The week­end was quite lit­er­ally a doze of eupho­ria as I’ve waited for far too long.  I grew tired of the end­less streams of game­play videos, media pre­views, or even offi­cial blogs as they no longer sat­isfy my hunger.  After play­ing Guild Wars 2’s Beta Week­end Event, I now feel tran­quil (or per­haps, withdrawal?)

Peo­ple say a pic­ture is worth a thou­sands of words, and I say a week­end of play­ing is worth a thou­sands of game­play videos.  So before I say any­thing neg­a­tive, I just want to point that that: It was a pleasure.

Now get­ting to the point… In this BWE I played only one character–a Charr Engi­neer of Iron Legion–and put all my time into the vast PvE con­tent  (any­one sur­prised?  Yes, I’m a carebearcat).  Though the per­sonal story (main story quest chain) ends at lv20 in this beta, I some­how got to lv27… mostly by casu­ally attend­ing dynamic events and com­plete local quests.  Although the beta expe­ri­ence still upholds my gen­eral expec­ta­tion to Guild Wars 2, there are sev­eral major issues, dis­cussed below the cut, that must be addressed by the developers.

Server capac­ity

Are­naNet tem­porar­ily shelved pre-purchasing of the game on their web­site for a rea­son.  The rea­son became obvi­ous a few hours into the BWE on Fri­day, as the server then became extremely laggy, and con­se­quently had to be rebooted.  Same thing hap­pened on Sat­ur­day rather unex­pect­edly, and this time the server stayed down longer than an hour.

Yet I don’t fore­see server capac­ity to be a huge prob­lem after the launch fever is past.  The solu­tion for heavy traf­fic should be easy; it is more about quan­tity of servers, than debug­ging code or bal­anc­ing game con­tent.  Either way, play­ers should have the option to switch to a less pop­u­lated server (for free of course, at launch).  The cur­rent “over­flow” mechanic works as adding an extra “chan­nel” to a sup­pos­edly single-instance zone on a server that expe­ri­ences high traf­fic.  A com­mon fea­ture within MMO games, though game­play rea­sons, such as how dynamic events favor sin­gle instance field on a shard, makes sense.  Yet the sys­tem does not have the flex­i­bil­ity of sim­ply switch­ing chan­nels: play­ers have reported that they were sep­a­rated from their friends and other party mem­bers, with­out ways to get back together other than wait­ing on a queue to get into the main instance.

The next BWE will def­i­nitely have the same amount–if not more–people par­tic­i­pat­ing, thus I truly ANet will add more servers by that time.

Game client graph­ics optimization

This issue has been brought up repeat­edly, and ANet is aware of it.  Cur­rently the beta build of the client is badly opti­mized, and peo­ple such as myself, with mid to high tier rigs mostly have low frame rates at crowded areas, while the hard­ware being under-utilized.  Starter racial starter cities have mas­sive struc­tures, and with the huge influx of new play­ers at start of the beta, I can only cat­e­go­rize the expe­ri­ence as excru­ci­at­ing, see­ing my frame rate dropped around 10~15 FPS if I stay in cer­tain area.  It is said that the game is cur­rently CPU-bound and not using enough GPU for what­ever it means.  The CPU con­sump­tion I was get­ting is around 80%, yeah… I still think I’d call some­thing CPU-bound if some­thing slaves my Quad Core Q9400 around 100% usage, like Bat­tle­field 3.

Need­less to say, this must be fixed.  Good thing is that ANet acknowl­edged the issue, and I can only assume that they’ll start work­ing on it soon.

PvE Dif­fi­cul­ties

Not say­ing that PvE in GW2 is too hard… but more bal­anc­ing is much needed.  From what I’m read­ing gw2guru and the offi­cial beta forums, Engi­neers and Mes­mers are the two pro­fes­sions require most player skills to play, while Ranger and Ele­men­tal­ists are the eas­i­est to play in PvE.  I can under­stand design prin­ci­ples that inevitably make some pro­fes­sions “harder” (as in player skills).  Yet it is rather odd for some Rangers com­plain the PvE is a “repet­i­tive skill spam”, while I had to do trial-and-error using my skill points the hard way to iden­tify the good and crap skills of my own profession.

