Playing GW2 these past few weeks has been eye opening

We’re the ones paying 13€/month + 45€ expansions + 20€ store mounts + 25€ services like race, faction or server change services. And the more I play GW2, the more I wonder: where does our money go?

You guys often praise WoW’s art team for the “amazing maps” but it just pales in comparison with what GW2 has to offer, not just in term of aesthetics but more importantly in term of design and ingenuisity.
Every map released in GW2 after their first expansion has been a masterpiece, full of clever ways to use gliding, mounts and masteries to travel around, with multi-layered maps that go deep down in the ground and super high in the sky.
They’re crazy fun to explore and run around, unlike WoW’s chore maps with annoying walls and cliffs that you can’t overcome and you just have to run around for ages until Blizz decides you’re allowed to unlock flying.

In comparison, this is a GW2 map from 2015:

Watch for a bit until she flies down, then feel free to click anywhere in the video to see more of the map.

What a disgrace.
Comparing this to any Shadowlands map makes me want to punch myself for having given so much money over the years that obviously didn’t go to any kind of game development department.

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Every map in Guild Wars 2 is instanced you know that right? It would be impossible for WoW to have maps like that with its current design.

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Like Shadowlands maps you mean? You won’t even be able to fly from one to the other when flying is released. Shadowlands maps work just like GW2 maps. Except they’re garbage.

Besides, not having anything fun on them is one thing, but the fact remains that they’re made purposely annoying. Traveling in Revendreth is just a painful experience. I’d enjoy the map more if it was completely flat.

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I don’t really see anyone praise WoWs world content or world design. Art is different from map layouts.

GW2 has significantly fewer (and lesser) dungeons and raids too, so having better world content is sort of the benchmark.
Now lets compare Castle Nathria to The Key of Ahdashim.

CN was released at the very end of 2020.
Ahdashim was released June 2019.

CN has 10 bosses.
Asdashim has 4.

Cherry picking a small aspect of an MMO and then asking what you’re paying for makes no sense.

So, when you say something like:

Raids, for one.

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One thing GW2 does amazingly compared to WoW’s almost empty oceans (except a bits in two “ocean zones”). There’s a world under the water and you get different fighting mechanics that I never tire of. There are races, many animals, plants, and treasures in the oceans of GW2…

Are you paying attention, Blizzard? LOL

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it would be more realistic.

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I am sad that I agree with OP.

WoW’s last 4 expansion maps have been very cluttered and seem to shrink with every expansion.

I do miss the times where I would just ride or fly and the zone would feel vast and huge and so much to explore.

GW2 world content does dominate over WoW’s in how they make it explorable.
PS: Not to mention their brilliant mount obtaining and riding design and how each type has many skins.

Something that I am a very big fan of.

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Forgot to mention to why ingame maps in WoW feel cluttered and small.

Phasing.

You look from one point of view, the land is vast but you can literally see everything from a single point of view instead of just a little bit to give sense of mystery.

You take two steps, BOOM, giants and balistas everywhere, explosions!

Take two steps back, empty again.

And like that every 5 square meters.

Not literally, but thats how it feels.

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Most MMO’s have larger maps than current WOW. I love FFXIV’s maps and the fact you can touch a place that has an aether current and teleport there. WOW should implement this as well as it would much better to teleport to home cities this way.

As for the map sizes, WOW is doing things on the cheap. Before we had large continent zones that were connected. Smaller islands were used for other locations that included additional content.

Now it seems that smaller islands are the actual continents. WOW needs to get back to larger zones and not just larger zones, but zones with actual content. Fill the zones with treasure chests, rares, etc like we had in WOD, Legion, and BFA. And stop with the stupid puzzles and multisteps to get a rare to rezz or to get a chest in SL. Simply go back to the old system.

