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[PA Comic] Wednesday, May 2, 2012 - The Ultimatrix
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Edit: Atta boy!
Tera wasn't *bad*, don't get me wrong, but it sure as hell wasn't worth playing for. The combat was less dynamic and enjoyable than Dragon's Nest, and the latter is free, and didn't whack me over the head, and tell me to kill piglets. I'm not sure how "Welcome to this mysterious island of incredible danger, now go kill these piglets by spamming these 2 skills over and over" translates into "fun to play". Maybe the combat gets more interesting at higher levels. But you know, I'm not going to pay 15 bucks a month on top of the initial cost of the game for a maybe. Game should be fun *immediately*.
Are you, by any chance, me? Agree completely. Nothing about Tera grabbed me, at all. GW2, after the first hour of being shell shocked by it all, grabbed me so hard I'm really eager to get back in there.
TOR has great storytelling
GW2 has engaging quests
Tera is fun to play
As the comic seems to be saying. Though i will side with GW2 and say it's a little unfair to judge it considering it's been public for about 60 hours so far. Features, areas and a bunch of other stuff weren't available during the first beta.
That being said, GW2 was also very engaging, but in different ways. Combat was more standard, with the variety coming from the various weapon combinations. I really liked starting with one skill for a particular weapon and unlocking the rest through use. It felt almost like a mini-game. The fact that you could "master" a weapon in just a short amount of time actually made it feel better to me. It's not something I'd want to worry about in the mid-levels/upper levels, but it's nice to have incremental gains reap obvious rewards early on. I was more interested in getting new skills to try out than leveling my character. Leveling my character was a nice side effect of leveling my weapon skills.
It's the most 'fun' of the three for me, but I understand how not a lot of people see it. The starting area is pretty to look at but your characters aren't very deep because of the low level. They tried to have a bigger hook by starting you at level 20 with a bunch of skills but that's just confusing and not very fun.
After the first couple areas, maybe around level 18-22 the game *really* ramps up. It's almost stupid how suddenly it goes from "hold left click and press space bar every so often" to "oh my god why can't I hold all these combos". The world PVP is intense because you don't always know who's going to flag themselves as an outlaw and try to jump you (And if you've done so as well recently you're able to be attacked by anyone until your infamy goes down, so that's distressing too). The questing is blah, I agree, but it could get better down the road. I can't comment on the political endgame as I haven't experienced it yet.
Your point is sound, your examples are atrocious.
Completely disagree with you about Tera, if you haven't tried it yet I strongly suggest you do. The 'hopping about' dramatically changes how fun standard MMO combat is. It goes from zero to some number higher than zero.
Or maybe we just need a sandbox game like EvE that can exist for nine + years on a sub model or similar and still be successful in delivering a semblance of the social multiplayer adventure MMOs are supposed to be, but without being just like EvE, the game you don't play so much as prepare to play, where you have to entirely rely on others to enjoy the game because of it's mind numbing spreadsheets and lack of content beyond the excellent kinds players put in like Burn Jita. We won't know if that's a better vision for the genre until someone decides to do it better, and no one has.
Fact: Star Wars: TOR presented its collective of narratives in a way that hadn't been done in an MMO before.
Opinion: The story in TOR was bad.
Fact: Tera (insert some mechanic they have that other games don't, or something).
Opinion: Tera is fun to play!
You've gotta have some ability to merit people for at least trying to make something different happen. We see so much in video game discussions that people are so upset with the lack of innovation or originality, and then when it comes in, THBBBBT people take a dump on it because it was fairly rough or didn't live up to hype, etc, despite working at least at minimum. What the hell. This is exactly why Mirror's Edge isn't getting a sequel, for example (though if it does, expect it to be colossally different).
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Mirror's Edge is vague on getting a sequel because of lackluster sales and by being bogged down by the dilution of purity of concept to the point where it damaged the core of the game. I loved that game, but I won't blame "hype" on why a sequel isn't out yet.
TOR story was nice but got old fast and I never really felt like I was in a MMO. I played beta and purchased the game on release but cancelled before my first month was up so all the big patches that hit after I can not comment on.
GW2 I've not prepurchased so I've not gotten any hands on.
TERA I played in some of the Beta and played 3 classes: Sorcerer, Archer and dual wielding melee guy. I played 2 of them to level 11 and got off the newbie Island. The new combat style was interesting, and chaining skills together was really fun. But I got bored really quick. So much so, that when I got off the Island I didn't care to play anymore.
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but the combat is just sooo FUN! With the class I play as an alternate (I have a priest main and a warrior alt), it's like playing Devil May Cry again. If the combat wasn't as fun as it was, I doubt TERA would have a single subscriber.
Truth. I lost a lot more of my life to Runescape than I ever did to WoW, and I spent two years straight in WoW then another year after a break.
I agree with this. I almost always agree with their assessment of games, but in this case, I felt when I played Guild Wars 2, that it was all three of those things, while their assessment of Tera and TOR is pretty much correct.
In fact, this is the only place I have come to see a organization or person who's played the game say anything less than glowing, wonderful things about it. The combat is great for making actionish combat with the limitation of online play, the story is amazing and very well done, the dynamic events are exactly what the genre's been needing, and it was more fun to play than anything I've picked up in years.
Yeah. The Guild Wars 2 combat isn't as aracadey as TERA, but it's certainly more interesting than the humdrum WoW/EQ-clone combat most MMO's have.
I'm sorry, but I can't see how anyone who played the game for more than an hour thinks that this is what the combat in TERA is like. The game drastically changes once you hit level 10-12, the same level that you leave the starting island. Which is something that most players are able to do in about an hour and a half if they are going slow.
