Look at Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 is not quite an MMO, there is no monthly fee and you don't exactly go around questing for people with exclamation marks over their heads, but it is still a fully-featured, deep and complex online experience where you can explore an insteresting world and feel like there's always something else to do while progressing with crafting, building your character and finding loot.

No race but class race

I love the races and classes in Guild Wars 2, they feel like a bit of fresh air after all the MMOs I've played, where in WoW or SWTOR you find two factions warring over whatever the plot tells them to feud about, the five races of GW2 are cooperating in a shaky alliance against dragons and dangers that cast a shadow of menace over their worlds. The races are mostly there to setup your starting zone and some backstory for your character that will bring you out there, exploring the world.

The classes are diverse, interesting and use different mechanics. Thieves can steal abilities from their enemies to use them against other foes and they have Initiative that is used to power their abilities, which aren't on a cooldown like the other classes, Elementalists have a wide array of spells for each elements, Guardians can block often and use shield-based abilities, Mesmer use illusions and clones and conditions (status ailments), Engineers use turrets and kits that completly change your skill set, Necromancers summon creatures and turn into death entities, the list goes on. 

This is interesting, because each class feels different than the others and each race has a different feel to its starting zone and primary quest lines.

Where the class system falls short

Your class defines what kind of weapons you can use in Guild Wars 2 and the weapon(s) you equip define the skillset you have. If you are a defender with a mace and a shield, you have 3 mace skills and 2 shield skills. If you have a sword and a focus, you have 3 sword skills and 2 focus skills, if you wield a two handed weapon, you'll have 5 skills from that weapon. Each weapon has a 'theme' associated to it, maybe if you equip a sword and shield you'll be able to fill the tank role or the DPS role, equiping a scepter would make you a healer, et cetera. In that fashion, most classes can do everything.

You also start with only the first weapon skill unlocked and you unlock the next ones by using the ones you already have. This is part of the problem with the classes in Guild Wars 2 and it's twofold.

First, you gain these new skills extremely quickly, you'll be able to unlock all of them by the time you reach level 3 and if you have a weapon of each type on hand you'll see everything there is by level 5.

Second of all, it's everything there is, attack-wise. You won't gain special dagger attacks at level 30 if you're a thief, nor a new bow skill will unlock in the late game, you have five skills per weapon, and that's that. If you plan on using daggers until the end of the game, if you only find good daggers, if you have passive skills - more on that later - that affect daggers, I hope you like stabbing dudes, jumping on dudes, spinning over dudes, throwing a dagger and being stealthy, because you're going to do a lot of that over the game.

How I would fix that
My idea would be to give less choices of weapons to each classes and take these skills and add them to the list of skills for another weapon, then make it so it takes a little longer to get to more advanced skills. Maybe change how the passive abilities work so they upgrade your basic skills? That could be interesting and keep them being better and better over the course of the game. That way you still learn your skills over time, but you have more than five and they don't look and act the same way through the game.

Character customization

Starting at level 5 you begin earning skill points. You can also get more skill points by doing skill challenges scattered thorough the world. These skill points can be spent on slot skills. You start with a basic healing skill that can be changed and the three other slots are locked until you get to certain levels. These skills range from passive abilities to summon spells to additional non-weapon specific attacks. 

They are a nice addition but are trickled down slowly and you won't know what to unlock when you get your first points because the effects are so diverse. You might want to get a passive precision buff or a poison that affects your 3 next attacks every minute. Not to say that these slot skills are a bad idea but it's unclear what you should or shouldn't take.

At level 11 you start getting traits and they give you passive stat bonuses and special passive effects every five levels. They are split into five branches of which you can max two if you play the whole thing and some effects are more useful than others. That's perfeclty fine as long as you know what kind of character you want to play. You will get abilities like "5% chance to gain Might whenever you kill an enemy (60 seconds cooldown)" or "Your minions have 20% more health". That kind of stuff.


This game is too hard

Not unlike borderlands 2!

Guild Wars 2 is what World of Warcraft used to be in some sense - too hard. I remember not so fondly a period of time where I had to stop between each encounter and eat/drink to get my HP/Mana back to appropriate levels for the next fight. I remember when dungeons were about pulling exactly as low number of enemies as possible. Nowadays WoW is way more casual, you can fight forever and I've ran dungeons in such a nonchalent manner that the challenge isn't there anymore. 

