More superficial crap from a so-called expert. You wonder how these people manage to produce the illusion of their competence except via the exclusion of people who know what they are talking about. All these Big Think educationalist people are the same: same types of people who work in the university sector peddling superficial analyses. They are lucky they create a world that owes them a living.
Well, thank God I never bought into the pay-to-play version of this. It's poor beyond belief once you get past the gesture at storytelling that so fragmented it doesn't engage you. The interface makes you realise the effort of other developers. You can't abandon quests and retaking them can be problematic. Support is poor within the game. The animations are poor and on a mid-range laptop (i7 gt555m) it looks nothing like the screen shots. Stuff you take for granted in most MMOs like looting and interacting with other players is tedious. Looks like a twelve year old game, plays like one and the whole grind of it is unrewarding. I bought it as soon as I found out it went free-to-play. I bought it while travelling over Christmas and as soon as I tried to get it going I spent two days having to photograph myself with my copy to send to them to validate I'd bought the copy. When I finally got to play I found it tedious. The spells are unrewarding. Healing is like trying to fill a bucket by spitting in it. I mean, there is nothing charming or engrossing in this game. If you can run it on a gtx 680 it might look a different game but if you are expecting to play casually on mid-range hardware, it runs worse than other games on my cheap machine. It's worth the box price but you soon tire.
Am I especially gullible since I had no problem willingly suspending my disbelief for a game that allowed me to rediscover the frustrations of intricate jumping about interspersed with assassination? I think the quality of the story is less important to the illusion than the interaction with the world. As the French Thomist put it, "Obviously, if there is in a substance anything that is act, it is not the matter, it is the form. The form then is the very act whereby a substance is what it is, and, if a being is primarily or, as Aristotle himself says, almost exclusively what it is, each being is primarily and almost exclusively its form. The distinctive character of a truly Aristotelian metaphysics of being...lies in the fact that it knows of no act superior to form, not even existence. There is nothing above being; there is nothing above the form, and this means that the form of a given being is an act of which there is no act". (Gilson)
Ok, been playing this since launch, levelling four characters simultaneously, so very slow levelling. I have them all at 30 now. The great flaw in this game is the class mechanics. I learned early in wow that I just cannot sustain engagement as DPS and in GW 2 all the classes lack differentiation. I just don't get interested in all the little skills that seem irrelevant. You just do nothing very well no matter how you try. All my characters are ridiculously vulnerable and it's a continuously frustrating experience to play. Damage is slow, death frequent. Respawns make playing with any consideration farcical. And any attempt to out-level the content to overcome the limitations meets with the enforced reduction of your character to the level you are in. I've been in since beta and I think I've grouped twice. seems that all on line games are played by anti-social people! GW 2 is designed around this but it's a superficial non-engaging experience. The story quests are sickeningly difficult. One weaker classes like elementalist, I die 5 times or so per story. It's worth the £35 for the box but it's quite tedious to play for long periods.
I tried Rift, played the lite then picked up a new game with a month's subscription and levelled to 50. It bored me to tears but I was determined to play it to the level cap. It is excruciatingly reminiscent of early WoW and made me realise why they nerfed WoW so much since it was so tedious to play but at the time I was new to on-line gaming and persevered. Rift has the usual major flaw of on-line games: people won't interact very much, let alone cooperate. The culture of the game is far superior to WoW, a lot like Star Wars was, it seems the lower the player base the more civilised the people. I found myself just running past the Rifts (since combat took me forever and it was tedious for me to kill a lot of mobs) just as I skipped the video clips in Star Wars! Seems whatever major development designers implement after two hours I am skipping it just to look on my map and go to the next quest! I really think developers need to develop some kind of mechanism just for people to group for quests so you just group up a bit like left 4 dead 2. I found Rift and Star Wars solo experiences bereft of cooperative play. Am I the only gamer who wants to use on-line games as a source of conversation and companionship?
@3amo0o0r Oh great, thank you so much for telling me. I notice that the 6 August is a monday. So, when does the weekend actually start? Is it Friday night like GW 2 beta weekends or will it be saturday?
@DiGzY Well, I will definitely get it as soon as they reduce the price. After your recommendation I will definitely try it. I wanted to get it and applied for the beta but didn't get in but when I saw the price, it put me off. I am making it a rule now that unless I can buy a discounted extended membership I won't pay.
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