I know there’s a lot of genuine challenge and difficulty in WoW, I had to retry many a mission I admit. But for me that’s a game breaking dichotomy, that the only clear road to the most hard-core rewards is yet entirely paved with the very worst elements of the experience. There’s almost like a plural catch-22 in place… there’s not much reward to be found for a casual attitude when most exploration is impossible without getting serious and structured about it. The professions are no reward at all, except as the means to get the serious gear faster. Being totally hard-core means you have to then get sidetracked by all that other crap as a routine, since again you need to get hold of that serious gear on a regular basis to survive, or more importantly to even get on teams… it’s such a tightly engineered morass. Other than the type of people for whom it’s a purely social scene, it really catered to only one rhythm and attitude of play. Though the PvP side seemed to add some options I guess.
I actually adored Guild Wars for a while, though my issues with it are many and very distinct. To say the game traumatized me is almost appropriate… I essentially developed a persecution complex within that realm, it was uncanny how many times my (many and varied) builds got screwed over within days of defining and playing them. And there was a truly reprehensible lack of responsibility in the evident attitude about game changes, considering the frequency of skill adjustments, and all the work that entailed, it seemed they yet couldn’t be bothered to reflect those changes in the wording. And the number of times I saw a single skill get dicked around with repeatedly, while the guts of certain other more favored builds that were at least as exploitable and obnoxious, languished for months unmolested; made it clear just how arbitrary their sense of ‘balance’ was on the administrative level.
Granted, the campaign / questing of Guild Wars is really really weak, mostly uninspired and extremely… flat. Even so, the system is by far the most engaging for any RPG ever, to me. Even if they did ruthlessly mine Magic the Gathering for 90% of the inspiration, they pulled it off just brilliantly. On the surface it might seem very limited and almost simplistic, but there’s far more genuine depth than anything else I’ve seen. Which actually contributes, in a round about way, to another of the biggest issues I had with the experience… most of the people playing are still locked into their cookie-cutter leets vs noobs bullshit mental prison.
My defining story about GW, as it represented to me… the first character I made, and the only one I played seriously for a long time, was a Monk with originally a Warrior secondary. The starting choice was simply that stylistically I liked the Monk, and I wanted it to be a fighting Monk, which unfortunately they don’t have any innate combat. (in game terms the Monk is really just a generic cleric class) Having made the choice, I was determined to justify the primary class and figure out how to make the most of the one exclusive attribute for Monks, which is called Divine Favor. Right from the start it zeroed me in on a certain way to play, that I could tell was extremely effective, and I played for a few days almost entirely solo, and I mean without any mercenaries either.
At about the same time I first tried jumping into the arena for some PvP, I had this quest that I knew the names of skill rewards for, and was quite sure the Paralysis one would be useful, so I finished it up before going back in the arena. But it also gave the first skill you can get that’s directly powered by the Divine Favor attribute, called Divine Boon, and as soon as I saw it I was ecstatic, it fit perfectly with how I’d already been playing. In practice it did not disappoint either, that skill along with one other basically never left my bar thereafter. OK, probably more info than needed… but between arena games and starting to play in groups more I transitioned into more support play, and became really good at it. At least I can say I got many compliments and honestly never ran across anyone else that played like my build or could pull off saves the way I did.
Now, here’s the meat of my tale… occasionally I’d have convos with people who hadn’t really seen the character in action, and most everyone seemed to have their same opinion about what made a good monk, and once I was even called a noob for using Divine Boon! The game majorly pissed me off at one point, after a couple months, pulling some horrible crap that I couldn’t really explain to anyone who doesn’t know how it works… and I quit playing. But the payoff of this (I’m sure not at all rivetting) story comes after I did pick it up again some months later, when I became aware of the “Boon/Prot” build archetype, which was well established as the most viable PvP support Monk, and was precisely what I’d been playing all along.
And I could give a few other examples of the same kind of story repeating: figuring out a build, usually finding the right skills before I even try it out, being rejected as a noob a number of times after telling people ‘what’ I am, and then some weeks later seeing someone else proudly advertising their role for a team… as that build. Guild Wars manages to underscore just how stupid and sheepish 99% of the people who play these games are, in a way no other game really could. Completely locked into a pattern of judging everyone else by what they play, rather than how they play.
And that’s why I’m permanently leery of investing my time or money in the genre, though there are many other games I have at least some interest in.