Player Impact starts to become more and more obvious as you progress deeper into the game. Gendarran Fields, the level 25-35 zone, starts to deliver on this, with some major settlements that can be ransacked and claimed by bandits or centaurs, where there are complex, interwoven DEs that contribute to the state of the friendy and hostile forces in the zone.
I got to that zone in BW2 and didn't see anything where players could have a permanent effect on the world (which was the point made in the Manifesto). Yes some major settlements can be captured by centaurs and you can retake them. If you leave though they are soon overrun again so the next group of players coming along can retake them.
By comparrison, WoW with its phasing mechanics allowed for a more permanent change to the world.
I did see a few events that try to do what they claim in the manifesto. An early example is the bandits poisoning the water supply if you fail to stop them (which you will fail because the DE is crafted so that the players will always fail). When you fail the world changes. The people in the starting village start complaining they are sick and something is wrong with the water supply. The sprinklers over the farms start spewing out poisoned water and so forth. The problem is that when you save the water supply it doesn't stay saved, that event repeats itself over and over.
GW2 does do a very good job of showing quests impacting on the world, but it just isn't anything permanent. You can save a hundred villages or slay a thousand evil giants and the village will still get attacked again and another giant will still appear to come and attack.
I'll agree with you on "permanent". It was a bad word to use and a bad promise to imply. The game has "persistence", not permanence. The only way to offer permanence would be to use phasing and I much prefer a world with out phasing. Changes to the world persist. The amount of push back on each persistent effect on the world depends on the design of the event chain and where the current state of the locale rests on that event chain.
There are some states that will not change until players do something to change them. If Bandits burn and occupy the local village, they will remain there until players push them out. If a guild wanted to set up protection of the town, to repel all attempts by the bandits to take back the village, they could do so and the bandits wouldn't recapture the village until players failed to defend it.
Persistence.
Things don't just happen on a timer. Things don't just fade back to their original condition once an event chain has played out.
So no, they didn't deliver permanence. I agree with you there. However, players can effect the state of the world and those states can have persistence, to the point that some states can not change with out interaction by the players.
As to the example of the poisoned water supply, I think you missed an important element of that chain. The bandits will continue to attempt to poison the water supply, but if they don't succeed, things don't just advance to the state where the water supply is poisoned and people are getting sick. You'll only see that event when players fail to thwart the poisoning attempt and you will only see them attempt to poison the water supply based on the outcome of their attempts to destroy the pipes that carry water down to the farms and village. Players influence the course of events, rather than there being a series of events that just run on a timer, with no concern for the action of the players.
I found the world and lore much more engaging than I thought it would be, so I voted yes. Although everything else was less than what I expected, the game did such a great job to suck me in that I vote yes.
I was hooked on the game based on the early levels. IMO they are more fun, as introductory content, than what we find in other games. The only way people might be disappointed would be if they expect the intro content to present complex event chains and other elements that promise to make GW2 a unique experience in the genre.
In most MMOs, by the time you reach level 5, you have a very good idea what the rest of the game will be like. The mobs will look different. They will be tougher and hit harder. The scenery will change, but it will just be the same experience with a different appearance.
In GW2, Dynamic Events get better and more complex as you progress. The AI becomes sharper, the types of skills and tactics you will encounter from mobs become more interesting and advanced. The impact that the player can have on the world becomes more and more obvious.
So, no, you can't jusdge the meat of this game based on a few levels of play. It starts out good and gets better. This is a good thing for extended game play, but it does present the danger that some people will give up too quickly. On the plus side, with no subscription fee, peoople who some how fail to get hooked on the first try can always return when they start to hear from others how fun the game is as you progress and how much depth it offers.
No need to cancel a subscription fee and sever all ties from the game, just because things just didn't click for someone on the first try!
BTW, I would also like to stress that I found some professions much more fun to play and more befitting my play style than others. It's hard to give absolute suggestions on profession, because there is a lot of variation is what professions various people love and hate. However, if things just don't feel very fun or exciting or natural, from a game play perspective, it can be very fruitful to play another profession. For me, personally, if Mesmer had been my only exposure to the game, I would have had to knock my opinion of the game down a couple notches. Playing as a Elementalist, Warrior or Melee Ranger, I couldn't get enough of the game!
I don't feel you are getting my meaning.
