Loving it! |
 |
51.6% (66) |
Good. |
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26.6% (34) |
Meh |
|
12.5% (16) |
Bad. |
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2.3% (3) |
Terrible! |
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7% (9) |
Poll: Guild Wars 2 Beta Thoughts? Pages PREV 1 2 3 NEXT | |
Really? I can't say I've been confused at all so far (except when creating a Mesmer and going straight into PvP. Too much mindfuck for me.). OT: Love it. It's not perfect, and people before me in this thread has some valid complaints, but I am not disappointed. Either way, I'm hooked. Let's hope they release it before I die of old age. | |
Guess you have noticed by now but the personal quest zones are instanced and your party can go there. That is as close as it gets. | |
Ah interesting. As I said I've been too busy to play it so haven't discovered this yet - hopefully come the next beta I will have more time! To be honest I'm not mega fussed about playing the beta at the moment - but I cannot wait for the full game to be released! | |
Beta is proving a whole lot more fun than I expected, though there have been a few issues. Mostly it was just getting into the same area as a party member, or connecting to the game in the first place. Outside of that, the combat was great, if a bit unforgiving at times. Then again, I am doing duel dagger elementalist which is some of the most tricky gameplay I've done in any game. The boss fights seem sort of poorly balanced atm, with them either having attacks anyone can ignore or they one shot you. Also, I've had some weird experience with the scaling, I'd prefer if it would let me always be higher than the mobs in the zone if I'm sufficiently leveled. Not full power mind you, but not going from 17 to 4, then fighting level 5s in groups. That was not particularly fun. | |
Played it over at a friends house. Twas alright. I still don't get the OMGWTFBBQ THIS GAME WILL REVOLUTIONIZE ALL MMOS FOREVER. Don't get me wrong, it was good, and could very well be great. My main problem is the persistent world bollocks. Can everyone please shut up about this now? I have had first-hand experience, the same with many people, and I can say that, just as I said before, they are little more than glorified public dailies from WAR or something. The effects they have on the world are marginal at best, and are reset in about 20 minutes anyway. It's not that great. The game itself is very good, very polished, the character creation is very cool, the personal story is complete shite, but I don't think anyone was really expecting something particularly good from it anyway. Overall, I'll probably pick it up come release. The MMO still needs shaken up, and while this is a step in the right direction, it still has many of the trappings of old. The holy trinity is still there, but not in the game mechanics. I found that, in a small group, we all tended to assign ourselves the classic roles anyway, and we did much better with that. This game is not revolutionising the MMO, it is not destroying the Holy Trinity, that is that. The MMO still needs shaking up, and this game will not do it. But, it is a nice stopgap. It's the hero the genre deserves, but not the one it needs right now. | |
Just wanted to share, as I found it quite funny, there is a ranger ability called Crippling Shot that they say "shatters the dream of your foes of becoming an adventurer with a single arrow to the knee." or something like that. It does 15 damage and causes bleeding over time for 6 seconds. | |
Depends what you are looking on an MMO. For rolplay and PvE this is just a nice game prob worth your time, for battlegrounds (structured PvP) it is a very good MMO def worth checking out, and for the ones that wanted to do RvR a la DoaC this is Jesus second coming. | |
Played a bit with a friend this weekend. And it was a huge pain in the ass. We could not stay in the same instance. After every quest, after every zoning, we'd have to fiddle with things and try to resync. In the end, it wasn't worth it. If the game doesn't even let you team up with your friends, what's the point of it being an MMO? | |
Wish I had an opinion, uncooperative beta code with no word from support. | |
Well, today our realm finally achived WORLD DOMINATION on the eternal BGs; and I must say, this is how world freaking PvP should have always been. An amazing WvW experience, the best massive PvP I have had; though i am sure green and blue aren't as pleased. Besides the game not assigning the party members to the same overflow server, have no mayor complains about the game. And seeing how they went out of the way to make sure people in different servers could play togueter with server guests, i am quite sure the overflow problem will be adressed before launch. | |
