User Experience in Guild Wars 2

Well, it's been a while since my last post. School, work and other obligations have reaaaaaallly taken up the majority of my time, but I have finally found a few hours to go ahead and do a quick usability analysis of one of my favorite games, Guild Wars 2.

Since Guild Wars 2 is an absolutely massive game, and I did not feel like spending hours upon hours analyzing everything, I decided to just pick 4 aspects of the game to take a look at. I hope you enjoy.

The Good

Combat

When afflicted by status effects during gameplay, several triggers are initiated that let the player know that something has happened to their character. For example, if I am in combat and an enemy gave me the “Chilled” debuff, which reduces my character’s move by 66% speed, and increases skill cooldowns by 40%. 

When I am afflicted by this debuff my character is given a “frost” effect that creates a ring of frost around my character and applies a light blue and white coloring to my character. The skill cooldown timer that appears after using a skill, which is normally grey number, changes into a light blue number. Additionally, a small icon above the skill bar appears, indicating that my character has been affected by “Chill”. 

This icon also shows a cooldown timer on the icon indicating time left on this debuff. Lastly, my character will say a voice line such as “So, so cold”, indicating that I have been afflicted by “Chill”. All of these different cues allow players to quickly find out if they have affected by “Chill” no matter which area of the screen they are focused on. Providing players with these multiple cues allows for players to understand what is happening to their character no matter where they are focused on.

For example, if I am extremely focused on the skill bar, I will notice the blue coloration of the cooldown numbers, as well as the icon appearing above the skill bar. If I was focused on the content on screen, such as the enemies or terrain, I will notice that my character now has a “frost” effect on my character.

 Quality of Life

A recent update just went live that added the ability to click on an achievement pop up that appears above the mini-map in the bottom right of the screen. Before this update, left-clicking this update simply made it vanish, but now when you left-click on these pop ups, it takes you directly to the specific achievement you have completed within the achievements section of the Hero Panel. 

While this may not seem like a big update, it enhances players’ ability to easily find and track these achievements. Before this update, you would have to read what the achievement you completed was (before it disappeared), and then open up the Hero Panel, then navigate to the Achievement section, then type into the search bar the specific achievement you have unlocked and then click on that achievement collection to find the achievement you completed. This new functionality saves players much time and improves their overall quality of life with the game as they can just simply click on the pop-up now.

If you click on the achievement icon (circled in red) it will take you straight to where it appears in the achievement panel. Also, I am under attack by an annoying Drake.

The Bad

Build Templates

The lack of “build templates” that players can create and swap between is an inconvenience to many players. The addition of some kind of “build template” functionality would allow players to create, swap between, and explore different class builds they might be interested in trying out. As many players who play MMORPGs, “min maxing” is a procedure many players go through to find out the “best build”, or “most efficient build” that they can play as and is crucial for high level play.

Without this functionality, players must manually swap between different “specializations”, “traits”, and equipment to see how these changes influence their character stats as well as the new functionality their skills may now trigger during combat. The problem with this is that when players wish to revert back to their original build, they must now manually switch back to what was previously selected. 

Not only is this a tedious process, I have often times forgotten what I had previously selected, causing me much frustration to remember the exact specifications that my build had contained. While this is mainly an issue for more active and experienced players, the addition of this feature would increase player's quality of life, and save them time finding out which build is the "most efficient". Additionally, adding this functionality might make it more likely for more casual players  to try out different builds at their leisure and find out a build they find as “the most fun to play”.

What the "Build" tab of the Hero Panel looks like. If they would just add either another tab to the Hero Panel or just add a "Switch Build" to the Build tab or the Equipment Tab it would make our lives so much easier.

Map Completion

Trying to 100% a specific map for rewards is often quite difficult as “points of interest”, which are denoted by small brown squares, can blend in easily with the World Map. When you open the World Map, a highly stylized and detailed 2D image, along with a legend indicating progress, of the current area you are in appears on screen. 

The problem that many players face is that if a player is attempting to 100% a map, and they have 3 points of interest left to find, it can take a very long time to find the remaining points of interest using this map. As the map is designed in a way to emulate the way the environment actually looks like but as a 2D image. This can cause the map to be  quite detailed and complex, especially if there are multiple “levels” or “floors” to a specific map. To then find these points of interest on complex, multi-level maps, such as the Heart of Thorns areas, can be quite a challenge as these small brown squares can easily blend into the map.

However, when there is one point of interest left to find in a map (or any other category of map completion) you can hover over the category on the legend, highlighting the remaining point of interest on the World Map. While this is extremely useful, this only happens when there is one item left. If this functionality worked at all times it would reduce the amount of frustration and time it takes for players to complete a map and receive these rewards you can only receive by completing a map. 

Good luck finding all the PoI's in this three level map...

Since many of the issues related to usability are based on subjective experiences, what are some other examples of good or bad usability Guild Wars 2 or other MMOs?