Played it during Beta and wasn't impressed but with GW2 coming up I thought I'd give it another go and honestly...Well it's still rather terrible. The excessive instancing, rubber banding, lack of jumping and just poor movement all leaves me feeling really detached from my character and the world in general.
I'm not sure at what point these great quests and storylines come in but so far it's just been poorly written boring fedex crap...
Have to throw my lot in with some of the previous posters in wondering what everyone sees in this game...
Im sorry but i just have to ask. Are you playing on dial up? how the hell are you rubber banding? This game plays smooth on a toaster. Are you wireless? Hell, this game runs on a 1 gig pentium 4 processor with 256mb of ram and 64 bit on-board integrated graphics without lag (only about 20 fps though). Your other issues are part of the game design. No you cant jump. Besides, nothing ruins immersion more than some jack off in full plate armour pogoing around town. (immersion: because somehow game features are supposed to make me forget that im playing a video game with a keyboard and mouse while staring at a monitor)
I've actually had an issue with rubber banding myself in the game. If you use the windows key to go to your desktop and then come back, all your heroes will be rubber banding every time you take a step. If you use the minimize button instead, it'll be fine when you come back. Maybe that's what happened.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it."-Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
Don't know if anyone already commented about this but: do you know what really makes me think "Good, boys!" when I play Guild Wars?
I don't think instacing is the best solution for the classic "I don't feel like a real hero" problem, but that's what ArenaNet gave us this time and I liked it:
You know that quest when a random NPC in a town tells you that some monsters are grouping together to destroy the town in a massive attack and you should kill them so a tragedy won't happen? Well, you get the quest and you leave the town and you find out the attack is really happening!!!1!! This should be kinda obvious but in my previous experiences all that would happen is that I'd have to kill some generic mob where the possibility of attacking something have probably never happened to occur in their AI minds. If I failed all that would happen is that I'd have to begin the quest once again (no burning towns =/), anyway it's still a step forward and I hope they go even further with GW2.
I love this game. It probably also has something to do with a weak case of "underground syndrome" that I have and with my tendency of "overrating" different stuff for the sake of they being different (even more when they succed), but this game united the single player and story driven mechanics I loved in JRPGs, the action oriented battle system a la Diablo and the mmo aspect in a very satisfying way. So, yeah, there are games a lot more profitable and maybe this even means something to ANet guys. Means nothing to me though.
After playing Free to Play Grinders like MapleStory and Rappelz, Guild Wars caught my eye. I ended up buying it and loving it... one campaign for four years, since money became tight for me after a little while. Now that I have enough money to get the other campaigns, Guild Wars 2 is right around the corner, so I think I'll save a bit.
Something about the GW trilogy is off. I say this because while I enjoyed the music, graphics, skill set depth and size of the game, I find myself suddenly not logging in for many months at a time. It just doesn't pull me or call me. Part of it I think has to do with the combat and the other part is how blasted hard it gets to solo the storyline past level 20, even with the right henchman setup. FOR ME.
That and the instancing completely ruins the immersion for me. So glad GW2 is getting away from that and making the combat more fluid and reactionary.
I give it a 6.5.
Immersion is always a very personal thing, so I don't want you to take this as an attack, but: why does instancing break your immersion? Single-player RPG games are plenty immersive, so it's not like you need other players around to feel like a world is alive. The world, the story, it's all crafted around you, the player; that's very immersive, IMO. On the other hand, in games with persistent worlds, my experience is that few people talk anyway, and the talk that does occur is rarely "immersive"; this is compounded by the fact that, while questing, it's generally in one's best interest to avoid other players so you don't fight each other for mob spawns. Incidentally, the fact that GW2 is breaking this by making it nearly impossible to be upset by the presence of another player is one of its biggeset draws for me, because (as mentioned) persistent worlds have left a bad taste in my mouth.
RE: not being able to get past content once you're lvl20...that means you're probably doing something wrong. Sorry, it's true. The game is silly easy in normal mode right now, especially compared to how it used to be. Hard mode makes it, well, hard, but if the basic campaign is stumping you in NM, that's an indication that you need to change your build and/or tactics.
[edit]Oh, unrelated: GW1 looks fantastic. I hate the WoW aesthetic, so GW gets points just for being more realistic (really, just less cartoony), but seriously, the environments are gorgeous, particularly the later campaigns/expansions. Anyone who says otherwise isn't running the game at decent settings. Re: bad textures...other players' armors will be displayed with compressed textures automatically, but there is an option in the menu to display them with full resolution. Use it. It makes a world of difference.
