deltor-gw2 said: Are you implying that you understood the weapon skill system within the first levels? Or that you weren’t extremely confused by utility skills coming SO early - let alone the elite skill?! Because I really thought that it was soooo hard! Note: ironi
I think you're being sarcastic here, based on the note, but I could be wrong? I'm not sure. xD That said, I think this is a valid point to bring up (even if you didn't mean to play devil's advocate, and I'd like to talk a bit about it!
Was Guild Wars 2 confusing for me, as a new player?
No, it wasn't. When I first played the GW2 beta, I picked Charr, I picked Guardian, I rolled Felidae.
In the starting instance, Fury of the Dead, I ran up to some enemy ghosts and pressed skill 1, because 2 and 3 on my mace were greyed out. When I killed a ghost, a small bit of my skill 2 filled up in yellow, and I instantly understood that killing enemies = unlock your weapon skills. It made sense, it wasn't hard to understand, and I didn't feel like I was being treated like an imbecile by the game.
When I hovered over the greyed out Weapon Switch arrow, it told me I would unlock weapon switching at level 7. So I understood that I could switch weapons manually before then, but had to wait before I could do it on the fly. Okay. When I looked at my character's equipment panel, I could clearly see that there was an off hand weapon slot whenever I wielded a mace, sceptre or sword in my main hand. If I grabbed a shield from my inventory and clicked on it, the off hand weapon slot would highlight blue, and the main hand slot would highlight red; it was very obvious were off hand weapons went.
Guild Wars 2 was never confusing for me, as a player. Gathering nodes were made very obvious to me simply by, you know, being nodes (both on my mini map and my main map.) Weapons were highlighted to show you where they could go in equipment slots. It was made obvious that you killed enemies to get your skills. I was never confused about how things worked, not once.
Was Guild Wars 2 a perfect new player experience?
Also no.
So what did Guild Wars 2 suffer from?
GW2 suffered from what I'd almost call a lack of direction. You see, Personal Story was a good way to lead players into new areas of the map, but the problem was that it didn't give them enough experience to keep up. Players that blindly followed the personal story without exploring then found themselves behind in levels.
Guild Wars 2 also suffered from trying to treat it's players as not inherently stupid. The result of this was heart quests, which didn't need explaining to me, but the more "hardcore" gamers ran around like headless chickens crying "WHERE ARE MY QUESTS, WHERE'S MY NPCS WITH EXCLAMATION MARKS, OH WOE ARE WE" and so a very vocal bunch of people paraded around claiming GW2 had no direction.
They were sort of right. If you only followed personal story and didn't explore, you quickly fell behind your story's level and had no idea where to go and catch up.
But if you explored and paid attention to the hearts that popped up, you never really fell behind. So in my honest opinion, GW2 suffered from
a lack of guiding the player to hearts in between personal story steps
a cluttered feel to it because it assumed players would explore for the sake of enjoying the game rather than blindly follow the green star on the map
feeling disjointed because of the above two
But Guild Wars 2 was never confusing when it came to gathering, salvaging, weapon skills or utilities. Not for me, at least.
And that's why I, personally, don't agree with, like or enjoy any of the changes they have made to levelling a new character. They have gated so much behind a level-locked system that it feels clunky and horrible to progress through. And before anybody picks at me for this; I literally re-rolled a new character to test this out and experience it, as well as logged into a level 10 and level 23 alt respectively to see how things looked on them.
