Legendary Fury - Guild Wars 2 News

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Legendary Fury - Guild Wars 2 News

The recent decision to ax new legendary weapons hasn't gone over well and speaks to wider issues with Guild Wars 2's development and communication.

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RemyVorender

Eh. Seems like they are trying to choose a direction and stuck to it now that the old captain isn't piloting the ship. I'm enjoying the game and hoping they continue down this new path.

Jaiml

Wishing it was Great Sword or Long Bow instead of a Short Bow. How many short bows are in use these days?

I guess I'll stop collecting mats now.

Still going to be playing the game. Nothing else is really catching my interest right now.

Let's just pick a direction and stick to it, ok?

SinfulChris

Maybe now we can see content instead of fluff padding with the change of direction.

Octagon7711

They should go back to their original ideas.

"GW2 doesn’t fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs. It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun; and of course, it doesn’t have a monthly fee."

maskedweasel

More legendaries would be nice at varying degrees honestly.  I had played the game for years before I went for my first legendary.. and I made the choice to get the legendary PRIOR to the new legendaries being released, despite only having to wait a bit simply because I figured, with precursor crafting, a lot of people would be making the new ones and the old ones would go out of style.

I guess not though....  legendaries are ridiculous to make.. but they are also the only real end game item worth going for as Anet won't drop them and no matter what changes happen in the game these legendaries will always be the top weapons available.

Scalpless

I think the biggest issue here is the breach of trust and borderline false advertising. The new precursors - an entire set of them - were listed as HoT's features. Some people bought HoT because of that. I don't care about Legendaries, but what's next? Will ANet scrap Living Story 3 and say "lol whoops, it was too difficult after all"? Probably not, but TBH at this point I wouldn't be too surprised.

Besides, it's just a few weapons and collections. If ANet can't deliver that, what can they deliver? The speed at which they've been releasing content is pathetic.

nimander99

Honestly the game lost its 'magic' for me after HoT came out. It's just not fun like it was before. It's hard to nail down anything concrete except that maybe scaling up the difficulty wasn't the right move in the open world areas?

unfilteredJW

Still feeling really good about not buying HOT.

APThug

I actually agree with Mike's decision to halt development on legendary weapons. If its taking your team this long to produce what was promised then something clearly went wrong. I'd rather have new content then new weapons anyways. Only a small portion of the gw2 players actually go after legendary weapons anyways.

I think the devs are just all over the place trying to please everyone but taking way to long to do it because teams are too spread out. They need to re-focus like how they used to do with a clear plan of execution.

Aeander

The big tragedy here is that the decision was profoundly pointless. An entire feature was scrapped so a mere 6 employees could be shifted to living world. That's roughly 2% of their development staff if their current company size is roughly equivalent to their launch team. Given that they've been hiring consistently throughout these past few years, I'm inclined to believe that this is the case.

What exactly are 6 employees who have already shown themselves to be slow going to accomplish in another part of the company? An entire promised feature has been scrapped for next to nothing.

Realizer

 The thing that bothers me is that it was only 6 active devs working on the Legendary weapons, and from what Anet has said putting those 6 devs on Living World is not going to make it release faster, so the conclusion for me is those people are just working on more skins for the cash shop. When your budget is getting so low to where 6 devs becomes an intolerable sacrifice even while they are working on content promised as a selling point for the expansion released 6 months ago, you've got a problem. 

 So while I loved GW2 and it will go down as one of my favorite MMOs, I'm afraid it's time to move on for now. Times were good while they lasted, even though it was shorter than expected for me. 

Aeander

Realizer said:

 The thing that bothers me is that it was only 6 active devs working on the Legendary weapons, and from what Anet has said putting those 6 devs on Living World is not going to make it release faster, so the conclusion for me is those people are just working on more skins for the cash shop. When your budget is getting so low to where 6 devs becomes an intolerable sacrifice even while they are working on content promised as a selling point for the expansion released 6 months ago, you've got a problem. 

 So while I loved GW2 and it will go down as one of my favorite MMOs, I'm afraid it's time to move on for now. Times were good while they lasted, even though it was shorter than expected for me. 

In some ways, this could be seen as an overreaction, but I can actually see where it's coming from. 

Anet has developed an unfortunate history of over-promising and under-delivering:
* Future legendaries scrapped.
* Minigames promised before the game's release not implemented until Heart of Thorns - and then being released in a horribly broken form locked behind a paywall.
* WvW being utterly unplayable for 3 years.
* Dungeons being abandoned instead of fixed after a single clumsy attempt at a new dungeon path.
* Etc. Etc. 


I loved Arenanet. Guild Wars 1 was my favorite game of all time. These people used to know how to give players a great stream of content at an amazing value. Now they release half of an expansion and scrap entire promised features. They used to develop amazing PvP game modes. Now they release slipshod capture point maps, a non-functional mass pvp mode, and a barely functional stronghold mode. They used to release complex skills and trust players to be intelligent enough to work with them. Now they assume we're all retarded.