I was also hooked on the game based on early levels. I feel that its one of the great things about it. What it does NOT do, is make me feel like I have made an impact on the world in the early part of the game (in my case levels 1-20). I played all the classes till at least 12.
It is in this aspect, one of the main points of the Manifesto, that I did not feel Anet acheived what they said they would.
I do get what you are saying, but I am saying that a game can go one of four ways:
a.) It can offer a consistent level of game play experience from start to finish, where what you get at level 5 is what you get at level 50.
b.) It can be very fun to play early on, but get worse as you play, to the point that many people restart the game with alts, to enjoy the fun, early game experience, rather than push through to the end of the game with any single character.
c.) It can start out at a certain level of game play and then provide a progression where the game becomes better and better as you progress.
d.) It can provide a wildly inconsistent game play experience, where people find them selves skipping chunks of content they know to be bad, while trying to progress doing content they know to be good.
GW2 appears to be an instance of the third option, which to me is the right way to design your game. If it's going to get better as you propgress, then there needs to be some base level of play experience from which the game then builds upon.
GW2's early levels provide a solid foundation, but they don't pull out all the bells and whistles of the game's design capabilities right from the start. They introduce more and more elements to the game as you go, so there is always a sense that the game has something new to offer in exchange for your continued play time.
BTW, too many MMOs offer the first or second option. WoW, at launch, was a good example of option a.). Game play was consistant through out and if you liked the early game, the rest of the PvE world content was more of the same. Age of Conan was a good example of option b.), where the opening game experience was superior to anything that came later in the game. The Secret World is, at best, a good example of option d.), where some content is fun enough that you would prefer to repeat the fun stuff and skip the bad stuff as you progress through the game.
God damn, I love the passion those game dev's speak with. The game I played last weekend definitely lives up to what they discussed in the manifesto video. Thank you for the link, that hyped up my day a bit.
I never allowed myself, or more accurately, got the oppurtunity to over hype myself for the game. I got the chance to play it at both PAX Prime conventions. After those 25min and 40min of game time, I knew what to expect.
Nothing ground breaking or a new level of innovation, but older and set ideas just made better. That's all I really need to warrant an "upgrade" IMO.
It's been a while since I played an MMO that was this grindy before level 10. I need levels before I can see more of the world / experience more of the personal storyline, and the only way to do that is to grind. Either I run around for events I've probably already done before, or I try to fill karma hearts with tedious "collect ten apples" chores.
I was so desperate for XP that I started doing the daily achievements...find ten different mobs to kill, gather 10 resources. Big disappointment.
You could have gone to other races homes, watched for DE's to occur, found points of interest, vistas, etc. I wasn't even trying to level and looked up and was 15. This just sounds like another person saying, "I did all the hearts, and couldn't level fast enough, WTF?"
The unfortunate answer comes back, sounding unfortunately condescending, you meed to slow down, look around, and learn to play the game the way it was designed, not the way you think it's designed.
How subtle are DE's? Here's the video that opened my eyes and made me understand that it was necessary to play with more attention to the area I was in:
The game exceeds my expectations based on the Manifesto, because my expectations were very low. I never thought any developer would actually create an A-list MMO based on that kind of a philosphy (I never played GW).
It depends on how you approach playing MMOGs as to whether or not you will probably find GW2 revolutionary and/or enjoyable. If you play MMOGs to get to max level ASAP and then grind some kind of end-game content for superior rewards based on the amount of time you're willing to invest playing the game, then GW2 is not only nothing special, it's worse than other MMOGs.
If, however, you play MMOGs to enjoy playing a character role (not a "class" role) throughout the content of the game, or enjoy exploring the content of a game as an end in itself (not just to gain extra power for your character), or enjoy game-within-game skill and tactics exploration, or just as an occasional escape from the real world, then GW2 might be the best thing to come out in the history of MMOGs.
It's been a while since I played an MMO that was this grindy before level 10. I need levels before I can see more of the world / experience more of the personal storyline, and the only way to do that is to grind. Either I run around for events I've probably already done before, or I try to fill karma hearts with tedious "collect ten apples" chores.
I was so desperate for XP that I started doing the daily achievements...find ten different mobs to kill, gather 10 resources. Big disappointment.
You could have gone to other races homes, watched for DE's to occur, found points of interest, vistas, etc. I wasn't even trying to level and looked up and was 15. This just sounds like another person saying, "I did all the hearts, and couldn't level fast enough, WTF?"
