Guild Wars 2 – cont.

So the game is pretty incredible.

But here is where we get to the part about what the game loses in order to be so.

Role fulfillment

There is no dedicated healer/tank classes in GW2, which has been a staple of the genre since its inception. All classes do damage in different ways, your first five skills are dependent on your weapon, the sixth skill is some sort of healing ability and the last three get to be chosen by the player.

This changes everything. All players are actually on an equal playing field, no classes are “worth” more than others because of the role they would normally take. This allows players to just play the game based on their interest and not worry about having to role a particular build.

And while this is a ground breaking moment, what is lost?

I feel as if a huge element of strategy has been sacrificed in order to appeal to a broader audience. One of the greatest parts about GW1 was planning what combination of skills, used across eight members of a team, will be the most effective in this particular scenario. You would have to plan meticulously sometimes in those later hard mode dungeons, which force player cooperation.

Every time you added a skill to your bar, you only have 8 slots back in GW1, you had to weight the choice against the 200+ others that could have been available.

From a design perspective that many skills is a nightmare. Each had to monitored to ensure that they are balanced against every other skill. Not to mention that with over 1000 skills, there would be favorites among the community, resulting in some skills not even being used.

But again as a player, I wanted to feel that crazy rush of sheer choice available to me. The weapons switching mechanic does this to a degree, allowing for the first five skills to be instantly switched out on the fly so that the player can react to the changing world, but I do miss those long minutes sitting in a town planning out not only my skill set, but my heroes.