Arenanet has become the Square Enix of the MMO market. They love announcing things and seem averse to actually developing them. What delicious irony it is that Square Enix themselves have actually produced a strong MMO.

Zen00

Aeander said:

Anet has developed an unfortunate history of over-promising and under-delivering:
* Future legendaries scrapped.
* Minigames promised before the game's release not implemented until Heart of Thorns - and then being released in a horribly broken form locked behind a paywall.
* WvW being utterly unplayable for 3 years.
* Dungeons being abandoned instead of fixed after a single clumsy attempt at a new dungeon path.
* Etc. Etc. 

A list that reflects my grivances pretty much.

Though I quit mostly because of WvWvW rage (they never addressed the loot disparity between WvWvW players and PvEers) and because after over 1000 hours of play time I still had yet to have even a single pre-cursor object drop that I could sell to get enough gold to get the pre-cursor I needed for the legendary weapon I wanted to make, eventually I just stopped caring and left the game (around 2013).

Albatroes

If only GW2 was just Guild Wars with GW2's graphics....If only....

Aeander

Albatroes said:

If only GW2 was just Guild Wars with GW2's graphics....If only....

I would play that all day, every day. Hell, they could just relaunch Guild Wars 1 as a free to play with a development team and I would play.

StarS0ft

Not understand why some people (like Jason Winter) so worry about legendaries.
For me its absolutely useless stuff. Expensive and useless. Realy, If you need top weapon, just make your ascended weapon for 5% of legendary cost. that's it.
Your need more stats, make some ascended, still much cheaper than even 1 legendary.
I really dont need another skin, I wish the real content, the real adventures, not these stupid skins.
So, I totally agree with Mike O'Blien.
C'mon, please stop crying about useless skins!

Scalpless

Aeander said:

These people used to know how to give players a great stream of content at an amazing value. Now they release half of an expansion and scrap entire promised features.

On a related note, this post Mike made recently stands out. It's hard to distinguish PR from what he really thinks, but it's still worrying. If ANet's lead doesn't think they released half an expansion, every other expansion will have this much content. That's... not good.

Dr_Binks

StarS0ft said:

Not understand why some people (like Jason Winter) so worry about legendaries.

For me its absolutely useless stuff. Expensive and useless. Realy, If you need top weapon, just make your ascended weapon for 5% of legendary cost. that's it.

Your need more stats, make some ascended, still much cheaper than even 1 legendary.

I really dont need another skin, I wish the real content, the real adventures, not these stupid skins.

So, I totally agree with Mike O'Blien.

C'mon, please stop crying about useless skins!

I agree with you, BUT the legendaries are really not the issue, sure they are something some peeps really want, but the breach in trust is the real issue here, and this is not the 1st time Anet has done this. Also the real salt is the fact the the art work for these weapons is in the game already. There are so many things that Anet said they would fix or do that have never been completed, but when you tell someone there will be content in the expan that you paid for because of the promised content only to be told sorry but the dev team cant get it done so we wont ship it is a bunch of BS!

I really like GW2 but the responsibility of the dev team does not give me any warm and fuzzys that they can get much done.

Jeyhu

Wow the biggest QQ article I have ever read. I'd rather have content everyone can enjoy then a whole batch of new "grinding" legendaries that I couldn't be bothered with. GTFO here, MMORPG writers are fucking dumb.

Gaia_Hunter

If 6 people take 6 months to make a legendary weapon, the cost of that weapon is $300K?

WTF?

I understand not wishing to spend $300K on a single skin (a full set would be $4.8M and take 8 years). 

But something just doesn't seem right with that statement.

Dakeru

Up until now I didn't care much.
But when Gaia feels that Anet lied then I sense it's time to get worried.

Maelzrael

Awesome job Jason Winter. That's journalism.

Wandris

Only thing I don't want to see is a major change in direction. HoT was great they just need to do more of the same in a timely manner. Legendary weapons put to the side? Not the end of the world as long as they do get completed sometime. The worse thing they could do now is backtrack and fall into the trap of trying to pander to the dissenting voices, mostly coming from players unwilling to adapt. The situation with BL sorta sucks though, I am hoping they have a solid plan to improve the new map and add a third for the next expansion all while making it a solid mode of play.

Thupli

I just don't get their development times and cycles. They did so great on gw, is it just that with a true mmo setting it requires thatmch more work to keep the engine stable with releases? What gives?

Dakeru

Thupli said:

I just don't get their development times and cycles. They did so great on gw, is it just that with a true mmo setting it requires thatmch more work to keep the engine stable with releases? What gives?

I'm playing both GW1 and GW2...
On 1 I am spending most of my time vanquishing and when I compare the open maps of 1 with the new 3-layer maps on 2 such as Verdant Brink then I know why it takes longer.

Those maps are infinitely more complex than what they did 10 years ago.