This is coming from a GW fan but to sum it up- it had lived up to my expectation. I was able to had a go with all 8 professions and they weren't that hard to control. I did however found the Engineer, Elementist, Mesmer and Ranger to be the easiest well quickest to master. Engineer can only use pistol and rifle and the Elementist had limited weapons so you're able to learn their skill faster while the Mesmer illusions came in very handle. My favourite had to be the Ranger that is once you get a long/ short bow and their pet actually came in handy unlike the GW 1 Ranger. The Guardian was my least favourite but only because I didn't fully utilise their skills (I didn't get why they had a blue flame on the left side of the skill bar). I found myself to be more interest in the Charr story due to each Legions story were different from each other while the Norn only interest me a little. The areas in that game is huge, really huge and I like the fact that the area will sometime have different events going on. Example in the human starter area one of the quests is to pick apples in a apple farm which is killing spiders and collecting the apples. When I made another human character, there was a spider queen in the apple farm and later on Bats were in the farm. My main concern with the game is more of a long term effect. Some of the quests were somewhat easy to powl through due to having many players in the area. Sure it will be like this in the first year and so but what about five years later? When the new players descrease dramatically it will be very hard for those players to take on the harder quest like the bosses roaming in the area. EDIT- Oh yeah the team need to fix the clipping problem with the Norn warrior as the beard stick through the helmet. | |
Waiting for open beta. Not really feeling optimistic about it, considering they forgot about fans who spent a LOT of money on game (two accounts with Trilogy + EotN) and played the game since the beginning (my oldest character just finished 5 years, and my main account is almost 6,5 years old). No beta invite. Kind of disappointed, though not surprising after Eye of the North. | |
You have to prepruchase the game since they will send you the code (or if you bought the package the code is inside) in order to play the beta. | |
Well aware that I have to pre-purchase the game. My point was that they could've at least given some chance for old-time fans who supported them for years at least some "thank you" instead of "Buy our next game!! then you'll get a chance to see it!". Unless there's some actual open beta, they lost me to Diablo 3. | |
Only had connection issues for a few hours on the first night. Other than that I manage to complete my Charr Engineer's storyline and I think it's great. I've also managed to try most of the classes, and I like how they've changed them from the first game. | |
Played to level 21 as a Charr Warrior. The personal story seems to pick up a bit at around level 10, but it's hard to get into. The cutscenes are awful. "Dynamic Events" are just Public Quests, but they're still fun, especially the ones that have you fighting ridiculously large enemies or ridiculously large amounts of enemies. I didn't find the questing to be particularly rewarding though, as I didn't seem to get much reward in the way of loot and you don't get any real benefit from leveling until level 10. Loved the fiery-death Champion Bloodthirsty Black Moas. Anyway, it was what I expected it to be. | |
yes, this was a pain. My understanding though is that the system is meant to put party members into the same overflow when overflow is necessary. Hopefully it will be fixed for the next beta. I enjoyed it very much. There were moments when it definitely just felt typical MMO grindy, as I tried to find an event that would finish off my level. Still, it was a lot of fun. | |
This was indeed extremely annoying. So annoying, in fact, and so completely pointless, that I am 100% certain it's just a bug/beta oversight and will be corrected in short order. | |
The thief isn't really a team player, if you want to see some of the fabled cooperation you'll be wanting to try out a Guardian, most of your abilities in that profession function best in group combat. | |
It isn't pointless. It is supposed to prevent zones from getting too crowded. Although it is indeed annoying that parties get split up by this mechanic, it is better than making queue up for the zone. | |
I'm talking about splitting parties, not the existence of the overflow zones. Anyone with a functioning brain knows what the point of the overflow zones is. There's really no excuse for splitting the parties. It's not "better than" anything. It's completely intolerable, hence why I assume it's a bug, and not a feature. | |
Yeah, if only they gave dedicated GW 1 players, i dunno, sweet exclusive weaps, pets, armour, titles... I do actually have a GW 1 account that i can't manage to grind to get those, find the PvE leveling too damn lame.
