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[Column] Guild Wars 2: The Heart of the Heart of Thorns Debate
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
This week, Jason examines what we know about Heart of Thorns and whether it will be enough to satisfy content-hungry Guild Wars 2 players.
Read more of Jason Winter's Guild Wars 2: The Heart of the Heart of Thorns Debate.
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"there's a one-time combat instance you'll have to do with your guild to claim your hall"
What about guildies who can't attend, or a new player who joins a guild several months later? This seems a little short-sighted on Anet's part. I guess they didn't learn from the backlash against temporary content that was season 1.
I agree. I don't understand this preoccupation with players being forced to play to a developers timetable, or with regard to this expansion, dancing to a developer's tune. There is a certain arrogance to limited time content, or inadequate information releases that just turns me off a game entirely.
I get the feeling that ANet are still dining on this reputation for "innovation" (which is a mystery to me since GW2 was a backward step from GW1 in terms of innovation).
Frankly in my games I don't want limited time content, I don't want pointlessly changing cities (what a waste of resources), I don't want dam jumping puzzles or other tedious and trivial distractions, I don't want fluff... I want content, and by content I mean new maps to explore, new classes to learn, a new story to play, new skills to capture... namely everything I got from a GW1 expansion.
Crazy idea here. How about before you put a product on sale you actually tell people what they're paying for?
Steam: Neph
lol yeah you'd think that would be obvious but apparently not on planet ANet.
I had fun once, it was terrible.
"Out of all of those, only the arena offers actual new gameplay – and even that, I think, won't be appealing for any length of time to most people. (Would you rather play the rewardless PvP of the arena or actual rewarding sPvP?"
I am not sure if you know, but for 2 years people are playing "gvg deathmatches (20vs20,15vs15)" first in wvw borderland windmill and later is obsidian sanctum.
It has been created and supported by community. There were a lot of guilds playing this. A lot of guilds left, because we didnt get any support from Anet. And now what? Anet is giving us arena, which has all mechanic which we asked for. You can even create your own pvp gamemode, you can invite other guilds from other server( right now we are limited to wvw match up), you can invite other people for duels.
The only downside i see, is the size of arena, but maybe ArenaNet after our feedback will add upgrades which will increase the size of battle arena.
Guilds didnt fight for rewards or anything like that, they fought to improve skills, communication,tactics, to get better, to have fun with AMAZING combat system. A lot of people who have never experienced it saying it is clusterf**ck, believe me it is not...
Well, i wonder how many updates the cash shop will get.
But still 3years for a expansion...and it does look shallow. I guess their target audience doesnt need more otherwise they would have come with something different.
My t hought exactly which is why I pretty much gave up at this point. I have better things to do than wait around for some company to get someone in there that can make decisions that make sense or actually release info that people are interested in.
How hard would it have been to create the following prior to selling their product?
"Preorder the Heart of Thorns expansion today!
It includes:
-X
-Y
-Z
-We've remade A so it's even better than before!
-Check out B over here!
-We went through and polished up the rest of the letters to make them up to par with more recent releases.
-Stay tuned as we release more details about each of these features in the coming weeks!"
I swear when they made this game they just threw out everything they learned while making GW1. No wonder most of the company has jumped ship since launch.
Steam: Neph
Anyone could buy a guild hall from off the auction terminals, set it up, or pack it up and move it to another planet in SWG. Those were the days...
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
You can't ask for a refund for not having XYZ if they don't tell you what XYX is. Duh!!
Some fair points all around.
A couple things, though:
Some people are going to blow through the content no matter how much there actually is. There were people who blew through the base game in a weekend when it originally launched. There are people who have managed to take games with 1000 or so hours of content and complete a fraction of it in a few days, calling it 'complete'.
As for Anet not labelling everything in the expansion, it's tough to say. It's clear that they are still working on a lot of the expansion as we speak (specializations clearly show this, as we know they will exist, but they are still fine-tuning some of them, and others haven't had a ton of work done quite yet). That's the problem with ambitious projects, there's a ton of work involved, and you don't always have the luxury of waiting until everything is 'done' to market your product.
- In this case, they probably should've waited until they had a more clear release date. However, that decision is often not up to the devs themselves, especially with larger companies / partnerships. It's often the producers / marketing that impose such deadlines, and the devs have to work their asses off trying to meet them.
