way.
Hopefully part 2 crushes this and makes it a world and immersive and MASSIVE.
As pointed out before, there won't be any secondary professions. And they are cutting down the number of skills by a lot.
The next point will disappoint you though. There is going to be arena style pvp, they are going for the competitive e-sport type nature of the game. However, there will be the world versus world realm, the mists, that might cater more to your preferences of pvp.
It will have to beat out FFXIV since they alluded to both systems being very similar ala weapons determining skills/abilities etc.
I would like to open beta both, but aside from FFXIV, just time obligations with other MMO's that I'm expected to be heavily interested in. I believe this year and the next are going to be huge years for the industry in terms of releases as opposed to how 2009 was more of a redefining what MMO actually is and many MMO's just fixing themselves.
Earthrise, WoW: Cataclysm, even EVE Online could possibly suck me back (even though I left due to lack of time ultimately). Then, theres other big monsters like Star Wars ToR, CCP's World of Darkness, Funcom's The Secret World and I'm sure plenty more left unnamed. Its going to start becoming a tough market out there after this year and the next.
EDIT: Not to mention the games that are already established, which these games might draw away, but the usual trend is that most come back to their prospective game unless the new ones are really that good to make up for the time invested in the older games.
Now that you mention it there are a lot of similarities in the skill systems between GW2 and FFXIV. XIV has a restricted hotbar as well that only lets you use a certain number of skills at any one time. The major difference though is that XIV allows you to level all classes on one character and access any skills you've learnt regardless of current class, so it's more sandboxy in that regard I guess.
Yes, it was a con. I'm not against any individual class having, say, 80 skills (arbitrary number). I don't mind having varience within classes. That doesn't bother me. What bothers me is, by the end of the game, you had 10 classes with some having ~140 skills, others no less than...I want to say 80, with skills spread out to the 4 corners of the world if you were lucky, requiring entire databases just to find what skills there were and where they ended up actually being. Then, combined with multiclassing, ended up having one ~140 class skill to mix with any of the other 9 classes, allowing for potentially infinite combinations of skills with a combined skill pool of well beyond 200-250 (numbers semi-arbitrary) skills to choose from, with the potential option at any time to swap out from the secondary pool to yet another 200-250 skill pool.
There are 3 primary problems associated with this. The first is, the game's economy for people not in the know made getting new skills ultimately restrictive. 1 plat skill prices on another, say, 20 skills, can be a lot of money for people who either don't know how to farm, or don't want to farm. You can ignore PVP chars in this case for me, since I didn't wish to use PVP chars, I preferred PVE ones. A farm was still there for PVP regardless, just less pronounced. Nevermind having to XP up (usually gotten while farming), trying new builds in myriad situations, and it became an expensive, grindy, time-consuming game of trial and error.
The second comes directly off of how training is done. You ended up with so many skills that they were always scattered to the four corners of the world. You had to go online, since simple exploration would not tell you what skills there were and where. I would end up spending hours on the wikis trying to just find skills I thought I would enjoy, let alone builds and styles, different class combinations, etc. This obsessive over-analyzation ended up undermining the experience because I never got anywhere or did anything, since the grind was obvious, and the skill choices very subtle and trial&error in nature. As I said...somewhere...some skills were almost identical to each other. But, if you went into higher end competetive PVP, a skill that was .5% different from another (arbitrary numbers are fun) could have potential differences of rearranging the entire composition of how your class functions in the game, simply because of a minor timing difference. I'm exaggerating, but this is also how I saw it moreso than anything.
The third is the slightly more obvious one. It A) muddles the classes, where they can all end up feeling very same-y, and
creates absolutely massive ballance headaches. To Arena.Net's credit, they tended to address this pretty quickly, but wasn't there a time when many classes ran with a few people running IWAY, and everyone having a ranger secondary (or primary, as the case sometimes was) just to have a pet to proc IWAY?
In the end, too much choice ended up dirtying the waters to the point where the quality of the game suffered to feed the ravenous masses with a quantity of bad or similar abilities that made it a headache for me to even try to come up with individual skill combinations that worked well under any general and/or specific situation. Throwing in a second class just added further fuel to the fire when it was already bloated to begin with.
In short, I'm of the mind of "less is more". You don't need 250 skills to choose from to have a varied, rewarding experience where you can run to an elementalist, know that they at least will cast something, but not know if they'll be area damage, single target damage, control, or survivalist in nature. You can still form strategies based off of these natures, such as "use physical ranged" or "expect these defenses, ready armor penetration abilities" (so to speak, if they're handy) while still keeping some variance to it, without running into, say, an elem/dervish that somehow, with 8 people attacking them, no one had a specific counter that was capable of killing them due to some unknown/unforseen combo that was absolutely broken barring true masters of the game with a full group that knows how they can counter many/any combo with their pre-made group.
Don't even get me started on how to plan entire groups of abilities to include synergy when you have to take into consideration nearly 800 skills, if not more. This is why I brought up how you practically had to be a statistician to really enjoy the system like it was.
Quality > Quantity, and less is more. There tends to be more fun when people work in finite tollerances to make divergent outcomes.
I don't care if they have arenas in the style of GVG or team v team, and I should clarify more to this point:
I would much rather they had more alternatives, such as the aforementioned Fort Aspenwood, than just the boring goal-less competetive E-Sport style ALA WoW arenas or the original GW system.
More specifically, I prefer, as I said, objective-based PVP, as opposed to wanton gratuitous violence (AKA murdering the enemy, profit). For example, Planetside was more fun than Battlefield 2, because Planetside had actual, overarching goals, it gave a purpose or meaning to the combat beyond inflating one's ego or online standing (or real rewards as the case could be), but instead had you capture bases, push ever-evolving battle lines of large numbers, etc. More specifically, when you captured an objective (base, tower) it meant you could advance the war, instead of just advance to a new map with your prior goal being essentially non-existent.
I'd much rather siege a fort, something that takes planning, thought, and the right strike of offense v defense, than mindlessly beat on a pre-made team over and over and over and over and over...
The only variance there is...what team composition will I be facing? Beyond that, individual maps usually didn't have enough variety beyond "here's a spot I can hide behind as necessary" and "here's random flat spot I can run around on and see the enemy, they can see me, scenery is just frill".
If anything, it's a style of PVP thing, and I prefer objectives.
Redundant statement is redundant.