So the difference is that it's an MMO. For however much semantics matter, I remember the original Guild Wars going out of its way to label itself a cooperative RPG or some such, rather than an MMO. Guild Wars 2 is explicitly an MMORPG.
Yes, I think this is the core of the problem -- instead of making another game like Guild Wars, a "cooperative online RPG" as they called it, they made an MMORPG, with most of the genre tropes you expect from that genre. I don't particularly like MMOs (my scattered attempts at them end up in me quitting in boredom pretty quickly in a way I have never felt about GW1), so I think that was a bad decision.
The respawning enemies has been a thing from Ultima Online to Everquest to WoW to Black Desert. Probably goes back to MUDs, but I'm less informed there. Despite what subgenre it falls into, pretty much all MMOs have respawning enemies.
When you can kill enemies and they stay dead, it gives you a sense of accomplishment. Killing enemies, clearing zones, maybe dying a bunch but knowing that that tough group is dead for as long as you stay in the zone so now you can progress on and try the next part of the area and see how far you can get despite the death penalty piling up... those experiences are amazing, and something unique to Guild Wars within games like this! It's great game design.
And then GW2 ditched all that in favor of respawning enemies, making me think 'why am I even playing this when nothing I do matters two minutes later?" Blah.
Or for another issue I have with GW2, I strongly prefer Guild Wars' map, which reveals as you explore, over the GW2 map with its weird 'you can see whole areas at once once you reach them' design. Sure, you do have to explore in order to find all the points of interest within those areas, but it's not the same thing. I really like mapping in games, and GW1 does it right.
Partying doesn't really feel deemphasized. At least not more than Guild Wars did in the later years when they let you run 7 NPCs.
This is kind of true, but not entirely. Yes, in '07, with Nightfall, ANet added Heroes, which dramatically changed the game, kind of for the worse I have always thought. Heroes are directly controllable, and you can tell them to go to specific points. You also can fully control their skillsets, etc. You can't do any of that with the more basic AI companions that existed before, Henchmen. Now, Heroes are great because they allow a solo player to be competently able to take on missions and quests in a way rarely possible before. This is essential these days, as the GW1 player count is naturally going to be pretty low, particularly when it is spread out over so much territory! Heroes are very useful.
However, I have a lot of great memories of playing story missions and sidequests in random groups of players, mostly in those days from '04 to '07 before Heroes, because at that time player groups were the only reasonable way to be able to have a chance at winning, unless you were really good at the game and actually could win with only Henchmen. I really liked this aspect of the game; even someone like me, who has little interest in being in a large guild in an MMO, could play this online game cooperatively with others because of its design. After the introduction of Heroes though this side of the game gradually faded out.
But even so, that side of GW is still there. There are quests that are a lot harder to do alone than with Heroes, and the game has good built-in grouping tools, even if naturally after this many years you are probably unlikely to find anyone. In GW2, however, they abandoned grouping for a lot of the game. Where the main story in GW1 is meant as a group activity, in GW2 your personal story is a single-player-only endeavor. You can group outside of that for quests and the like, but it definitely feels like a more WoW-ish, solo-friendly-outside-of-raids-and-such design, and that's a big change from GW1. I admit that I've played many hundreds of hours less of GW2 than GW1, so I'm probably missing some things, but that is my impression anyway.
Now, I will admit that nailing the design to both allow good solo play, which is important, AND grouping must be
incredibly difficult, but there's got to be a better solution than what GW2 does. This is far from the worst thing about GW2, that is probably its dumbed-down skill system, but it is a bit of a disappointment.
I mean that's a rock and hard place provision one of the main if not the msin criticism of the first was that it was not an mom despite being compared against and competing with other mmo's and gw1 was very old by the time gw2 rolled about so I'm honestly not surprised the developed a wanted to the something different. Issue was they had no clear vision for the game (gw1 has no clear vision but with gw2 they seemed to have even less).
Well, GW2 did release some years after the original, but it was announced several years before its release with its final design clearly in mind.
) while in Tera you just shoot in the direction you're facing, always.
