Here's your chance to get in on the ground floor of designing this game. Guild Wars 1 (for lack of a better name) has some great things going for it, but some things just annoy me. So in the interest of giving the devs some feedback, I thought I'd open this "suggestion box" for ways to improve upon some things in GW1.
First, I'd like to see a "try before you buy" approach to armor purchasing. I want to know how a given piece of armor looks on my character before deciding whether I want to buy it. The mini-armor pics you get now don't show you how the armor will look once it's applied. I thought female Kurzick Ritualist armor would look great until I actually bought it and put it on my character. Yuck. Chalk this one up under the heading "better character customization."
Second, the Insignia quests in Factions were a great idea that never went anywhere. If you (the devs) come up with something like this for Guild Wars 2, please make something like an insignia mean something, even if it's something - like a medal - you can wear on your armor indicating rank or title.
Third, jumping and swimming are all well and good, but even in a game like CoH, where super jump and super speed are used as means of super travel, they're virtually nothing more than different ways to get from point A to point B. **Yawn**. (In a game like WoW or LoTRO, they're just really boring ways to travel and mean absolutely nothing other than that).
Please consider giving us quests that actually require the use of these skills: swimming into a sunken ship to finds clues or out of a submerged cave to escape monsters (a la "The Thirteenth Warrior"). Put breath-hold swimming on a timer - like Half-Life - to add to the challenge. Or make it a sporting event - like Roller Beetle Racing. Make jumping a way to move from buoyed rocks on a lava flow to cross it safely, or a way to move among the rooftops of a town to chase monsters or evade them. And think of adding one more "travel" skill: climbing. Give us a way to scale back up cliffs from which we may jump. The 3-d artwork is amazing, but give us a 3-d world in which we can move vertically as well as horizontally, with the ability to swim down or climb up as the need arises. Jumping for the sake of jumping doesn't add immersion or fun. Jumping to cling to an overhead vine to avoid a pit of vipers would certainly be more immersive!
Give certain characters the ability to buff these skills, so that, for instance, a protection monk could use a spell to increase your breath-hold time or cause you to jump higher. Make other skills available as buffs to certain other professions - give the already athletic Assassin the skill to jump higher or swim faster.
Well, that's all I can think of for now. The devs at A-Net have an amazing opportunity here to build a much more immersive game than even GW1 is, because they're starting from scratch. So if you have any ideas, feel free to post them here.
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