Guild Wars 2 is not really casual. Fighting multiple enemies at once will result in my death, fighting enemies too quickly one after another will result in my death, trying to tackle event bosses resulted to my death. That last part makes sense because these bosses are supposed to be fought with groups but when I want to gain Skill points, I should be able to fight the boss alone. And more often than not, you don't know what you did wrong.

 When you fall to your death, you get into a little 'Fight to survive' minigame in which you have to kill an enemy to get back up. Even if you do, your equipment becomes damaged, you lose maximum HP for a while and your HP when revived is ridiculously low so you might just fall over instantly until you get sent back to a waypoint. All characters in Guild Wars 2 can revive others so if you're playing with a party it might make things easier.

Another thing that increases difficulty is the fact that your level is always scaled down to the area you're in. So no matter how strong you are, if you go to a level 3 area, you'll be level 3 and the tough monsters will still be tough. It adds challenge, I'm sure, but it also makes grinding to be able to beat tough encounter more or less impossible.

How to fix this
Easy, make the game a bit easier! It's not enjoyable to have three or four enemies respawn at the same spot and kill you without you having the chance to do anything. Maybe removing the level scaling? I'm not sure if I like the idea of adding challenge by removing your stats whenever you're in a place that should be too easy for you.

The crafting system is full of good ideas, but...

In Guild Wars 2, your inventory is mostly never full of crafting materials of all kinds like in some other games because you can send at any time all materials you have directly to your 'collection' which is infinite space to store these kind of items. Then when you are at a crafting station, you can use these items from your collection directly into crafting. The best thing is that this is cross-characters so you can use your materials with all your professions.

To be more down to basics, professions range from Artificer, Armorsmith, Cook, Leatherworker, Tailor and the like. You gain both profession experience and actual exp when you craft things and you start with a few handful of receipes. You begin by being able to make simple items and you discover more things by combining what you can do. It's simple really, you mix a boot part with a boot sole with a magic item that gives precision and you'll get boots of precisions.

The system works fairly well and is full of little things to make it feel easy to use without breaking the pace too much. Barring the fact that the items you use to gather materials - metals, wood and food - have durabilities that go down and break after a while.

That being said, I've encountered a small issue with the way receipes work, and it's in the fact that you'll get basic materials - copper ore, greenwood trees and the like - in the first area of the game and even if you mine everything you find, you might not be able to move on to the next rank of materials by the time you're leaving that area, and there are no more of these materials in the next maps. So you need to go back in that first area and gather these ressources until you have enough, and that might not be the funniest thing ever. It's also kind of frustrating to mix and match what you have and get 'this receipe needs a level 400 in that profession', because if you can have the materials that early, why can't you use them?

How I would fix it
Easy, add some overlap in the ressources so you get some in the more advanced maps but with less frequency, that would solve this.

So many things to do, some of them funnier than others
There is tons to do in guild wars 2! You can explore the whole map and find all the waypoints, all the 'places' of that map, do all the quests at the various quest hubs, do all skill challenges and find all the vistas (high vintage points that give you a nice cutscene showing the area around you), also there are tons of achievements, you can create your own guild and do world versus world PvP.

The quest system is interesting, you arrive into zones and then you do things from a list and a gauge fills up, when it's full because you have done enough of the thing, you complete the quest and get gold by mail. It's very streamlined. If you don't feel like fighting, you can just gather things or talk to NPCs or whatever else the quests ask you to do.

When I started playing Guild Wars 2, I tried to get everything in all the maps, because I'm a completitionist and because finding everything gives you nice items and rewards. I hit the same wall on my two first characters - finding all the vistas, areas and waypoints in the main capital cities is super boring because you have no reason to go wander around in these huge multi-level maps. And you can't do anything else while you just look around for these very specific areas. It's kinda boring, it might take up to an hour if you're not very thorough, and after a while you'd just wish you could move on.

Another thing that I dislike are jumping puzzles, I'm not sure if any of you have played Maple Story, but the jumping puzzles in there are terrible. Guild Wars 2 tries to add some of them - to find vistas or specific areas - and the 3d controls don't really lend themselves well to jumping on tiny platforms and falling over, having to restart again. It's not fun and MMO controls don't lend themselves well to that kind of action.

