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Guild Wars 2 - The Six Big Wins for Path of Fire - MMORPG.com
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Guild Wars 2 - The Six Big Wins for Path of Fire - MMORPG.com
Path of Fire is officially here! Travel across the sandy plains of the Crystal Desert as you chase down the God of War, Balthazar, and do your best to save not only the people of the desert, but the entire world. Path of Fire has launched to a wonderful reception so far from the community, and it brings with it both some amazingly gameplay as well as brilliant quality of life and class improvements. Here are the six biggest wins from Path of Fire so far!
Comments
I feel like the art-style they chose is pretty timeless so far. It looks like a painting, it's hard to tell what age it is just by looking at it.
If the mounts, map designs, and storytelling of Path of Fire had been a part of the 2012 Guild Wars 2 experience, Guild Wars 2 would be a far bigger game than it is today. But what they have done here is impressive nonetheless. I am once again optimistic about the game's direction.
PS - All mammals have nipples.
Get over it already.
"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
There is a meta events near Augury's Shadow called Path to Ascension that end with spawning a Legendary copy of a player.
Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
My Review Manifesto
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Indeed. Until Path of Fire I was thinking Anet was a one hit wonder with the original Guild Wars. The first was horrid for me, but likely in part due to the expectations of Guild Wars 1 players mixed in with the Hype of all the rest due to how they advertised it. HoT was a mess in terms of map and mastery design, as well as the way they implemented the specialized classes and how they made the core game free to play (which people thought was how HoT would play out until they found themselves getting one shot by vines and the like). It also suffered from giving off a "raid or die" mindset for a lot of players and the inability for PvPers to acquire the things raiders did. Though overall story telling was much better. Though Path of Fire really blew things away with what they learned.
In essence, I'd probably give (when comparing it to GW1, which for the sake of argument on this scale is a 10 out of 1-10) the core game a 3.5/10, HoT a 5/10 and PoF a solid 8/10 at the moment. Gives me hope for seeing the rest of Elona in patches, as well as Cantha in the next expansion pack. Still not enough MMO to keep me playing for more than a couple weeks and whenever holidays / living world updates come along, but worth the $80 deluxe edition.
Once you unlocked a mount, it is account wide though and can use it on any of your characters regardless of level.
1) The Expansion is for Endgamers.
Its nice that one gets a Level 80 boost, but truth be told... the expectation is to have a specialization going into it and preparing for it. This also means knowing your class. Using a Max-Level boost and running to the Expansion means getting your ass kicked.
This is also means that there are many players who do not know their class and are being carried by others.
2) HoT-Dependent
In order to progress through the expansion, you need every bit of strength possible. This means you need to have the HoT Specializations. While new Specializations are great, not all the new ones beat the old ones according to the forums.
3) Story
Its nice to have a link to Elona/Crystal Desert and feel so nice about linking Guild Wars 1, but that is the problem. The initial main story of the game had so many holes in the Guild Wars Lore and connecting both games together that it felt that my crime was playing Guild Wars 1. If I didn't play Guild Wars 1, I could have accepted Guild Wars 2's story without dealing with the main Lore. In fact, that has been such a turn-off for players throughout this game's life cycle. The Expansion Stories + Current Living World stories are the saving grace.
...and its funny how much one has to actually pay to unlock stories if a new player was absent. Imagine, a game where the penalty for not playing is to pay for content. 200 Gems for each Episode.
Even worse is the fact that Anet had to resort to finally triggering Guild Wars 1 Nostalgia in order to survive, when Nostalgia THIS GOOD should have been triggered since GW2's ORIGINAL BASE GAME.
4) Inconsistent Graphics
The graphics get prettier as one goes through the expansions, along with the Artwork that goes with it. Unfortunately, its very far from Uniform. As new maps came out, the graphics became better. Like you can literally enter an area and say "This is 2012" and then walk to the next area and say "Oh this is 2017" and then when you enter any of the original instances, some look amazing and others look like garbage.
I dare say that this is a game where as far as base graphics go, has not aged well. Textures in the Expansion look good in a 4K Monitor, but when I go to Lion's Arch, It doesn't look so well that I am stuck playing the game at 1920 x 1080 resolution to keep everything as consistent as possible.
5) Marketing
HoT came out during a time where GW2 needed an Endgame badly, and it was advertised for Level 80 characters. Anet even went to claim that it was to breathe new life to those long-term players who made Guild Wars 2 their home.
