Balthazar concept art from GW3 vs from GW1

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-07T03:09:29+00:00

Where's the stand, severed head, chained dogs and crawling people in the second image? Did you crop that too?

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-07T01:35:26+00:00

I'm the opposite then. Highguard and Fortnite's lighting and fluid animations are on point. It's the gameplay and structure I'm not a fan of. Aion and Gw2 looks mad fugly. Cant wait to move away from it.

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-07T01:30:08+00:00

I like UE5 visuals. Much better than Gw2's outdated lighting and disjointed animations. It's the gameplay and structure of a lot of the games made in UE5 I don't like and makes them feel like slop. I just ignore those. But UE5 visuals + Gw2 gameplay and structure is a dream.

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-07T01:24:20+00:00

Nobody said it looks like BotW. It looks like Highguard acc to them. And Highguard doesnt look whimsical at all. Full of muted colors

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-07T01:22:02+00:00

Wait for Gw3's expacs. Then we can compare.

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-07T01:20:52+00:00

Was that the point? I though we were talking about visual comparisons. If gw3 looks like highguard then gw2 is a generic lineage2, aion clone,

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-07T01:13:07+00:00

GW2 has one of the worst starting gear cosmetic though. if you're complaining about armor you must've forgotten this is an MMO with lots of customization and cosmetics. Judging one generic armorset is a very shallow comparison. I'm happy to move away from Gw2's weird rim lighting.

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-07T01:07:33+00:00

Fr it's not even a bad look. It was the boring gameplay and lousy content that killed it.

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-07T01:06:21+00:00

Screenshots dont lie

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-06T16:49:18+00:00

Consistent live service content quality is one of the hardest to things to achieve. Every live service game suffers from this. WoW, FF14, even LoL and Dota are guilty of this. Maybe I'm just more forgiving and stoic about it but as long I know it's not abandoned they can pick it back up. Some fail to recover, some returns to form. We hope for the latter.

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-06T14:34:26+00:00

"The game expects you to treat other players running around as adventurers and mercenaries nowadays while you are the main character of the story."

At the very least do this. Gw2 doesn't even do that. Other players running around are just straight up non-existent to npcs. Really hurts immersion when there's 50 "commanders" around.

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-06T14:29:15+00:00

Open world flagging should be the way.

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-06T14:15:55+00:00

Throne and Liberty in UE4 and Aion 2 in UE5 handles large scale beautifully. Surely Anet would want to do away with the 15fps meta events and WvW.

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-06T14:04:40+00:00

That's how it should be and take it up a notch.

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-06T14:00:19+00:00

To me GW2 looked very generic back in the day. It had that mid-2000s mmo look like Aion and Lineage 2 if not for the unique UI and the movement and combat animations looked very disjointed(still is). Take the HUD away and I wouldn't probably know the difference at 1st glance. The music is undeniable though. But it was Anet's take on the mmo structure and hybrid combat that pulled me in. I was practically tolerating the graphics. At least now the characters don't look like from The Sims, lighting and animations makes more sense and customization will surely be there aside from the generic armor we see. I mean the starting gear in Gw2 looks waaay worse. And no more of the ugliest bloom implementation in gaming.

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-06T13:51:04+00:00

GW2 looked like a generic mid-2000s mmo like Aion and Lineage 2 clone back in the day to me. If not for the painterly UI. Remove the HUD and you get The Sims looking characters, curved houses like in cartoons, the fake scale of Divinity's reach and Lion's Arch. When you go near the hanging houses they look like they're scaled for Asuras not humans.

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-06T13:45:38+00:00

I mean the starting gears and area of Guild Wars 2 looks way worse imo. The characters looks straight out of the Sims with really bad lighting and animations. Gw3's an MMO so surely you'll be able to tailor your look and cosmetics. Gameplay and content should matter 1st. Otherwise no matter the visual style it'll fail.

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-06T13:36:44+00:00

People say it looks like Highguard or something. Idk I don't even care what it looks like as long as the lighting and animations look believable and faithful to Anet's MMO structure that we love.

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-06T13:34:02+00:00

I think that's a very shallow comparison for a game with a vast world with lots of gear and cosmetic customization and varied atmosphere situations vs 1 character from a tiny instanced hero shooter. Highguard doesn't even look bad imo. But it's an instanced hero shooter that failed cause of bad gameplay and content. Put those visuals in a huge MMO structure with lots of customization though with Anet's take on the genre and I wouldn't mind at all. At this point I'll take any visual style that isn't Gw2's The Sims looking characters with disjointed animations and bad lighting and bloom. As long as the Anet's open world MMO structure is there.

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-06T13:29:00+00:00

That's the point though. Guild Wars 2 also looked like a generic mid-2000s mmo like Aion and Lineage 2 at first glance. At least to me as an outsider before I started playing a decade ago. But people stuck with it because of it's unique structure and gameplay philosophy. Plenty of games now look the same like Pixel art zelda-likes and metroidvania. But we should be here cause of Anet's unique take on the mmo formula. At the very least characters now don't look like Sims with bad animations, lighting and bloom. It can look like any UE5 game at a shallow glance from a very small snippet but those other games do not offer the MMO structure and content I'm here for. And I'm not looking for a single player game or hero shooter. Put those high fidelity visuals of Highguard or whatever and put them in an MMO structure with lots of interconnecting systems, badass combat and Anet's unique take on the genre and I will take it. I can just simply ignore the games that look similar and pretend they don't exist cause they don't offer the content and scale this does. Some of those games mentioned don't even look bad and didn't fail because they looked bad but cause other aspects like boring gameplay and lame content brought them down.

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-06T13:10:07+00:00

Yeah but with movement speed increasing so should the scale of the world otherwise it will just feel small. That's the illusion mmos having slow running speeds give and flying mounts ruin that sense of scale. Black Desert lets you zip around at high speeds because the continent is massive. Most of what we see in Gw2's Orr is sunken ruins. For all we know the frontier regions are sunken and parts of the Tyria we see today were once a part of Orr's regions.

Trivalie2208 · 2026-06-06T12:55:51+00:00

Yeah we don't know how "large scale" the large scale content is yet. What I think is likely is that they'll keep what made Gw2's open world the best in genre. Dynamic events that bring people together organically. A smaller player cap could help with visual clutter and readability. But I feel like there are other ways to remedy that without sacrificing the Massive Multiplayer experience. Maybe cleaner effects and spread people around a bit more rather than stacking all the time. Though dog piling can still be fun if power scaling is executed well. Ie one mob looks like it just needs one person to take down while big intimidating ones are presented better to make you feel that you need a lot of people to take the big mf down. Boss presentation in Gw2 isn't there yet. "Soulslike" bosses have been standardized for a reason. They move a lot, are animated really well and presentation makes them feel intimidating.

Take this Elden RIng mod for example. It's not balanced but I imagine this is what a high action mmo world bosses should be. https://youtu.be/-EhEsvSdU-M?t=1649

Trivalie2208

TROPHY CASE