Another more observ­able dis­crep­ancy is that the Charr start­ing areas (lv1~25) are vis­i­bly harder than that of Norn’s.  The Norn fields are more open and have less sit­u­a­tions where NPC foes are closely cramped up together, which is prob­lem­atic for all pro­fes­sions, and lethal to ranged pro­fes­sions that rely on kit­ing.  ANet is aware of this and adjust­ment is expected in the future.  Hope­fully the Sal­vari and Asura start­ing areas, which are unavail­able dur­ing this beta, will be more or less bal­anced once play­ers are allowed to play those two races.

Melee vs ranged on bosses

Some­what an exten­sion to the pre­vi­ous topic.  The gen­eral design phi­los­o­phy for GW2’s PvE is: Melee -> higher risk of tak­ing hits but deals more dam­age, and ranged -> lower risk of tak­ing hits but deals less dam­age.  It is a sim­ple for­mula fits GW2’s com­bat sys­tem, which is adver­tised as a com­plete lack of tra­di­tional “holy trin­ity”: Tank, DPS, and Healer.

Bar­ring some iso­lated quirks, melee and ranged attacks work in syn­ergy.  All pro­fes­sions in GW2 can wield at least one ranged weapon; though unsur­pris­ingly, some pro­fes­sions are bet­ter at melee and some are at ranged attacks.  The prob­lem arises when most boss crea­tures in GW2 has nasty PBAoE that makes melee an infe­rior option com­pare to deal­ing dam­age at a dis­tance.  In the­ory, melee char­ac­ters can dodge and use skills to mit­i­gate dam­age.  But in prac­tice, those bosses hit hard (as much as 2 hits kill a full HP char­ac­ter at same level), and com­bined with insur­mount­able dis­trac­tion as the result of the game ren­der­ing a huge amount of over­done par­ti­cle effects, and higher net­work latency asso­ci­ated with being in the same place with many other play­ers, this has become a pri­or­ity issue.

Once again, Are­naNet is noted of the issue.  Though to bal­anc­ing out melee and ranged skills is no small feat, espe­cially for the pos­si­ble impli­ca­tion on PvP.  On a plus side, I heard melee and ranged are bal­anced in pvp, where many play­ers favor to get close up and personal.

GUI and “Hid­den Features”

It was a minor frus­tra­tion to find out about two minor, yet vin­di­cat­ing fea­tures of GW2, after the BWE was over.  First of them: craft­ing mate­ri­als can be directly “send” to player character’s bank, which has a spe­cial vault that stores all kinds of mate­r­ial with­out clut­ter­ing up the nor­mal space.  Another one is the “switch weapon” hot key that sup­pos­edly allow the player to have two sets of weapons equipped and swapped at will in com­bat.  Cruel humor it is, in a sense that these fea­tures are of the “if nobody told me it was pos­si­ble I’ve have never guessed” kind.

Good thing I know them now, so I’ll have less hatred toward man­ag­ing my inven­tory dur­ing the next BWE.

I sup­pose the only other beef I have against the GUI depart­ment is the cam­era con­trol.  It looks like a hybrid between GW1 and Tera, where I can only move using 4 direc­tional keys, but with­out the TPS aim lock­ing scheme that Tera sports.  I really miss the abil­ity to click on ground and move; I think the only rea­son to remove mouse cur­sor move­ment is to make mouse move­ment tie to cam­era, like Tera.  But in GW2, right click­ing is nec­es­sary to move the cam­era angle, and often than not, hold­ing RMB for an extended amount of time is tir­ing.  AWSD move­ment is fine, but hav­ing to press F1 to F8 and 1 to 0 keys while mov­ing is ask­ing for either super­hu­man abil­i­ties, or a com­pletely remap of the skill hotkeys.

While ANet has not acknowl­edge this being on their back­log in any way, I’ll be remap­ping my keys.  I think F1~F4 can use QERT key, 5~8 change to FGCV, heal to C and elite skill to X.  Not sure about F5~F8 since they are gen­er­ally not impor­tant enough.

Con­clu­sion

Guild Wars 2 still does not have a release date as of now, and the gen­eral con­sen­sus believes the game will not launch until Q3 of 2012.  From the obser­va­tion of this BWE, I fully agree that it will take even the best team over two months to fin­ish pol­ish­ing this game to a releasable state.  Guild Wars 1 has been a pol­ished prod­uct since long time ago, so I don’t have a rea­son to doubt ArenaNet’s abil­ity as of now.  The next BWE will be the golden oppor­tu­nity to eval­u­ate ArenaNet’s progress, and until then, I con­sider my pre-purchase still a money well spent for all the other good qual­i­ties of this game.