Zero Punctuation: Guild Wars 2

[Aardvaarkman]

At last! The Escapist Expo is no longer on in September!

 

[Furrama]

so basically you want a lot of story but you don't want to get it through:

-in game text
-novels
-outside info (wiki, previous games in the series)

you didn't comment on NPC chatter, but I'm guessing you're not too keen on that either.

That pretty much just leaves cut scenes, right? is that what you want, hours and hours of cut scenes?

Noooooo!! What? Cut scenes? Really? I'm talking about in game integration of a story rather then element's that take you out and you jump to cut scenes? You know, unfolding the story through the game play rather then breaking it up and making them separate entities. How are cut scenes any better? You can have a story come out through the actual game play you know. It has been done. A lot. Hell even the Elder Scrolls games which had mountains of text didn't require you to stop and read every book to get an understanding for the story. Elements that brings the game play to a halt, sits you down, and dumps piecemeal exposition on your head as a means to further story in an interactive medium is wrong.

It's about flow, accessibility, and integration into game play. If someone genuinely interested in story, said there's none to be found then the developers messed up on that one. I'm sure that all these elements could have been used well. Except for outside info story should at the very least be somewhat part of the game - I actually can't believe you think that's in any way acceptable. Novels too shouldn't be a primary means of story and only supplemental at best. In game text is a tad antiquated too but proper presentation can kind of make it work in an rpg setting, although it's never ideal either.

I have no problem's with npc's which is why I never mentioned them although it does come back to accessibility. Which npc's hold the key bits of story versus how likely you are to hear those bits from them. How cohesive to the whole each story fragment is so the main story doesn't get lost among the information relevant to that second and the quest at hand. These are done horribly in MMO's because the shear amount of exposition most of which is obviously irrelevant (do I really care about farmer X's irrigation issue's? I have dragons to slay!) makes it easy to tune out and miss the small pieces that are. This is also a failing of presentation going back to text boxes earlier as they are usually visually ugly things that grow more so the more you make the effort to read them and find out they told you nothing of interest or relevance to your story.

A lot of interesting story bits are there, you just have to dig for them. Hidden areas, little NPC conversations you might catch, in game books, funny and sad gravestone markers. I think they were attempting to make it so that if you didn't care about the story it wouldn't really bother you too much if you didn't want it to. If you poke around and look in cracks and read everything there is a lot of information in game. But if you aren't looking you'll miss it, and it's all very easy to miss.

Not sure if I like that approach, but I can kinda understand what they were going for.

 

[AdamG3691]

Very circus themed this week. Did he meet a clown at the expo?

that is actually a real part of the human storyline

time for your mind to be blown even more: you can actually play as a combat stage magician who bounces around summoning illusions, flashy butterflies, uses swords and pistol for romantic literature duelling, and flays the minds of the innocent with magic that can rend the very fabric of spacetime.


kinda disappointed he picked the human storyline though, it's definitely the weakest of the five, you also have norn (giant guys who live in mountains, are part polar bear and can turn into werewolves/bears/leopards/ravens), asura (arrogant magitech gnomes who look like small version of ET, and have a habit of making things float and have the mentality of "if all else fails, strap it to a golem")
sylvari (welsh plant people who glow in the dark, have a hive mind and could actually be the servants of either the world itself, or an undiscovered elder dragon)
and charr (giant cat people who kill gods and deity-esque beings, make giant war machines, are surprisingly comedic for what is pretty much a giant army (meatoberfest and the cattlepult are great), and live in the death star)

each one has a unique storyline with so many branches it's not even funny:
5 races, each has three choices at the start, then another three for the second part of the opening zone story, then ANOTHER three for which guild/order you want to join, then three MORE for which of the less developed races you want to help, then two more for getting assistance in the final battle, and then a final three based on a choice you make earlier in the storyline.

