First of all, I played Guild Wars for over 2000 hours on multiple accounts. Initially, I wasn’t too impressed (I started playing in 2006) but over the years—-and expansions—-it got better, more addictive and, ultimately, more rewarding.
Guild Wars 2 is amazingly beautiful. Jeremy Soule has done a masterful job, as usual. But after playing Guild Wars 2 for over 220 hours, to say I’m disappointed would be a gross understatement. This isn’t even a ‘There is no endgame’ gripe’. I’ve been reading lots of posts by people who purportedly enjoyed getting to level 80, only to be bored and disappointed with a lack of endgame, but I was bored really from the start.
I have a huge amount of problems with this game, but ultimately, because of everybody’s time, I’m only going to address the big three. Again, I’ll preface by saying I played the original Guild Wars for 2000 hours, I’ve never touched WoW (lest I be called a Blizzard fanboy) and I come to this game after years of waiting and anticipation. I’ve tried my absolute best over the past 200 hours to love this game. I spent three grand on a system that would be able to max it out. And so far, I’ve been bored out of my mind.
My big three problems:
1. Dynamic events. Dynamic events were the worst implementation of a pitifully bad idea I can possibly imagine for a video game. Any dynamic event, whether it’s fighting 8 centaurs or battling a dragon, is essentially a boring, monotonous hackfest that begs to be ALT-TAB’ed. Scaling is pathetic (try doing a boss by yourself, which happens often these days in low areas) and quickly goes from impossibly difficult to profoundly boring. As soon as a sizable group of players appears and the boss’ stats scale, it turns into a 5 minute auto-attack where you hope you’ve done enough damage to get XP by the end, followed by one amalgamated mad-dash to the body to see if there’s any loot.
It’s profoundly boring, every single time.
This, of course, doesn’t even address the fact that dynamic events themselves are boring. Oh, someone’s been kidnapped and taken to a cave and I need to save him (aka, hackfest a boss for 5 minutes)? Great, I’d rather find a rusty fork and plunge it into my eye. The only time boss fights are enjoyable is when there is a very low number of people (think 3-5) and so you feel like your hits are actually doing something, and yet there is also a true risk of failure. When there are 50 players hacking at a boss, big deal if you get downed or (unlikely) defeated: you’ll get resurrected straight away. (Continued)