"the game is one of the few that is able to perfect a pretty decent balance of PvE and PvP"
This is phrased so hilariously, using the word 'perfect' while qualified to describe 'pretty decent'. It's like saying your vision of perfection is something 'above average but not particularly amazing'. That woman is perfect, she has all her own teeth and original genitalia.
Speaking of Guild Wars, its graphics were vastly superior to GW2, whose weapons and armor look relatively ugly. The skills and combinations were way more fun in GW1 than GW2... GW2 which is completely bland and just many variations of a few very basic things.
Comments
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Kamadan, Lions Arch, and Embark Beach.
I've actually had an issue with rubber banding myself in the game. If you use the windows key to go to your desktop and then come back, all your heroes will be rubber banding every time you take a step. If you use the minimize button instead, it'll be fine when you come back. Maybe that's what happened.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
Don't know if anyone already commented about this but: do you know what really makes me think "Good, boys!" when I play Guild Wars?
I don't think instacing is the best solution for the classic "I don't feel like a real hero" problem, but that's what ArenaNet gave us this time and I liked it:
You know that quest when a random NPC in a town tells you that some monsters are grouping together to destroy the town in a massive attack and you should kill them so a tragedy won't happen? Well, you get the quest and you leave the town and you find out the attack is really happening!!!1!! This should be kinda obvious but in my previous experiences all that would happen is that I'd have to kill some generic mob where the possibility of attacking something have probably never happened to occur in their AI minds. If I failed all that would happen is that I'd have to begin the quest once again (no burning towns =/), anyway it's still a step forward and I hope they go even further with GW2.
I love this game. It probably also has something to do with a weak case of "underground syndrome" that I have and with my tendency of "overrating" different stuff for the sake of they being different (even more when they succed), but this game united the single player and story driven mechanics I loved in JRPGs, the action oriented battle system a la Diablo and the mmo aspect in a very satisfying way. So, yeah, there are games a lot more profitable and maybe this even means something to ANet guys. Means nothing to me though.
After playing Free to Play Grinders like MapleStory and Rappelz, Guild Wars caught my eye. I ended up buying it and loving it... one campaign for four years, since money became tight for me after a little while. Now that I have enough money to get the other campaigns, Guild Wars 2 is right around the corner, so I think I'll save a bit.
Immersion is always a very personal thing, so I don't want you to take this as an attack, but: why does instancing break your immersion? Single-player RPG games are plenty immersive, so it's not like you need other players around to feel like a world is alive. The world, the story, it's all crafted around you, the player; that's very immersive, IMO. On the other hand, in games with persistent worlds, my experience is that few people talk anyway, and the talk that does occur is rarely "immersive"; this is compounded by the fact that, while questing, it's generally in one's best interest to avoid other players so you don't fight each other for mob spawns. Incidentally, the fact that GW2 is breaking this by making it nearly impossible to be upset by the presence of another player is one of its biggeset draws for me, because (as mentioned) persistent worlds have left a bad taste in my mouth.
RE: not being able to get past content once you're lvl20...that means you're probably doing something wrong. Sorry, it's true. The game is silly easy in normal mode right now, especially compared to how it used to be. Hard mode makes it, well, hard, but if the basic campaign is stumping you in NM, that's an indication that you need to change your build and/or tactics.
[edit]Oh, unrelated: GW1 looks fantastic. I hate the WoW aesthetic, so GW gets points just for being more realistic (really, just less cartoony), but seriously, the environments are gorgeous, particularly the later campaigns/expansions. Anyone who says otherwise isn't running the game at decent settings. Re: bad textures...other players' armors will be displayed with compressed textures automatically, but there is an option in the menu to display them with full resolution. Use it. It makes a world of difference.
"the game is one of the few that is able to perfect a pretty decent balance of PvE and PvP"
This is phrased so hilariously, using the word 'perfect' while qualified to describe 'pretty decent'. It's like saying your vision of perfection is something 'above average but not particularly amazing'. That woman is perfect, she has all her own teeth and original genitalia.
Speaking of Guild Wars, its graphics were vastly superior to GW2, whose weapons and armor look relatively ugly. The skills and combinations were way more fun in GW1 than GW2... GW2 which is completely bland and just many variations of a few very basic things.