The combat in this game should be fluid, dynamic, and absolutely involve you at every step of the way. Spamming one or two skills is a sign that you're not moving around, dodging, or just in general approaching the combat the way it's meant to be played. What level exactly did you stop at?
The game also has an intro portion that shows what the class you're playing as feels like at higher levels, perhaps you played during the closed beta and missed this portion?
Other than that; I do agree that the quests aren't fun. And the developers are stubbornly clinging on to outdated quest models for little reason other than it's readily accessible to people who play solely in korean cyber-cafes. It doesn't cripple the game, and world events are being added as well. So it's not like the game is a chore to play and I feel was worth paying for if not for the end-game content alone.
I find this interesting because everyone who told me to keep going in Tera gave me a different level range where the game would magically become fun. I got tired of trying to mine for this "fun" everyone kept telling was just over the next hill. Once you've gone over enough hills and didn't find anything you stop believing people about there being something over the next one, you know? I'm only talking for me here. I'm glad other people enjoy it but I just didn't.
I think the thing that crippled the game for me was the questing system. While it might not hurt the game for you it made me feel like I was playing something straight out of the initial f2p Korean deluge, before the model caught on in the west, and the games were only about grind. I'm not talking about the combat system here I am talking about everything else surrounding it.
There's only so much I'm willing to put into trying to enjoy a game and if I only think one game system is worth it and the rest isn't I'll go ahead and pass.
I'm not talking about the usual 'It gets better later on! Trust me!' that many games try to pull, I understand the feeling of being told that a bad game gets better later on, but then have it never get better. But I have noticed in recent times that many people won't even give some games a chance. They'll play the first few minutes of it and declare it to be a terrible game with no redeeming values, and that's the opposite of what I like to see happen. If you can judge all elements of the game in the first few minutes, then it's okay to proclaim the game as being a boring snorefest. But not having the patience to at least get off the tutorial island isn't something I can help with.
The combat gets better once you receive a handful of abilities that help with movement and mobility, which is what this game is all about. Typically, these skills come at the level 10-12 range for most classes.
Okay, I agree with you here! The questing system was clearly put in because it was really easy to make a leveling system where players were just led along from one quest hotspot to another. It was made because it works out really well for Koreans who only get to play the game an hour or so at a time at cybercafes. Which is who the game was made for in the first place. And that's exactly how the game is. The combat gets better, not the questing system. And I even noted several times that the questing system was very much a boring, broken mess, and that I play the game for the combat. If the game isn't for you, that's okay with me. I'm not trying to convert anyone, but I feel it's unfair to hardly even experience the first hour or so of the game and then badmouth it on the internet.
EDIT: I would like to add that while it looks like I'm defending it based on some kind of blind fan rage, I'm really not. What I'm presenting are my opinions here. And overall there are many aspects of its release which I'm sorely disappointed in. For one, many bugs which were reported during the beta phase of TERA were never fixed, and overall it's as if the parent company who are in charge of actually developing the game are seemingly ignoring the fact that it has released in North America. I really don't see the game lasting much longer than half a year at the rate that the parent company is neglecting it. Many features are missing, most of the promised content that was promised at launch wasn't actually ready for launch and has been delayed.
And I still can't convince myself to pick up GW2. As great as the questing system is (it was really fun, and the NPCs actually felt alive instead of giant signs with quest text written on them), I can't go from TERA's combat system to GW2's. I will probably just end up playing Monster Hunter Tri again once TERA dies down.
This. I don't like to dig for fun in my games. I've heard from a lot of people that the TERA combat takes off at a certain point. There's a lot of comparisons to monster hunter. You know what? I"m a huge fan of Monster Hunter. But you know what I could do instead of digging for fun in Tera? Play Monster Hunter with my friends. And then I'd have fun right away. My patience level in games varies. But when I could have kickass combat right now, why should I have to search for it in a game with a pile of recognized flaws that will bring down the whole experience? I gave Tera a few hours. If your game can't hook people in a matter of hours, it's a problem. White Mage, I understand where you're coming from, but It's not a matter of people playing it for a few minutes and going "Feh". It's a matter of people going at it for a few hours, and finding the initial experience so dull that they put it down.
Irrelevant of which game has a better combat system, Guild Wars 2 engaged me immediately with both the quests/story, and introduced me to new combat skills and story elements at an expedient rate and kept the game interesting (at least for me). Contrary to what most people might say, I don't think it's the first few hours in a game that are the least important, but the most. If one game sends me to kill pigs, and the other sends me to fight vengeful ghosts of the damned and massive possessed statues, which one do you think will earn my attention quicker?
I agree with the rest of your post in that I also am not trying to start a fight or anything. I am glad you enjoy the game and people should just play what they like. I happened to like GW2 better.
However, I just want to touch on the quoted part here. I gave the game far more than an hour. I don't fully remember but I think my highest character was around 14-15 and I played two classes the other making it to 9 or so.
Which is where my comment about mining for fun comes in. Many people gave me the level 10-12 range as a place to reach to have fun and when I got there the new magic fun time range everyone was telling me about was in the 20's. That's what my comment was referencing and I didn't give enough back information to get that across clearly.
Besides the one or two tutorial missions (which lasted a few minutes), the first few hours of monster hunter involved me killing raptors and and assorted varieties of wyverns, in particular, a big angry red one with lots of spikes that spat fire, and then I used their fiddly bits to make my gear, and on one occasion, some bones for some bread. I'm not sure how that's dull. And the combat was fun the entire time.
Didn't take me that long. Must be different editions.
And it has like, story stuff happening outside of cutscenes.
Swtor is dialogue and set pieces inside cutscenes -> wow from 2005 outside of cutscenes. GW2 has dialogue during action sometimes and I feel like it adds a lot.