In the loop

Coming to the close of this 24 hours of Guild Wars 2, I'm surprised at how it's turned out.

I won't deny that I went back to this game with the the expectation that it would be a one and done.  As I said at the start there's a reason why this was the last MMO on my original list that I came back to, and so I'm somewhat surprised to find that I've enjoyed my time back in GW2 more than I expected to, and it may make a return in my next rotation.

So what's changed in the sx years or so since I last adventured through this world?

Well, for one thing I've chalked up a lot more time in a lot more MMOs since then, which perhaps makes me more appreciative of certain aspects of this one - like the way it is quite determinedly not trying to be World of Warcraft.

In 2014 I felt starved of options by the small number of active combat skills available to me in this game, but since then with the time I've spent in Neverwinter I now have a far better feel for active(ish) combat than I did then.  Aside from that the combat flow also feels smoother now, with the secondary abilities in particular feeling more useful than they were when I last played.  I can't say for sure whether that's due to changes made to the game over the years, or it's just that I'm a more experienced player now than I was then.  Likely it's both.

There's a lot of other ways in which this game differs from the template popularised by WoW, and seeing as I've talked about several of them in previous posts I won't go back over them all now.  It doesn't all work, but it's mostly solidly designed and functional.  In general the game looks good, sounds great* and plays well.

*The sound design in this game is simply fantastic - the music neither overwhelms everything else nor fades too far into the background, weapon hits have real impact, and the background chatter of NPCs and the shouts of hostile mobs never feel out of place.

Still, even allowing that my attitude toward the game is a lot more positive now than it used to be, I still feel think the game can get unduly repetitive.  It's not actually All Centaurs All The Time, but GW2 does have a very specific gameplay loop - enter new area, complete tasks (and nearby events), move to next unexplored area, repeat - and it rarely ventures far outside this loop.  It can lead to the game feeling one note, although it's a good note, and very well played.

Also contributing to this is something else I've mentioned before - nothing lasts very long.  Locations zip by very quickly, especially since the Hearts system means that it's possible at times to complete all the objectives for an area before you've more than glanced around, and the game is arguably too good at ushering the player from one Point of Interest to the next.*

*Once this mindset takes hold it can be quite disconcerting to discover a detailed location that isn't a POI or a Vista or otherwise Something To Do.  There's a strong sense of 'what am I missing here?' about those areas.

There's often not much sense of place, and there's also rarely any sense of pushing deep into an unknown area, since a TP back to base is never far away.  Sure, I can do that in other MMOs as well, but I can't usually do it nearly so often, nearly so easily, or to nearly so many possible destinations.  Just as the world of Neverwinter can feel small due to it being so easy to travel directly from any zone to any other zone, so the zones of Guild Wars 2 can feel small due to it being so easy to travel to just about any point from just about any other point.

This ease of travel is convenient, and certainly fits in well with the MMORPG-without-the-boring-bits design philosophy that is so prevalent throughout GW2, but I still feel that at times it makes the game less than it could be.

I don't think I'll ever love Guild Wars 2 the way I love some other games in this genre.  The thin story combined with the relentless gamification of everything I do makes it one of the least immersive MMOs I've played, and yet if I had to recommend an MMO to someone who had never played one before I'd probably point them to this game, because it's incredibly user friendly, and for all the criticisms I've made of it (and a few I haven't made of it - yet) it's very fun in the moment.  So much so that I might return to it sooner than I'd have expected.