so: 5*3*3*3*3*2*3 = 2430 unique combinations of storylines


also, I'm not sure how far yahtzee got in the game, but the elder dragons DO have a large part, the charr are fighting The Branded, servants of an elder dragon that destroyed half of their levelling zones, the norn fight The Icebrood, servants of another elder dragon, there are also The Destroyers, which serve the elser dragon that fored the asure out of their homes, there are hints that The Sylvari are servants of an elder dragon that have become corrupt and turned good, and The Risen, which appear in nearly all of the south and southwestern zones and the storyline is all about killing their creator, the elder dragon Zhaitan, from lv 20 onwards, hell the lv 70-80 zones take place in Orr, the original human country which is now zhaitan's seat of power, and the non-racial zones south of lion's arch (the non-racial capital) are all about preparing to fight them


as for the "only buy the skills you want" it really depends on what you're doing, but by the end, once you've got all of the skills, the points are still useful because you use them to buy items used in the mystic forge to get awesome items (also, the heal he was talking about is wrong, since he's a necro, he'll have been talking about consume conditions, which heals you based on the conditions YOU have, not your enemy, why would you want that? because you also have an ability to transfer conditions from your allies to you, and not only that, once you've got this concentration of nastiness on you, you can send it to an enemy, and then spread it to all the enemies nearby, also, lots of your abilities cause conditions on both the enemy and yourself, so eating the conditions is a good way of removing that problem... although why yahtzee would be using consume conditions is beyond me, since he's using the minionmaster build he should have been using the blood fiend ability, wheras consume conditions is for conditionmancers)

 

[AdamG3691]

Very circus themed this week. Did he meet a clown at the expo?

You can actually choose that circucs thing as a backstory, when you're making a character.

Wait.........seriously?

Given your avatar I know what you are about to go do ;D

Kefka is more than a mere clown!

it is entirely possible to make a mesmer or elementalist, dress them up in a set called Conjurer's x (where x is the piece of clothing, like conjurer's mantle), dye each piece infdividually to give them a jester style colour palette, and make choices in dialog trees that give your character the personality of kefka.

I know it's possible because I've done it on my mesmer
homicidally insane giant cat stage magicians FTW

 

[juangarcia2007]

Guild Wars 2

This week, Zero Punctuation reviews Guild Wars 2.

Watch Video

Oh look everyone, Yahtzee's doing a review of a mmorpger again!!! BING!!! Thank you hero of the hour! Here's a pile of experience and money now piss off!! LOL

 

[GenGenners]

Very circus themed this week. Did he meet a clown at the expo?

You can actually choose that circucs thing as a backstory, when you're making a character.

Wait.........seriously?

Given your avatar I know what you are about to go do ;D

Kefka is more than a mere clown!

it is entirely possible to make a mesmer or elementalist, dress them up in a set called Conjurer's x (where x is the piece of clothing, like conjurer's mantle), dye each piece infdividually to give them a jester style colour palette, and make choices in dialog trees that give your character the personality of kefka.

I know it's possible because I've done it on my mesmer
homicidally insane giant cat stage magicians FTW

I'm going to be a massive fanboy now and ask whether you based your design on his original Yoshitaka Amano artwork/Dissidia render, or his FFVI in-game appearance?

 

[mattaui]

I've got characters of all races and all professions (hooray for cheap gems and farming crafting mats), and the charr seem to do the best job in the early levels of hooking you into the lore. I'd dabbled in GW1, so I knew the basics, but it's very interesting to see the previous 'bad guys' presented in a sympathetic light. So you come to understand the conflict between the humans and the charr, and how you've got a human-charr alliance (in effect) that wants peace, but also humans (separatists) and charr (renegades) who want to continue the war.

Perhaps the charr pull you in because they're a little more front and center, beset by the ghosts of Ascalon from the start, while the human starting areas do feel a little safe and inconsequential. Could be also that the charr are just more interesting, being giant hulking beasts that defeated their own false gods, invented the printing press and love explosives (like the charrzooka).