Bottomline there are tons of things to do in guild wars 2, but not everything can be a winner. Some of this stuff is pretty hit-or-miss, maybe you'll enjoy jumping around and finding all of the little things hidden in the world.

How I would fix this
Hard to say, MMO mini-games are not always great - like the races in DCUO - but the whole map overloading issue could be solved by not having these things in cities. You have to walk around fields to fight monsters and do quest, but cities never require it.

Some housekeeping

Next game I look at
Is going to be guild wars 2. A great game with tons of neat ideas but some flaws and small things that bug me here and there

Do not hesitate to
Suggest me games to look at and crack my skull at how to make their design better and/or ask me anything! I'm here for the long run anywas.

Look at Borderlands 2

Writing one of these looks at Borderlands 2 is quite difficult because while I had good things to say about torchlight 2, the best part of that look is to think about ideas to improve the game and its systems. Borderlands 2 is big, complex, well-crafted and polished, but not without minor flaws. Taking terrible games and suggesting ways to make them less so is easy, taking great games and having to scratch your head on how to refine some systems here and there can be tough, but doable. No game is perfect for everyone but I don't want to be seen as nit picky; I'm offering the view of what I think is flawed in these games I take a good look at. Don't get me wrong, for me to play that much, the game has to have something!

Welcome to borderlands! Two!

I spent the first six hours of Borderlands 2 complaining internally that this wasn't really a new game. I played so much Borderlands 1 - but not any DLC - that I was feeling too much like this could have been DLC for the first game. Expend the planet Pandora, expand on the vault idea, expand on the concept of vault hunters, introduce new villains, that could have been done into DLC, no? I don't mean that Borderlands 1 and 2 are the same game but I could have an argument that they aren't that different.

The character classes are basically the same.
In borderlands 1 you had the following characters: An army guy that could throw turrets, a tough guy that became berserk, a magic girl with a stealth power and a guy that sniped and threw birds. What do you get in Borderlands 2? An army guy that throws turrets - and this time, turrets can't heal nor replenish your ammo - a tough guy that becomes berserk, a magic girl with a stun power and a guy that snipes and uses a stealth power. See the pattern? I haven't played all of the game with all classes, but I fear that they don't change radically through the whole thing. 

How to fix this
Well, try classes with more variety. Of course, changing completely whole systems of the games would need very much discussion here and I'm not sure how well I could write my ideas of how talent trees would work for my made-up classes. That being said, how about the other archetypes of characters in video games? How about a doctor? A scientist? A treasure hunter?  A crazy survivalist type guy? No reason why they had to (almost) copy and paste the basic ideas from the old characters.

I have some ideas, of course, a character with a physical shield, a character that can control multiple weapons at once (Maybe a siren using telekinesis?), how about actual stealth? It'd be neat to be able to kill silently. A character that uses blood magic to fire life at enemies? The possibilities are there, they are a-plenty, no real reason to make another 4 of the same batch of guys.

From sand to snow to buildings in ruins
Pandora is the location of the two Borderlands games and it shows, they try to make it interesting by adding a few exotic locales here and there - the big futuristic city is nice! - but otherwise, you're driving or running on the snow for a good chunk of the game and on the sandy deserts of the planet for another one. You can do so much on a desert/tundra planet but that's not really an excuse on an academic level. Indoor design was also taken a bit from Borderlands 1. Basically playing the two games from back to back made me realize that yes, they were so much alike.

How to fix this
Maybe terraforming? Biomes? Glass domes full of jungles? Deep-sea missions? Pandora has ice, no reason it can't have water! Even forests would be neat. Different building styles? Maybe? It lacks a distinct look, that's for sure. I would add new environments and work them into the story somehow.

Opposing forces
Aside from bosses which are mostly unique to each stories - but often stronger versions of specific enemies - Borderlands 2 features almost the same species of enemies to kill. Bandits, bruisers, midgets, psychos, rakks, skaggs, ants, burrower snake things, robots... To be fair, there are a few new enemy types in Borderlands 2, bullymongs, nomads, goliaths and the like, so it's not entirely the same thing. 

