Slurm
Nightwalker
Wimmy Wam Wam Wazzle!
Posts: 5,065
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Post by Slurm on Apr 29, 2012 12:52:08 GMT -5
Thought I'd open up a general thread as we progressed through the beta. What do you guys and gals think of the game so far?
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Post by trapsinger on Apr 29, 2012 13:46:59 GMT -5
it's harder and took me longer to learn than any mmo i've played in a long time, but the world is fantastic, and the game play is engaging. I think this one is a win.
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Post by Grok on Apr 29, 2012 18:49:11 GMT -5
I'm looking forward to hearing your opinions!
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Post by Rer on Apr 29, 2012 18:54:41 GMT -5
Same, do let us know what you guys think about it.
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Post by pandalishus on Apr 29, 2012 19:37:19 GMT -5
Me too. Interested to know what you all think. Also interested to hear how your rigs are handling the gfx, etc.
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Post by trapsinger on Apr 30, 2012 1:04:42 GMT -5
Well I'm out of the game for the night, but the wife isn't quite done so I'll write up some more detailed impressions.
As I said before my first impression of the game was a little strained. The controls and the movement was just different enough from other mmo's that i had trouble adjusting. And just like my first time in League of Legends I found it very hard to play a melee character when I was first learning the game. It took me about a just to feel comfortable with hitting my targets in melee. This is because there is a lot of movement, both by the player with dodging around, and attacks that leap you in or out of combat, and with NPCs doing the same thing. It's very hard to maintain melee distance and facing.
Luckily all classes get at least one ranged weapon attack of at least 900 range. But if you are expecting to have my problem with movement, I suggest learning the game with a class that starts with a ranged weapon (Necro, Ele, or Ranger).
Graphics performance wise: I'm playing on a sony laptop, with an intel i7 processor(3.5 GHz w/ Turbo Boost), 8 gigs of RAM, and an ATI Radeon HD 6630. I tried the game with the graphics all the way up, and it was a bit stuttery, maybe around 15 fps, and with the graphics all the way down it seemed more smooth, between maybe 20 and 40 fps. which isn't exceptional, swtor runs much better on my machine. However, I will say that with the graphics all the way down the performance was remarkably consistent in all areas. Even in large scale WvW with at least 50 people around casting spells, i was able to move and play just fine around 20 fps. I should also note that I actually preferred the appearance of the graphics on low, i had an easier time seeing what was happening without all the shinies and mists and things.
I would say the most impressive parts of the game were the size and depth of the world, and the remarkably well handled variance between the classes.
The world is just Huge. There is so much to see and so much to do, and all the environments are amazing. In two days I only really had time to fully explore the starting human area completely, which covers level 1 to 15, for one of five races in a game with a level cap of 80. A quick comparison to swtor, the quicktravel points in swtor are much like the waypoints in GW2, but just the level 1 to 15 area for humans has 17 of them! it was probably larger than a whole planet in swtor, and there was definitely more to see and more to do. luckily, there is no time restriction on using the way points, so travel is actually much less tedious than swtor.
the classes are amazing. they all have an extremely different feel and play style to them, i think because they are not tied down to traditional class roles, so there is no sense of required abilities to this game. I spent most of my time playing the ranger and the guardian, as those are the two i'm interested in for release.
My wife and I both agree that the ranger seems to be the easiest class to learn the game on. Almost all of their weapons have range, easing some of the difficulty on figuring out movement in melee, and the pets are almost fully automated, which takes some of the burden off learning all your other abilities right away as the pet can both do and take some damage for you.
The guardian on the other hand seems to be for more advanced players. Only of their weapons has a 900 range, and it's a one handed weapon, which means you will almost be forced to play in melee range, and only two of their weapons have a distance closing ability, which means new players (me) will spend a lot of time running up to targets and lose out on a lot of dps. Also, while many guardian abilities say, "and heal nearby allies" the range on this heal is extremely small for many of the abilities, sometimes only melee range, and with all the movement in combat it makes this class a far less effective healer than appears to be on paper.
Some other fun notes on classes I tried: All engineer healing and utility skills have a secondary function. The necro's basic healing ability is a pet that heals the necro whenever he hits something, also the necro can have a ton of pets by filling their whole utility bar with different ones. I saw one guy running around with like six pets out. The closest thing to a pure healer from other games appears to be the water elementalist, they seem very friendly to group play.
