As a Guild Wars 1 veteran waiting for Guild Wars 2 for so long I was so dramatically disappointed by the game that I just could not play it any longer. Which is a shame because I think it is actually a good game. It is just not Guild Wars 2. It's like a completely different franchise now. The biggest change that sealed the deal for me was the removal of the classic trinity of RPGs. You always had your frontline, midline and backline in Guild Wars 1. Your tanky guys, your damage dealer/disabler and your healer/supporter. If you were in a group you had that clear role and you could tailor your characters to perfectly fit your preferred playstyle. In GW 2 everyone is just an all arounder that can do everything and it feels all so monotone. Especially for me being the backline (Monks and Ritualists ftw) it was just a terrible experience because there is no dedicated backline in GW 2. There is supports at best and even they do damage too. You don't have that teamwork that you rely on your frontline and midline to actually tank and kill stuff and they rely on you to keep them alive. Having clear roles makes for a much more satisfying experience in my opinion. One thing also is the lack of variety. Guild Wars 1 had over a thousand different skills. And while a bunch of them were garbage and unusable you still had so much more you could choose from than in GW2. Just a few weapon sets and minor skills soon become stale and monotone. Also I liked the instances much more than the open world thing. I don't want a dozen random dudes joining my group of people. Also it makes balancing super weird. Like some condition and buffs become redundant at a certain number of people because they can't stack infinitely. Also the game almost expects you to have someone with you. In GW 1 I could just grab henchies or even better use heroes which I could finetune. And there was even a whole lot of theory and strategy involved in hero builds. They were actually better at certain things than players and worse at other things so it made it interesting to use them. Then there was the PvP. And GW1 had hands down the best PvP I have ever played in any game. It had a ton of different modes. It was fairly well balanced. And because of that you had just so much variety. Also that system of defined roles that I mentioned earlier also worked really well in PvP. PS: Oops. Sorry for the wall of text. The nostalgia got me.
I completely agree. Parties are just big spam squads with no one coordinating with other people. The boss encounters just boil down to 20 or 30 people spamming the same attacks over and over again until the health bar creeps down. I'm sure that some people there are buffing people but no one can really tell or is paying any attention. I can see the thinking behind it, but I don't think it was worth messing with. It almost feels like getting rid of the Trinity was them being different for the sake of it.
The Dungeon Crawl Exactly. I don't feel the weight of my actions at all. Also there seems to be no tactical thinking. And yeah they wanted to try something new. I guess it did attract a bunch of new players but it seemed to utterly alienate the playerbase they already had.
Agreed. While it really is amazing to roam around gw2 to see so many of the maps and areas expanded on and seeing new parts of the world.... But thats where the positives end for me with 2. I wish it wasnt called guild wars 2 becuase it bares no resemblance other than visually
Thanks for this video. I just started playing Guild Wars 2 and after a few hours in realized it's a fair bit different than the first. This video explains a lot!
GW2 is actually more like other WoW-like MMOs than like GW1. Big differences between GW1 and such MMOs: 1) Squad/team build based, instance based. Normally every round of PvE is like "doing a dungeon/instance" with a team build. So the game designers could make all the enemies designed for teams as well (not so much for easier "low level" areas but more for harder/elite areas). 2) In PvE you can have henchmen (computer controlled NPCs) and heroes (customizable computer controlled NPCs that you can manually control) on your team. 3) There's a wider variety of player build types/roles. It's significantly more than the Holy Trinity. 4) No instance queuing. This is a big minus. You can't do "normal" PvE while queuing for an elite instance or PvP. But GW1 being more team build based with very many viable builds makes such stuff harder. One SoS rit may be fine in a team but more SoS rits normally doesn't work. It's not as simple like other games where for "easier instances/dungeons" the Game server can automatically put 1 tank, X DPS and Y Healers in a group and if stuff goes wrong the players would seldom blame the Game server's decision :). 5) Level and gear caps. You max out on gear and level fairly quickly. GW1 has stuff like q7 shields but it's still nothing like many other MMOs. There's no grinding for more powerful gear so that you can grind for even more powerful gear. You can grind for prettier gear if you want and many do. The WoW bunch may feel GW2 has no gear grind but compared to GW1 there is :).
The biggest problem I had with Guild Wars 2 was the way they had quests set up in form of those hearts. I couldn't believe they replaced traditional quests with that shit. I don't know if the expansions changed the way quests work in that game because I haven't played it in such a long time
Yeah they seemed incredibly grindy for a game that shouted about going against traditional MMO concepts before release. Such a shame that you had to take a break from saving the world against undead dragons to feed wurms and clean graffiti off rocks...
