Munki's Blog

First and foremost, let me express that I'm a fanboy. So much so, that over the course of the last few months I've bought 6 copies of the game, not for myself mind you, but for other folks that I hope will be joining me in playing what i feel is an overall fun experience. My undoubtedly over biased opinion shouldn't persuade/dissuade anyone on the fence about pre-ordering or pre-purchasing this game and this post just isn't meant to do anything of the sort. What I'm thinking about right now is, where do we go now that this Beta Weekend Event #2 is over, what should we realistically expect in the coming months? Where can ArenaNet improve? Where is the game flawed and what parts seem perfectly good fun? It's definitely not my place to judge the direction ArenaNet is going, but i certainly do have my opinions about what's in store for us as consumers of this somewhat brightly polished piece of work. The list below isn't in any order of importance, but it as as it comes to mind, fresh off this weekends many hours of play.

Graphically Enhanced - Functionally Gimped
 
Visually the game is pretty stunning, the art style is very tastefully done even if it isn't everyone's cup-o-tea. There's a very large attention to detail in the overall look of the game, however it does come at a cost and that is often functionality. Granted I'm not saying the game is functionally inept, but there are some pretty glaring issues with the way certain parts of the game handle.

Damn, your storage pane is a huge pain!

If your into crafting, playing the auction house game or simply just being able to run around town figuring out what you have in account storage, you'll understand this bit. Account storage really needs to be simplified, there's just far too much screen real estate being used and being a huge fan of Guild Wars account storage, it really should be able to be kept open while running about in town. I spent a good deal of time running back and forth, pulling items out and returning them to my account storage, then trotting off to the auction house and back again to a crafting table. I do love the fact that there are specific areas for crafting supplies and ultimately one could have personal storage of up to 140 items (7 bags of 20), however in the early stages of crafting, it's entirely to cumbersome to click and run around sorting your crafting goodies.

Improvements here could be:

    Account storage needs to be simplified (more compact)
    Account storage pane should stay open while in town
    Tabs for crafting materials should be separated from mini pet storage, etc.
    Crafting windows should have a filter (level of crafting) to cut down the list

Radar Love

Next comes an out and about bit. I've talked about this many times with people, but a follow option should be possible. I know it would be a pathing nightmare to follow a party member everywhere, but if your toon even ran off in the basic direction of the party member you were trying to follow it would be a huge improvement. There have been major improvements to how you locate individual party members both on the map and out in the world, but these could definitely be clearer. Much time was spent scouring the map for party member locations, I almost feel if they made those little blue dot's blip, like a radar would, it would improve that functionality ten-fold. This not to mention that if they were on a different layer, you couldn't see them at all.

Map markers, great-balls-of-fire, would that be a massive improvement to a party. Placing a flag on the world map would be monumental for party organization and having a button to center it would be stellar.

Improvements here could be:

    Radar blips on the world map indicating a party member location
    Setting waypoint flags and a "center on" button on the world map
    Detachable radar map/mini map.
    Some way to run in the general direction of a party member when double clicking their icon.
    Double clicking an NPC in town should go to that NPC

Gah, stop shooting already!

I played a ranger for awhile and what really irked me most is the lack of a cancel function for skills that fired off automatically. Granted in Guild Wars 1 you could just take a step and cancel a long cast or a skill that continued to fire off past the initial cast. However the much improved system of being able to move and fire off skills has completely removed that dynamic. I suspect there should be a default way to cancel a skill, I'd suggest that quick tap of the shift key or something similar should be at play here. The best default way was the escape key (which didn't always work, especially if your target was already dead). I didn't pour through the key-bindings to see if there was a key to assign for this function however, so I couldn't make a big stink here. However, there should be something default and regardless I'd also like to see the continued cast skills be able to work on switched targets. If a skill continues firing off arrows, I should really be able to just switch targets and it continue to do damage, not just fire them off blindly.

Improvements here could be:

    A quick cancel key for skills with longer casts or that continue to fire past activation
    Switching targets should take damage on extended skills, not just fire off blindly.

Personal Story, it's like stop and go traffic.
 
Unfortunately, many people might think completion of the personal storyline basically means the game is over, so I get why there are gaps between level requirements to move through the story. This on top of the fact that they are trying to move you along through the content and those areas really require you to be survivable at a certain level. However, in some cases there are 4-5 levels between the next step in the story making the flow really fall away. Where was I in the story 4 hours ago, while i had to go level?

