Larsen

GW2 is a dead game. It only remains vaguely sustainable because the PvE side is a haven for collectors and casuals. It's a game with no future.

Dasryn, on 31 March 2013 - 10:43 AM, said:

It was just too primitive to support a competitive scene. No observer mode, no real tournament structure, no sensible rank or rating system, no matchmaking, and the total separation between the two sides of the game (PvP and PvE) meant there was little incentive to dabble in both. GW1 allowed you to use your PvE character in PvP, and there was a lot of prestige in doing so because you could use items with rare skins where most others had the standard issue PvP sets.

The reason people aren't discussing PvP is because this game's PvP was dead on arrival. There's almost nobody there. No competitive scene ever sprang up, no guilds ever made names for themselves, no metagame ever developed. It was stillborn and never became anything because the developers neglected most of the fundamental features that make a healthy PvP environment (most of which were in GW1, which makes their absence in GW2 all the more bizarre and tragic). Don't expect much discussion about GW2 PvP -- there's nobody around to talk about it, and there hasn't been any meaningful PvP to talk about. In fact, the best period for GW2 PvP was the beta weekends leading up to release. That was the peak of competitive PvP and the only time when anybody was remotely serious about it.

I think it was naive - profoundly stupid, really - to think they could succeed with a game with such a low ceiling. Among all those I played (and quit) with, the overwhelming reason for disappointment has been the absence of purpose in GW2.

There's something to be said of the actual quality of the existing features as well, of course -- they're not exactly great, and the PvP in particular has been disastrous. However, people can live with strange design if they feel something for the game itself. Vanilla WoW wasn't exactly a masterpiece of genius design, and almost everything was vastly changed even in its first expansion, but people were able to tolerate the archaic raiding system, the nearly non-existent PvP system and the godawful class design because the fundamentals of the game made them care.

GW2 doesn't make people care. There's nothing to care about. The thing that should have been the hook - competitive PvP - was dead on arrival and tragically the game's worst feature when it should have been its best. The ceiling of a game's PvP side is as high as the players make it since the level of popularity and competition sets the ceiling. In PvE it's more about the content, and it's obvious that this was never meant to be GW2's strength. It can't carry the game, it was meant to be a side-dish to the game's supposedly groundbreaking PvP scene, but that was a catastrophe. Since this caused the game to rely on its very lean PvE side for sustenance, there was never much hope. People came for the steak, but the steak was inedible so there was nothing but potatoes and that's hardly a meal by itself.

I've always said that it was a huge mistake to shoehorn Guild Wars into an MMORPG mold without actually providing what people traditionally come to MMORPGs for. GW1 was not really an MMORPG; it was a mission-based co-op RPG with communal cities, more akin to something like Path of Exile. It was certainly not in any way comparable to games like EQ and WoW. Trying to hammer GW gameplay into an EQ/WoW-shaped hole didn't work.

The game offers nothing for casuals that any other mainstream MMORPG doesn't offer, it's just that there's nothing above that in GW2. There's nothing to make people care, and this is important even to players who never see the higher tiers of gameplay. The existence of difficult and exclusive content is what inspires ambition and drives people to care about a game, and a huge part of the appeal of traditional MMORPGs is the fact that there's such a high ceiling. People wouldn't care about WoW if there was no content above heroic dungeons. That's basically the extent of GW2. The absence of any higher content instill a lack of purpose and ambition that stifles the drive even of those players who weren't actually going to participate in a hypothetical equivalent to WoW's hardmore raids or EQ's epic quests. Just the fact that these things existed in those games was enough to make all the "lesser" content feel relevant and interesting. There was a reason for doing it, and the journey felt meaningful because there was room to grow, a higher ceiling, things to care about.

There's pretty much nothing in GW2 that you can't get in most any other MMORPG except for one thing: you can ensure that nobody's character is stronger than yours, even though you put in practically no effort. That's really the one thing GW2 offers. Its failings have reduced it to a game for people who can't put in the time (or aren't good enough at playing video games) to rise to the top, but nevertheless feel the need to not have anyone be superior to themselves. That's not much of a market to cater to, and probably not the type of player any developer would be proud of serving.

Sales numbers mean very little. You can gauge a game's critical success and popularity by how people talk about it. A succesful and thriving game is heard of all over the gaming world as people will mention it often, refer to its competitive scene, share stories about its PvE, and so on. Nobody talks about GW2, it's simply never mentioned outside of actual GW2 forums (of which there are like... three). It's a game that utterly failed to catch on because no part of it is good enough. Its PvP falls flat, its PvE is almost non-existent, there are no famous guilds, there's no competitive environment, there's no publicity whatsoever because practically nobody plays GW2 on anything more than an ultra-casual basis. It's a game that has made literally zero impression on the industry, a game that has changed nothing and accomplished nothing. This is particularly evident in its PvP aspect, which was supposed to be its selling point but tragicomically turned out to be its worst feature, but is also true of every other part of the game. It has been one of the biggest failures in the history of the MMORPG genre, almost comparable to legendary catastrophes like Warhammer Online and Age of Conan (both of which were games that initially sold pretty well for their time).