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So, I sat down and played some GW1.
The good
Nothing comes close to establishing the feel of M:TG or DnD in video game form. It is the heretofore ultimate development of the medieval fantasy world. The world feels very real. Itemization is polar opposite of "pixels with stats on it", totally diverse and asymmetrical.
The bad
Like every other competitor to WoW, GW1 completely and abjectly fails at WoW's winning qualities. The game control is extremely clunky. The game uses collision, which isn't a problem by itself, but the collision is extremely aggressive and object collision in some cases extends meters beyond visual dimensions.
The camera cannot be locked to free motion - the key must be held down. The camera can only be dragged by holding down the right mouse button (cannot be rebound), which is uncomfortable and a totally bizarre and counterintuitive design decision. I don't understand who came up with the idea of right button dragging or why.
The interface is both simplistic and confusing. Binds can't easily be dragged around as in WoW. The utility of items is not immediately clear - what is equipment, junk, consumable etc. Weapon speed and proficiency are not displayed, which means one has to hope for the best. Unit HP is not displayed. The game also has no unit portraits, which is a seemingly trivial but major annoyance - as stupid as it sounds, I rely on portraits to remember what I'm targetting.
The most damning failure of the game are two minor flaws in the world environment: poor contrast, and extremely opaque quests. For example, if a person is standing next to a tree, the tree and the person have about the same level of chroma, detail, and dynamism. Ideally, the tree's leaves would sway at a different speed than the person idles, and one would be brighter or duller than the other. Instead, objects and environments in the game feel far too uniform in their color and palette - brilliant outdoors, dim indoors.
Quests are often very unclear and frustrated by the excessive use of instancing. For example, "kill five bears" isn't much better when the fifth bear is a particular bear somewhere in the depths of a cave you've run through a bunch of times. There's also the poor quality of the SCT that makes it very hard to see what your character is actually doing.
But back to GW2. I doubt GW2 will be anything like GW1 because:
1. any game that goes for a playerbase in the millions (and there's no question that's the goal) cannot possibly have the same "hardcore" design as GW1 - kids want things on rails
2. hopeless clunkiness ("if the feel of the game isn't just right, people will quit and you'll never know why")
But we'll see. It's a fun game, and I'll stick with it for now.
Aestu of Bleeding Hollow... Nihilism is a copout.
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