At its core it is a sandbox war economy simulator in space with some bad (optional) story tacked onto it. It offers some tutorials but most things will be learning-by-doing. The battles are quite fun and you can participate with whatever ship you like, from fighters, frigates or corvettes all the way up to destroyers and carriers. Building your own stations to fill the deliberate shortages of the NPC economies is very satisfying and the station designer is easy to use. The universe is somewhat dynamic with warring factions being able to take over territory of other factions and the Xenon faction posing a threat to everyone although these changes are slow so you won’t be rushed into defending yourself (except if you setup shop near enemy territory).
It’s the only game that really does what it does, but it has a learning curve like a brick wall, and a combo of UI & certain mechanics that make it harder than it needs to be. I still keep playing it…
If you yearn for complex space logistics with some first person space combat sprinkled on top, and can tolerate obtuse mechanics and some bugs, it’s quite fun.
Honestly, GW2 is the kind of MMO I’d play on the deck if it was compatible with a controller. It has everything to make a great controller MMO… Except the controlller support.
I set up a pretty workable controller config that I played with for like two months, but even with many hours invested in fine tuning it I just felt like I was fighting the game’s UI and I gave up.
What’s really frustrating is that the game is totally playable with a controller. ANet just needs to update the menus and it would be a fantastic experience.
Try this config. I posted about it above. It’s worked well for me to the point I’m no longer even comfortable playing GW2 on a keyboard, I’m able to react much more quickly to everything with the gamepad setup. Most important thing is always use action camera for combat and general exploration unless you specifically need the mouse for something.
I had a setup that turned on the action camera when I put my thumb on the steam decks left stick, so I was always in normal mode unless I was actively looking around or moving.
It was pretty natural and the best experience I came up with, but I still felt like it was a compromise I was frustrated to have to make.
Paste that steam link in a browser while Steam is open and it will pull up the controller config.
Control mappings have face buttons and R1/R2 as attacks, L1/L2 as button layer modifiers, Joystick mouse and more. F-keys are on the d-pad, and most mouse related functions are active while holding L1. Pressing L2+R2 heals. Back button is your "interact. L1 + R3 switches between “action” camera and regular mouse mode for aiming. Action camera is better for combat, and is the mode I use like 90% of the time. Dodge is on R3. L3 swaps weapons. There’s also key combos for all the mounts, special action abilities (N key, on L2+back)… basically, everything you could possibly want to do in-game, there’s a controller way to do it. You may need to remap some of the mount buttons, I forget if I did custom mappings for some of those, as I have a lot of mounts (everything except roller beetle and gryffon).
Hope it works for you. I think it’s a great config, but my perspective may be skewed since I’m highly accustomed to it from muscle memory and using it for years (with Xpadder even, before steam controller mapping was a thing). I’ve used this config for every single class in the game and dialed it in so I can play literally any class without issues, including ones that have a number of aiming skills like engineer and elementalist. Actually, elementalist is a blast for this, dpad was perfect for switching elements compared to fumbling with F-keys.
It’s a shame their new format of yearly expansions doesn’t really allow them to make new elite specializations. Many professions still feel unrealized in certain ways that new weapons can’t fill.
I’m thinking mostly from a fantasy angle. I’ll give some examples from the classes I play:
Warrior: lacks a spec focused on the defensive juggernaut fantasy that you infer from the class description. Hammer Spellbreaker kind of fits here but it’s a bit of a stretch of what a spellbreaker should be thematically. Also lacking is a commander/captain support spec, maybe something built around shouts and/or banners.
Elementalist: why is the only spec not about going in and smacking people in melee tempest? And even then the best weapon is the sword. There’s a reason newbs go in and try to make staff work as a ranged weapon.
Engineer: turret spec please.
Mesmer: maybe mirage kind of fits the core mesmer fantasy, but I’m not sure if the ambushes fit there. The other specs don’t really fit since it’s mostly about doing away with your clones.
Those all seem like good ones to me, too. Honestly the defensive juggernaut thing doesn’t really exist period in GW2, so I guess it’s by design. At least not compared to other RPGs. Everyone is quite squishy.
You’ve made me realize that a mesmer fantasy I miss from GW1 is a domination magic mesmer. Something that heavily punishes certain types of gameplay and doesn’t do the illusion thing. Is that what you were getting at with the mesmer part?
I wonder if they would ever consider adding new specs to only some classes instead of all at once. On one hand people would definitely rage and whine, but I could imagine that making for much better designed specs over time.
The problem with a punishment mesmer, defensive juggernaut anything, and turret engie is that they result in degenerate gameplay. Turrets can’t be allowed to succeed in PVE (see: Lake Doric), and none of these class fantasies can be allowed at all in PVP.
Turrets and juggernauts turn into turtling bunkers that either grind play to a halt or turn into raid bosses, and the only way to balance them is to essentially make the style of play unfun for the person who wants it. “Being unkillable” or “controlling this space” can’t be supported in a competitive game mode. Now, you can balance this by just splitting everything and making the specs unplayable or wildly different in competitive modes, but that means you’re now devoting the dev resources to build the thing twice (for both modes), yet players can only really enjoy it in PVE. From a design perspective, that’s a really poor return on investment for an elite spec.
Punishment mesmer worked in GW1 because you had much better defined roles in all game modes with less overlap, and there was ability parity between players and NPCs, so you could interact with an enemy mob essentially the same way you’d interact with an enemy player. In GW2, you can’t punish a playstyle because playstyles aren’t that well defined, and you can’t create a niche for hex gameplay because they gave everybody else the mesmer toys (see: Torment and Confusion). If you try to make a spec that depends on them even more than certain mesmer specs already do, the byproduct will be turning revs into gods (again). There’s also no energy denial in GW2, and you can’t give a player a bar full of interrupts because everybody already has as many interrupts as the game can support without being catastrophically unfun. GW2 is just the wrong kind of game for GW1’s mesmer–like a lot of things that were better in GW1.
If you ask me, we don’t need more elite specs. We need more non-elite specs–stuff we can combine more freely with what we already have–and we need the elites to be “de-elited” so that the power level of the vanilla specs have better parity with their elite counterparts. I know they’ve taken a pass at this before (or two or three), but it has clearly not panned out. The presence of multiple options for ranged elementalists, for example, is definitely something that needs to be supported.
Erm, that’s quite the bare bones trailer we’ve got here, somewhat underwhelming. Not every trailer is going to be Long Live the Lich or War Eternal, but come on.
I’ll reserve my judgement until I experience the new content, but it felt like a player-made machinima at best. I’m incredibly excited about the new raid
Remember to wait for the golden ultra edition on PC at 50% off before buying or you’ll miss all the dlc and 2 different versions with 20% of the content they cut out of the base game!
I dunno about this one. Waiting to see what the crowd thinks as far as reviews. Secrets of the Obscure was as mediocre as they come and I have doubts now.
Well to be fair, only Cataclysm had decent writing. HW1 lived off its world building, but being a fresh setup it did a superb job with that.
Then HW2 mostly coasted on the success of HW1 in world building, bringing much of it down with its shallow design but eh, still good enougthe problem is that by now the world is known in large parts. Bow they need to bring in actual story, especially because we know from Cataclysm that they can do that.
youtube.com
Aktywne