I'm Scared. Hold Me.
I’m pretty straight-forwardly positive about Guild Wars 2. Arenanet has hundreds of employees, they made a good game with Guild Wars, and there’s no reason to doubt they’ll make a fine game with plenty of content. Okay sure, they’re a game company and game companies are notorious for misleading fans with hype, but that’s no reason to be completely negative.
In fact, this far from release, with only their word to go on, there’s no evidence to base any negativity on.
That said, I’ve had a few criticisms or worries for a while now, but kept having to revise my draft because Arenanet kept releasing new information that addressed what I was specifically worried about. Party poopers.
Here’s the 7 things I dread might be a problem in Guild Wars 2.
1. Grouping. If I don’t have to join a group, will I? MMO players already avoid getting into groups. Is it possible people will avoid grouping simply because they’ve been trained to do so? Other MMOs make it incredibly easy to level on your own, and grouping with random people can often be a terrible experience. Some times it’s just faster to play on your own.
Arenanet has specifically said that they developed GW2 to bring people together to work towards a goal and be more social. But the implementation confuses me. Isn’t this a same difference situation? If I’m not playing with people in a group, even if we have the same goal, I’m not sure how much more social that is.
2. Still Grouping. In most MMOs I am occasionally forced to group up to defeat bosses or low level dungeons. It’s impossible to do on my own. To defeat a boss in Guild Wars 2 it doesn’t sound like I need to group at all, before endgame anyway. Isn’t this an advantage a normal MMO has over GW2? At the very least they have some forced socialization.
3. Events. Lets say you’ve got multiple groups in a zone. They’ve pushed that Dredge Army back to their original base. The other groups (or even a single person) have also pressed their respective events back to their source. Someone else enters the zone and finds little to do but random mobs. Doesn’t sound advantageous to the player. Do I have to run half way across the map to find something going on?
4. Social Web. Guild Wars 2 has said they’ll have web based chat, and web based auctions. They’re very active on facebook and twitter. My paranoia is telling me that’s far from the extent they’ll take GW2. This is pure speculation, but, I’m betting they’ll have a Warcraft Armoury slash Vanguard Character Page slash Facebook and Twitter slash Chatango clusterfuck. I kind of hate the social web.
Then again maybe they won’t. Arenanet doesn’t so much as host their own forums, they have an ideology of letting other people do that sort of thing as it’s better to promote their game. Somebody is going to do this though.
5. Long waits for new content. To me, a layman, it sounds as though this stuff takes a long time to put together and a lot of QA testers looking for bugs. Then again WoW has made how much money and released only 2 expansions so far? Whats up with that?
6. Too similar/Not similar enough to Guild Wars. There’s a lot of things I could list here so I’ll keep it to a few examples. Like travel times for instance. Guild Wars may have plenty of loading screens, but damn if you can’t get somewhere fast. Whether it be warping or running skills, I like it. Less instances could mean more traveling, but it’s too soon to say. Art style. Although the graphics look good and I’m sure will only get better closer to launch (graphics are normally the last thing tweaked before a game is released) I’m concerned everything is just going to end up looking like Guild Wars. Here’s a set of armour that looks like it could be in GW, here’s a monster that looks like it could be in GW, here’s an animation that looks exactly like a GW animation. I don’t think I’m being too paranoid about this particular point, I mean for the most part it’s the same company in the same world with I’m sure many of the same artists and employees. They’re talented people but they’re not gods. Of course some of their work is going to be a little too similar.
7. Reskinning. Anyone that plays Guild Wars knows this dirty little secret. They reskin the hell out of monsters. Oh you liked that Jungle Troll did you? Why not check out our Fen Trolls for a change? You liked Centaurs in Prophecies? Well I hope you did because they’re in Nightfall and Eye of the North too! Ugh centaurs, and they’re already confirmed for Guild Wars 2, and even possibly Undead Centaurs as well. Sigh.
One of the things I should point out before ending this post is, most of the things people seem to gravitate to when worrying over Guild Wars 2, don’t bother me. 10 slot skill bar? Doesn’t bother me. Event System too predictable? You mean like every other quest in every other game is a freaking innovation? No more instancing? Why are you playing online if you don’t want to play with people.
The majority of peoples criticisms that I read are non-issues resolved by either reading the material released so far, or waiting for more concrete information to be released on the subject. It’s still early and even most of my own worries are probably completely baseless.