Here's a bunch of guys in a line shooting at me (Borderlands 1)

Needless to say, there is a huge improvement in enemy AI. I literally had a row of bandits stand behind a short wall in borderlands 1 and shoot in my direction until I killed them all. Enemies in borderlands 2 are much more mobile and will dodge around to avoid grenades and generally being shot, they are much more accurate and some synergy exists between certain enemy types. While I applaud the effort to make enemies more interesting, the lack of variety is still a bit jarring, I'm surprised that we're still fighting the same psycho bandits and bile spitting monster dogs than in borderlands 1.

Bosses are also vastly improved, you can't really stay in one spot and just shoot forever anymore, you need to move a bit and employ some form of tactical process that wasn't there in the original game.

How to 'fix' this
Find a reason why the bandits are gone, Hyperion replaced them with mercs? You're on a different part of Pandora and other gangs rule the spot? It's not that big of an issue...

You look badass
Badass ranks are a new mechanic of borderlands 2, you get achievements based on certain tasks such as killing enemies with assault rifles with increasingly demanding tiers of achievements (killing 10 enemies, 100, then 500) and you get badass ranks from achieving these goals. These ranks can be traded for permanent stat bonuses to any and all of your characters that you create. The more you rise in badass rank, the more points you need to get a stat bonus. This is a really interesting system that makes your new characters slightly more powerful, gives you a reason to take one weapon (in this case the assault rifle) then try and complete all the challenges related to that one thing.

When you start a new character, all the challenges have reset so you can theoretically create an infinite number of characters and get ridiculous stat bonuses. In practice if you want to get all the challenges with one characters you'll need to switch weapons often and play lots of the game. All and all it's a really neat system, achievements that give tangible bonuses in games are motivating for a certain kind of players to try and get them all. Of course, the completionist side of me I would have loved it if challenges counted as completed on your new characters so it would've been easier to complete them all over multiple playthroughs.

Fight for your life

Sadly, I'm not going to make it

There is nothing more frustrating than being shot down and having to kill an enemy under a certain amount of time and not being able to do so. Stuck having to reload in FFYL mode? The worst. An enemy hides behind some cover and you can't possibly kill it in time? The worst! You have a wildly inaccurate gun so you shoot randomly trying to get that last sliver of life down on the one target you have but can't and respawn five seconds later and the boss is now full life? The worst! I'm not going to say that it's VERY easy to go down in Borderlands 2, but you do from time to time, and then I hope you have left some enemies weakened or you have some special skill you can use while down because otherwise it might be a frustrating experience.

Especially if you're doing arena combat and the end of a wave is near, but you get down and can't make it, you have to start over.

How to fix this
Simplest solution? Add health recovery items and maybe stimpacks that you can use in FFYL to get back up. Make it so you can carry 2-3 only at any time to not break completely the game. This way you'll be able to fix the small errors you make when you tackle enemies the wrong way but won't be able to cheese your way past bosses simply by chugging potions.

So many things!

Customization! I got it, you need it.
The new gun system is fine. You can expect some specific abilities from different gun makers - bandit will have more ammo, Tediore fires explosive bullets, Hyperion guns are more precise - and most often than not you can tell what a gun will do only at first glance.  That being said I haven't seen much in the crazy/overpowered category for weaponry and shields. I've heard reports of bee shields being really good? 

The skill trees allow for some choices, upgrade to melee attacks, gun combat, special skills, you're going to be able to build the character of your choosing with what borderlands 2 offers.

The shields are also reasonably interesting, you get high capacity shields that lower your health, shields that drop boosters, shields that increase your damage when you shoot with a full shield, grenades have interesting effects that return in a mix-and-match fashion from borderlands 1 and you get a class mod and a relic. You can customize your characters pretty well and the visual options are really extensive and you unlock more as you go on.

Loot toilets

In conclusion, some one-liners

• Why give that much focus to the characters of borderlands 1? They aren't that interesting, also I didn't know people were fan of them.
• What's up with that checkpointing? Why can't I come back to a checkpoint at the end of a level when I quit and relaunch the game? Do I really have to do the whole thing again?
• Why did they remove weapon proficiency? It was cool to become better with weapons you used often, maybe they did so because people wouldn't try different weapon types?
• How did they manage to make the driving seem worse than 1? There's something different to it.
• Tiny Tina won't be my character of the year.
• Good job on the PC port this time around.