>Le me, replying to a nearly 5 years old video: To be fair, if they were willing to go tabula rasa on the game when switching from GW to GW2, then perhaps there's a chance that GW3 - whenever it may come - will be something different again? Could be that they've gathered enough opinions and raw data from the players to know the good and bad parts of both games, and to make GW3 to be a hybrid of both. Hopefully in a form that'll shake up the genre.
I think you need to value exploring a little bit more. Map completion in gw2 was and is still a huge part of the pve content. I understand why not everyone likes it though. I think i was halfway through the story when i hit 80^^. Depends on your priorities i suppose, but i truly think anet wanted people to explore and see that as a part of the main content but also do the story on the side. Not just feel the exploring as a grind only to get to the story missions. Subbed btw:)
Oh yeah, you can tell that plenty of effort went into making it as enjoyable as possible, like with the Vista Points and Points Of Interest. And the evironments and landscapes do have some real treats in there to discover. But for me, the MMO mechanics get in the way of that a bit. Or rather, make it less fun that it was before
I agree. I quickly fell off GW2 because of the lack of variation in the builds. Compared to GW1 there was very little experimentation available, and it lost the excitement of finding a new outpost with a new skill vendor.
(I know, this video is old and therefor can not include an opinion about the current version of both games) I first started GW2 and it is still my favourite MMO, but in order to learn more about the history I tried GW1 and it has definetelly it's own charm, but the two games are really much different gameplay experiences and you need to adjust to them.
I agree completely with all your points and i'd also add that the consistent party sizes allowed so much better combat balancing because the devs knew exactly what kind of power you'd have and could pitch the difficulty where they wanted relative to that. How many times are there issues in gw2 with stuff either being far too easy or taking 20 hours to kill one thing because of the scaling? I also HATE that every class in GW2 is it's own self-sustaining, tanking, healing, damage dealing unit. In GW you had to actually rely on tactics because if you got yourself into a situation you couldn't handle then you had to rely on someone else in your party to get you out of it. I feel absolutely no teamwork in GW2, merely hit all your skills to grind away at the health bar and hit your healing skill/dodge if your health gets low. Of course it's not quite as simple as that but it certainly feels like it at times.
I really, really miss having and playing a healing class. I get the idea that every class should be able to sustain itself to a point but I'd love to play a class which is there to buff and support with healing. It's one of the reasons I main druid. I'm a huge fan of support style classes. But alas, everyone can do pretty well on their own. And in PVE I'm pretty much useless. And my healing is okay at best.
I appreciate this video! However, because of the friendly game mechanics in GW2, I would say other players running around are the new Henchmen and Heroes!
That's an interesting way of looking at it, but as time goes on, eventually most people will have stopped playing, so you'll stop bumping in to other players out and about in the world.
The numbers might dwindle, but since they implemented the megaservers it has been quite good! Also the scaling kinda makes it so that you don't need others for most events. Most events are soloable regardless, even though this is beside the point haha!
First one was great and i still miss it sometimes. The exploration and difficulty made it fun. It felt like journey rather than game. GW 2 feels rather childish imo. Just now started it again and it feels better than at launch because of action camera
@@l-chan3347 trying to bee like another popular game is not a good thing at all. It takes away most of the personality of the game and makes OG fans dislike the devs
@@virtuousheathen981 F2P is more rare than anything today 👀 Gear thats pretty much infinitely valuable too? Heck yes. The game is pretty much perfect in every way and I dont know why people are crying over the loss of npcs 💀 Especially with the existence of a necromancer lol
@@l-chan3347 if you're playing GW2 as a f2p game, you're basically playing a demo and nobody will ever let you run end-game content. I would MUCH rather pay $30 for the base game of GW1 with ALL expansions included rather than pay $40 PER expansion with certain content being locked behind certain expansions (i.e. mounts). Also, it's not necessarily the loss of NPCs, it's the fact that skills are tied to weapons which is absolutely stupid and takes away A LOT of personality from builds, and not everybody that plays solo wants to be stuck to Necro (which is an underpowered class unless you run ONE specific build).
