Spent some time over the last few days being slapped about the head by the Halibut of Frustration, in Guild Wars. My time there is rapidly dividing into two distinct phases.
There’s the solitary overland roaming, when I, and five mostly silent, entirely predictable and totally obedient AI NPC henchmen form up a party and explore the various non-mission Explorable Area regions of the Crystal Desert – Prophet’s Path, Salt Flats, Diviners Ascent, Arid Sea, Vulture Drifts, Skyward Reach and The Scar. I’ve always found GW to have one of the more good-looking MMO worlds – well designed and varied regions, and in some places, quite breathtaking. The Jeremy Soule soundtrack fits much of the place well, (despite being mostly knocked off from other J.S. games – NWN, etc), and the Desert in particular is a wonderful place to just roam, take in the atmosphere, see the sights and generally immerse oneself in the wind-scoured, desolate ruins of civilisations long gone. Technically, despite looking as good as it does, GW is perhaps one of the most forgiving MMOs when it comes to my poor ageing PC hardware, and flows along quite smoothly, despite hectic fighting, spell effects and the like. The mobs aren’t too difficult, but still present some challenges, with agro radiuses, etc, and tend to drop a satisfying amount of purple (WoW Blues), and occasional gold (WoW Purples), items. Fun, in a casual kind of way, but there is a certain lack of meaningful progress to it all. For that, you need to do the Missions.
The second mode of play is a familiar nemesis, which I thought I’d ditched leaving WoW; random Pick Up Grouping. This is where six complete strangers, with unknown levels of skill, competence, commitment and patience meet for the very first time, and then immediately engage in life-threatening teamwork activity. In Guild Wars, this is something of a requirement to make progress through the 25 instanced Mission areas. These are scattered throughout the various campaign areas of the world, and by working through them, the player advances the ongoing story. In many cases, it’s possible to avoid them entirely, and take a ‘long route’ around the region, through the above-mentioned Explorable areas, but some of them are required to be completed in order to unlock further regions, and I seem to be at one of these bottlenecks now.
So here we are again, ‘LFG’, against my general inclination, or better judgement, but what surprised me was that in Guild Wars, it’s even worse. Because of the way the skills work, you don’t get nine (or however many) distinct ‘classes’, allowing you to at least guess what the random crazies might get up to. Instead, you get 100 possible Primary/Secondary combinations, and something like 400 different skills to make up each of their 8 active hotkeys from. Certainly, some particular builds are favoured over others (W/Mo 4TW! apparently), but it becomes almost impossible to second-guess what another player might be capable of from visual appearance, or even the Pri/Sec class ‘name’. Great for PvP - the element of surprise and all that, but not so helpful in a cooperative endeavour where the most introduction one can expect is ‘hi m8 u rdy???’, before the fun begins.
See that’s another thing – the average GW PUG member is, if anything, even less articulate than the typical WoW PUG Munchkin, often, not saying anything at all during the course of the enforced collaboration. I wouldn’t mind if they then instead used the surprisingly complex system of chat macros, designed for this very purpose. Spacebar attacks, CTRL+Spacebar attacks, and tells everyone else you’re attacking, and even sets up the Assist function for everyone else. All they need to do is press ‘T’ and Space, but nooooo…
Three missions in particular stood out this week – Elona’s Reach, Dunes of Despair and Thirsty River. These three are required so that I can then have a go at this ‘Ascension’ thing, which the plot seems to hinge on at the moment, and is the sole reason I’m in the desert in the first place. It’ll help me fight evil better or some such. Anyway, each Mission in GW is subtly different, varying from straight gauntlet killing sprees, through timed exercises, up to some quite elaborate capture the flag pseudo Team-PvP style matches against AI opponents, and in one case, actual other players. Commendable, but this variety does present problems for the average PUG, who are not known for mental flexibility or improvisational reactions. MONGO SMASH!
Dunes of Despair was fairly straight-forward with just henchmen – it basically involves you having to protect an NPC for so many minutes, while he does a ritual of some sort. Lot of running about swatting each wave of mobs before they got to him, but nothing too tricky.
Elona’s Reach, described in the GuildWiki as the one of most difficult missions, took a few goes. The idea here is to find and retrieve two flags within 30 mins, from behind some very dense lines of interwoven-agro monsters, many of whom patrol, and a few boss mobs to boot. I especially hate the timed missions – they make me panic, and make mistakes, which I guess is the point. I partied up for it, and got wiped a number of times by folks who seemed not to understand the idea of agro-radius. It bloody DRAWS your agro radius on the minimap, for godsakes! ‘sry gtg :(’ Several extremely frustrating and fruitless excursions later, I decided to just have a go solo. ‘Solo’ in GW generally means ‘with all AI henchmen’ i.e. No other actual Players, but this turned out to be far more relaxing, working my way through the mobs without the pressure of five pairs of scornful eyes staring at me through various monitors across the world, and what initially started as a dry-run/recon trip, suddenly turned into a serious attempt on the mission. I did it with about two minutes to spare, and even managed to complete the bonus task, for extra points, further reinforcing the idea that Other People = Failure. In most cases, the AI henchmen, despite being several levels lower than you, and only having a Primary class, and no Secondary, and NOT BEING REAL are STILL more effective than most people you meet in a mission lobby.
Which just leaves Thirsty River. This one is basically a sort of team-v-team challenge. You and your band of hapless idiots have to first beat one AI team, then two at once, then three at once. Each enemy team completely resurrects every two minutes unless you can kill its priest, who is stood behind that team’s boss mob. Sounds straight forward, but it’s this one I’m having the most trouble with, largely because one of the final three Bosses is a Monk (GW’s Cleric class) who is capable of massively out-healing my entire team’s damage, on either himself, or the resurrection priest. Two minutes later, his entire team spawns on top of us and blam. ‘Your team has been defeated. Returning to the Outpost’. Again. There might be a build I can use to lock him down, while the henchmen do him in, but theoretically at least, it would be easier with 6 Players – more damage, better abilities than the henchmen, etc.
So I’ve been throwing myself into it with the usual morbid abandon, in the hope that one time I’ll get lucky and end up a team that knows what the hell it's doing. ‘lfp no n00bs!’ they shout, little realising that anyone still this side of the mission, is probably a n00b, or they'd be there by now. The nature of the mission – kill the enemy teams – means that I can’t even pay someone to ‘run’ it for me, which in this particular case, would be quite a desirable proposition.
(Running is where we all wait at the start, and a character with extremely specialised run-speed, evasion, dodging and self-healing skills just blasts through to the end point, ‘completing’ it for all of us, as if one players gets to the far exit, the whole party zones out, regardless of where they are. We used to call it ‘Blitzing’ in Anarchy Online. It's a big industry and an enormous number of players would rather fast-track to the end of the game than actually have to take part. I begin to see why...)
The worst part of it all, is that unlike WoW, I can’t even get a decent anecdote out of these nightmarish outings. We group up, we enter the mission, we get to the first difficult bit, we wipe, we bounce back to the outpost, we disband, we wait to join another…often without a world spoken. No Ranterbury Tales here I’m afraid - there's simply nothing to report. No personalities ever emerge, and often the only way you know the person isn't actually an NPC Henchman, is that the Henchmen normally use complete sentences, albeit from a very small repertoire, and tend not to all charge off at different targets without being told. WoW PUGs are bad too, but at least they’re interesting!
All in all, it’s a good job I quite like the Crystal Desert really…going to be there for quite some time…