|
So I've been playing through GW1.
I have to say, the only way GW2 will not be total shit is if they fire the entire team that programmed GW1's combat/pathing system.
Part of the problem - a big part - is the *duh duh duh* B2P model.
The B2P model's weakness is reflected in the very uneven quality of the game content. About 75% of the way through the Nightfall campaign, the quality of the programming drops precipitously. Mobs and NPCs get stuck more often. Mechanics break. You can actually see a big fat line where the devs said, "OK, we made the first 75% decent, that'll be enough to get people to buy this. Now let's hurry and get the rest of this shit out the door."
B2P also means that NCsoft obviously doesn't care about fixing serious problems. Example: Just past that magic three-quarters line, there's an encounter which apparently broke and started behaving dramatically differently after a patch...in 2007.
NCsoft will tell you to read the Wiki, because it describes how it's supposed to work. I guess it's convenient that their own employees are active editors. And I guess it's also convenient they can say, "well its not official material so don't hold us to it". Regardless, how the encounter is described in the Wiki and how it actually works in the game are very different. And how it works in the game is not how it is portrayed in older Youtube videos.
Getting into the gritty details:
The encounter takes place on a small map with three capture points situated radially around a fourth central capture point. The win condition is to cap all three radial positions; the failure condition is to lose the central point. The center and platforms are initially occupied by mobs, and more mobs will gradually spawn on all uncapped platforms.
There is a mob called a Blasphemy. It spawns on any of the radial points and slowly walks to the center. When at the center, it gets a massive bonus to its capture progress (enough that it takes about three allies to break-even). It casts a spell (interruptible) that cancels a quarter of friendly cap progress and summons an add on all uncapped platforms. When killed, it applies a debuff to everyone that dramatically increases damage taken by a flat amount (not a percentage), spawns three orbs (pretty much functionally identical to Algalon stars or Curator orbs), and respawns after a certain period of time. Its respawn time decreases down to a minimum of fifteen seconds as platforms are capped.
Now, here's how the encounter is broken:
The script for the Blasphemy spawn will often read as if all platforms have been capped when none have been, meaning the Blasphemy respawns in only 15 seconds while the player still has to clear the platforms and all the orbs that are still up for the last one. In addition, the Blasphemy will often get stuck on its platform and begin casting behind a wall of mobs, or it will path extremely unevenly, cleaving to the walls.
The Blasphemy's casts can and should be interrupted. I play a Ranger. Rangers interrupt via a shot which is a "on next attack" type ability, like the old versions of warrior abilities. (I believe in WoW this never applied to Pummel, not even in Vanilla). This creates two problems: inability to counter reliably due to the swing timer, and the fact that using the counter shot is likely to kill the mob at a bad time.
The orbs spawned when the Blasphemy die count as mobs, not pets, so killing the Blasphemy increases the number of hostiles on the platform and actually causes the enemy to capture the platform faster. This effectively negates any player ability to control the encounter by any means other than sheer brute force.
In addition, it is not actually possible to cap the platforms at all due to a bug: the enemy capture progress can go to 0, achieving the mission objective, but it isn't actually possible to neutralize the spawns. Again, simple arithmetic means that doing the encounter in a controlled way is therefore impossible and it is necessary to brute-force it.
GW1 mobs spawns are odd in that they are semi-random. Mobs typically can spawn anywhere in a radius of about ten meters from a certain point. I guess this is meant to make the game look more organic, but in practice it is a recipe for diabolical RNG and bugginess. Any encounter can proceed dramatically differently depending on whether a mob - or several - spawn five yards closer or further from the center or other mobs.
In the case of this particular encounter, the platforms each have a single large stationary mob in addition to several humanoids. The stationary mob is basically a Crusher Tentacle and cannot be safely attacked by melee. It lies on the very edge of range from the center platform. It can usually be reached by ranged, but what is less certain is how the mobs on the platform will react. Sometimes they just stand there. Other times they rubberband back and forth. Still other times, they will charge right off their platform and aggro on melee sitting in the center.
Anyway, after over six hours of wiping to this, including several incidents where the NPCs decided to get stuck on the handrails of the center platform, I teamed with some human players and just zerged the encounter down. No strategy and no control, just kill everything in sight, repeatedly, clear the board, and it all works out somehow. It's a kind of gameplay not unique to GW1 or MMOs that is a classic sign of terrible game balance and shoddy programming.
