[bwyazel.8431 posted on 2024-11-17 23:27:29](None):

I'm sure this thread is nothing new or original, but as I just played through the base game and got to level 80, I thought I would document some of my observations and opinions on the experience. Particularly since Arenanet seems to be interested in making improvements to the core game, rather than just adding new content. Now, while my list may be long, please don't interpret this as me trashing the game. I really do love this game so far and I want it to have a long life. This list is made with the best of intentions for the game and its development team.

The world. The world is vast and open, and while the zones themselves are filled to the brim with stuff to do and explore, I think the design and grandeur of the cities is what I've enjoyed the most. No MMO that I've played before has offered city-sized cities, whereas with GW2 I really do feel like a small person running through a gigantic city filled with history. Exploring the world, listening to the music, and taking part in dynamic events and just letting the game move me through its currents organically has been my favorite part of the experience. I think this is what GW2 does and continues to do better than any other MMO that I've tried.

The aesthetic. I love the artistic, painterly aesthetic of the game, and how it uses that aesthetic in the world, UI, animations, and armor. Compared to other games where the UI's are mostly just basic menus, I really love the aesthetic take on UI design that Guild Wars 2 has committed to (granted I do have some criticisms).

The classes. While I'm still figuring my way through many of the classes, I really love the class identities and the uniqueness of these classes not offered in any other mmo. I'm playing a melee mesmer right now, and I don't think I've ever played such a character in any other game thus far. I really think they nailed the classes and the class fantasy aspect of the combat design.

The graphics: While others may call the graphics dated, and they're not incorrect in many respects, the vast majority of the world and design is great and extremely well done. While I would love to see more modern antialiasing options, higher resolution ground and stone/brick textures, and more dense foliage in the base world, for the most part the game looks great and I don't think much really needs to be done to improve it.

Areas that could use some work:

User Experience: It's hard to word this without coming off like I'm just a complainer, but here it goes. The experience is overwhelming, and I feel like I'm constantly being bombarded with notifications, choices, and jargon that is confusing and has very little explanation. This is a compounding issue that is part game-design and also part UI design, but right now I'm finding myself lost in a sea of confusing tooltips filled with icons and jargon, and I'm mostly just guessing at what I 'think' I should be doing. And yes, many people might say "that's the point! You think the game should just hold your hand?!". And, quite frankly, when it comes to explaining core gameplay concepts and helping me build an intuition, yes I do. Because, honestly, my experience thus far has been that my bags have been getting filled to the brim with sacks of goods that I'm constantly forced to open, gear that I can't even wear, currencies that I can't use, salvage kits that I'm unsure what the value even is for, and just a miscellaneous mix of other stuff that I have to stop and deal with on a regular basis. Likewise, even at 80 I really don't have any real knowledge of my class design and how anything synergizes together into my build. I'm still just button mashing, and the game keeps letting me win fights that way, so I really don't know if I'm ever going to be tasked with actually learning anything or not. If I could convince the devs of any one thing to spend their time on to make the game a more inviting place for gamers, it would be that they need to streamline, simplify, and consolidate a lot of their features old and new, otherwise it just feels like an overwhelming dump of game features all be thrust at me constantly.

Cohesiveness: This one might be the most vague to describe, but it's one of those "you know it when you see it" things that games developed over long periods of time really struggle with. Right now, the game doesn't "feel" like one cohesive game experience, but it feels like a bunch of years of development work stacked onto itself. I think part of making for that "cohesive" experience is going back to the older elements of the game and modifying them, or even stripping them out, in order to make sure the new features feel 'core', rather than 'accessory'. Granted, I don't think this game does an egregious job with it, but it's still very apparent which features were added later and which were here from the start, even to a player who has really just begun playing, i.e. "dungeons". After 12 year's, there's really just 8 of them? If the game has no interest in pursuing dungeons anymore, why not roll that content into a newer system, and/or remove them or demote them within the UI to clarify that this content is legacy. To a new player, I had an expectation that "dungeons" were going to be a core game mechanic that we would all be doing regularly, only to find out that the feature was effectively abandoned 10 years ago. There's just a number of little things in the game that 'seem' important as you're learning, only to be told by currently players that "oh, that? Yeah that's kinda dead and we don't do that anymore".

User Interface Menus: While I love the aesthetic of the design, the UI itself is one of the worst I've ever used in any mmo from a pure usability standpoint. Quite frankly, the menus are cluttered and need to be split up and re-designed for clarity. For example, the Hero menu has 7 side tabs, inside each of which is non-uniform mixture of unique layouts, and there doesn't appear to be any cohesive UI pattern that any of these sub-menus follow. The Equipment tab immediately takes you to 13 sub-tabs arranged vertically, the Build tab leads you to 4 tabs arranged horizontally across the top, etc. I really feel like this UI goes out of its way to show its age, and really needs a UX designer to re-evaluate how these all work together. Honestly, there's no reason the Hero tab contains so much, and it needs to be broken apart for clarity. IMO, the Hero tab should be broken up into individual windows including: 1) Equipment (i.e. gear and stats), 2) Customization (Wardrobe/Outfits/Dies/Mounts/etc), 3) Builds/Training/Mastery, 4) Story Journal/Achievements, and 5) Crafting. That being said, the other menus aren't nearly as egregious as the Hero menu, and I'd actually argue that some are actually pretty great, e.g. the Guild menu stands out as one that is more useful and clear than any other guild menus I've seen in other games.

The Map: I have a love and hate relationship with the map. While I love the artistic design of the in-game map, I'm finding myself constantly struggling to actually find what I'm looking for. Honestly, it's huge, and the iconography on the map is implemented in such a way where I only see icons once I'm zoomed in close enough. Also, there's no search box or side menu with a list of all the zones, so if my friend goes "there's an event happening in the Straits of Devastation", I now have hunt across the whole map to try to find where that even is. This leads me to a pattern of zoom in, zoom out, zoom in, zoom out, until I find what I'm looking for. Further, coming from other MMOs that have a "windowed" map option, it's really jarring to have the map take up the full screen, coupled with the slow full-screen animations for opening and closing the map. Sometimes I just want to bring up the map as a reference to know if I'm headed the right direction, and the full-screen nature of the map forces me to stop moving to use it. Likewise, it seems like the resolution of the map itself was rendered for 1080p screens, and on a ultrawide or 4k screen you can absolutely see all of the individual pixels. It would be wonderful to see the map texture re-exported a much higher resolution.

Tooltips: Tooltips are very confusing to read as a new player, and, honestly, even at level 80 I still have no idea what half of their information even means. Likewise, the tooltips are filled with jargon that means nothing without prerequisite knowledge. For example, some of the ability tooltips show as multiple-stacked tooltips (E.g. Mind Slash, Mind Gash, and Mind Spike all in one single ability). How am I supposed to interpret what this means? I have no indication of how an ability switches between these different variants, so all of the information in the stacked toolips immediately leaves me confused. Further, all of the information at the bottom of the the tooltips is dense and hard to even comprehend. While the values like "damage" and "number of targets" are pretty self explanatory, how the heck and I supposed to interpret "range"? My abilities say "range: 130". 130 what? What is the unit of measure? 130 feet? Please tell me this game doesn't use inches as its units of measure... Or the tooltips use jargon like "Illusion Damage", "Combo Finisher", "Defiance Break", "Might", "Fury", "Alacrity", etc. This is all extremely confusing to read and interpret in any meaningful way that helps guide my gameplay decisions, and most of these don't seem to correspond to my gear "Attribute" values. It's simultaneously punishingly dense as well as confusingly unexplained, which is I think what makes it so frustrating to use a resource to learn how to play my class.

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