Look at Torchlight 2

The original Torchlight took most of its ideas from Blizzard’s Diablo 2 and Torchlight 2 follows the same pattern. It would have been interesting to see where Runic’s title splits apart from the craft of similar games, but barring really neat ideas, some mechanics and systems just don’t cut it to make a deep action RPG. Seeing the promises of mod tools makes me think that it would be possible to tweak Torchlight 2 and see if my ideas hold up.

The pet system was refined and improved
Being able to send your pet to town and sell all your junk loot in Torchlight 1 was already a great idea, Runic made it one notch better by allowing you to buy items using your pet. Potions, scrolls, dynamite (for quick fishing) are now buyable from anywhere in the game while your pet goes to make you money off the stuff you won’t use.

Pets now have specific equipment, tags and collars, that give them interesting abilities such as breaking shields and healing you when they hit. The fact that they can cast spells also returns, making pets effective at healing or summoning minions to help. All they need now is a way to enchant items, buy new equipment and the like through your pet and you’ll never have to go back to town again!

Great enemy variety, but...
Nomad robots with bionic arms, swarms of roaches, slimes that split up in multiple slimes, robots, zombies, goblins, beastmen, huge bosses, Torchlight 2 has a lot of different enemy styles to fit all the environments of the game. You constantly get swarmed by complex hordes of enemies and navigating around all of them can be an interesting challenge.

That being said, I’m always a bit bummed out when I encounter really familiar abilities from Diablo 2 (or 3) in there. Circles of ghostly hands on the ground that slows you down? A fan of knives? I just wished all the abilities were crazy like raising giant stone circles or pentagrams of electricity. Also on easier difficulties, some of these abilities don’t have the time to shine - you’re blasting through enemies way too fast.

Enemies that also totally negate your attacks can be frustrating if you’re not paying attention; Shield-bearing enemies can take a large number of hits before their shield breaks and you actually damage them - easy to fix, make the shields not block 100% of attacks, or only block a certain % of the damage dealt - enemies with big electrical shields that reflect damage back at you and enemies that become untargetable once they start flying.

Choosing where to put stat points is confusing

STATS! Everything in focus!

While leveling up in torchlight 2 - something that happens fairly often - you will need to assign 5 stat points between Strength, Dexterity, Focus and Vitality. These stats have clear uses, strength will increase weapon damage and critical hit damage, intelligence will increase mana, magic damage and execute chance (the chance to hit with two weapons at once) and so forth. You also need certain stats to equip items (or you’ll need to wait until a specific level).

However, choosing where to put them feels confusing and then almost inconsequential. Do I need two more points in strength per level if I’m a berserker? How about Focus? As a mage, do I put everything into Focus? Oh but some of your mage gear will require Vitality. How much? These questions should be easy to answer, or you shouldn’t ask them at all.

Diablo 2’s stat system was flawed in the way that either you ‘knew’ what you were doing (by following a guide, probably) or you spent points in a way that wouldn’t let your character able to clear the higher difficulties. Torchlight 2 is broken in a different way. You can just put points anyway you want, it will be fine, you wouldn’t be able to equip everything you’ll find anyways.

How I would fix it.
Give the player an obvious way to know how they should spec their character and streamline the items to match that progression. For instance, if you want a mage that uses wands, putting 3 points of focus per level would allow you to wear any wands you find, if you want staves, 2 points in strength and 2 in focus would be a way to go. Showing what the ‘sweet spot’ for your stats based on your class and skills would help tremendously. Then I’d know that if I’m a berserker and want to use two weapons, I actually need Focus for the execute chance bonus.

Another good way to fix this is remove the points allocation entirely. Mages get +3 focus and +1 everything else, outlanders +3 dexterity, engineers +3 vitality, etc.

Skill points are cool except if you need to hoard them

I don't feel like my points are doing
much here...

The skill system is fairly interesting, you have three branches of skills and nine passives, most of which unlock after 7-level increments. All skills have 3 tiers which unlock after you put 5-point increments into them. This is original and like I said, feels interesting. However in the way you play action rpgs, you aren’t going to have more than 2 or 3 attack abilities (Even then I mostly use one) this makes using low-level skills until they’re at 15/15 points kinda weird.