The thing is, this mission is actually required to proceed down the main questline and finish the campaign. You can't skip it or go around it. Obscure quests and odd mechanics do often break in WoW and remain bugged for years, but Blizzard is very vigilant in fixing things that players just can't do without, usually within a few weeks at most. That a primary quest could be bugged for FIVE YEARS is unthinkable in WoW.
So, next mission. This mission features large, overtuned patrols in tight corridors and spiders that do a frontal cone AoE. Both types of mobs will either A) wipe the group in seconds or B) get roflstomped. Which occurs depends on how your group and the mob group initially meet, depending on many variables outside player control, including random mob spawning and pathing.
Basically the goal is to focus down one mob while diffusing incoming damage evenly across your own group. Unfortunately, without threat tables or "focus this" commands, all you can really do is get in aggro range and hope for the best. And you have no way of telling your NPC allies to spread out for AoE - there isn't a "stagger formation" button like even Street had the good sense to include in Age of Empires. You pull, they all get hit by aoe and die instantly, you grit your teeth.
This mission is a really good example of the hard fail of the B2P paradigm and slipshod design. The spiders, for example, often decide to root themselves in a random spot rather than fully resetting after leaving combat. Several times, I had to end the mission attempt 20 minutes in after spiders decided to root themselves between my character and dead party members, preventing a rez.
Past the perimeter of the mission area are a series of gate-like structures barring access to wider areas. Obviously the small mission area was originally intended to be much larger, but the devs decided to quickly truncate the zone and ship it. The mission area is divided by large "rivers of spirits" joined between islets by bridges. There is one optional mob that dwells on an islet adjacent to one of the gate structures, away from the rest of the map, across a river.
There is no bridge. So how do you get to the mob? Did I say there was no bridge? Not true, there is a bridge, it's just invisible (as in there is absolutely no clue, implied or otherwise, that it is there, short of...reading the Wiki). When you walk over this invisible bridge, your character appears to be floating 15 meters over the river, walking on thin air. The bridge is not straight and walking back necessitates navigating invisible walls and invisible contours and is unnecessarily aggravating.
Brute forced that one too after about 20 attempts. Whatever.
So now I'm on the second-to-last mission of the first campaign. This mission is remarkable in that it manages to capture all the things I hated about Hellfire Peninsula. Not only does it have that hideous red terrain and gaping crevasses, it also has those really bizarre, nauseating camera angles, where eye level is about five meters under your character's feet, and the zoom function is limited to a factor of about two. Trying to fight near a wall or slope or canyon is fighting blind, with the terrain in your face, and hoping it works out somehow.
Midway through the mission, there is a large area with patrols that spawn when the player steps over an invisible line. The patrols pat along different routes in the area, but they all spawn on a single point about 30 meters ahead of that invisible line. If you step too far forward, half a dozen groups of mobs will spawn on you and wipe you instantly. Once you know, of course, it's a silly mistake to make, but one wonders why the game was even programmed that way to begin with.
And the last boss. Ohhhh that last boss. The last boss is two bosses in one, a melee boss and a caster boss. The caster boss has a slightly shorter leash, but being a caster, can attack the player from greater distance. The point of the encounter (going by the Wiki) is to pull both bosses, get one to leash, and kill the other.
The melee mob hits extremely hard, and fighting him basically means spamming rezzes. On everyone except you the player, because you do not take a debuff when your NPC allies die, but the inverse is not true. So you have to - again - hang back and pray for the best.
The biggest problem is - duh duh duh - the random nature of the spawn positioning and the incredibly terrible ally NPC behavior. On one attempt where everything up to this part went perfectly, with beautiful irony, the caster had spawned a bit forward and the melee a bit back, such that the caster still technically had a shorter leash, but any distance sufficient to get it to reset also caused the melee to run past his leash. After 45 minutes of trying to coax the two apart I just alt-F4d and said screw it. I'll probably try again later. Whatever.
So uh yeah. Massive nerdrage. They better fix this shit in GW2.
Aestu of Bleeding Hollow... Nihilism is a copout.
|
