Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Siveon
Over the time as I was waiting for the release of yet another game, I would have come read all sorts of information and opinions about it. Some, overexcited players, offer very enthusiastic yet exaggerated opinions as if praising their own God and expecting a blessing, while others seem to act as peasants in a witch hunt, doing everything they can hoping to again watch another witch burn at the stake in the old Inquisition days.
I was never one to follow anything without knowledge, what can not be seen can always be heard and even the senses can be fooled, so in order to obtain the precious truth one must really needs to gather information from all sources and senses over time, comparing, connecting and weighting them as if they where part of a "string theory", which will hopefully result in something closer to the unquestionable truth.
One great example of why we should not trust our senses was the first time I played Guild Wars 2. After waiting so long, reading so much and watching so many videos I was finally able to play the game, I felt like a kid opening a present at Christmas and when that happens it's like looking at a bright lamp, it shines so much that only after some time can we see past the brightness and when we look away we can still see the afterimage, that was what happen in the first beta weekend. That effect soon starts to fade and we are able to see things clearer.
The first topic that comes to mind was some people saying the quests were just a glorified "kill 10 rats" quest. I do understand why they would say that but honestly that is just an over-simplification in order to add more wood to the fire.
Lets try a real world scenario, imagine if in the medieval times you needed to kill a group of mercenaries, you could see it as "kill 10 mercenaries" could you not? The difference is that in Real-Life you can choose how to deal with them, and that is what's missing in games, "choice".
GW2 however brought us closer to that by saying "there is more then one way to help", what that means is on that same quest, in order to "handle the rat problem" not only can you "kill 10 rats" you can also "poison the rat food", "use a magical flute to lure them away" or "convert the rats to help the npc instead".
Another well known topic is the old combat and tab-targeting system, some people complain and say its outdated, which is true, but then they only focus on the targeting system and talk about Tera combat system who most of the skills make your character stop and the rest slows to a crawl an already snail paced game, making that game feel like a turn-based RPG, so they just lose all the right to complain about it. But I digress, even though tab-targeting is old and honestly sometimes hard to control in GW2 as it made me hit the wrong mob several times, these people seem to ignore the not-so-old combat system.
Projectiles in GW2 hit who ever it touches and they can be physically blocked, so just because you have a target selected doesn't mean he is the one getting hit, Rangers with the "arrows pierce targets" Trait are an exception as they will hit anything in the arrow's path.
Skills do not require a target to be used and like the projectile they will do dmg to who ever they hit/touch and a great majority of the skills do not require you to stop not even for casting, so far I only know of 2 skills which require you to not move(a ranger and an elementalist AOE), which makes the combat very fast paced and fresh.
The last topic I am going to touch is the "zerg fest WvWvW". Some complain that World vs World vs World is mostly about the numbers, this not 100% true... for now at least.
I have experience that Sieges weapons wins wars not zergs, several times I have witnessed a smaller group of players not only successfully defend their keep, but pushed us back to ours simply because our group had a zerg-mind and they overwhelmed us with a simple arrow cart(which seems to be maybe a bit too powerful). In the end I could say it's more Siege weapon dependent than zerg fest, but of course as time passes people will learn and build more Siege weapons thus becoming zerg dependent.
In any case 3W(easier than typing "WvWvW") relies completely on other players from your server to join together and fight the common foe, for nothing other than bragging rights and the pride to say that they play in the best PvP server.
On the bright side, as a server wins/loses 3W, it starts to be fight with other more/less successful servers, this means that over time it becomes a bit more balanced as less PvP active servers begin to play against others of a similar nature.
The game is far from perfect, there are bad things as well as things that could be improved but doesn't mean we have to bash everything to a pulp. The worst part is that almost of the bad things people point out aren't horrible enough to be labeled as "bad", they're just small quirks or preferences, maybe I'll make a post about disappointing things I saw in GW2.
That's it for today, hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it.
I was never one to follow anything without knowledge, what can not be seen can always be heard and even the senses can be fooled, so in order to obtain the precious truth one must really needs to gather information from all sources and senses over time, comparing, connecting and weighting them as if they where part of a "string theory", which will hopefully result in something closer to the unquestionable truth.One great example of why we should not trust our senses was the first time I played Guild Wars 2. After waiting so long, reading so much and watching so many videos I was finally able to play the game, I felt like a kid opening a present at Christmas and when that happens it's like looking at a bright lamp, it shines so much that only after some time can we see past the brightness and when we look away we can still see the afterimage, that was what happen in the first beta weekend. That effect soon starts to fade and we are able to see things clearer.
The first topic that comes to mind was some people saying the quests were just a glorified "kill 10 rats" quest. I do understand why they would say that but honestly that is just an over-simplification in order to add more wood to the fire.
Lets try a real world scenario, imagine if in the medieval times you needed to kill a group of mercenaries, you could see it as "kill 10 mercenaries" could you not? The difference is that in Real-Life you can choose how to deal with them, and that is what's missing in games, "choice".
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| Guild Wars 2 Quest |
Another well known topic is the old combat and tab-targeting system, some people complain and say its outdated, which is true, but then they only focus on the targeting system and talk about Tera combat system who most of the skills make your character stop and the rest slows to a crawl an already snail paced game, making that game feel like a turn-based RPG, so they just lose all the right to complain about it. But I digress, even though tab-targeting is old and honestly sometimes hard to control in GW2 as it made me hit the wrong mob several times, these people seem to ignore the not-so-old combat system.
Projectiles in GW2 hit who ever it touches and they can be physically blocked, so just because you have a target selected doesn't mean he is the one getting hit, Rangers with the "arrows pierce targets" Trait are an exception as they will hit anything in the arrow's path.
Skills do not require a target to be used and like the projectile they will do dmg to who ever they hit/touch and a great majority of the skills do not require you to stop not even for casting, so far I only know of 2 skills which require you to not move(a ranger and an elementalist AOE), which makes the combat very fast paced and fresh.
I have experience that Sieges weapons wins wars not zergs, several times I have witnessed a smaller group of players not only successfully defend their keep, but pushed us back to ours simply because our group had a zerg-mind and they overwhelmed us with a simple arrow cart(which seems to be maybe a bit too powerful). In the end I could say it's more Siege weapon dependent than zerg fest, but of course as time passes people will learn and build more Siege weapons thus becoming zerg dependent.
In any case 3W(easier than typing "WvWvW") relies completely on other players from your server to join together and fight the common foe, for nothing other than bragging rights and the pride to say that they play in the best PvP server.
On the bright side, as a server wins/loses 3W, it starts to be fight with other more/less successful servers, this means that over time it becomes a bit more balanced as less PvP active servers begin to play against others of a similar nature.
The game is far from perfect, there are bad things as well as things that could be improved but doesn't mean we have to bash everything to a pulp. The worst part is that almost of the bad things people point out aren't horrible enough to be labeled as "bad", they're just small quirks or preferences, maybe I'll make a post about disappointing things I saw in GW2.
That's it for today, hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it.
