The next game purchase I am likely to make is GW 2 but I am not convinced it's for me. Noel (office gamer chap) says it's going to change the world. I know there are some GW1 fans on here. Anyone catch the Beta? Any thoughts? Opinions? Half formed points of view welcome!
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The beta was annoyingly a set of weekends that were few and far between so I only got a few snapshots of play on it.
It was interesting combination of dynamic play areas that repeat their cycle of activities and you join in by turning up like rift and chamnpions and warhammer have with a set of instnaced story quests that are just for the player and their party.
Unlike GW1 the outside of the cities is not instanced to the player everyone is in it (most of the time if you have a story mission it will instance off a chunk)
You earn skills through use so every character starts with a basic attack and then as they use their various abilities others unlock as you use the skills under them. Skills also seemed to be weapon specific as well as the elementalist I played with suddenly switched to a whole set of different skills when I swapped a wand to a staff.
As far as gameplay goes it's the same old stuff kill 10 of these collect 30 of those and then turn it in rinse and repeat.
Will it change the world doubtful it's nice but it's not that different from all the other stuff it lacks swtor's compelling story it hasn' got the dynamic combat some of the other mmo's have but it's still a compelling game it's just another one of the pack as far as I can see newer shinier and with some improvements but obviously just another iteration.
Not had any experience of GW2, and will probably be avoiding it, simply as I don't really want it to become the time-sink that GW1 became to me (~1,200 hours played)
The "big thing" about GW1 compared to other games in the market was the comparative lack of grind. The maximum level was 20, and you could reach that in a few hours simply by following the core missions...after that there was considerable story left to go. The subsequent mission packs had 2 entry points...new characters were placed in an initial arc, with an expected levelling to 20 at about the same time as they met existing characters. Ditto with kit..getting max-level kit was reasonably simple, so in general once you were abot halfway through the game, everyone was on a par...the only differences were skill-selection (you had 8, but could rebuild in towns) and actual ability.
The other "big thing" was no subscription fees, so there was never any "I must play to get my money's worth" pressure. You could do an evenings play, then leave it for a week. Especially in end-game (which was based around raiding high-level areas, hunting monsters for skill-capping, and PvP) you could plan in a 1-2 hour game once a week, and not worry about the down-time.
The one other thing that was good, IMHO, was that excepting certain high-level areas, the entire game could be done solo...there was a decent selection of bots/heros to fill out a party to your choosing, and you could also bespoke up some to accompany you (there was even a PvP flavour where you and your customised bots fought someone elses). It was certainly easier if you got in a group for areas, but it wasn't compulsory.
The downsides...it did often feel like a single-player game. Out of towns you were in an instance...good in that it could drive stories very easily for you...bad in that it was easy to path the areas.
Parties, so some extent, needed certain key characters to be viable. A monk/healer, a warrior/tank, and a damage outputter/necromancer/elementalist were the core of any team...play one of the weirder types (mesmer, paragon) and you would struggle to find a party (it's no co-incidence that the only character I got through every mission was a monk). If you play with Pick-Up teams, you would be sensible to take one of these characters to not waste ages typing "LFG" in a window.
Thanks chums. I am tempted to get some MMO going on but I am not sure this is the one for me.
For MMO's without the (RPG) so much bolted on the end check out Planetside 2. I loved the concept of this, but apparently no 1 suffered from excessive defensive power.
I think more and more I prefer games that play to completion within a set period of time, with no ongoing arc. Loving Tribes:Ascend at the mo (I'm rubbish at it, but can be useful in a defensive capacity, and the starter pack gives you enough to be fully useful almost immediately). If Planetside 2 was like that I'd be interested, but I imagine it will have ongoing levels of power-creepage.
I played planetside 1 a fair amount and it was a lot of fun huge battles different roles from stealth infiltrator (which I liked but was crap at spent hours invisibly stalking enemies would then get shot in the face when I went for the kill and my knife failed to do them in, though sneaking into bases and watching the enemies from within was cool) to huge armored max suits. Loads of great vehicles to play with I had fun with the attack gun ship things and at one point was in a 10 strong squadron that did a load of coordinated straffing runs over a base then going kamakazi for the final push
It was a lot of fun probably even more fun if you had friends in the game and formed one of the companies I was more a lone wolf.
PS2 looks like it has all the original stuff and more so it should be good
I've picked up a copy of this after a chat with Jon, who sold me on its virtues. Not played enough to form any real impressions yet beyond 'gosh this is pretty'.