You mean besides stuns, slows, armour debuffs, pulls, blinds? A good theif is an amazing team player, he is just not a team buffer. | |
They also give it to anyone who bought the game just before release and managed to get those 30 points. Or someone who bought account second-hand off ebay for few bucks to get the weapons. Again, it's the "old-timers vs newcomers" thing. Old-time players get exactly the same things new players get. What's the incentive for the old players to play the game? Pretty sure if I got to play the beta, like I had the chance with Diablo 3, I might've considered pre-purchasing it. Now, not so sure. Already pre-ordered D3, and if it wasn't coming out this year, I would've went for GW2 instead. | |
So... Essentially because they weren't treating you super special compared to the rest, your not going to preorder it? | |
In case you weren't aware, the Hall of Hero's from EoTN will return in the Norn area and have exclusive items at each returning GW1's player beck and call decided by all the different achievements the player had completed over the course of their playtime, including armor, mounts, powerups, etc. As for long time players getting instant access into the beta's.. why? No company that I'm aware of ever does that, and really doesn't have any reason to do so. Hell, no one even had to subscribe to the game to play it, only their time was being consumed. And, the incentive should be playing the game that is the sequel to the one you loved playing, not being rewarded for how long you have been a fanboy. Seriously. In Diablo 3's open beta, the beta was really, really small in terms of explorable area's and story progression in the first Act. Guild Wars 2 was much larger in these respects. | |
I was in the closed beta so my mind was already set on "pretty damn good, but might not be exactly what its fans were hoping for". Though I had a scare with the lag at the start. I went through the closed beta without a single wiff of lag, but with it it's a totally different game as I'm sure you can all understand. When you have an Ettin take a great big slow telegraphed swipe at you, and by the time he swings you're behind him and 12 foot away, but then you still get hit... yeah, that defeats the point of the game. I was glad when they seemed to have sorted that out. If they have those kind of problems after launch it'll break the game. The gameplay is spot on so long as your latency behaves itself. Is anybody in the know about video editing and uploading? Like I want to take snippets of avi files from fraps and put them together in a video, maybe with a voice over and with some fading in and out. What freeware can I do that with? And what sort of compression should you use when uploading to Youtube? | |
NB: Guild Wars "Hardcore" player - 50/50 HoM here. Needless to say, I was a fan of the original. That said, the game was, while I could play it, disappointing. I'm not going to complain about lag, bugs, or lack of optimization, since I know what "beta" means. That's not to say it's a BAD game by any stretch of the imagination. It just didn't live up to expectations. Other than the names of places, races, and skill callbacks, there's really nothing of Guild Wars in the game. "But Targren," it's been said, "It's a completely different type of game! ANet is finally making the real MMO they've always wanted to make. How can you expect it to be like Guild Wars?" "Because, grasshopper," I would reply with patient serenity, "It's Guild Wars 2. It takes place far enough in the future from the last game that the story isn't really tied to it, and if they weren't courting fans of the original, they could have named it anything else." But, never let it be said that I'm not even handed. So I did put a lot of thought into judging it on its own merits. As others have mentioned, the tutorial really needs to be buffed up. It takes too long to figure out what's going on, how public events work, etc. I put in 20 hours into the beta and I still am not quite sure how most of the events I played through 5-10 times (in Shaemoor) are actually TRIGGERED. I just sort of hung around in the area and hope'd they'd start. Hopefully, that's something addressed by release. The vaunted combat system is a little too frantic. Between the fact that any event done right is basically a mass charlie-foxtrot, and the flooding particle effects making it barely possible to follow the action, the nuances like "dodging" don't really have as heavy an effect as they might have intended. Add in a crazy amount of PBAoE (point blank AoE, a.k.a. anti-melee AoE) and characters like the "glass cannon" thief run into a big problem in melee. They've done away with holy trinity roles like "Tanking" but kept the one-shot-kills toward squishies dumb enough to get too close (how do you retreat from combat if the first hit downs you?) There are some balance issues that bother me. I can see the logic for making fast-travel a money sink, but I really think that having to pay money to rez at a waypoint is a little excessive, considering that you're already going to have to pay to repair your gear, plus you've more than likely got a good hike to get back to where you died. It's also unduly hard on low-level players. 