I’ve got like 10k hours in the game and I play for the combat and, for the past few years, the “joy of movement” (their words) with mounts. And the story has ups and downs but there are definitely some ups. The telling thereof has certainly gotten pretty good. (Early stuff… isn’t.) It peaked in the content between the 2nd and 3rd xpac.
But having tried to get my gf into the game relatively recently, I was frustrated that the sense of progression and story doesn’t really line up with the difficulty curve – first expansion is still the most brutal place in the world, prior to mounts, and we’re on what, the 6th now? So as a new player to play the most fun mechanical parts you’ve got to go to from the vanilla story, skip the first xpac, hit the second (most mounts) and fourth (flying mount)… making for a really disjointed experience. Which is sad because once you have all the bits (or if you played it all along) it’s fantastic. Or alternatively to play the story in order (and the way it was paced along the way) you basically play a ten year old game as it evolves in front of you, where some parts don’t hold up super well.
Far and away my favorite MMO combat. And some of my favorite movement; definitely for the genre. But I get the frustration.
Jotunn@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I have about 4000 hours in Guild Wars 2, if my memory serves me right, I think it suffers from a big you had to be there problem. All of my friends that I have played any larger amount of time with were early adopters to the game. Everyone I have introduced afterwards have just gone around mildly entertained and not really seeing any point in continuing playing after maybe 10 hours.
Personally I think power and feature creep is a source to that problem. Back when I was new there were some challenges in the leveling areas, whacky balance in the relative end game zones meant a quick mistake could get you downed. Even the open world areas Orr were hard to move around in alone as a few enemy veterans quickly gang up on you. The smaller scope and lack of mounts also made running into other players a common occurrence. The updates often had hard or challenging content that the community could talk about together, even in the open world of the first expansion there were a bound of enemies keeping you on your toes.
But nowadays, even when I purposefully under gear and play bad builds those areas prove no danger at all. A recent example is a common, but still harder, enemy in the second expansion that a friend and I could finish so quickly that it hardly had time to make a move. That was a bit prideful and funny to us then, but now I could do that alone, with earlier mentioned bad build. Power creep, polishing rough edges and mounts have made the game uneventful and lacking in memorable moments. I get bored by the content, both new and old, and a bit sad when I breeze through some of the hard older stuff that used to challenge and entertain the whole group all on my own. So I really understand that someone without the nostalgia telling them how good or fun certain parts were just get whelmed by the experience.
Even if the big beautiful zones filled with the quirky events and stuff that pulled me to the game back in 2012 still remains, I consider it a snore fest to experience them today.