Guild Wars 2: Wishlist, further comments

Some more post-demo thoughts:

GW2 Wishlist

This is premature and I know it. The game's not finished, the demo clearly didn't have all the features of the game, and the Q&A we've seen suggests that many fine-tuning details are on the queue of things to do but not yet done. But there's a few things I hope they'll add or change before the game is complete:

• Full UI customization: definitely being worked on to some extent (right now you can only move the chat window). Since GW1 has a very flexible screen layout, I don't imagine this will be left out, but I do not like the default placement of most of the things (ironically, the chat window's default position is where I put it in GW1, so it's the one thing I don't care you can already move, heh).
• Better keybinding: GW1 used only base keys, no Shift/Ctrl/Alt combos. I need them to add at least Shift (and preferably all three) because there is no way I'm going to reliably hit 8/9/0 (and I'm iffy on the function keys) while moving and mousing. :D I am willing to mouse skills or attunement and weapon changes if necessary but it would, of course, be far more efficient to be able to do both key and mouse as needed.
• Flexible armor visibility: GW1 allows you to hide or show cloaks and helms, and, of late, costume bits. That feature does not appear to be in GW2 at the moment, though this one I'm fairly confident they'll add to some extent. My ideal would be able to toggle cloaks, helms/headpieces, shoulder pads, and maybe gloves and boots as well (I particularly would use those on things like charr and asura), as well as having a set of town clothing that are toggleable, rather than needing to carry extra clothing around and swap to it. It would be even better if these were hot-key assignable, provided there's a decent keybind system. I notice there are also some jewelry slots; I have not yet seen if those are visible on the character. If so, add those to the toggle list (although I'm likely to leave them visible anyhow).
• Better system than "buy skills again": I was noting in the demo that the same skills later seem to have higher energy costs as well as, of course, more effect. I thought originally this might be because they automatically grew with you, which would be sorta-consistent with the original GW1 (where the more attribute points you had, the better the skill), but it turns out you have to buy higher "tiers" of the skill. This is one of the the things about WoW I found annoying, so I'm not any happier about it here, especially given the notion of skill drops (about which we don't have enough info, but which I'm also not keen on).
• Scaling dungeons: They've said many times that the game should be mainly soloable, which I personally find a required feature of games due to the fact that my playtime, being erratic, is usually spent mainly playing with my SO. However, there's some indication that dungeons will be tuned towards full parties. I would much rather see them scaleable like events, where the difficulty ramps up as more people join. I don't see why I should have to find a party (that I'm just as likely to have to bail on thanks to my back hurting) just to complete a dungeon. Granted, even if they don't scale them, chances are I'll be able to complete them with just my SO (we did 5-man raids in WoW with just us, after all), but it'd still be a more solo-friendly design.
• More flexible background options: I mentioned I found two of the three human options cliché. This is because they are "dead parents" and "dead sister". I understand that they may be keeping these limited due to desiring to voice everything and such, but couldn't they do something with making that "lost loved ones" and "revenge" and let you fill in the details in your mind? Or via text only? I'd settle for them simply adding 2-3 more options there, because three really isn't enough.

Further Thoughts on Reactions to the Game

There's some complaints I've heard that I consider extremely trivial (the glow on friends and enemies—only visible when you mouse-over or target—instead of circles comes to mind). Then there's the ones I've heard where I think they just are, well, wrong.

"See, there's quests after all!"

I went over this already, but let's go into it in detail. People have actually said "there's no difference between what GW2 has and a standard quest system". They are utterly, utterly wrong. Yes, there are still some people with a marker over their head (it's an * instead of a !, because they're trying to distance themselves from the whole traditional quest thang). These people fall into three categories:

• Info givers/certain event starters: This includes "scouts" (people who give hints on where nearby you can find events) people who will tell you optional info about the event you're actually seeing happen, who you can then say "Yes, I'll help out" to (but note that I saw several events where this wasn't even remotely necessary), and people who will kick off "player-initiated" events like the ability to train your charr in combat in the Last Whiskey Bar. None of these are traditional quest-givers. They are information givers, or people who start something timed or deliberate rather than the automatic things that also happen.
• Reward givers/cut-scene starters: These are the people who you talk to when you've already accomplished something. They are not necessarily the people you talked to when you started it. This is the surest sign this is not a traditional quest system: you do not go up to someone, who tells you "This thing is happening!" (when you can look around and see that it isn't), and then return to them later. You see a thing happening, go up to someone who tells you what's going on, and then go do whatever, and then, when you're finished, you may well go up to some other person entirely who thanks you for your help and maybe gives you a direct reward, and maybe also points you along your way (via a cut-scene of sorts, no less) to the next thing. The only event I saw where you talk to the same person more than once is an asura who explicitly asks you to get something for him.
• Event targets: For instance, people you rescue as a human in the tutorial event. You click on them to tell them it's safe to run. Granted they could make this just happen automagically when you got close and weren't in combat, but they chose to make you actively participate. Live with it.

"There's no relation between the skill mechanics of GW1 and GW2!!11eleventy"

Sure there is. You still have a skill bar that's limited. Instead of getting Every Last Skill You Ever Learned on your bar to work with, you still have to pick a) weapon sets to determine the first five skills, b) a heal skill (out of multiple choices), c) an elite (out of multiple choices), and d) three utility skills (out of multiple choices). The difference is, these skills are no longer based on limited attributes like "Sword Mastery" that require you to invest points in them just so you can be useful at all. Instead they are effective from the get-go, with standard attributes (like strength and intelligence) and traits (like "20% critical chance with axes") to make them better... which is a clear evolution of the limiting GW1 attribute system. This allows you to both have a wide variety of gameplay choices available at any time and to invest in specialties. This is an improvement, and the people who don't see it that way are... weird.

"There's no energy management at all anymore!"

This is actually a more legitimate complaint, though I still think they're seeing it in too black and white of terms. There's no auto-attack with weapon thing going on, so everything you do costs energy. Dodging also costs energy. Yes, in the official demos, we rarely saw people run low on energy... but people who played the demo are seeing that, in fact, it's possible if you just blindly spam everything (including dodges).

So, no, there's no really limited energy pool that means you must do every last thing conservatively anymore and (probably) no "e-denial", and I'm okay with these things, because frankly the idea that someone else can shut down my effectiveness completely never struck me as a good idea. And making me take three times as long as necessary to finish a battle and then have to rest between them because of how miserly the energy pool is? Not my favorite part of GW1. Yes, I see there's a tactical thing going on with the notion, but I think the new way is better: make energy a pool that allows for a long period of careful skill use or a short period of really overexuberant skill use, but either way allows for fully participating. That's a good idea.

I won't get into the notion of potions again. I don't think they're bad, as long as they're balanced reasonably. That's all I'm gonna say.