@@l-chan3347 I won't even get started about how they got rid of traditional missions and quests in favor of stupid ass hearts that have to be filled 🙄🙄
There are so many things lacking in GW2. The storyline is poorly executed, and feels extremely linear and some of the voice acting is really bad. Also being able to trade between players and also dueling is not permitted which makes no sense to me.
guild wars 2 plays like far cry for me in most of the gameplay its fun but like far cry i cant play them afther eachother but can replay afther a bit agian
I still consider it an mmorpg, especially by todays standards, many other games have similar formulas and are called mmorpg's. Also, 99% of people dont interact with people out in the world anyway. Also, most mmo's limit how many people you can see in the open world. At anypoint when i quest in ff xiv or ESO or even wow, i never see more than 1 or 2 people in the world due to how the servers literally shard people or do similar things so its really not that much different. And like all mmos, you see most of the people in the hub. So ive got no problem with calling this an mmorpg, shoot, people are even calling warframe or destiny mmorpg's and we can agree gw1 fits that bill alot more than those. The lack of real progression in gw2 and how its ALL tied to the mastery systems, well thats my #1 problem with 2. I literally hate that.... And the lack of real quests. Half the reason i play mmos is to enjoy the questing
I think you're right in that it arguably fits the description of an MMORPG better than anything else, but to me it's almost like saying that Iron Maiden and Napalm Death are both metal bands. It's true, they are both of that genre, but they're so different from each other that it would almost be disingenuous to put them solely in the same broad catagory.
Lol the same old debate. Gw2 had an actual market, a mailing system, better crafting, actual open world mmo content, and just better combat. Gw1 combat is dated and you can’t really solo it. As for build variety out of a 1000 skills you’re probably only gonna be using like 8 or 9. No class balance. You’re never gonna use martial heroes over caster heroes. Gw1 is overrated by Guild Wars players
As a Guild Wars 1 veteran waiting for Guild Wars 2 for so long I was so dramatically disappointed by the game that I just could not play it any longer. Which is a shame because I think it is actually a good game. It is just not Guild Wars 2. It's like a completely different franchise now.
The biggest change that sealed the deal for me was the removal of the classic trinity of RPGs. You always had your frontline, midline and backline in Guild Wars 1. Your tanky guys, your damage dealer/disabler and your healer/supporter. If you were in a group you had that clear role and you could tailor your characters to perfectly fit your preferred playstyle. In GW 2 everyone is just an all arounder that can do everything and it feels all so monotone. Especially for me being the backline (Monks and Ritualists ftw) it was just a terrible experience because there is no dedicated backline in GW 2. There is supports at best and even they do damage too. You don't have that teamwork that you rely on your frontline and midline to actually tank and kill stuff and they rely on you to keep them alive. Having clear roles makes for a much more satisfying experience in my opinion.
One thing also is the lack of variety. Guild Wars 1 had over a thousand different skills. And while a bunch of them were garbage and unusable you still had so much more you could choose from than in GW2. Just a few weapon sets and minor skills soon become stale and monotone.
Also I liked the instances much more than the open world thing. I don't want a dozen random dudes joining my group of people. Also it makes balancing super weird. Like some condition and buffs become redundant at a certain number of people because they can't stack infinitely. Also the game almost expects you to have someone with you. In GW 1 I could just grab henchies or even better use heroes which I could finetune. And there was even a whole lot of theory and strategy involved in hero builds. They were actually better at certain things than players and worse at other things so it made it interesting to use them.
Then there was the PvP. And GW1 had hands down the best PvP I have ever played in any game. It had a ton of different modes. It was fairly well balanced. And because of that you had just so much variety. Also that system of defined roles that I mentioned earlier also worked really well in PvP.
PS: Oops. Sorry for the wall of text. The nostalgia got me.
I completely agree. Parties are just big spam squads with no one coordinating with other people. The boss encounters just boil down to 20 or 30 people spamming the same attacks over and over again until the health bar creeps down. I'm sure that some people there are buffing people but no one can really tell or is paying any attention. I can see the thinking behind it, but I don't think it was worth messing with. It almost feels like getting rid of the Trinity was them being different for the sake of it.
The Dungeon Crawl Exactly. I don't feel the weight of my actions at all. Also there seems to be no tactical thinking.
And yeah they wanted to try something new. I guess it did attract a bunch of new players but it seemed to utterly alienate the playerbase they already had.
True Words! GW2 is a Single Player Game in a Boring online world
@The Grouch you know it. well said.