I honestly feel this is a major flaw, an almost glaringly poor design. I'm hard pressed to think of a quick fix for this really. But, it does come to mind that they could integrate the areas "story" within the main story, to make you feel more like playing a specific zone flows with your personal story. An example would be something along the lines of Beetletuns problem with graphitti and pests… It's a very simplified idea here, but tossing you back out into an area should somehow work in line with your story, so you at least feel as though those sometimes 5 levels are being done with some purpose, and that the zone your in is some what in line with the story. It's there in the beginning, but it quickly falls away as you progress. Guild Wars 1 actually had that flow, since you were moving through the content as part of the story. This flow concept is gravely missing in Guild Wars 2. I may be off-base here with all of the story and across all the races in all the areas, but you really do get a sense of disconnect once you are required to trot around dealing with all the zones problems, leveling up to the next part of the story.

WvWvW - WuV, why must you smother me?
 
I can't really get into any PVP issues, but in closing this up, WvWvW (World Versus World Versus World or WuV) seems to be the developmental version of a needy, whining fiance. There just seems to be so much focus, not only on it's flaws but on fine tuning the idea of this epic battle. I get that it's a popular part of the game world, I see it's potential, but just like that great graphics focus making features functionally gimped, WvW seems to be ripping the developmental steam right out of PVE. It's more of a cautionary thing, and less than a huge problem at this point. Kinda like my buddy not being able to go out on Friday cause his wife needs more *me* time. Yet, I can see the pain skill balancing had on PVE in Guild Wars 1 during the early days, down the road a ways I can see the impact focus being pushed toward the more grueling aspects of WvW development, ultimately burning the PVE bridge down. I'm truly hoping that it won't be all hands on deck, cuddling with WuV because of it's awkward "emotional problems". If it becomes that needy lover, we as PVE fans might have to dump the rest of the game altogether. Let's face it WuV, you're a game all on your own.

I imagine there will be a fairly large number of positive reviews and general touting, but right now, as good as the game is, I have some pretty big issues with it.

The Overflow.
The overflow server basically means no more queues in full instances of a zone, hurray! However there are a few things that make this great idea a hardly stellar implementation. First and foremost is when you're partied up, no one person should hit the overflow, If you're all together, you should stay that way. Everyone should go jolly off into the overflow. Secondly, there is a greater sense of disconnect when 2 people go to an overflow and neither are with each other, where are you? somewhere in the ether i would assume. Which leads me to this next bit.

The Respwan rate.
Just as baddies scale up in power and ability when more people are around and in turn decrease with less population hacking away at them, the respawn rate should also scale. Meaning longer periods of time before that last 6 guys you killed come up behind you after you've just bashed them into the ground. There were many times I found a couple of us getting back hammered simply because we couldn't zerg our way through a cave full of bandits or a crevasse full of destroyers. This is pretty much one thing i completely loathe about persistent world MMO's, and something that Arenanet really needs to get right.

World Events.
Ok, so this is a tough one, the event system as it stands needs tweaking regardless and it being a pretty new type of system, it definitely has some bugs. First and foremost is again the scalability. Yes i understand, big events aren't supposed to be done by less than say 10 people, but however, some of these events don't seem to have logical chains that trigger them. The Shadow Behemoth is one of those that you can easily either never participate in or show up with only 5 people in the area willing to take on the beast. I saw events like this pop up in numerous places and often, for the few of us around, became epic failures. One thought would be the ability to follow some of these events, like you would a forum post. Talk to someone and they would somehow inform you that they desperately need help as the OMG boss is coming, maybe through the email system. This is especially true for those events that seem to be on a timer. It also would provide feedback on the popularity of an event over time and help to make a decision whether to toss out or change a less popular one

Party system.
There's a couple of things i would change with the party system. One thing would be a right click menu option that has "Find on map". It's a friggen pain in the ass to find others in party sometimes, even in the same zone. This is especially true with the blue dot ordeal and being zoomed out of the world map. I almost feel it's better to not be in party and just randomly run around on my own not trying to find and follow various party members. Which leads me to this next bit.

Will the real mini map please stand up?
This is a must have in my book, the radar even with zoom levels is hardly a substitute for the original Guild Wars mini map, i toggled the world map so many times it felt like part of a bad habit than any kind of solution. It's possible i missed some sort of other option here, but i did look for it.

Lack of Auto Follow.
Let's face it, if you're a Guild Wars player, the auto follow features was one of the best mechanics when adventuring with your group. Granted this might be a huge issue when that person you're following is down off a 50 foot cliff and your toon is chasing them to their death mindlessly, but at the very least, if someone is relatively close, You should be able to just run in their general direction without toggling the map or trying to pick them out in the radar.

Targeting.
This may not be a big issue, but targeting is clunky at best. There might have been key bindings for select closest target, but i didn't see it. There is just way to much going on in some battles to be click targeting. Select next and previous targets would be great too!

