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.
I picked it up to test. So far I once got soft locked in a push animation while pushing a box another player was pushing, but otherwise the game seems nice and fun. Also it’s beautifully designed.
But this also really highlights an incredibly unexplored “setting” for Souls games (or even games as a whole): Battlefields.
To my knowledge, only Nioh 1 (and to a much lesser extent 2) ever really approached that. The feeling of being one unstoppable murder beast of a guy sprinting from cover to cover as what feels like hordes of mooks with rifles unloading on you. Diving into a trench to try and limit the directions you can be attacked from. And storming into an officer’s camp to assassinate them.
Instead, we always get there after the war (which will likely be the case here since the story stuff is almost always set “in the past” for ER) or we’ll be off on our own and just hear a few rumbles in the distance.
For games as a whole, I will go way back to Medal of Honor: Frontline. All the Medal of Honor games are about war (mostly WW2) but this one really stuck with me for its depiction of storming the beach on D-Day. You really did have to sprint from cover to cover where there was barely any while soldiers around you get mowed down by MGs from the bunkers ahead. It was intense and one wrong move would have you annihilated. There’s definitely a long list of military shooters depicting battlefields where you work your way through from cover to cover, but this one was one of the earliest I can think of that did it well, depicted a real battle, and really drove home the absolute insanity of the situation those soldiers went through.
On the complete opposite end there’s always the dynasty warriors games where you melee fight through battlefields full of soldiers, but those are ridiculous for being completely unrealistic in the process. However, they do all retell the classic stories of real battles that took place between the ancient Chinese battles, and for the ones I played pretty much every level involved navigating a huge battlefield to turn the tide between two armies clashing as you went.
Giant Lord or whatever TLG’s old name was has some vibes of it where explosions happen until the boss fight starts. But it is still very much on the outskirts of a battle with just a fancy skybox.
Definitely intriguing. Partially in awe of this labor of love. Tiny Devs successfully competing with AAA is mighty impressive. Haven’t really been big on city sims but must admit this has me curious, especially with the banner lords looking big troop combat biz.
Miiiight have to hop on the band wagon to see what the fuss is about.
I think for calling out a sponsorship on a video about greed?
I don’t generally begrudge content creators their sponsorships, gotta pay the bills somehow, god knows youtube’s going to do everything in its power to make sure videos get demonetized.
Yo not gonna lie kinda vibe with this comment. I love gaming as an art and a social activity but it’s also the “sand I bury my head in”. I’m currently on a Factorio playthrough that I started purely as a distraction for my latest bout of depression.
And I do also agree greed has ruined a lot more “important” things than gaming.
But also, no need to shame people for wanting something they love to be free from corporate greed. Be cool friend.
I have! Can’t butcher things yet which I forgot and also forgot animal people have the food needs of their animal base so maybe I should have started with a goblin adventurer that needs no food or water instead of the eagle woman.
I still wish and hope we get goosemen someday.
I need to be a very naughty horrible goose stealing everyone’s items!
It’s very different. I’ve only just created a party and watched some tutorials, but I have a general idea of what it’s going for, and it’s nearly the polar opposite of fortress mode.
As the other has said, adventurer mode is very different. You control only yourself and a few others at most. You must worry about food and drink and sleep every day instead of it being every so often for dwarves. There is much less about what to do (currently, demigods/chosen will have more godly influence on them maybe?) so you make your own existence.
As a fan of Adventure mode in the legacy version of the game for years, I am excited for the new changes and mechanics that have been in the Steam version since release but in Adventure mode.
Is it a public beta or something I can just click on in the beta tab?
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