I don't think enough was said about the much more dynamic and action-oriented gameplay, either. I know it's not the first to implement such a thing, but it's just a lot more entertaining and visceral. It made it very hard to go back to standing still and mashing buttons in more traditional MMOs.

But like others noted, this was a somewhat positive review, even if I felt it was more of a review of a first impression of one part of a much bigger game.

 

[AdamG3691]

Very circus themed this week. Did he meet a clown at the expo?

You can actually choose that circucs thing as a backstory, when you're making a character.

Wait.........seriously?

Given your avatar I know what you are about to go do ;D

Kefka is more than a mere clown!

it is entirely possible to make a mesmer or elementalist, dress them up in a set called Conjurer's x (where x is the piece of clothing, like conjurer's mantle), dye each piece infdividually to give them a jester style colour palette, and make choices in dialog trees that give your character the personality of kefka.

I know it's possible because I've done it on my mesmer
homicidally insane giant cat stage magicians FTW

I'm going to be a massive fanboy now and ask whether you based your design on his original Yoshitaka Amano artwork/Dissidia render, or his FFVI in-game appearance?

a bit of both, it's difficult to get a match with the sprite since there is so little detail compared to the models in GW2, but at the same time, the detail on the dissidia one makes it hard to match the armour as well, also the RPing personality is based on the dissidia version, it's hard to RP as an insane god of magic when you aren't actually one, it's impossible to get it looking exactly like it (obvoiusly, after all, they can't just put in "kefka armour"), but you can get pretty close with the right combination, and things like the spiky collar from the sprite are there if you know where to find them, but it's more of a question of "can you get the colours you want?" because they change depending on material and lighting, for example, gold dye on cloth is just a golden yellow, but on metals it's actually golden metal, and this can cause problems, on my necro it works great, because what looks like a dark green ends up looking like a greenish oil slick and matches the colour of the spell effects perfectly when using cabalist's gear (skulls, summoning circles, it's really good looking on necros), but it just looks silly when not using it because it doesn't have the right reflections on other materials. I could get Abyss, which is a VERY dark blue/green/black, and considered the darkest black available, but it costs about three gold, which takes DAYS of grinding to get, same problem with things like white, or any desirable colour


I will also say this:
see the hat the red mage in my avatar is wearing?
it's ingame as a medium armour piece
(unfortunately, I haven't been able to find one that also has the mask from the original sprite T_T)

 

[scw55]

I play GW2. I agree with Yahtzee, I still will carry on playing it.

Misunderstanding of the Skill Points thing but that's fair enough as I didn't know about the end game thingy later on.
-
He forgot to mention if you roll a Charr and use the Heritage Light Armour set and dye it appropriately, you're a Feline Phantom of the Opera.

 

[AdamG3691]

I play GW2. I agree with Yahtzee, I still will carry on playing it.

Misunderstanding of the Skill Points thing but that's fair enough as I didn't know about the end game thingy later on.
-
He forgot to mention if you roll a Charr and use the Heritage Light Armour set and dye it appropriately, you're a Feline Phantom of the Opera.

Heritage armour looks GREAT on charr, it's one of the few easily accessible* light armours that you can get in the early game that doesn't look ridiculous on a charr.
glory/orchid with antique gold or autumn trim is great for mesmers, ebony with green trim is great for necros, and autumn with antique gold trim is great for elementalists (I tried it out on a friends account who has heritage armour, it was GLORIOUS)

*(I say easy in the context of "if you played GW1, it is easy to get in GW2, if you didn't play GW1, it's impossible")

 

[GenGenners]

Very circus themed this week. Did he meet a clown at the expo?

You can actually choose that circucs thing as a backstory, when you're making a character.

Wait.........seriously?

Given your avatar I know what you are about to go do ;D

Kefka is more than a mere clown!

it is entirely possible to make a mesmer or elementalist, dress them up in a set called Conjurer's x (where x is the piece of clothing, like conjurer's mantle), dye each piece infdividually to give them a jester style colour palette, and make choices in dialog trees that give your character the personality of kefka.