15 copper on top of repair fees is a lot when you're derping around shaemoor fields, and by the time you get out of there, it's nothing at all. So there's really no point to having it there, IMO. My last big worry is the cash shop. I said from the day that they started selling "Mercenary Heroes" that we'd have to worry about them selling power. I was, alas, not wrong. The standard power-boosting fare of XP buffs, item drop buffs, etc... are available on top of the normal, pointless-but-fun cosmetic stuff. Particularly insulting are the "mystic keys," lifted straight out of TF2, and the fact that you can trade "gems" (the cash shop "tokens") for gold, legitimizing gold-buying as a gameplay mechanic. How badly that works out, I suppose, is going to depend on how much gems cost, both in terms of real cash and in gold, but I don't foresee it ending well. For a "social" game, the communication system is woefully inadequate. No Zone chat at all, just a "local" channel which seems to just cover some arbitrary radius. Now, lest I give the impression that I only had complaints, some of the good things: The game is gorgeous. Full stop. I have no complaints about the aesthetics, at all. I was afraid I'd hate the new weapon-skill system, but I really enjoyed it. It takes about 50 kills to unlock all 5 weapons for a particular loadout, but I've always liked a little grind. Most of the achievements seem a little pointless, but they're basically just titles renamed. Giving points for them seems a bit too XBL-like and has no real purpose, though. It would be better if you could do something with them. I like that I get a "completion" status on every load screen. Great for a completionist whore like me. :) | |
Played the entirety of the weekend, and loved all of it. The combat is fast, and yet extremely tactical. It changes greatly depending on what class you play as, but you really need to watch your surroundings. The "look at the game, not the UI" really comes into its own; Past the starting areas, you need to keep an eye on your enemy and what they're doing. If you're a ranged class like the Elementalist, you need to know where to move to, and how to keep the enemy at a distance. As a warrior (which I spent the most time on) you need to know which attack animations are going to hurt and need to be blocked, interupted or dodged, and which are OK to let land. The big issue with this though, is that on the crowded boss fights, you can't see the attack animations for the fireworks, which leads to a lot of pain. The classes all feel very flexible, and yet keep a separate flavor. Each will carry a mix of damage and support while none will carry it all, so yes, the trinity is gone. My favourite class being the warrior, because in the skill selection all were distinct and yet could fit together well - I ended up taking a pair of maces for melee shutdown, and a rifle for single target ranged damage. The way many of the utility skills worked made it simple to aid others - I had a shout that buffed all nearby allies, and another that res'ed allies if I killed a foe in 10s. The dynamic events were a mixed bag. There were some incredible epic fights against giant foes, some defense against hordes, but also some that were just kind of awkward slugfests. The difficulty needs some balancing too - they're supposed to scale with number of people involved, but that often meant either too few and it was too hard, or too many and it was too easy. The overflow needs some tweaking to stop it getting in the way of friends playing together, but it beats queuing, so I can't hold it too much at fault, but it does need a solution before release. Can't speak for the easy-to-understand side - I had a full weight of a lot of reading behind me, and had no problems working out what to do. I had a few friends play who'd read little more than the profession list, and they found it OK but I can't say they didn't miss anything. Community is good. The downed / defeated part comes into its own when you have people willing to help, and I've been on both sides of someone putting themselves at risk to help out someone they'd not even spoken to. In fact, coming to help out led to the more epic fights of the weekend. I think I saw more "thanks" said in one weekend than in months of Rift / TOR. So overall : Super positive. There are a few issues, yes, but that's why it's beta not release. It's definitely shaping up to be something truly incredible. | |
Guild Wars 2 had an open beta? Didn't realize it.