PoF was advertised as a new expansion "for everyone who loved Guild Wars 1" and it so it lead to many players purchasing the expansion, just to find out that it is also an endgame expansion. This created problems (continued later).
6) Mounts
Mounts are awesome to have, but when a player has to collect different mounts intentionally in order to traverse different parts, it forces the players to go after each relevant mount and forces each player to use each relevant mount when need be. In fact, the forum has a thread dealing with an argument around the cost of the mounts. Some claiming that some cost 20G and in order to get the Griffon mount, some are saying 250G.
In short,
Mounts are FUCKING AWESOME, but FUCKING GARBAGE at the same time!
7) Inventory Space (marketing continued)
This isn't an expansion where a player can just walk into. Like HoT, a thread exists in the forum about the Inventory Space required to actually do well in this environment and the costs associated in Gold/Gems to get said Inventory Space. Its actually quite staggering. Basically a player has to pay $17 or get 1200 GEMS (remember, minimum is 800 on a sale) to get 3 Bag Slot Expansions. Then its extremely expensive for a new player to get the bags needed to start. The forum suggests 24 - 32 slot bags (if you can afford them). The costs for a single bag over 20 Slots starts to get Ridiculous... where a 32 slot bag is around 250 - 300+ Gold due to cost of mats, Clearly an Endgame Bag for players with money to burn.
8) Server Woes...
New players enter a server only seeing a population marker, and not knowing the attitude of the server. Upon entry, a lot of the Low Level Areas have players who are leveling Alts or new players. However, the mid-level areas in the game are pretty much barren and empty; New players are pretty much alone for 20 levels in the game until it picks up again at around Level 50 - 60. Anet knows that many people will abandon maps for examples and that is why Max-Level Boosts exist.
9) Cash-Shop pushing:
If a player has 10 hours a day to grind faithfully, one can get what is needed in a few months of playing. However, Arenanet is known for employing certain maneuvers to push people towards spending their money on the cash shop. A lot of the reason why Guild Wars 2 players grind so much is because they do not want to spend real money for Gems. So they grind whatever and even make legendaries on new characters to sell them.
10) B2P to F2P
Anet promised players that this game would originally be B2P with unlimited access without any of the P2P/F2P game shenanigans. Then a year later NEXON bought shares from NCSOFT and sent an agent to work with Anet's Guild Wars 2. The Guild Wars 2 Manifesto was thrown out the window completely, and the grind was added to the game (Laurels, Tokens, a lot of currencies, etc). During that period a lot of players including myself left. Eventually NEXON was driven out from NCSOFT a few years later. However, the damage was done. A lot of players had left and the one thing that was done was that the game was forced to be made into an F2P.
Guild Wars 2 transformed from the game we expected in September, 2012, to what it is today. Like most games, it was a mixed bag.
11) Little Profession Lore.
This always bothered me.
You pick a class and the class just exists in the world.
The game doesn't do a good job to define where these professions came from.
All they did was allow all races/gender to be any profession (a good thing), but if everyone can do the same thing, why is culture only defined by the stereotype of "You look different, so your maps look different, and therefore your culture is different... all because you talk differently"
and this is every single race.
They try to give each race a difference voice with a different problem and a set of enemies, but when each race can do just about everything (in their cities) as each other....it makes me truly ask "What truly does make you different?"
For example, I can travel to Japan, China, South Korea, etc and they have Art Forms, Traditions, and Styles that are native to those nations. I walk from Divinity's Reach to where the Charr are, and the only difference is in how the maps look, how the city and their people look, since everyone can do the same + their racial skill!
Then the fact that each Class can do all the roles (DPS, TANK, SUPPORT, HEAL) always made me feel that was a human thing. Humans are the people in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and RPGs who are Extremely Adaptive in the whole "If there is a way, we will do it"
Guild Wars 2! All Hail Equality!
By everyone being the same, we are all different!
Yay! No more barriers!
Oh wait....
Cultures emerge as a result of their environment. Milder environments allow societies to advance more quickly due to having fewer challenges to deal with just to survive. Cultures in tropical climates develop differently from cultures in desert or cold climates. For example, cultures in tropical climates tend to enjoy spicier foods due to spices being a preservative for food (in the time before refrigeration), whereas cultures in (for example) Russia tend to have blander food as a result of preservatives having been historically less necessary and less available.