Agreed. While it really is amazing to roam around gw2 to see so many of the maps and areas expanded on and seeing new parts of the world.... But thats where the positives end for me with 2. I wish it wasnt called guild wars 2 becuase it bares no resemblance other than visually
Original Guild Wars will forever be the best
Thanks for this video. I just started playing Guild Wars 2 and after a few hours in realized it's a fair bit different than the first. This video explains a lot!
GW2 is actually more like other WoW-like MMOs than like GW1.
Big differences between GW1 and such MMOs:
1) Squad/team build based, instance based. Normally every round of PvE is like "doing a dungeon/instance" with a team build. So the game designers could make all the enemies designed for teams as well (not so much for easier "low level" areas but more for harder/elite areas).
2) In PvE you can have henchmen (computer controlled NPCs) and heroes (customizable computer controlled NPCs that you can manually control) on your team.
3) There's a wider variety of player build types/roles. It's significantly more than the Holy Trinity.
4) No instance queuing. This is a big minus. You can't do "normal" PvE while queuing for an elite instance or PvP. But GW1 being more team build based with very many viable builds makes such stuff harder. One SoS rit may be fine in a team but more SoS rits normally doesn't work. It's not as simple like other games where for "easier instances/dungeons" the Game server can automatically put 1 tank, X DPS and Y Healers in a group and if stuff goes wrong the players would seldom blame the Game server's decision :).
5) Level and gear caps. You max out on gear and level fairly quickly. GW1 has stuff like q7 shields but it's still nothing like many other MMOs. There's no grinding for more powerful gear so that you can grind for even more powerful gear. You can grind for prettier gear if you want and many do. The WoW bunch may feel GW2 has no gear grind but compared to GW1 there is :).
guild wars 3 will exist?
Nothing beats GW1, hoping GW3 is closer to that than its sequel
The biggest problem I had with Guild Wars 2 was the way they had quests set up in form of those hearts. I couldn't believe they replaced traditional quests with that shit. I don't know if the expansions changed the way quests work in that game because I haven't played it in such a long time
Yeah they seemed incredibly grindy for a game that shouted about going against traditional MMO concepts before release. Such a shame that you had to take a break from saving the world against undead dragons to feed wurms and clean graffiti off rocks...
>Le me, replying to a nearly 5 years old video:
To be fair, if they were willing to go tabula rasa on the game when switching from GW to GW2, then perhaps there's a chance that GW3 - whenever it may come - will be something different again?
Could be that they've gathered enough opinions and raw data from the players to know the good and bad parts of both games, and to make GW3 to be a hybrid of both. Hopefully in a form that'll shake up the genre.
did you add motion blur? It seems really really blurry every time you move anything
I think you need to value exploring a little bit more. Map completion in gw2 was and is still a huge part of the pve content. I understand why not everyone likes it though. I think i was halfway through the story when i hit 80^^. Depends on your priorities i suppose, but i truly think anet wanted people to explore and see that as a part of the main content but also do the story on the side. Not just feel the exploring as a grind only to get to the story missions. Subbed btw:)
Oh yeah, you can tell that plenty of effort went into making it as enjoyable as possible, like with the Vista Points and Points Of Interest. And the evironments and landscapes do have some real treats in there to discover. But for me, the MMO mechanics get in the way of that a bit. Or rather, make it less fun that it was before
The freedom of playing what ever build you like is just what makes Guild Wars 1 superior.
Casual audience will like GW2 a lot more.
I agree. I quickly fell off GW2 because of the lack of variation in the builds. Compared to GW1 there was very little experimentation available, and it lost the excitement of finding a new outpost with a new skill vendor.
(I know, this video is old and therefor can not include an opinion about the current version of both games)
I first started GW2 and it is still my favourite MMO, but in order to learn more about the history I tried GW1 and it has definetelly it's own charm, but the two games are really much different gameplay experiences and you need to adjust to them.
I agree completely with all your points and i'd also add that the consistent party sizes allowed so much better combat balancing because the devs knew exactly what kind of power you'd have and could pitch the difficulty where they wanted relative to that. How many times are there issues in gw2 with stuff either being far too easy or taking 20 hours to kill one thing because of the scaling?
I also HATE that every class in GW2 is it's own self-sustaining, tanking, healing, damage dealing unit. In GW you had to actually rely on tactics because if you got yourself into a situation you couldn't handle then you had to rely on someone else in your party to get you out of it. I feel absolutely no teamwork in GW2, merely hit all your skills to grind away at the health bar and hit your healing skill/dodge if your health gets low. Of course it's not quite as simple as that but it certainly feels like it at times.