Well, that plus constantly ignoring the loyal playerbase for some time now (power creep in PvE and ignoring PvP balancing, removing Xunlai Tournament House because they didn't want to try fixing it, releasing a PvE-only expansion that betrayed the original vision of skill > time spent playing game). I'm not that angry. It's just my explanation of why I won't blindly pay a company that has given me nothing to make me want to pre-order their game. Blizzard did give me the option of trying the game and seeing for my own how it works out. Blizzard isn't exactly known for giving extensive betas in Diablo games. Diablo 2's demo was one class (Barbarian) up to level I think 10 (a lot less compared to D3) and only two first quests (as opposed to a couple of quests from Act 1 in D3). | |
The architecture and aesthetics were one of the few, very few things that i considered amazing about GW 1; GW 2 inherits that, you can tell you are in the same fantasy world just by how the builds are designed and decorated, and some of the mechanics (thankfuly not a lot of them, not that much of a fan of GW 1).
I love discovering the mechanics of games rather than read them, that's why i love games like Neo Scavenger (a spiritual successor of Fallout 2 that you should go and play right now!). But you are right, the game does not hold your hand. AFAIK the events either trigger due time (most of them i belive) or due talking to a NPC, rezzing an NPC, killing a specific NPC (very rare).
O.o
This will be adressed, there was enough QQ on /local and the forums about being locked out of rezzing due the waypoint fee to think otherwise.
On the fence about this, if they sell XP, medium tier weaps and usless vanity stuff, fine, even if they sell you out of grinding by giving you point boosts and gold boosts... xcept... well in WvW gold is a huge deal, with gems you can literally buy siege and golems. With just 1 golem our world conquered all of the eternal battlegrounds and most of the green world, i can see how easy it would be to buy your win in WvW and that is unacceptable. | |
That's the problem. Even in PvE, you're VERY rarely going to go 1v1 once you leave the first noob zone. And it's not just a matter of "running into WvW when you're not ready: it's no good dodging when you can't see the telegraphs that you're going to have to dodge because of all the particle effects, like I said. And outside of mobs, once you get to 2 or 3-on-1 on-level mobs, you'll be burning your dodge bar on the first and then the others have free rein to wail on you while it recharges, so you pretty much have to go ranged (yay Dancing daggers. I LOVE that move). | |
I greatly enjoyed my weekend in GW2, mostly just walked around exploring and doing random events or heart quests I came upon. My only real gripe was with the mesmer illusions which need some kind of overhaul. They're meant to provide a minimal amount of distraction to allow you to evade mobs a bit more easily, since you're just so damn squishy, but I rarely ever saw mobs target them and I died, a LOT. but even though the combat frustrated my, I was genuinely having fun the entire time and can't wait to be able to dive into the world for keeps and really build my character up. | |
PvE aside (i went only up to lvl 15 areas, and up to there don't remember being forced into more than 1 vs 2, and with careful pulling and snares that turns into 1v1 two times), in pvp if you find yourself into 1 vs 3 then you already failed and unless the other guys are dumb, you should die. As for particles... i honestly wouldnt know, i NEEDED to turn everything but textures and shaders to minimum in order to be able to have a somewhat playable FPS during WvW sieges, and with those settings you can easily see what you need to without being annoyed with too much trash on screen. | |
It's pretty common to get 2 or 3 on you at once, especially with PvE's insane respawn timer. I understand they probably set it low so that you wouldn't have to wander through an empty countryside after a group washed through slaughtering everything in sight, but there are some mobs that literally respawn faster than you can clear them out, often right on top of you. Especially if you take the extra time of "careful pulling." Like I said, balance issues that need a little tweaking before release. I'll probably be playing a caster class when it comes out though. Just to be safe. Balance never was ANet's strong suit. | |
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Ahhh ok....shame, that was a lot of fun - going off on little adventures. But oh well.