** We'll see how things turn out, how much content there actually is, and whether or not it seems worth the price. There's a lot of aspects to this expansion that are unorthodox, so it's not exactly reasonable to try and treat the expansion exactly like every other one released. There's a lot of feature creation / adjustments being made for this; much more than just additional content. Which makes it overall a more complex product to deliver, but unfortunately it's difficulty that won't get appreciated by the average gamer.
Piss poor excuse for saying Anet has to find a way for characters to progress, since they never had a plan at launch. I guess we should be sympathetic, though? Maybe two and a half years ago. However, Anet is finally realizing the collective patience of the playerbase has run out. It's time our wallets do the talking.
New metas are fun, just because your previous build doesn't work anymore doesn't mean everything is broken, or maybe it does, who knows as there has not been nearly enough time to determine anything about the new build sytem.
Arenanet is not going to reverse the changes, they have always very much been about making the game they want to make not the one people tell them they should make, even if it pisses people off.
It's not an excuse for anything, it's simply how they chose to design their game. Love it, hate it, or just think it's meh.
The status quo of MMO has seen its shelf-life, and it's running out. It's the reason games like Wildstar aren't doing so hot, because there are diminishing returns on that kind of progression.
Anet has been doing things differently with GW2 since the start, that IS their plan. They are trying to make an MMO based on a different set of rules. To a large degree they've accomplished this, though not everyone likes this style of MMO.
- They've definitely made a good amount of mistakes and errors, but tbh that's the price you pay when trying to innovate. It's more risky, has more complications, and we've seen that w/ GW2. Luckily they have been working on fixing a lot of those errors, whereas many other companies would've wrote it off as a learning experience and simply made a new game.
As for character progression, they're using ideas that are staples of some of the most well known, well designed video games in history. They weren't piss poor in megaman, or zelda, or metroid, or castlevania. So why are they automatically terrible when applied to an MMO?
Some things are out of wack, but the balance doesn't seem nearly as screwed as a lot of people seem to be making it out to be. I'm not getting completely annihilated in sPvP by conditions, WvW is about the same (but with a new form of cheese), World Bosses are a bit easier, but everything else is basically the same.
It just means that older builds aren't as good anymore, new builds are better, and people are still learning to adapt to conditions actually being useful again.
I ll buy HoT because it will offer me a couple hundred hours of quality gameplay, like vanilla GW2 did, but sadly once again it wont last long and it wont be my main mmo.
It will be a filler mmo as it is 3 years now for me, when i wasn't playing WoW, WS or even ESO (if they decide to put some real content).
Anyway i ll be happy to play it when HoT launches
All Time Favorites: EQ1, WoW, EvE, GW1
Playing Now: WoW, ESO, GW2
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I don't see difference in world bossess escept tequatl which now mostly fails. I heard it got 2x hp and weak point that don't appear sometimes.
About specializations. Older trait system was much more flexible in my opinion. I cant get my favourite engineer build that I used to have. But now I can be more focused on damage or healing. Choices are hard. Still I prefer old system.
I wish that expansion will come in cheaper price (without core game in prive at least) as I bought the core game from reseller so I cant get refund when buying expansion
Totally agree on class balance. I have 16 max lvl chars. My warriors (which were my favorite for being able to handle pve content fast) now sucks and necro (which was rather toothless) now has more firepower, but not as much as my warriors used to have!
As for world bosses being easier, sb is now boring, with double hp it takes up to 3 times as long to kill, with an occasional fail, due to running out of time. It was not made any harder to kill in so far as what we have to do, it just takes longer (same as fighting pve content). Rather pathetic!
Just posted this on another thread works here too.
Whether its a fair price is irrelevant with the expansion your not just buying the base things your also buying the immense amount of living world that will follow all next year, which will be loads of content period.
Like I said in regard to the last time you posted this, it only applies if they do not charge for that content after a period of time as they did before. Once they start to monetize it, this argument goes out the window.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Warrior sucking should be a nice change of pace. I always seen them as the most powerful class in the game since release, not counting the culling issue on Thieves which made them godly in WvW. Usually when you have great offense you sacrifice defense but that was never the case for Warriors.
I still haven't had much time to mess around with all the changes. Are they really this bad, and why?