Good Morning Friends. Sometimes I get something stuck in my head and I have trouble letting go of it. For a decade now, Guild Wars 2 has been this puzzle that I have been trying to crack. I’ve fought and spent countless hours trying to sort out why many of my friends enjoyed it, but that I struggled to latch onto it. Now that I have arrived at the moment where it is really clicking for me… I’ve been puzzling over why exactly I bounced so hard for so many years. Last night I think I landed on the very specific reasons, and this morning I am going to take you on a journey as I dive into them. Ultimately like so many problems in my life it has come down to assumptions and expectations.
In 1996 when I got into the beta for a game from then upstart developer Blizzard called Diablo, it was essentially everything I had wanted in a video game up until that point. Suffice to say that I love Diablo with all of my heart and even though the original is rather kludgy by today’s comparisons, it will always right or wrong be up on a bit of a pedestal. There are times when it is important to understand the lineage of a game and I have talked about in the past how Final Fantasy XIV behaves oddly not because it draws its roots to World of Warcraft, but that it ultimately draws its roots to Everquest and that community by way of Final Fantasy XI which was directly inspired by EQ. As we talk about Guild Wars, we have to start with Diablo and ultimately the games that spun out of Diablo like Lineage and Dungeon Siege.
So while Guild Wars and World of Warcraft were technically contemporaries, there was never a time when I actively compared the two games or even treated them like they were in the same genre. Guild Wars very clearly drew its provenance from Diablo and Lineage by reference whereas World of Warcraft was based out of building a better Everquest. As a result the sort of gameplay that Guild Wars had felt like a fresh take on the dungeon crawler genre, or more so expanded upon it by adding much better story and new kinds of networked gameplay. I did not expect anything more from it than a game that let me kill monsters for stacks of loot, and I found the card based skill system to be interesting. I have always been a huge fan of Magic the Gathering and once I made that mental connection to deck building I was set.
Where we run into problems however is with the release of Guild Wars 2. During the run up to the game there was a lot of very lofty bullshit bandied about by the team. Rather intentional or not, they painted a target on their back of having to bear the burden of being the “WoW Killer”. So as a result I stopped comparing Guild Wars 2 to that provenance of Guild Wars dating back to Diablo… and instead started comparing it directly to World of Warcraft. The comparison did not really hold up because as we all know Guild Wars 2 is doing something very different, and as a result was missing a lot of the underpinnings of that traditional World of Warcraft experience. I gave it a shot but it just did not have the same magic I was hoping it would rekindle from those early days of Warcraft. Like I said I am not sure if this really was intention on the part of the developers or if something that some marketing agency decided needed to happen but in truth they should have spent more time distancing themselves from the MMORPG pack than they did.
The problem for me however is that the damage was already done. Guild Wars 1 mentally was ArenaNet showing me what they could do with the Diablo formula, and as a result I had equated the second game to them showing me their take on World of Warcraft. The word “Warrior” means something very specific to me as a result of that connection. Tales of the Aggronaut started its life as a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog, so I had a very specific style of gameplay that I wanted to experience when I rolled this new character type in Guild Wars 2. The disconnect being that Warrior is no more tanky than any other class in the game because there is no traditional trinity of roles, nor should there really be. I kept trying to force Guild Wars 2 into the mold of my experiences from other MMORPGs when I never thought to take a step back and trace the path back to Diablo.
In Diablo you have the Barbarian and it is no more tanky than any other class in that game. It is instead a class defined by melee combat and short duration largely shout based buffs for your team. Effectively you could swap the word Barbarian for Warrior and have a better understanding of what the Guild Wars 2 class is trying to be. However for me the well was poisoned and Guild Was 2 was a game that was “doing warriors wrong!” even though I had been perfectly happy to play the “Warrior as Barbarian” in the original Guild Wars. It is shocking just how much difference the right frame of mind makes when approaching something, and how our assumptions can be the destroyer of possibilities.
One of the problems that I have is that I get hung up on fetishizing specific weapons. For example in Destiny 2, there is never going to be a point where I am not either actively wielding or have in my inventory an Auto Rifle. That is the weapon for me and I will go through some weird contorted lengths to make sure I am using one. Similarly with MMORPGs, I want to be using a sword and a shield… and occasionally an Axe or a Mace will do but the important part is the shield. That is a deep part of what I consider to be a “tank” and why I play them. While I enjoy the non-traditional tanks like the Warrior in FFXIV or the Demon Hunter in World of Warcraft, I will never feel quite as at home as when I have a large chunk of metal strapped to my left arm. This is what is largely referred to as a “class fantasy” and it is one that is completely unsupported by Guild Wars 2.
