And now for something completely different...

Yeah, it's a lot fancier than my usual armament, but at least I know how to hit things with my sword.

I want to talk about mini-games in MMOs - more specifically the ones that hand you a whole new skill bar that you have to use for an encounter - and why they almost always suck.

 

For example, there's a sequence in the Scorched Desert in Secret World Legends where the player character is captured and temporarily depowered, so you have to fight your way out using a set of hand-to-hand combat abilities. It's honestly excruciating to play through.

Back to this game, and here's the problem: Guild Wars 2 has really solid combat that offers a good enough selection of abilities that allow the player to customize their playstyle without overwhelming them with too many options all at once. From time to time I'll tweak which abilities I use, but for the most part I stick with what I know, what I'm used to, what I can at this point use with a reflexive, instinctive understanding of what each one does and how often I can use it.

 So an encounter that hands me a completely different set of abilities and tells me I must use them is going to throw all that experience out the window. Suddenly I don't know what any of this stuff does, and since I'm only using it for one battle and will then never use it again, I've got neither the time nor the inclination to learn it. Button mashing ensues.

GW2 has done this to me twice in the latest stage of the personal story. The first time it handed me a weapon - a fairly nifty looking blaster that wouldn't have looked out of place in City of Heroes - and since it only came with three built-in skills, each with a very specific use in the encounter, it worked out okay... except it ran out of ammo, or I broke it by using it as a club too many times, or it just glitched out.. and vanished. With no way to replace it and no way to complete the encounter without it, I had to quit and then restart the instance. Looking at forums this has been a known issue for years, but has never been fixed.

But glitches aside, it's a simple enough encounter. The next one on the other hand...

The next one, a couple of sequences later, gave me an entire row of new attacks, most of which were only vaguely explained, and threw me straight into a fight against a horde of undead. The middle of a swarm of enemies isn't a great place for careful tactical thinking at the best of times. The story was telling me I'd been transformed into an incredibly powerful avatar of mass murder - that's not a paraphrase either - while in the gameplay I was thrashing around trying to remember which button did what, and dying a couple of times before I button mashed my way to the end of it. When an NPC said regretfully that I wouldn't be able to use this superweapon a second time I felt nothing but relief.

I've learned how to play my character over dozens of hours. Don't suddenly give me effectively an entirely different character to play and expect the resulting experience to be anything other than an exercise in bafflement and frustration.