Less content of worse quality, but much more aggressively monetized? Half the content at the same price?
Anet axed Living World, rebranded it as “Mini Expansions” and is reselling it to us at full price. Complex mount system gets sidelined in favour of A mount to rule them all. Class skills and mechanics that have existed for years and years and years without issue are suddenly a problem and get gutted, dumbed down or removed. Classes get homogenised and simplified. Very little actually new systems get created, instead the existing game gets switched around as a much easier alternative. More focus on easy and cheap to develop daily/weekly content for whatever the current’s expansion faction is.
I know that pattern.
I also know another pattern. SquareEnix. ActivisionBlizzard. NCNet.
I think people are seriously overreacting. From what I see all changes seems to be done with a positive intention (not saying that the balance will be better or worse, but their intention is to make it better)
They have been struggling to find a good and sustainable content delivery system since the start of the game, this is just the latest idea. And there is no aggressive monetization in it, it’s still the cheapest model between all the main mmos. Expansion/content ratio got a bit more expensive compared to before, true, but it’s hardly aggressive or expensive. To be honest we had it way too cheap until now compared to the average market prices, it’s understandable. And until now they always offered super cheap bundles for old expansion after a bit, if someone prefers to wait a bit and save money.
And I’m having a hard time to see how more weapons on all elite specs + new core weapons can be negative in any kind of way (outside of balance concerns, but I haven’t seen anyone worry about that) The new combat changes don’t even require the new expansion from what I got…
And the new reward system is just daily/weekly/monthly achievements but hopefully done better.
If anything they are showing interest in making the game better and more stable
There’s definitely pros and cons. It looks like there will be some fun stuff, and GW2 is still cheaper than every single other MMO on the market (WoW and ESO+ cost 6x as much as GW2 per year), but it does feel like a lot of content, especially OW, is slowly being invalidated by crazy new mechanics and power creep. I mean, we’ll soon be able to mount up in combat? Death was already pretty meaningless lol; now you’ll never die unless you’re actively trying to.
The combat and exploration is still the best of any MMO on the market though, so yeah, it surprises me how extremely negative some people are about what’s coming.
Yeah, the powercreep is a totally legitimate concern since HoT Mounting in combat feels a bit cheap to me too, can be useful when going around gathering or stuff like that but maybe it’s a little bit too convenient