I really, really miss having and playing a healing class. I get the idea that every class should be able to sustain itself to a point but I'd love to play a class which is there to buff and support with healing. It's one of the reasons I main druid. I'm a huge fan of support style classes.
But alas, everyone can do pretty well on their own. And in PVE I'm pretty much useless. And my healing is okay at best.
Have you tried to play raids? There a healer is essential
as someone playing it today: I wish it was that simple T-T Raids are hell xD
I appreciate this video!
However, because of the friendly game mechanics in GW2, I would say other players running around are the new Henchmen and Heroes!
That's an interesting way of looking at it, but as time goes on, eventually most people will have stopped playing, so you'll stop bumping in to other players out and about in the world.
The numbers might dwindle, but since they implemented the megaservers it has been quite good! Also the scaling kinda makes it so that you don't need others for most events. Most events are soloable regardless, even though this is beside the point haha!
First one was great and i still miss it sometimes. The exploration and difficulty made it fun. It felt like journey rather than game.
GW 2 feels rather childish imo. Just now started it again and it feels better than at launch because of action camera
Still playing OG GW here in 2021!
GW2 was trying too hard to be a f2p WoW imo
And that makes it great :3
@@l-chan3347 trying to bee like another popular game is not a good thing at all. It takes away most of the personality of the game and makes OG fans dislike the devs
@@virtuousheathen981 F2P is more rare than anything today 👀 Gear thats pretty much infinitely valuable too? Heck yes. The game is pretty much perfect in every way and I dont know why people are crying over the loss of npcs 💀 Especially with the existence of a necromancer lol
@@l-chan3347 if you're playing GW2 as a f2p game, you're basically playing a demo and nobody will ever let you run end-game content. I would MUCH rather pay $30 for the base game of GW1 with ALL expansions included rather than pay $40 PER expansion with certain content being locked behind certain expansions (i.e. mounts). Also, it's not necessarily the loss of NPCs, it's the fact that skills are tied to weapons which is absolutely stupid and takes away A LOT of personality from builds, and not everybody that plays solo wants to be stuck to Necro (which is an underpowered class unless you run ONE specific build).
@@l-chan3347 I won't even get started about how they got rid of traditional missions and quests in favor of stupid ass hearts that have to be filled 🙄🙄
There are so many things lacking in GW2. The storyline is poorly executed, and feels extremely linear and some of the voice acting is really bad. Also being able to trade between players and also dueling is not permitted which makes no sense to me.
guild wars 2 plays like far cry for me in most of the gameplay its fun but like far cry i cant play them afther eachother but can replay afther a bit agian
I still consider it an mmorpg, especially by todays standards, many other games have similar formulas and are called mmorpg's. Also, 99% of people dont interact with people out in the world anyway. Also, most mmo's limit how many people you can see in the open world. At anypoint when i quest in ff xiv or ESO or even wow, i never see more than 1 or 2 people in the world due to how the servers literally shard people or do similar things so its really not that much different. And like all mmos, you see most of the people in the hub. So ive got no problem with calling this an mmorpg, shoot, people are even calling warframe or destiny mmorpg's and we can agree gw1 fits that bill alot more than those. The lack of real progression in gw2 and how its ALL tied to the mastery systems, well thats my #1 problem with 2. I literally hate that.... And the lack of real quests. Half the reason i play mmos is to enjoy the questing
Gw is wayyyy better
I would say the game is still an mmorpg, even taking into mind the interaction limitations.
I think you're right in that it arguably fits the description of an MMORPG better than anything else, but to me it's almost like saying that Iron Maiden and Napalm Death are both metal bands. It's true, they are both of that genre, but they're so different from each other that it would almost be disingenuous to put them solely in the same broad catagory.
Henchmen and Heroes was my favorite part of GW1. I hate people and they worked out just fine as replacements.
GuildWars 1 is hte best co-rpg game ever!
GW2 is so bad, uninstalled few times.
GW is the best. GW 2 is trash.
Gw1 is trash. Gw2 is waaaayyyyyy better!
Lol the same old debate. Gw2 had an actual market, a mailing system, better crafting, actual open world mmo content, and just better combat. Gw1 combat is dated and you can’t really solo it. As for build variety out of a 1000 skills you’re probably only gonna be using like 8 or 9. No class balance. You’re never gonna use martial heroes over caster heroes. Gw1 is overrated by Guild Wars players
Of course it's an old debate, it's a 7 year old video.