What changed is that I had a conversation with my friend Tam about what I actually want from a class and he managed to narrow in on one piece of the narrative that I had not caught myself. I want a character with extremely high suitability. So while it is very much not my “class fantasy” he said I should check out the Necromancer and I did precisely that. There is something about playing a caster which is entirely out of my comfort range, and a pet class specifically… and caused me to completely re-frame the experience of playing Guild Wars 2. No longer was I playing a game that was pretending to be World of Warcraft but instead playing a game that very much drew its roots to the Diablo 2/3 Necromancer, another class that I love. Being forcibly pushed out of my comfort zone has allowed me to completely re-imagine the experience of playing Guild Wars 2 for the better.
For years I have believed that Guild Wars 2 was an attempt to build the WoW Killer, because that is what the marketing told me it was. What the game is instead however is a direct successor to Guild Wars 1, taking a lot of the things that worked well there and expanding upon them and building them into a big open world event based game. It is a game where your class doesn’t really matter all that much, but what does matter is the way you build it and the gear that you equip… which is entirely translatable to the experience I have with builds and Diablo 3. With this frame of context everything about the Guild Wars 2 experience suddenly feels better. I’ve been able to chuck it mentally into the appropriate bin of equivalent experiences and now it is absolutely scratching that Diablo itch for me.
Last night I had a freaking blast running around and doing the big World Boss events. At the suggestion of Bhagpuss in my comments yesterday, I spent the 400 gems on the doodad that auto teleports me to any available events. It is maybe some of the best money I have ever spent on a game like this, and the end result was three hours of mayhem and so much loot. Granted a large chunk of it was salvage fodder, but I did manage to pull a really cool exotic staff and more importantly a ton of gossamer and a handful of high end leather as well as a few more crafting patterns. What Guild Wars 2 does best is the drop in nature of the big zone events, and now that I have tackled the mental obstacles that I had placed in front of my enjoyment… it is a glorious experience.
Considering World of Warcraft was both my entrance to the MMORPG genre AND the game that made me consider myself “a gamer”, plus the sheer amount of time I put into it, expecting to find WoW-like aspects in other MMOs was a real issue for a while, because it prevented me from trying different things. Looking for a proper mage class or a hunter like WoW’s was awful for so many years, especially in GW2 and ESO, but letting go of the expectation and looking at a game for what it does on its own 2 feet has been so freeing.
Glad the suggestion was helpful.
I remember the marketing push for GW2 very well. It was what got me to try the game in the first place. I’d played Guild Wars but had pretty much forgotten all about it – I only played the original Prophecies at release. It took me about a month to finish and I never followed up with any of the expansions until I went back to do some of them for GW2’s Hall of Monuments.
I interpreted the “WoW killer” rhetoric completely differently. I believed they were trying to create a new and different kind of mmorpg that would avoid the kinds of restrictive practices from the DikuMUD/EQ/WoW heritage like the Trinity, forced grouping and quest-focused leveling. I was actually surprised ti find there even were any dungeons in the game at all. Having never played any of the Diablo games, it never ocurred to me to compare either of the Guild Wars titles to those mechanics but it seemed to me that what the original GW2 at launch offered was most of the best aspects of “traditional” mmorpgs with many of the “bad” bits left out.
My position has always been that a huge number of people who bought the game then reacted to what they saw much as you did, failing to connect with it because it was too unlike WoW and the rest of the genre as it was known at the time. ANet appeared to freeze, then panic and pretty much the rest of the game’s history is the devs trying to retro-fit GW2 into the kind of game they originally set out to replace. These days it’s barely distinguishable in mechanics from any other mmorpg. A few things have different names (Quests are called “Collections” for example) but almost everything else they promised to avoid is now a core part of the game.
And, of course, the genre itself has broadened and deepened over the last decade to encompass all kinds of different types of game under the banner of “mmorpg”. Black Desert, Lost Ark, New World… all of them would have been unthinkable when GW2 launched. I don’t know how much those kinds of experiences factor in to you’re finding it more tolerable this time around but I suspect we’re all a lot more open to new ways of doing things in mmorpgs than we were ten years ago.
I would definitely agree that I am mentally in a different place today than I was when Guild Wars 2 released. My play patterns are also completely different. I think what also lead me to interpret the diatribe surrounding the release differently is that the game they appeared to be rebelling against no longer represented World of Warcraft in the state I knew it. Guild Wars 2 launched in the same year we got Mists of Pandaria and at that point World of Warcraft was already way more casual friendly and open to different play styles. I think that is the sort of thing that happens as development goes on, the original thing you were targeting to deliver a better experience than… had evolved into something completely different.
So I viewed the boasts as taking on modern World of Warcraft, not necessarily the target version which would have been Burning Crusade WoW at the time this project started. However my knowledge of WoW framed my interpretation of that message. WoW was not a net negative for me, so I expected a product that improved on that formula not one that threw it away. However looking back Guild Wars 2 is way closer to Guild Wars 1, than the traditional WoW-Like MMORPG formula and had I realized that… my frame of scope would have changed as well.