I've spent this morning arguing with people about why I think Guild Wars 2 needs more skills for its primary professions. On the Reddit, at least, I think most people misunderstood my arguement. So I've got a little analogy to explain it.
Imagine I have a toybox. This toybox can hold 20 multicoloured building blocks, no more. Every day I take my building blocks out of the box and build a house, or a car, or a space ship.
It doesn't take too long till I've used every block in every workable combination. The blocks are interesting enough, but they are played out and I could do with some more.
Then a guy comes along and tries to solve my problem. He takes my box and takes out all the blocks, he repaints them, and buffs them up so that they are shiny. He hands me back my box of blocks.
This doesn't solve my problem. Even though they look different, I am still choosing from the same number of blocks and the number of things I can build has not changed. I want more choice, so I can make different structures - not just houses, cars and spaceships, but giraffes, skyscrapers and mobile anti-aircraft units.
So the guy goes away, determined to solve my problem. After a while he comes back with another box entirely. This box has a whole new set of 20 multicoloured building blocks in. He takes my box away and places his new box, exactly the same size, containing the same number of blocks, in front of me. He says that I can use either box I want, but not both. If I want to switch between the boxes then I have to put all my blocks away in his box and ask for the other one.
Again, its not long before I've used every block in every combination in the new box. I don't want to go back to the old box, because that is played out as well.
What the guy doesn't realise is that I don't have a problem with the blocks. I have a problem with the box.
What I need is a bigger box with more blocks in it. Then I could build more houses, skyscrapers, hotels, mansions, maisonettes, bungalows, wig-wams or yurts than I could shake a stick at. Each time I got more blocks the number of interesting and exciting things I could build would increase exponentially - I could combine new blocks with old ones and put an anti-aircraft cannon on the top of my house, or giraffe, if I were that way inclined.
ps. My arguement has not been helped by the fact that I totally overlooked the addition of those new healing skills from 2013 in my original arguement. Yes, they do count as new skills, but seeing as most builds are built around the utilities, rather than the heal, they are not very impactful - hence why I forgot them.
Yes, and hopefully the expansion starts that. I feel this update is "how we need to repaint the blocks so we can start adding different ones". In fact, my hope is that this is going to the longest wait for an expansion in Guild Wars 2 because they are setting everything up to do exactly that.
ReplyDeleteI said to TLC on Twitter that I think the whole Spec system will make more sense when we get more specs. Currently, the ranger will be neglected because the druid is getting all the new skills and weapons. The ranger is pretty much exactly the same.
ReplyDeleteIf this is set-up time for a series of new specs, then great. If we have to wait another year and half before they move to introduce new specs... well then.