NOTE: Shield's are not armor! I mean...they have a little armor, but less than even light armor gloves. They are weapons! Usually reactive weapons, where you hold it up for a cast time and if someone hits you, then you explode damage at them.
I was also excited to see that even the basic no cooldown autoattack was different for all weapons on all classes. Some cause bleeding, some are aoe, some ricochet around. Very exciting to simply put on a new weapon and see what happens. Weapons also have different ranges depending on the class wielding them. Longbows for example are 1200 range for rangers, and 900 range for warriors.
I also think the personal stories are better in GW2 than swtor. You don't get a dialogue option every 5 seconds like swtor, but they had no bearing on the story anyway. In this you get maybe or one two choices every few levels, but the choices have real meaning. They change what instances you go to on which maps, and who you interact with, so it feels like they have more bearing on actual game play.
So, mostly, I loved the game, and I can't wait to play more.
My one big complaint, which I hope is something they will address in a later build, is that it can currently become impossible to play with someone, even if they are in your party already. When a map fills up, it starts to dump people into an overflow server. Which is great in the performance sense, the servers were remarkably stable and almost lag free the entire time i was playing. However, there is no option to move to the same overflow server as another member of your party, so if one of you gets dumped into overflow, or if there is more than one overflow and you get randomly assigned to different ones you are just screwed. Learn to solo. But their "guesting" feature which is meant to allow you to play with friends on other servers is also not yet implemented, so hopefully figuring out one of those things will mean figuring out both of them, since they are similar. This did, however, cause us to find out that you can invite someone to your guild even if they are on another server, and they can still chat with you and contribute influence to the guild, while still playing on a different home server. so that's good.
some other features that should be in the game, but aren't (yet?)
/logout /quit /ginvite /dance
To invite someone to the guild you have to open the guild pane, go to the roster tab, and find a small, dark, not obvious field labeled "Search" type in the name of who you want to add, and then click a plus symbol next to that field. this was not intuitive.
Anyway, that was probably more than anyone wanted to read, and the wife is finally going to bed. I'd be happy to elaborate on anything if people have specific questions.
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Slurm
Nightwalker
Wimmy Wam Wam Wazzle!
Posts: 5,065
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Post by Slurm on Apr 30, 2012 4:45:56 GMT -5
I played the Ranger to level 5, the Necro, Engineer, and Warrior to level 3, and dabbled in the Guardian. In an effort to keep things as fresh as possible, I limited the amount of time I played, but it was honestly hard to resist logging in. Part of that is the new MMO smell, but a larger contributor is probably that it felt like every time I logged out, I left with more curiosity about the game. I still don't understand how a lot of stuff works. I still haven't played around in PvP. Is there crafting? I assume so because I've picked up components, but I don't know if it's any fun.
What I will say is that this game is fucking death for altoholics. While I'm about 90% sure (and that number has gone down since before I played the beta) that I want to stick with a Ranger, every class I play has me questioning that. Each one is fun and fresh; something I didn't think would be possible anymore. This is somewhat due to the abilities all being based off of your weapon types and changing just by swapping them out, but also because of the look and feel of the game.
I had some similar problems to Trap. My framerate wasn't fantastic during peak hours when there was a ton of people in the starting zone, but I noticed in the morning it was MUCH smoother. But past that, while Trap said things are easier to look for with some of the spell effects toned down, I don't know that I could play without them. Everything looks so goddamn classy!!! The SUPERB animations mixed with effects that look like paint being splashed accross the screen is just a wonderful thing to see.
One last thing: Arenanet's take on public quests is brilliant. I'm not sure if the difficulty ramped up as more people came into the areas, but some of them actually got a little hairy, and it was amazing to see someone come over to revive you if you fell. (since anyone in the game can do that - again, brilliant)
Will I be playing this for months and months to come? Just like SWTOR, I think that depends on how everyone else feels about it, and PvP. All I do know is; I do not want to play another beta weekend. I want this fucking game out now.
edit: one more thing I forgot to mention. I know I was only level 5, but I couldn't believe how little of even the starting zone I had seen. /agree with Trap. This place is HUGE.
