Katie Fey
Guild Wars is approaching it's third birthday. It was never the most complex of "MMO"s (a title disputed by players of more involved games like EQ) and really the PvE was always treated as an added bonus compared with the core PvP. In fact the PvP game is played in an annual world championship tournament, making GW perhaps the Counter-Strike of MMOs.
But there is a PvE game and the first chapter, retroactively titled Prophecies, still offers a fun gaming experience.
Unless you've been playing for 3 years. I've previously commented (several times) that MMOs, at least when it comes to PvE, are less dependent on genuine skill and more reliant on experience, whether that experience comes about first-hand or is appropriated from a source such as GuildWiki. The fact is, if you've been playing GW for 3 years you're going to have a pretty good idea how to beat any given situation. That's not being "skillful", that's a result of having played more or less every encounter the game has to offer, perhaps several times across multiple professions.
A short while after the release of the third chapter, "Nightfall", A-Net got around to releasing NF's version of an end-game raid dungeon, namely the Domain of Anguish. Oh, the wailing that was heard on forums around the world. OMG it's insanely hard!!! OMG this isn't fun!!! Fast-forward a year, and predictably we now suffer forum threads of people complaining that DoA, along with the rest of the game, is way too easy.
NF even introduced "Hard Mode", where the stats of all the creaures in all the instances are substantially boosted in order to give the self-important hardcore players something to occupy themselves in between wanking over their own greatness.
Artificially cranking up the difficulty of a game is something I touched on when I encountered Crysis. There are obviously a lot of people out there who are desperate to prove some sort of "achievement", even if it's the worthless achievement of having beaten a game at it's maximum difficulty. The problem is, cranking up the difficulty beyond the "natural" challenge level usual creates situations that are frustrating and unbalanced and usually end up getting beaten through the use of exploits rather than any sort of skill.
GW is particularly susceptible to this issue, in a relatively subtle way. The game is generally less level and gear-dependent than many RPGs, but offers a much larger range of available skills across multiple professions, where you can take on an arbitrary "secondary" profession as necessary. Combined with the fact that each additional chapter has introduced new skills, and in some cases professions, and the potential number of combinations of skills at your disposal is in the thousands. I'm sure the precise number has been calculated.
Understandably with so many potential combinations there end up being "trick" builds. Perhaps the most well-known is the "55" Monk farming build, but the end result is that for any given encounter there usually ends up being a "correct" build that you can easily go and look up. Of course hardcore players would never admit to using other people's builds but the fact is there are very few people who have genuinely created new builds, the rest are using variations.
Note there are essentially counters to every possible build when it comes to PvP, but also when you have a properly-managed team, the potential team build combinations is also much larger.
Trick builds that unbalance PvP are notorious for being nerfed by A-Net because they can't afford to compromise the balance of their beloved competitive PvP. On the other hand, PvE-centric builds are rarely touched and can have a long lifespan.
The point is that these trick builds can be considered "exploits" in the sense that they can allow players to beat encounters in ways that weren't intended by the game designers and subsequently make the game easier to beat.
What I don't understand is why people continue to play a game that they consider "tediously easy". It's as if they feel they are owed something for having spent thousands of hours of their lives beating the game. In the case of GW they've already had Hard Mode, and now they've beaten that too. Let's not forget that not only is GW subscription-free, but is also at the end of it's life now that A-Net are preparing GW2. Do they really expect A-Net to rework the entire game just to cater to some twats who feel like they need more of a challenge because too many people have achieved the same level as them and they're having trouble proving how leet they are?
What do you think GW2 will bring? What's really sad is that a large number of GW1 players want GW2 to be little more than a glorified expansion. They even wanted to take their existing characters over but fortunately A-Net crushed that by setting the sequel "hundreds of years" in the future compared with GW1. Those players basically wanted all their "hard work" in GW1 to count towards 2 so that they could get a head start on any noobs that were coming the GW for the first time. I found that attitude sickening and frankly fucking ignorant. If the sequel turns out to be so similar to the original game that is essentially is a glorified sequel, you can bet those same idiots will be the first to complain that it's "easy" and "boring". Imagine letting them bring fully-skilled, full-equipped characters from the first game. What a bunch of fucking morons.
Meanwhile if GW2 is radically different, those players will complain that it's "lost it's feel", while secretly being upset that they have to learn a load of new systems along with everyone else.
I hope GW2 is different to the direction GW1 has taken in the most recent chapters. A-Net, not known for making clever decisions when it comes to the evolution of the game, have gradually introduced more and more grind in an effort to keep long-time players busy. This is in stark contrast to the original chapter of the game which was much more narrative-driven and about adventure and exploration rather than stupid, tiered title-tracks. Sadly I suspect they'll just keep going in that direction and GW2 will be an epic grind-fest that is even harder to distinguish from "grown-up" MMOs.
But at least that'll make the grind-whores happy.
No comments:
Post a Comment