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For interesting level design to happen, flying needs to be permanently removed. Current maps are designed weirdly, both taking flying into account but also trying to ignore it. Blizz knows they can get away with bland level design because flying is going to come. And as flying exists, other viable methods of transportation are a waste of time (talking about gliding, leaping, super jumps, etc)

It’s that they are cluttered and small. Ion’s interview with Preach was eye opening. Why they make the maps so small… they want to cut down on “travel time” and have more “combat time” but… that kills the world. And I would much rather have an interesting, vast world than spend 20% more time pressing 1,4,2,3

Ultimately, it seems for Blizz the open world is a waste of time. In GW2, it’s not. From the little I saw from the game, they put a lot of effort into designing their maps, and systems to encourage exploration and completionism of the maps. This is good. In WoW, the open world is a vestigial feature. It’s all about the instances here.

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Well for one there is a pretty big team working full time with WoW content that needs to get paid, if you compared the team working on Guild Wars 2 content and the team that works on WoW content you will see an enormous difference in size between the teams.

As far as maps goes I’m sure there are games with better maps than wow for sure, but its just one aspect out of many in a game. There is a big reason to why all players rerolling games because its so much better is back in wow after a couple of months.

Even if the games looks good they need to be able to draw you in and keep you in and to this date no game has been able to do that quite like WoW has managed too.

One thing I’ve never liked is threads like this I don’t see the point if I dislike a game and don’t wanna play it no more I would inform my guild about it and quit the game but I see no reason why I would go to the games forum and try to convince people I don’t even know that the game I’m rerolling to is better.

Certain aspects of other games are better. WoW Is still as a whole better, but in need of improvement.

Basically, we are jealous of features of other games that we wish WoW had it.

Yep. 9 months without a single patch of content.
And what will we get now?
A new Maw-like zone, and a Torghast raid full of re-used assets.

Can’t wait not to play it.

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then what people are praising actually?

Didn’t see anyone praising anything lately. Last thing I heard that raid encounter design is ok but it is literally just dance 2021, not exactly what would make the game so great.

The only thing that wow has going for it is the combat flow and they are destroying it more and more with aoe caps, haste reductions and whatnot

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Why are you pretending like you don’t play the game or get value out of it?

This season alone you’ve played a minimum of 1736 2v2 arena games and 972 3v3 games, that seems like money value to me.

SL sucks, I say it plenty, but the blatant dishonesty here is bothersome.

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When i have nothing to do in wow, i play gw2. In gw2 i get lost in the world exploring. Probably cause its new and fresh to me, but i do like their open world content. I’m not sure it could ever replace wow for me completely though.

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Well, there haven’t been any new raids in Guild Wars 2 for more than a year. Last fractal was also added nearly a year ago, so what is your point? Guild Wars 2 content draught is even worse. You can just check the forums and see a lot of people crying over boring copy+paste Icebrood Saga. Developers of Guild Wars 2 don’t even care about cheaters, bots, and wintraders. They can’t fix the bug, which allows players to duplicate items, for almost a year since it was reported. There is a guy that has been duplicating for months even up to 33-34m gold. Do you know how everyone found out? Just because of the twitch stream; otherwise, no one would have even thought about it. Guild Wars 2 last expansion was more than 3 years ago. PvP and WvW are dead modes; the latter has been abandoned by developers for years and so unrewarding that there is zero to no point in playing it. PvP is filled with bots, cheaters, and wintraders. The meta had been for more than a year before a developer team finally decided to do something about it. Guild Wars 2 is just trash, and it is a fact that only an idiot would deny. How can a game be good when people, who cheat, are ignored and not banned?

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God, I was just coming in to write the same.

GW2 has been on admitted maintenance mode for a year. One of my closest pals is a GW2 freak and he looks across with envy because ArenaNet have literally just given up.

I don’t play any other MMOs at the moment so I don’t frequent their forums but for those that do and do, are GW2 and FFXIV’s forums full of how much better WoW is and why can’t we have this feature from WoW in our game?

Pretty much.

It’s the same across every spectrum of every game. Christ, for the pinnacle it’s held up to be, look at PoE currently where the playerbase are up in arms at that games ‘content draught’.