I know it's possible because I've done it on my mesmer
homicidally insane giant cat stage magicians FTW

I'm going to be a massive fanboy now and ask whether you based your design on his original Yoshitaka Amano artwork/Dissidia render, or his FFVI in-game appearance?

a bit of both, it's difficult to get a match with the sprite since there is so little detail compared to the models in GW2, but at the same time, the detail on the dissidia one makes it hard to match the armour as well, also the RPing personality is based on the dissidia version, it's hard to RP as an insane god of magic when you aren't actually one, it's impossible to get it looking exactly like it (obvoiusly, after all, they can't just put in "kefka armour"), but you can get pretty close with the right combination, and things like the spiky collar from the sprite are there if you know where to find them, but it's more of a question of "can you get the colours you want?" because they change depending on material and lighting, for example, gold dye on cloth is just a golden yellow, but on metals it's actually golden metal, and this can cause problems, on my necro it works great, because what looks like a dark green ends up looking like a greenish oil slick and matches the colour of the spell effects perfectly when using cabalist's gear (skulls, summoning circles, it's really good looking on necros), but it just looks silly when not using it because it doesn't have the right reflections on other materials. I could get Abyss, which is a VERY dark blue/green/black, and considered the darkest black available, but it costs about three gold, which takes DAYS of grinding to get, same problem with things like white, or any desirable colour


I will also say this:
see the hat the red mage in my avatar is wearing?
it's ingame as a medium armour piece
(unfortunately, I haven't been able to find one that also has the mask from the original sprite T_T)

Yeah, I know what you mean by colours on different materials. It's impossible to make things look just right. I try my best though

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

M'kay, I try to give Yahtzee some leeway, and I'll admit of his MMO reviews, this one is definitely the least scathing. However as someone who's playing GW2, I think his criticism that there is no plot is a complete load. GW2 has just as much plot as WoW did at the start of its release. Yahtzee says the only thing resembling a plot was the fact the elder dragons have woken up and are threatening the world, but outside of that there's no real sense of what your role in it is. Well what did the base WoW game start you out with? Hell, I don't even remember them announcing the primary antagonist with that one, you were just supposed to follow the quest lines until you eventually were lead up to Ragnaros, or whatever his name was. It wasn't until the expansions they began letting you know who you would ultimately be fighting at the end.

The problem here seems to be Yahtzee is completely ignoring the back story in the game. I wouldn't expect him to read both of the novels they came out with and give a full synopsis of the backstory in his video, but he could at least acknowledge it. He says there's no plot outside the elder dragons, completely ignoring things like the 250 years of conflict between the humans and the charr and the tentative alliance they're now forming, the creation and emergence of the sylvari, the doom of Ascalon, I mean holy crap that's a lot to just gloss over.

Which part of your explanation am I supposed to find reasonable: that I should be willing to wait for future expansions for a plot to emerge(and no, the state of previous games does not excuse this one), or that I should have to buy and read a couple of novels to understand what's going on?

This sounds like the sort of reasoning people use when they try to convince Yahtzee that it's okay for the single player mode of a game to be shit if the multiplayer mode is good.

The story is fine but not great by general standards. There is a plot and the only thing that is left a bit lacking is the explanation of Destiny's Edge's back story but Guild Wars 2 does not deliver its story like a lot of other games. It does it a bit more like Half Life 2. By that I mean you get a solid story that is not great but not bad if you just do the personal story. If you take the time to explore, talk to NPCs read, stuff on statues and listen to NPC conversations you learn a lot about the world that you may or not already know.

Once you get to the level 30 zones the story does become quite urgent as you really start to see the Elder Dragons effects. You start off at the bottom and work your way up. In those areas you see plenty of Branded, Icebrood, Risen, etc which are all servants of Dragons and most quests involve stopping their influence. You even get events dedicated to killing some of the Dragon's Champions and Lieutenants as well as repelling attacks.