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Pazzolupo
Grimweird
It's not what you did. It's what you did before what you did.
Posts: 1,147
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Post by Pazzolupo on Apr 30, 2012 6:19:18 GMT -5
I didn't get a ton of time to play, but I have had very similar experiences. The class system is interesting, and I like that instead of grinding levels to unlock abilities you just swap weapons and use it for a few minutes.
For your look at crafting, at least a peek, check this out real quick. They made some good decisions with it. The more of the same item you have to craft, the faster it crafts each one. Weird, but watch the video to see what I mean.
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Aberrant
Ragewalker
Core 03/2003 DAoC Founding Member Former Councilor
twitter : Jabberant
Posts: 3,585
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Post by Aberrant on Apr 30, 2012 8:49:12 GMT -5
Got an Elementalist to level 9, and an Engineer to 5.
One thing that stands out to me is the difficulty of the game. This reminds me a lot of GW1, where not everything is a cake walk. You have to use a lot of strategy and think before you act. The death mechanic is awesome, as I was able to use it in a lot of different ways to stay alive in both pve and pvp.
The PvP has me thinking we might finally have something that can come close to DAoC. I LOVED my time in pvp, and the maps are HUGE. It feels like the Frontiers to me.
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Post by jagerbarrel on Apr 30, 2012 19:30:17 GMT -5
Disclosure - GW1 isn't an MMO and I thought it sucked. Big time.
While I only took an Elementalist to 16 and a Necro to 8 (both Norn so I don't spoil anything), I strongly suspect that the game will do quite well, especially if you're a DAoC veteran.
The world is indeed huge, and early PvE is interesting. PvE is done along the WAR lines, so grouping in open world in unnecessary as PvE lakes can and will level you beyond current content quickly. Personal stories are a fun diversion, but at least with my 2 characters didn't scale well. I died,with equipment damage, 8 times trying to farm down one instance. That said, I look forward to whatever PvE goodness awaits us.
But the fun lies beyond the mists, and I expect the bulk of the player base will settle in with WvWvW, because it takes everything that was fun with DAoC RvR and distills it down to an online margarita machine full of win.
Yes, it's that good. As someone who leans PvE and never really appreciated PvP until DAoC Guin, this game is nothing short of awesome.
The only question is, when can we get a gank group going?
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Vejuz
Harpy Archer
Not all who Wander are Lost
Posts: 1,296
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Post by Vejuz on Apr 30, 2012 19:39:22 GMT -5
I love this game. I love the hell of out of it. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the beta, I frequently lost track of time and found myself looking at a clock only to see 5 or 6 hours had passed as if by like magic. It's been a long, long time since an MMO has been able to do to me, I loved just about every moment of the weekend. I got my Elementalist up to level 18, so I a lot of the later human content (I even finished the personal story quests they had in the beta). I adore dynamic events; they reward exploration and keep the moment to moment gameplay fresh and exciting; I played through the human and norn starter areas at least twice over the weekend and both times I saw events kick off that I hadn't seen before. Some very fun stuff. As I got my Ele up into the second zone, it became clear to me that the difficulty of the game definitely scales up as you progress. The personal story and DEs in that level definitely got a lot more challenging, with a lot more moving parts as I progressed. I played primilary Mesmer and Ele, with dabbling in Ranger, Thief, Necro and Warrior. Ranger really surprised me - I thoroughly enjoyed my time playing the Ranger. It's attacks had "Oomph" and the pet wasn't annoying to control at all. I played mostly with longbow and sword/dagger. Ele was a ton of fun, as one might guess given how much I leveled her. The class feels very kinetic with a ton of strategic choice and snap decisions to make. I was somewhat disappointed with the Mesmer, but I'm not quite sure if the problem lied with me or the balancing of the class. The Mesmer felt very ineffectual, especially since NPCs never seem to attack my doubles and B-line toward me. I'll definitely give it another shot next time I get a chance. WvW is amazing - it reminds me strongly of RvR in WAR. Performance during Zergy moments was good - there is definitely a lot of auto-lowering of things to improve performance. Even when things became sort of jittery the UI and the game remained responsive, and I was able to fight normally even under Gate siege conditions. I had a ton of amazing moments over the weekend, but I feel like fighting the Shadow Benemoth was the high point for the weekend. It's a boss they've shown before, but if you're not familar it's a GAINT shadow creature that emerges from the swamp. About a dozen people and I teamed up to take the thing down after fighting off waves of adds from portals. It was amazing, and a surprisingly technical fight for a boss that spawned in a level 15 zone.