You need to get to certain levels to put a certain amount of points into a skill so you’ll get to your level 31 ability and won’t have even maxed the first skill, if you so choose to use it. First-level skills are often than not less useful (and statistically worse) than high-level skills, such as a skill that fires a single projectile versus an homing barrage of constantly shooting rockets. Of course, the tier bonuses are neat (except when they simply increase another value, such as a skill working over 10 seconds instead of 5) but I don’t think that getting +2% damage per level each 3-4 level to a skill that would numerically be outclassed anyway by a higher-level ability feels like a real choice to the player.

Another problem with that system is the fact that if you want to use a high-level skill as your main attack and dump all the points you can into it, you’ll need to hoard your skill points for most of the game (up to level 35) and that doesn’t motivate me to play up to that point. The in-game respec system is not quite useful, being able to roll back your last 3 skill points gives you a minimal margin of error, but not much else.

How I would fix it
Average the strength of the skills so they work on 9 (or 6) levels instead of 15, reduce the number of levels per tier, increase the gap between the skill levels (or stop giving one point per level) so that when you place a point, it boosts your skills in a significant way, but you also have enough points to get more skills at higher tiers.

Being geared in all-legendary loot is great, but...
You constantly get magical items in Torchlight 2, set items, orange items, blue items, rare items... It’s not uncommon to find your first set item in the first map of the game or get one for completing the first quest you do. Finding new and better stuff is always fun but if you drill down the numbers, it feels unnecessary.

Set bonuses that are 2% better than normal items of the same level, legendaries that have 5-6 stats on them, but the increases are minimal. The point of rare items is to be worth something more than normal items, but as I see them they are a small upgrade often linked to specific stats that you might not be even able to use (such as fire damage bonuses for instance)

That's the first quest in the game! Set items!

How I would fix it
This is quite easy, increase the stats on the legendaries and set items, make them drop less often, that should do it. When you find a legendary/set item, it will be really good and you won’t get as many as often, so they will create a greater sense of excitement, not making most of the unique items vendor trash.



In conclusion, some one-liners

• Not a fan of the way fumbles work, having a chance to deal ridiculously low damage isn’t fun.
• Some of the passives are interesting but it’s not obvious if they work with all skills.
• Enchanting is great, being able to remove enchantments is also interesting, that said I’m not sure I’d ever keep an item so long that I really needed to re-roll enchants on it.
• The Mapworks is also a really great idea and is endlessly replayable.
• Ranged weapons have a very short range and enemies almost appear in your face, I wonder if the second part is a bug.
• Harder difficulties aren’t worth it if you don’t get anything in return. You’ll get the same items in casual than in elite.
• More checkpoints would be nice. The maps are big and having to walk through a big and empty map when you quit then come back isn’t the funniest.
• Mana was boring back then, it’s boring now, running out of mana means you can’t do anything until it recharges.
• The music is so good Matt Uelmen it hurts. If you close your eyes sometimes you’ll imagine yourself in Diablo 2.
• Buffs that behave like passives (can be on at all times because they have the same duration as their cooldowns) but that you have to recast all the times are dumb, they should be made into passives or really increase their duration.
• You know what I like? Cloud saves. You know what I hate? Having to redo a whole act because somehow my cloud saves didn't sync properly.

Intro Post

Hey there!
My name's Jérémie Tessier, but you might know me as poik007, I design games in my free time, then struggle endlessly to implement my designs in any satisfactory manner! To pay the bills, I work IT at a start-up in Montreal, Canada.

On this blog, I'm going to review games from a designer standpoint, review ideas, mechanics, systems and overall experiences. This blog is not intended to be helpful with purchasing decisions. Don't expect me to say "Buy this game" or "Don't buy this game" but rather "In this game, X and Y happen, maybe if Z happened instead of Y, it'd be more fun." And then again, fun is subjective, so feel free to comment, argue, debate with me.

I just want games to be good, I want to make and play good games, I want to understand what works in games and what doesn't, both on an academic and a entertainment standpoint. My goal is to write about one of these every week.

Coming up tonight, a look at Torchlight 2!