I know it' common practice in these games, but having little things to click on to give you an exposition dump, no matter how flowery the words they use, is a terrible way to integrate story into an interactive medium. If every time I want to learn a piece of the story I have to stop playing the game then that's no different from them delivering the pdf's of the book with the game and not letting you start to you get to the last page. The story and game are still basically separate entities.

If Yahtzee got through however much he played without noticing any meaningful story that is the fault of the game not the player and the only "laziness" here is the way the designers chose to integrate the story.

I think understand what you're trying to say I think but it just reminds me of people saying FF XIII was bad because it was linear. It wasn't bad because it was linear it is bad because it was just badly done. I assume you are saying the starting areas are bad because they are boring/give no urgency?

 

[iblis666]

DAMN YOU YAHTZEE!! You are supposed to talk me out of buying video games, but after watching your video a few hours latter having it eating at my insides i just bought it even though i never buy games newly released or even not on sale. I mean what the hell was that video, you usually make it sound like a mutant incestuous twin of its self with dicks sprouting all over it but this game you sounded positive.

 

[DoomBlackDragon]

If you want to see MMO story done right, try out The Secret World.


The rest of the game sucks though.

They have done alot of of work on it. I think it going in the right direction. The game is actully good. People should try it out.

DAMN YOU YAHTZEE!! You are supposed to talk me out of buying video games, but after watching your video a few hours latter having it eating at my insides i just bought it even though i never buy games newly released or even not on sale. I mean what the hell was that video, you usually make it sound like a mutant incestuous twin of its self with dicks sprouting all over it but this game you sounded positive.

Sounds like you are having buyers remorse. Yeah the games not as good as alot of people let on.

 

[Furrama]

A lot of interesting story bits are there, you just have to dig for them. Hidden areas, little NPC conversations you might catch, in game books, funny and sad gravestone markers. I think they were attempting to make it so that if you didn't care about the story it wouldn't really bother you too much if you didn't want it to. If you poke around and look in cracks and read everything there is a lot of information in game. But if you aren't looking you'll miss it, and it's all very easy to miss.

Not sure if I like that approach, but I can kinda understand what they were going for.

Sure but call a spade a spade. A bad approach is still bad no matter how deliberate it is. The whole thing also smacks of a lack of faith in their own story as a major point of interest which to me speaks volumes. I think part of it is the genre. The world is so vast with so many points of interest it's hard to co-ordinate a story through out the actual in game experience. I feel for them but that doesn't mean the end result doesn't suck it only adds a sad inevitability to it.

Edit: I should also add I don't think the game is bad. I was just responding to someone who said that Yahtzee was wrong because their is a story when I think the fact that he missed it indicates a failing of the way it was told and then I was just highlighting the points that I feel led to that.

Whether or not it sucks is a matter of opinion and what you're looking for. Plenty of people don't care about the story in games, no matter how good/bad it is. They skip cut-scenes, they care little for context, they just want to smash in heads. Some people love the rails, and feel that's what makes a story stronger. Neither are wrong.

If you read up a bit on page two somewhere you'll see I also have my own issues with the story. Mine is not the mechanism in which they deliver the story, but how badly paced it can be in places, and dissonant at times with earlier themes and whatnot. It looks less like they didn't have faith in their story, but that they didn't have time to refine in delivery. It's all there, it just didn't gel very well. The story itself isn't even that bad, it just needed some epicifying at the end and better pacing in the middle.

 

[Darks63]

By the sounds of it he did mostly pve content so it seems like half a review of the game if not 1/3 of one.

 

[FallenMessiah88]

Never really been into MMO's. However, Guild Wars 2 did manage to get my attention, mostly because I thought the world itself as well as the lore was interesting. All in all, if I'm ever going to play an MMORPG, I'm probably going to play this one.