It's not just that the forced perspective gives me mild vertigo and a flurry of motion sickness. It's the incredible wealth of detail that seems almost like a sensual assault. The spell effects! The explosions! All the strange creatures scurrying and gesticulating. Even the motes in the air and the beams of sunlight through the trees.
It takes a brief while for my protective mental limiters to power up, before my brain begins to filter out the "noise", before things return to everyday normal. Just for an hour or so it's like it was way back in the day, when MMOs were new and everything was wild, fresh and magical.
I guess if I only played a couple of hours a week things might always seem that way. But then how would I ever get my dailies done?
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I've spent a good deal of the last few weeks of PVE dailies on karka train. NE Harathi Hinterlands hit me like that when I was looking for some champs to burn down solo (welcome to megaserver), the area outside the Kull Skullsmasher event. A very effectively executed upland forest chunk that I can't believe I never paid attention to. There's only a couple of patches like that in the whole game (most appear more jungle like, or the terrain and camera conspire to effectively blot that out).
ReplyDeleteWithout waypoints/flightpaths/whatever, the game could be like that. Spend a few weeks of gameplay sessions in one of the blasted/scorched landscapes, and switch it up.
I get that rare feeling every now and then still when exploring new and beautiful areas in MMOs :) I'm glad to see others still have an eye for that same poetry.
ReplyDeleteThere is no game that does it quite like GW2, the game is just so stunning. LOTRO is probably closest to an authentic feeling because it's a bit more 'empty' than GW2 which is over-stylized at times. love them both.