And of course, cultures branch out and change as a result of major historical events. One of the biggest ones that we've seen in Guild Wars would of course be Pyre Fierceshot's revolution. While Guild Wars 2's humans still place a huge emphasis on gods, the Charr have become self-reliant and largely atheistic due to centuries of lies and tyranny by the Flame Legion and the subsequent revolution against them.
2. This is bullshit. PoF is a lot easier than HoT and even HoT was not that hard. The difference in difficulty between the core game and HoT was just too big for many players. The transition should've been smoother.
3. Where exactly are those holes in the main game? What the guild wars universe has always done is looking at lore as something that is viewed very differently by different groups and those different groups are probably all wrong in one respect or another. GW2 simply advanged that theme further.
The lore was never what turned people off, it was the quality of storytelling that did that. And they have improved a lot in that department.
Gems can be bought with gold though. And how much is it really? This is a game without subscription fee. And active players get the episodes for free. I think they are very generous.
4. I guess. But then again, do you want the new areas to look as bad as the old areas? Is it a crime to make new areas look as good as possible now?
5. There was never any doubt that this was an endgame expansion (just like HoT was). And you're overstating the fact that people are coming back to this game for GW1-nostalgia. I think it has a lot more to do with mounts and the look of the new areas.
6. The griffon is not needed anywhere. It is a goal to go for after you have done the story and explored the areas. So it's a convenience and prestige thing.
The other mounts were designed around the thing you think is a weakness. It's what most people love about them.
7. This is bullshit again. I never paid any realworld money on bag slots and I did fine in the expansion. I had a lot less inventory problems in PoF than I did in HoT.
8. Isn't this the case in most MMO's? What can you do?
9. Anet is a bussiness and thus they want to make money. At the same time it's a triple A MMO without subscription fee and now with a free base game. I think they are quite generous.
10. Conspirency theories and bullshit. I really don't see what the problem is with F2P. The game has become a lot more popular due to that change.
11. Yes there is little profession lore (by design). However, you picked a weird time to complain about it. The new generation of elite specs actually has lore you can find in-game.
And it's only humans that can be jack-of-all-trades and adaptive?
Well.
Holy crap. Where did this game come from? My opinion is skewed a bit because I'm still in the 'honeymoon' stage. How on earth did GW2 rise from the dead (in my mind)? The story content was great, the environments are THE BEST I've ever seen in an MMO (IMHO). But... the mounts re-make the game. It's not just mounts, but HOW they did mounts. The most creative use of mounts I've ever seen. Usable in all the old content? Oh.... and a 'secret' mount? (not much of a secret anymore though ;P). Tons and I mean tons to do. Not to mention some really cool folks in the community.
Well, that post was long (sorry). But yeah - PoF is a triumph.
As for if the old or new speccs is best that depends a lot on your playstyle but as expected there still are some balancing needed, it will probably take a few months before they are as they should be both in PvE and PvP.
Also, the speccs are different and might be stronger in some gameplay and weaker in other. A Deadeye is nasty in PvP but far weaker for soloing then a Daredevil (or I still can't play the class that well, always that possibility). But just because it's weaker (for that gameplay) doesn't really mean much problems, just that I need to be a bit more careful and time what I do better.
all you did was compare POF to HOT
Does anyone know if you still have to do like three tedious fights before the final boss or if they added a checkpoint system?
Between that and not being able to find groups for those hero points(I'm not sure what they are called) that required groups to down. I started the expansion a month late so groups were hard to find as people were farming for gear. I believe they eventually added a group finder for those things as well.
Anyway I love the way the game looks and the story though. I loved exploring in that game, something I never even liked in Skyrim. I wasn't a fan of WvWvW or dungeons in the game and so I quit out of frustration.
Movement and animations are perfect,and I haven't experienced any motion sickness up until now.
Not bad for a game that didn't want to have mounts for years.
The map and level design is as always epic,in my opinion the maps of GW2 are masterpieces.
Class design is great as well.
Conceptually the new Elites are fantastic and unique.
Nicelly balanced for PvE.
In PvP and WvW though,and because of the class balance there,the depth of the classes and their mechanics get lost behind a wall of unreasonably high damage output and relentless skill spam.
That's been an issue since HoT that only got worse now.
And GW2 was and still is my go to game for eye therapy.