The unfortunate answer comes back, sounding unfortunately condescending, you meed to slow down, look around, and learn to play the game the way it was designed, not the way you think it's designed.
How subtle are DE's? Here's the video that opened my eyes and made me understand that it was necessary to play with more attention to the area I was in:
The only way I can see anyone being exp-starved in GW2 is, IMO, if they are simply racing to get "through" the game to the end. That kind of playstyle isn't as compatible with way GW2 is constructed as the more casual or laid-back playstyle that is more intent on experiencing full content throughout the game. What doesn't seem "grindy" when you don't really care about anything you're experiencing except getting the next level-up? Everything is a "grind" with that mentality.
I found myself leveling too fast, but then I realized that you can't actually "outlevel" content Schweet!
Voted yes. In some areas in my opinion it exceeded what I had imagined from the manifesto, in others perhaps it didn't. However, the overall result is that their vision (which the manifesto stands for) comes through clearly. I'm big on vision and I respect companies that stick by their guns - so very rare - or are in the game for the long haul. That said, clearly your mileage may vary in regard to personal preference, but that doesn't diminish the fact that Anet has so far delivered their vision to us. Whethere you like it or not is another matter.
Yes and no. If i go purely on features promised yes everything is there but the talks about how GW2 is going to change MMO landscape...nope i disagree with that.
Actually, I firmly believe it will. I've logged 125 hours of playtesting GW2 and not only does it deliver, but it is indeed full of many innovations that make most other MMOs pale in comparison. There are not only huge advantages for player enjoyment in GW2s game design, but there are also many lessons on how to increase content creation productivity and delivery for other developers to learn from, as well as other game play innovations that can make it more fun to play an mmo with other people.
If the game is nearly as successful as I anticipate, the business model will also have heavy influence on the genre.
In additional to many key innovations, GW2 also sets a high bar on a number of more traditional elements vs. most MMOs released in the last five years. Production quality, environmental detail, character creation, world space, content redundancy, non-linearity and breadth of features all set GW2 many notches above most of the crap we've seen in recent years. What they've done in five years, on what reportedly is a fairly modest budget for a massive AAA MMO, really set a high water mark that other developers will try to match. MMOs are risky business and publishers/investors are going to expect their developers to step up and deliver results on par with what Arenanet have managed with GW2.
This game will have a huge impact on the genre in much the same way that WoW did. I just hope that the lesson for developers will be that innovation and design from the ground up, rethinking established MMO design norms, are worth the risk and effort. If other developers just try to clone GW2, the way they've all been cloning WoW, (with little success), then much of the potential for re-invigoration of the genre will be lost.
It is difficult to get an unibased view on this forum but we will know soon enough if GW2 is going to change MMO landscape forever. Something like i said in last post i doubt wll ever happen.
Comments
I cant either but its funny to me when I hear people say it.
I'll agree with you on "permanent". It was a bad word to use and a bad promise to imply. The game has "persistence", not permanence. The only way to offer permanence would be to use phasing and I much prefer a world with out phasing. Changes to the world persist. The amount of push back on each persistent effect on the world depends on the design of the event chain and where the current state of the locale rests on that event chain.
There are some states that will not change until players do something to change them. If Bandits burn and occupy the local village, they will remain there until players push them out. If a guild wanted to set up protection of the town, to repel all attempts by the bandits to take back the village, they could do so and the bandits wouldn't recapture the village until players failed to defend it.
Persistence.
Things don't just happen on a timer. Things don't just fade back to their original condition once an event chain has played out.
So no, they didn't deliver permanence. I agree with you there. However, players can effect the state of the world and those states can have persistence, to the point that some states can not change with out interaction by the players.
As to the example of the poisoned water supply, I think you missed an important element of that chain. The bandits will continue to attempt to poison the water supply, but if they don't succeed, things don't just advance to the state where the water supply is poisoned and people are getting sick. You'll only see that event when players fail to thwart the poisoning attempt and you will only see them attempt to poison the water supply based on the outcome of their attempts to destroy the pipes that carry water down to the farms and village. Players influence the course of events, rather than there being a series of events that just run on a timer, with no concern for the action of the players.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
I found the world and lore much more engaging than I thought it would be, so I voted yes. Although everything else was less than what I expected, the game did such a great job to suck me in that I vote yes.