City Lag.
The cities, any of them, are at best lagfests, if not almost unplayable on some lower end video cards and/or processors. It work great for my i5 and 6970 card, but the Intel e8500 with a 4950 card had some serious lag issues. This isn't even 3 year old hardware! I get the optimization issues still needing to be worked out and perhaps there was some issue with the pc, but it was pretty rough.

Crafting.
Last but not least, and this is a problem with most games crafting systems, is that materials for some disciplines are quite hard to come by while others are very simple and straight forward. It would be really nice if that part of the auction house was available at the specific crafting areas. In Guild Wars you could buy mats directly from vendors, why not make that happen in Guild Wars 2? Have those materials supplied by the vendors, even if they are tied to auction house prices and purchases. For cooks, it's fairly simple to just toss ingredients together and craft something, not to mention many of the items are available from vendors too, but not so for most of the other disciplines.

I'm typically not the type that anticipates releases, nor do i really follow the whole development cycle of a title (beyond what's required to do my job in video game packaging), but Arenanet's upcoming release of Guild Wars 2 really strikes a cord with me. Be it a nostalgia for the almost courtship like hours of gameplay with my future wife via the original, or simply just the sheer number of hours invested, I genuinely feel giddy when I hear the latest news. Yet, somewhere amongst that giddiness, I can't help but feel a sense of panic as well. That panic pretty much stems from my basic perception that any game that get's hyped as much and lingers as long as this one, tends to turn into sour grapes come the first few days of actual play time. While it's true that almost every game I've even remotely anticipated has left a bad taste, i still struggle with not consuming every tidbit I can find about it in my off hours.

Game Pushers...
We have a title for a few people here on the site, "Game Pushers" are typically those folks that manage to draw in (or sucker) people into playing a title they normally wouldn't. It usually stems from that fact that we enjoy the company of these people and we really just want to like what they are pushing. So the hype machine whirls on across the interwebs almost solely based on this idea, we just want to play with our friends, be a part of the group and continually have a grand time, even if the game isn't our thing or just doesn't live up to our desires. Why i'm saying this is, that's really where i see Guild Wars 2 as the ultimate example of how it'll play out with your little group, people that never played MMORPGs may very well end up here, with the rest of us habitual MMO users. So when saying I'm somewhat fearful of a possible disappointing experience, it's pretty well justified.

The product of an addiction...
To be so focused on a game and place such a level of expectation can't be healthy, but damn if it doesn't feel so friggen good.
Completely irrational behavior, I know, but there is a real sense of excitement, followed closely after with anger when things aren't being fed to you. Arenanet's lack of public commitment to a release date has *addicts* all over the net showing signs of pure frustration. In many cases only the most hard core addicts feel strung along with sparse nuggets of info and overall empty prospect of when they might actually get their grubby paws on the product. Most of the time it feels like Anet knows that these people are just going to continue clamoring and pushing the hype meter forward, but there certainly is a tipping point before the *dealer* get's his just dessert. Simply due to this hard core group of addicts, the hype meter can quickly take a turn, making high anticipation become a complete lack of desire almost over night. Right at this moment, that tipping point may very well be close at hand.

Ride that hype, baby...
Sites around the net are giving out awards for that coveted "most anticipated game of 2012" top spot to Guild Wars 2 and Arenanet is definitely riding that hype. They recently tweeted many different sites that have bestowed them this title, yet what irks me is that there not only isn't a public release date, but that there are also promoting that *possible* misinformation, further tying them into a 2012 release. Just imagine if you will 2012 passing by, looking at Guild Wars 2 still being released on a "when it's ready" stance. There would not only be some pretty pissed off people, it just might tarnish sales to the point of people responding with things like "oh yeah I was waiting to play that one, but now... not so much". Regardless of any possibly imagined outcome or what the actual facts are about the inevitable release date, ArenaNet, simply by promoting these awards/ideas really does put them at a 2012 release. It would be nigh impossible to back pedal there way out of it now.

The confession of an addict...
These are obviously my strung out views, but i can't help but be fairly irked that the time table isn't finalized and at least, in some sense small sense, public. I've seen the havock, SW:TOR really put the pressure on our production cycle with last minute release info and in all reality a pressure situation isn't always a bad thing. Given that little tidbit and seeing how some games are received regardless of perfection out of the gate, there are some hard core addicts out there that are a little roughed up over promoting a 2012 anticipation award while taking a stance that there simply isn't any release date info (phewy! i say!). There also just isn't a sense of it being retailers and websites that hand out these things, their responsibility to have their facts straight. Regardless, I'm still in anticipation of a really great game and leave you with a very well done promo video.

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