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Kapalla
Puppeteer
Global Agenda
Posts: 116
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Post by Kapalla on Apr 30, 2012 19:59:18 GMT -5
ok, i can field any questions as I played about 35 hours this weekend. O.o Now, my impressions are very biased as I am a Guild Wars fan boy who has about 2k hours into that game. I got my mesmer to level 18 and a elementalist to level 12. I pvped with every class except warrior and guardian but I did play guardian a bit in pve.
PVE This is by a long shot the most fun in pve i have ever played. I am a pvper at heart and I found myself time and time again just quiting WvW and structured pvp to......get rabbits out of someones field or go find my disgraced father in my personal story for my char mesmer. The pve is also challenging. I know some people are saying that it is hard, but I prefer challenging. I think that we as mmo players have been catered to since WoW came out. Every mmo since WoW until now you could pve and watch TV at the same time. GW2 pve is so much fun..
EVENT SCALING The events do scale, and very well I think. I was in the char starter zone and we had around 50 people doing an event and when the boss spawned HE WIPED US!!! This is great content and I cant wait until the higher end zones when the events affect the the zone more. The ones in the starter zones only affect small portions of an area
CRAFTING The crafting is very fun. The recipe discovery is a nice feature, I am sure all the possible recipes will be online on day 1 but I still think it is great. The biggest thing is that the stuff I was crafting is actually good stuff. This is the first time in a while where the craft-able gear is nice. I didn't start crafting on my mesmer until I was level 15 and in 10 minutes of crafting I had 3 pieces that were an improvement. The way that they handle crafting multiple items is great. Not having to wait 10 minutes for your 200 ore to smelt is wonderful. I crafted 80 copper ore in about 10 seconds. It just goes faster and faster the more you do at a time.
AUCTIONING The trade outpost is a general auction house where you can list things that I want and at what price. Plus the ability to see 5 day trends for any item, oh and the fact that you can list items from ANYWHERE!!! right click on the item and list on the trading post and it pulls up your item and shows you all the items listed that are the same to give you the range.. and it shows you people who want to buy them now and for how much.. its pretty much the BEST auction house, consignment, trade post in an mmo ever(catching the theme of my post yet?)
WvW I did a ton of WvW and I will keep it short since this post is out of control atm. The zones are beautiful, I have friends who could care less about the art style say in the middle of running to the defense of a keep, " Hey guys wait stop right here. Turn around and look how awesome this center keep looks from here" lol. The pvp is the best of daoc with the siege warfare of WAR all on crack. The forts are diverse and interesting. We found a fort where you could swim up through a tunnel found deep in a lake and break open a grate that leads into the back area of a tower. We ran with zergs for a while but the most fun we had was fighting 5v5s in the open with groups that were trying to reinforce. I know some people will be worried about being on the best server for wvw but I can tell you that our server was getting beat down but in 2 rotation match ups of the servers(they did this each day for the beta weekend) we were now in a fight for first place and all the servers were competitive. In short, loved it, best RvR ever.
STRUCTURED PVP The structured pvp is fun fast and easy to access. You can make a new character and within 5 or so minutes be in the pvp lobby setting up your traits, gear, skills. Click play now and you are in a pvp match in less then 10 seconds. The two maps that were available to play were fun and dynamic. There was tons of action and it kept me wanting more. Now my only negative on this front is that the automated tournaments were not available for testing. This lets you get your best 5 man team and queue for a tournament. When a total of 8 teams queue(which will take seconds I am sure) it sets up a ladder and away you go. pretty much the best war zone pvp ever.
PERFORMANCE Now my performance will vary by a mile to everyone else, but I will post anyway. I run 3 23" monitors and 5940x1080 so I have 2 GTX 570 in SLI and a q9800 at 3Ghz 6 gigs of ram. Everywhere but mass scale wvw i had no problems. In mass wvw i dropped to about 10fps. I think that with little to no optimizations and no SLI support that this is acceptable. IF after those things and I get lag in wvw at medium setting like i had this weekend I will have to upgrade the ol' cpu and ram.
