Battlefield 2, Guild Wars, Etc.
All three of you who read this site with any semblance of regularity have probably noticed my lack of updates lately. I will give you an excuse: I’ve been extremely busy with work. That’s the excuse I am sticking to for now. For my being busy, I am sorry to both the three who read the site as well as myself for having to be busy and not having the motivation to write anything new for a while.
Okay, now that I have the pointless part out of the way, let’s talk Guild Wars. Almost everyone who I used to play Guild Wars with has stopped playing. I was playing hardcore until I went to E3, and it pretty much took me until yesterday before I logged back in. Why? For me personally, I had no motivation to play again because I didn’t want to try to Ascend again. My character is level 18 and his attribute are a bit screwed up (and I’m on of attribute refunds), and I don’t feel like leveling him just so I can attempt to Acscend. That, and the Ranger mirror is pretty stupid hard. His bow hits for at least 4x as much damage as mine does, which is pretty damn weak.
Why else am I not playing Guild Wars? Well, the instancing idea was pretty good. It provides a lot of custom-tailored content for small groups or soloers to enjoy whenever they want. However, this sort of content can only take an online world so far. Guild Wars lacks a sense of community. That is its major flaw. They need to introduce several common zones where players can get together and fight NPCs with dozens/hundreds of other players. This helps foster a sense of community more than the dozens of isolated city zones where people tend not to talk about anything more than what they are selling or trying to scam. Perhaps they’ll improve the community feel of Guild Wars at some point. They need to, or the game could die out.
On to my next bitching session. Battlefield 2. I was really excited for this. I’m on an FPS kick right now, so I wanted something fresh and new to shoot other people in. PlanetSide did well to quench the thirst for a while, but it is far from new to me. Then came Battlefield 2. I played the demo and bought the game the day it came out.
Then came the annoyances. I was unable to find a game with a decent ping in under 10 minutes. The multiplayer search functionality simply sucks, although they claim they’ll be fixing it in a patch soon. It lacks some fundamental filter functionality. For example, you can’t filter out servers with above a certain ping. That’s just stupid, and it makes me sad that a company could leave something so basic out. When you manage to find a server with decent ping, it is often a load of crap. Sure, my ping says 40, but people are still warping around the entire map (and no, it is not just happening to me).
Beyond the obvious functionality problems with Battlefield 2, it’s quite a good game. It is fun when it works, the kits are pretty well-balanced, and it actually takes skill to fly (skill that I have a rather apparent lack of). I’ll wait until they patch it up before I give a real review of it.
So, there you have it. The only game I’m really playing with any regularity other than BF2 right now is EverQuest II. The game is slowly but surely coming together into something worth writing home about.
As one of your three regular viewers, welcome back
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Heh, I wonder who the other guy is then…
Personally, I haven’t tried Guild Wars (at least, not yet), but what I gather from some other bloggers is that one of the problems with the game IS the community… or at least the large proportion of idiots and jerks in it. I suspect that PVP and no monthly fee tends to attract an anti-social type. I won’t claim to be certain about that, though…
Glad to see you back, too.
Never go on an adventure without a hat!
Indy
Number three, sounding off…
I, too, tried Guild Wars for a brief time (I think I got a ranger/necro up to 14 or 15) before losing interest. To be fair, I played solo a lot (because all of my loser friends are still stuck in WoW…) and I appreciated the inclusion of hirelings to round out a party, but after a while, it started feeling a lot like Dungeon Siege with lag – very automatic-feeling combat, very linear world that needed walking/fighting through, and very limited interaction with whatever other players might be out there. I didn’t try the PvP much, but what little I did try felt very chaotic and unorganized, more like a bar brawl than a planned tactical battle. Maybe it gets better later on – maybe I’ll see, one of these days. I’m still sort of curious about the rest of the game, and the “no monthly fee” thing means that I probably will, someday, but I’m not in a big hurry to jump back in right now.
That said, and whatever frustrations that exist in the game, there are some completely fabulous design decisions made. It’s all been said before – basically, the merciless excising of all the traditional bits in an MMORPG that bore people, the level grind, the interminable running around, blah, blah, and so on. Even though I didn’t enjoy Guild Wars as much as I’d have liked to, I hope that someone does recognize the advances presented by the game, and incorporate them into something that’s a bit more fun to play sometime in the near future…
I am “that guy”
The “success” of Guild Wars won’t be measured by those not playing it (no, I’m not playing it, heh). Look at how long Diablo 2 lasted (1.10 patch, for example) and that didn’t even have the “keep releasing expansions” plan going for it. It was, quite simply, an action rpg that did precisely what an action rpg is expected to do.
Was the community in Diablo 2 worth anything at all? Nope, it was complete ass. And by “complete ass” I mean a perfectly fine community for those who participated in it, but most certainly not my cup of tea. And despite what any of us thought of that community, it didn’t cause the game to disintegrate. Instead it merely made us say “this game is pretty fun but the community is ruining it, I suspect the game will flop in another X months.”
Leave community to the MMOs I say. GW’s success, or lack of it, will not be due to its community, imho.
And also, b/c it would be silly to just barge in here with contradictory statements shooting from my laser eyes and nothing more to offer I am (was) the silent fifth, it: would seem. Welcome back, sir.
I would argue that Diablo 2 had a far tighter community than Guild Wars. In Diablo 2, there was a central location for people to talk. Sure, most of that talk was complete nonsense, but you felt like part of something.
In Guild Wars, I don’t feel like I’m part of anything. I feel like I’m a solo player rolling around a game with a less directed story than most single player games. In between my solo adventures, I get a bunch of spam (going into a city zone).
It is likely my fault that it feels like a single player game, but for some reason, I never found it easy to get a group going.
I wonder at the success of Guild Wars, and whether ArenaNet is worried about the game. From what I understood at release, they planned on releasing content expansions for a small fee to keep the game going. We haven’t seen one yet, and their first content update, Sorrow’s Furnace, is going to be free. It looks to me like they’re grasping for people to come back before they release something that costs money.
Another silent reader… And one with a little more interest than normal
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Anyway, I just wanted to comment on the final paragraph of the above from Grouchy Gnome:
Firstly, free updates were always planned and have been public knowledge since well before release. These will typically be smaller updates with some content and new game features (such as Observer Mode). New game features will usually be released free via these updates; for example if we were to implement an Auction system it will be via a free update.
Secondly, the paid for expansions will be very large. Roughly the same amount of content as the original game (and therefore larger than the standard expansion pack size, hence why we call them Chapters). The first is scheduled for the first half of 2006, and beyond that we’re aiming for every 6-9 months.
I Kinda disagree with the lack of community especially in the advanced PvP tournament section and the immense strategies involved.
First for community you have the option of joining a guild wich gives u an option to chat with them no matter their location and with a good guild will crate a good atmosepher. As strategy goes in the 8 v 8 tournament there is no way in hell a group without a strategy can make it further than the first round without strategy.