Before I started playing the new Diablo IV Season I had been playing Guild Wars 2 quite a bit. I am very much not ready to let go of that game so I have to figure out a way to balance things out a little. Both games have a bit of time pressure attached to them: the Diablo IV season will end, and Guild Wars 2 has a new expansion coming very soon (and come to think of it, D4 has an expansion in a couple months).
I’ve had a Guild Wars 2 account pretty much since it launched. According to the /age command my account is 4,366 days old. That’s not to say I’ve played a lot. I have a bunch of characters but only 3 of note.
I have a level 80 but that character did a lot of his leveling by logging in every day and collecting the daily experience rewards they used to dish out. This character has a play time of about 47 hours. He was my first character back when leveling was presumably the slowest it has ever been, but most days I’d log in, grab the daily rewards and log out. I don’t think he moved an inch for about 20 levels!
I have a level 56 character that I actually played all the way to level 56, and his play time is 67 hours; I honestly don’t remember much about playing him.
My current “main” is level 70 Warrior with a play time of 32 hours. I’ve been using a bunch of exp buffs on her which might explain why she seems to be leveling faster than the level 56, or maybe the game itself has been tweaked to speed up leveling. Not sure.
Then I have some even lower levels not worth talking about. Grand total play time is 225 hours which averages out to like 18:45/year. 🙂 Obviously in reality the game just laid dormant for years at a time. (I seem to be injecting a lot of math into my blog posts lately for some reason.)
Anyway, yes when I came back after several years away I of course started a new character to “re-learn to play” and I of course grew attached to her and so just kept on. I have a ton of level boosts in my inventory so I could’ve just boosted her to level 80 but I figured that would defeat the point of playing a new character to re-learn. Plus it feels cheat-ie. One of my weird quirks… using a %exp booster is fine. Using an level skip boost feels like cheating!
Right now she is still in the base game story. My intention as of now is to play through all the content in order. With 10 years of content that will take me quite a while, I reckon. I own the first couple of expansion packs but have been resisting buying others until I catch up. And after 32 hours I am still baffled by a lot of things. I have a ton of hero points that I’m holding onto because I have no idea what to do with them after I have all my skill slots full, and I’m not really struggling much with the content unless I wander into an event that needs a big group and there aren’t enough of us there.
I’ve been trying to learn to be patient about games. I find that just playing and slowly figuring things out is more rewarding than googling or watching YouTube videos and then just emulating what some other player is doing. Since I’m not in an active guild, if I am doing it wrong I’m only hurting myself, and if I’m having fun I’m really NOT hurting myself even if I die over and over!
I am looking forward to how things change at level 80. It’s strange how much I’ve been changing as a gamer in recent years. I’ve mentioned a few times that these days it is much less common for me to get super hyped for an upcoming game and to jump in on Day 1, and I’ve been getting a lot more satisfaction out of playing older games that have had some years of patching and polish. But another change is that the old me tended to lose interest in a game once a character hit level cap. I was so addicted to the dopamine hit of the DINGS! that once there were no more levels to gain I either rolled an alt or moved to a new game. Now I’m much more liable to keep on playing (~glances over at his level 313 Fallout 76 character~) and exploring the game’s systems and nuances.
So yeah, no giant landmarks to celebrate in Guild Wars 2 just now, but I did want to get a post about out because it deserves the attention!! 🙂
I have been playing the same level 80 character for ten years in GW2 and I still don’t know what the heck I’m doing 🙂
As long as we’re having fun, right!? 🙂
A lot of people seem to like playing through the Living Story content in order. ANet certainly do everything they can to encourage it. As someone who did play through it in order when it came out, I’d say a great deal of it deserves to be skipped. There were several years when it was very obvious that there was a serious issue with producing narrative content in a timely fashion and the devs tried to make up for it by having a ton of time-consuming busywork and some of the most long-winded, tedious boss fights imagineable. It’s possible they retuned some of that when they packaged it up so they could sell to latecomers but I doubt it somehow. I’ve certainly never been tempted to go back and check – once was more than enough for a lot of it.
The open world stuff is much better, on the whole, and as far as I remember almost nothing is ever gated by having to have done the story stuff.
If you happen to see this Bhag; how far does that criticism of the live content run, do you think?
I got ‘up to date’ with all the live content going into the Path of Fire expansion, but I’ve not really played again seriously since. I have logged in on occasion to try grab the Season 4 Living World Story for free, but I think I still missed a chapter here or there, and either way haven’t played any of ’em yet.
So I’m curious now, whether Season 4 attracts that same criticism or whether it was part of the turning point?
I wouldn’t hold super high expectations for any GW2 story arc. It either seems to falter at some point due to it being made by multiple teams who don’t seem to know how to connect to each others’ works or there was something fundamentally ‘off’ with the story to begin with – either due to the story writers’ logic or need to shoehorn an explanation for whatever new mechanical or system gimmick to be introduced.
That said, each chunk of story/gameplay episode is usually not too bad when taken just as that chunk alone.
Living World Season 4 has some nice maps and is popular for volatile magic currency, which feeds into trophy bag rewards that are good money/needed for legendaries. Icebrood Saga (Season 5) started out VERY strong with Grothmar Valley and wasn’t too bad all the way until Drizzlewood… and then plunged off a cliff with repeated Dragon Response Missions that were great in theory (soloable and groupable scaling content) and deeply overstayed their welcome by about 6 missions in practice.
It’s safer to play GW2 for its gameplay rather than story. Maybe you like how particular skills feel in combat, or wandering around some beautiful landscapes solo, or the spontaneous coordinating zergs in the open world, or the instanced group organization, or trundling around in WvW in a zerg or roaming looking for small fights. The story is better as a once and done introduction to unlocking all the maps, a half-tutorial if you will. Hope for anything more, and you will likely cry at the lack of continuity or despoiled lore.