TLDR
I loved this game and will be playing for a long long time and I will happily answer any questions.
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Vejuz
Harpy Archer
Not all who Wander are Lost
Posts: 1,296
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Post by Vejuz on Apr 30, 2012 21:33:41 GMT -5
I'll definitely answer questions as well; there are likely to be details that wont be teased out of the dark corners of my brain without them.
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Vejuz
Harpy Archer
Not all who Wander are Lost
Posts: 1,296
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Post by Vejuz on Apr 30, 2012 22:04:08 GMT -5
Interesting tid-bit just sleeted into my brain:
While, outside of the personal story, you never need to talk to NPCs, doing so can be beneficial! For example, I learned some nice snippets of lore from NPCs, and in 2 memorable cases, I can actually started dynamic events!
In the first one, I spoke to a ghost who walked around waxing poetic about her life and then took a stroll with her. Once we hit a certain point, she freaked the ef out and started a DE to kill her.
In the second case, I spoke with a researcher who asked my opinion on which direction he should search for artifacts. I said north so he....ran north and a DE started! I was exploring at the time though, so I don't know what happened with that one.
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Post by Scarybooster on May 1, 2012 8:00:03 GMT -5
I had a great time. I wrote up a Pros and Cons up on my blog. I had a few lag issues but most of the time the game ran smooth at Ultra settings for me. I have an i7 6 core intel with 12gb ram. I have a low end graphics card an nividia 460 GTX 2gb and a DSL connections. When I had lag so did everybody else so it wasn't me. On Ultra the game looks amazing. Some people on the forums complained at how crappy the graphics were... Ummm troll much.
The worst problem I know they will fix because there was a massive outcry was the Overflow servers. Not the one you get logging into the game, but the zone overflows that would break up groups. What I didn't know is Overdlow servers are from all servers not just yours. If you get slapped in an overflow, you are in a random pool from the whole game.
WvW and Arena PvP is awesome. If you are not sure if you want to stick with a class, hit the Arena PvP button and you get most of your level 80 spells and the exact same gear as everybody else in your class. There is no arena PvP gear grind but as you play, your gear looks more bad ass. It is like when WAR was in beta they said you could have a necklace of ears to show your kills. I never saw this in that game. GW2 is suppose to pimp you out. I wonder if that means we'll get WoW shoulder pads.
The game is amazing and the guild perks are really cool. I was sad I was totally locked out of the MP guild on day 2 from a patch. It showed others in the guild I was in, but I couldn't represent the guild. I do say, I did not like the idea of multiple guilds. I'm not a whore. It's a cool concept but I feel like I'm splitting up my friends. Good news is, you can make your own guild all by yourself and have your own guild bank for extra space. It gets around the whole, "you can't mail yourself to have a mule" thing.
The voice acting was cheesy compared to SWTOR but better than most. I avoided personal stories and just clicked past it all in character creation. A big surprise for me was the amount of creatures you can shapeshift into. I saw robots, horned rabbits, pigs, birds, welps, golms, Naga looking, anacondas (if you want buns hun), a probably many more.
The cash shop had some great stuff, but it is far from done. I logged into GW1 to get a feel for what we can expect. They have a lot of costumes, PvP maps and weapons, hero kits, combat pets, mission pack, bag slots, and character slots. I just hope they leave out the combat pets that can be used in PvP and the PvP gear.
I think the game is well worth the $60 to play for a lifetime. I can see myself playing for at least a year. I played 7 classes mostly up to level 2 and PvPd them to get an end game feel. I loved all of them. I just didn't try the guardian.
I see where ANet has locked in a way to make cash tho. You can but Gems with Gold, but your gear breaks super fast and if you Rez you have to pay to go to waypoint as long as you have money vdont think about hording your money in a bank or getting out of it easy, because if you don't have the cash on that character, it finds it on your account. I see it very hard to make gold in this game with all the fees. I guess it keeps the Gem business flowing with real cash.
That's my thoughts besides the blog post I did.
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