I do get what you are saying, but I am saying that a game can go one of four ways:
a.) It can offer a consistent level of game play experience from start to finish, where what you get at level 5 is what you get at level 50.
b.) It can be very fun to play early on, but get worse as you play, to the point that many people restart the game with alts, to enjoy the fun, early game experience, rather than push through to the end of the game with any single character.
c.) It can start out at a certain level of game play and then provide a progression where the game becomes better and better as you progress.
d.) It can provide a wildly inconsistent game play experience, where people find them selves skipping chunks of content they know to be bad, while trying to progress doing content they know to be good.
GW2 appears to be an instance of the third option, which to me is the right way to design your game. If it's going to get better as you propgress, then there needs to be some base level of play experience from which the game then builds upon.
GW2's early levels provide a solid foundation, but they don't pull out all the bells and whistles of the game's design capabilities right from the start. They introduce more and more elements to the game as you go, so there is always a sense that the game has something new to offer in exchange for your continued play time.
BTW, too many MMOs offer the first or second option. WoW, at launch, was a good example of option a.). Game play was consistant through out and if you liked the early game, the rest of the PvE world content was more of the same. Age of Conan was a good example of option b.), where the opening game experience was superior to anything that came later in the game. The Secret World is, at best, a good example of option d.), where some content is fun enough that you would prefer to repeat the fun stuff and skip the bad stuff as you progress through the game.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
God damn, I love the passion those game dev's speak with. The game I played last weekend definitely lives up to what they discussed in the manifesto video. Thank you for the link, that hyped up my day a bit.
Its the latest incarnation of the same game, with some new stuff and a new delivery system.
Yeah it lived up the the manifesto, i just dont think that it did so as most assumed it would..soon.
Yes, yes and yes.
I never allowed myself, or more accurately, got the oppurtunity to over hype myself for the game. I got the chance to play it at both PAX Prime conventions. After those 25min and 40min of game time, I knew what to expect.
Nothing ground breaking or a new level of innovation, but older and set ideas just made better. That's all I really need to warrant an "upgrade" IMO.
Just....better.
You could have gone to other races homes, watched for DE's to occur, found points of interest, vistas, etc. I wasn't even trying to level and looked up and was 15. This just sounds like another person saying, "I did all the hearts, and couldn't level fast enough, WTF?"
The unfortunate answer comes back, sounding unfortunately condescending, you meed to slow down, look around, and learn to play the game the way it was designed, not the way you think it's designed.
How subtle are DE's? Here's the video that opened my eyes and made me understand that it was necessary to play with more attention to the area I was in:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CyqGJHTjes
The game exceeds my expectations based on the Manifesto, because my expectations were very low. I never thought any developer would actually create an A-list MMO based on that kind of a philosphy (I never played GW).
It depends on how you approach playing MMOGs as to whether or not you will probably find GW2 revolutionary and/or enjoyable. If you play MMOGs to get to max level ASAP and then grind some kind of end-game content for superior rewards based on the amount of time you're willing to invest playing the game, then GW2 is not only nothing special, it's worse than other MMOGs.
If, however, you play MMOGs to enjoy playing a character role (not a "class" role) throughout the content of the game, or enjoy exploring the content of a game as an end in itself (not just to gain extra power for your character), or enjoy game-within-game skill and tactics exploration, or just as an occasional escape from the real world, then GW2 might be the best thing to come out in the history of MMOGs.
The only way I can see anyone being exp-starved in GW2 is, IMO, if they are simply racing to get "through" the game to the end. That kind of playstyle isn't as compatible with way GW2 is constructed as the more casual or laid-back playstyle that is more intent on experiencing full content throughout the game. What doesn't seem "grindy" when you don't really care about anything you're experiencing except getting the next level-up? Everything is a "grind" with that mentality.
I found myself leveling too fast, but then I realized that you can't actually "outlevel" content
Schweet!
Voted yes. In some areas in my opinion it exceeded what I had imagined from the manifesto, in others perhaps it didn't. However, the overall result is that their vision (which the manifesto stands for) comes through clearly. I'm big on vision and I respect companies that stick by their guns - so very rare - or are in the game for the long haul. That said, clearly your mileage may vary in regard to personal preference, but that doesn't diminish the fact that Anet has so far delivered their vision to us. Whethere you like it or not is another matter.
It is difficult to get an unibased view on this forum but we will know soon enough if GW2 is going to change MMO landscape forever. Something like i said in last post i doubt wll ever happen.