Crosius, on 19 January 2015 - 10:04 AM, said:
I just feel that if Anet only expands on the maps and ideas of PvE, that the PvP/WvW base of Guild Wars will be a little disgruntled and end up withering away into nothing. I will admit that if I don't see the changes I would prefer to see in this expansion, I will be extremely disappointed, much like the many others out there who probably will.
Granted the addition of new weapons or skills will bring in a nightmare of balance and totally wreck what system was in place, but that's all part of the game if you ask me. Working with the same thing over and over again can get pretty stale to me, even if it becomes progressively more fair or polished each update.
Competitive gameplay doesn't need new content in order to evolve. This game is still literally probably at least a decade from being remotely close to "solved" or skillcapped. ArenaNet could literally not release so much as a patch for the next ten years, and the meta would still continue to shift and evolve at the top tier as players get better, wells of knowledge get deeper, etc. Even relatively mature games still experience gradual evolution as top players continue to dig deep in search of techniques to gain an advantage over other top players.
On the other side, if they do add completely unwarranted new classes or weapons or levels, then it will basically "reset" the body of player knowledge and experience to a large extent. The result would be that we'd be practically playing a brand new game, but one that is objectively
worse in the long run since it would be clunkier, less elegant, and harder to balance, and so instead of re-learning the game, a lot of top players would just go learn something else instead. Hopefully ArenaNet is smart enough to recognise that this would be a bad thing.
Aduah, on 18 January 2015 - 02:37 PM, said:
So Unlike many of you, I WANT new classes, I WANT new weapons, I WANT new races, and I WANT NEW MAPS. Whole Maps, complete maps. All at once. GimmeGimmeGimmeGimmeGimme.
There is nothing wrong with diversity. and when a game has been "Solved", perfected, where the hell is the fun in that, then you dont have anything new to discover. No thanks. I'd loooooooooooooove to have a new class just to throw a wrench in people's god damn quest for perfection.
Variety for variety's sake is a poor mother to a well-designed game. This game already has
plenty of diversity. Just looking at classes, without even considering the multiple viable builds for each of them, there are already 32768 possible party compositions in Guild Wars 2. Not counting variations on a theme (e.g. Altruistic Healing Guardian and Virtues Guardian) as separate entities, I can think of 17 wholly distinct, tournament-viable builds for sPvP off the top of my head right now, and that's both being conservative about what I'm considering "tournament-viable" and not counting the as yet undiscovered/unexplored builds that absolutely certainly exist. That's already at the upper-end of the spectrum for reasonable competitive games; moreover, build diversity is significantly
higher in WvW.
So what would all that extra variety add, exactly? What roles are not being suitably filled? What niche is left open? I certainly can't see any gaps. Simplicity is the mother of all true elegance. Don't add complexity to a system unless you have a clear reason for doing so.
Quote
Subtractive Design
Subtractive design is the process of removing imperfections and extraneous parts in order to strengthen the core elements. You can think of a design as something you build up, construct and let grow, but it’s pruning away the excess that gives a design a sense of simplicity, elegance, and power. Quote
Treat your game design the same way. Yes you should explore the design space, but omit needless words, mechanics, characters, and choices. Although your primary goal regarding viable options is to make sure you’re giving the player enough options, your secondary goal should be to eliminate all the useless ones.
I can never comprehend people who complain about any PvP content (and WvW should ultimately be viewed as a form of PvP content) going "stale". Pretty much by definition, that's not really possible, because the players
are the content, and unless the game is so poorly designed as to have a clearly calculable pure solution (Guild Wars 2 certainly doesn't have to worry about this), the players will always be evolving. It's basically impossible for any competitive PvP game to remain static; the people who populate it will continually be growing in skill, knowledge, and experience, and that will inevitably change the gameplay on its own.
Personally, I can't see how anyone could view Guild Wars 2 as anything
other than a PvP game at its core. The PvE content is window dressing; the heart and soul of this game has to be the PvP side. The mechanics of Guild Wars 2--down state, dodge roll, combo fields, the class system, etc.--are amazing from a PvP standpoint and make the combat system easily the best on the market for my money. But those same mechanics that make this game amazing in PvP settings make it virtually impossible to design truly interesting PvE content, because they're just frankly impossible to balance against enemies that can't react, adapt, or participate in many of those mechanics (the day PvE mobs start stomping downstate players would be... amusing, though).
0
