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.
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.
There is a “puzzle” in Riven that I got stuck on for hours, just searching the map looking for anything that I had left to do. I couldn’t find any more interactable things that hadn’t been done. Then I looked it up and found it was a door that you had to enter then turn around and close to find the hidden passageway behind it. There was no puzzling value to it being hidden like that, it was something you either simply found or didn’t. I put it down to old-style game design that hadn’t yet learned what not to do in a somewhat open world game.
Honestly this iteration could move the entrance like one metre to the left so it’s not hidden and it would be a better game for it.
This post embodies my entire experience with Myst and Riven. I was just constantly bewildered thinking I’d missed something important and broken the game or something.
Luckily i had a buddy that had a knack for those games so i got to experience the full game without constantly banging my head against a wall.
The only similar experience I had with Myst was the rail maze. I didn’t notice the audio cue at all so I just mapped out the whole thing on paper by following the left hand wall. I say that because when I was done, I tried following the right hand wall out of curiosity and it was the shortest possible path. It was like a cruel joke on people who say that you can find your way through a maze by following the left hand wall, just because the “left” wall was the way people phrased that concept.
I finished the whole series and it was better designed later on. None of the other games had such notorious sticking points.
In cyan’s defense, every other point and click mystery/adventure game at the time was so much worse about this shit. Spacequest had stuff like if you forgot to do something in the first room you fail in the last room and can’t fix it. Even Nancy Drew, which was made for kids, had some bullshit (but at least a built-in hint system). Game design had come a long way. The new monkey island games are great.
Yeah, 3 and 4 were where they hit on a really good balance between the pre-rendered graphics and a smooth experience with the skybox-style wraparound images. In V they went to full 3D rendering which was clunky because the computers of the time just weren’t up to it. I think now we’re finally seeing how good these games can look and work in 3D.
I think there’s two of those in a row. It’s on the island with the big boiler and Gehn’s study and such, there’s the door into the cavern(?) where you can find the frog trap thing, and you have to close those doors to find the corridor to the spinning orb, then you have to close the door you came in to find the little syncroscope in a side chamber in a wall to stop it.
As a nod to this, there is a part in Obduction that does the same thing. If you’ve never played it, it’s well worth it. Just keep the “cyan brain” on when you play!
I have played through that and I don’t remember that part, did they make it easier to find or something? I’d be shocked if they left it the same, it really sucked.
It was easier I guess because it was a 3d world. But it was in Farleys house. When you go in through the back after you input the security code, that door stays open. When you close it from the inside, it reveals a tunnel that (eventually with seeds) leads to her private area with her things.
Actually the 3d thing makes a lot of sense. I had a walk around the new Myst game recently and everything’s location was so much clearer when you weren’t navigating it through static screens.
Same when we went through myst as well, the masterpiece one, not the new one.
Despite the limitations though, riven had an absurd amount of “views” or screens to give you the feeling that you were there. When I revisited it, I was afraid after the full 3d version, the kids and I wouldn’t adapt to the still frames, but they held up surprisingly well!
I’m not sure how to help, but so much of that game is interlinked with itself, where few things are standalone. It took a while for us to get through it.
Surprisingly, people say the gauntlet at the end is the hardest part, but we got through it pretty painless. It was some door that we missed as we ran through the world’s that tripped us up and needed to get a spoiler to continue.
I had a moment like that on Myst. In the room near the beginning of the game, there is a button you are supposed to push, so you can insert numbers and change the messages on the machine. I didn’t see the button so I ended up wandering the island confused on what to do. I had to get help for that. Thankfully I ended up playing through the game with my friend.
Bloody hell, you fished out this memory from the abyss of my mind. I remember it. I was 8. All I wanted was to see those two sea mammals waddle once again in their little creek. Instead, I was granted impossible puzzles.
Did you ever finish it? If not the conclusion of the game was pretty satisfying, and nothing is spoiled by being told about the door thing. It’s actually more memorable for me than the following ones, maybe because I spent so long wandering around in despair. I actually tried replaying it a little while ago but just bounced off the extremely clunky 90s design and the technical limitations. I think this remake will be a good chance to try again, and see the environments rendered nicely.
Yup, if you’ve played Obduction it’s like that. Full 3d environments made with modern rendering. I tried the latest Myst remake and this one feels like a modern game, although I imagine most of the early 90s design foibles are still there.
I haven’t played many of the other remakes of the original, there have probably been too many, but it’s nice to see the later games getting this treatment.
Yes, ok. Fantastic. Will definitely buy it. These games were such a big part of my childhood. The first one though… Never got really far. I wast too young
Another great video from Neil. I will visit the museum one day. That is a beautiful looking machine, especially the keyboard. I was very surprised to find out it was only a 286.
Was not expecting everything on one board like that. It probably would have been easier to just package a PC and Megadrive more or less separate with a switch between them. Sega really put some work into that.
That’s right! It’s referenced in the video as well (and from memory Neil also mentioned it in a previous video, but I wouldn’t be able to link to it tbf)
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