#the rng is immense and sometimes hilarious

[purgetrooperfox]

girl HELP i'm having complex emotions about kim kitsuragi three years after the release of disco elysium

[next-lvl]

Majority of my followers know what Wakfu is, but not all know about the game: how many wounds it left in my heart, and everyone else’s. This post isn’t gonna be precisely explaining the wrongs that Wakfu did, I just wanted to mention that, in aftermath, it was a disaster of a game that left its most loyal players hurt, disappointed and immensely sad. I still keep meeting people who love this franchise, but can’t stand the game anymore since it’s.. Changed too much and didn’t stay enjoyable, to say mildly. I’m surrounded by, literally, traumatized veterans who look back at the good old days and shed tears. And I’ve been talking a lot about GW2 recently, not for no reason.

I want you to heal, just like I did. I mean.. I’m still hurt over Wakfu and I’ll stay this way forever, but I found a game where you can feel safe, loved, cared about. Devs in GW2 are humans who talk to us, who put smileys and memes in their posts, who hang out on reddit and ingame. This’s one of the major and striking differences between Wakfu and GW2. I’m still genuinely stunned by my own experience with customer support, I had a few troubles during my 1.5 years in GW2 and the response was not only fast and effective, it was HUMAN AND CUTE. I’m still not over it. Now that I’ve been invited to be a creative partner.. I’m still not over it too. They shower their regular players and content creators in gentle attention and kindness. I cry. During the 5+ years of being the most active and visible artist in Wakfu fandom, literally promoting it with thousands of drawings, I’ve never got a tiniest bit of official recognition. Not even a single placement on official media. When I took part in contests, I never won. Overall it’s been a one-way street. During my first 1.5 years in GW2, I’ve been noticed, picked up by the team, pampered and spoiled to the point of barely believing it’s true. That’s my personal experience, but it should indicate Anet’s general attitude towards the players. They. Do. Care.

I just wanna try and convince more ex-Wakfu players to give GW2 a shot. The two games are different in the visual and core gameplay aspects, yes, transitioning from an isometric 2D turn-based to a 3D, real-time game was somewhat harsh, but boy, how glad I am that I did it.

There’s EVEN MORE TEXT, brace yourselves. :D In GW2, I found everything that I wish was in Wakfu.

GW2 is a true sandbox. You log in, you do whatever the fuck you want. Level your first (second, 12th, 33rd, 68th) char? Grind mobs and dungeons? NO. Run around, look for events, explore, literally everything you do and everywhere you go, gives xp. You can level via crafting! Which, btw, is relevant throughout the entire game, unlike in Wakfu.

You do have dungeons of two kinds, and you CAN farm them if you want, but it’s your deliberate decision. There ARE farms in GW2, but they’re fun, if you’re not trying to get a legendary weapon in a month. I personally like running around with a bunch of random people who are there to FARM events in a specific map, but that happens once every two months.

Said legendary weapons ARE hard to get and yes, they can get you burnt out in no time if you don’t have a concept of a “long term goal”. Leggies are a prestige item, and, just like other prestige items (auras, specific minis, skins, etc), they’re meant to be your ultimate show-off item. People see you and know that you’ve been through.. A lot. BUT. Your hard-earned prestige item is to stay prestige. I assume you know relics in Wakfu? Then you must know what happened to them after a few years.

There’s no devaluing in GW2. Your trophies stay relevant and rare. Your prizes, your exclusive titles, skins, etc stay exclusive. You aren’t losing half of your wealth just because the devs decided to revamp ALL GEAR FOR THE THIRD TIME.

Speaking of the gear, the orange set you get at 80, is endgame gear. GW2 is 5 years old, so that orange gear is. People crafted it on the release and.. It stayed endgame. Yes, there’s also pink gear, which ~5% better than orange and is only needed if you do high lvl fractals or are min-maxing in raids. If you’re casual or just starting, you don’t even have to think about it. But once you craft your set, it stays relevant forever. People’s effort is never shoved up their asses.

There’s no constant carrot-on-a-stick gear upgrades. Level cap is 80 since release and will stay so. The game promotes safety and stability, that’s what attracted me. You take a 2 years break? No problem, you log in and go play. Nothing has lost its value, you don’t feel inferior, you don’t need to catch up to play with your friends.

Which reminded me: there’s a wonderfully done level downscale system. You’re a lvl 80 in a lvl 16 zone? Your stats are auto-adapted so the enemies you fought as a noob are still dangerous, and your reward (xp/gold/materials) is adapted to your true lvl. You go and play anywhere you want, and get fair rewards.

Crafting materials of all levels are also demanded and relevant. Oh yeah, you can run around for hours just gathering wood/ore, familiar to Wakfu players? It’s nice and relaxing until you meet another player. Well, in GW2 all gathering nodes are NOT shared. You see a tree? It’s your tree. That dude who runs up to it won’t steal it from you.

Oh also there’s no kill steal! Which is big, imo. You’re encouraged to play together, to help people kill stuff, to contribute to any event you see around, since everyone gets rewarded equally.

Legendary stability of GW2 servers. Lemme just say: there’s no weekly maintenance. There is. No. Downtime. Even on the big update days, you can download and play pretty safely. If there’s a hotfix, the game KINDLY WARNS YOU that you need to update and you have TWO FLIPPING HOURS to do so. Before you did that, you still can play, finish whatever you were up to.

Everything revolves around player’s happiness and convenience. There are constant quality-of-life updates. Your bags are full of crap? Here, salvage it into materials with two clicks, then deposit into your bank with two clicks (from anywhere in the world), then compact the rest of your shit. Yeah, with two clicks. x’D

There’s wonderful Fashion Wars. The game offers so much customization, and it’s taken so seriously, that it’s one of the endgame aspects. There’s 30000+ achievement points to earn, which are mostly fun and make you go out of your usual way. Dailies? You get 10 points and 2 gold for doing 3 easy tasks that take ~15 minutes.

There’s LORE. There’s fun little interactions all over the world. You just did an event? Stay here and listen, probably npcs will say/do something and start another event, logically following the previous one. The world lives and breathes. You can just walk around and observe. You’ll learn so much. And of course, there’s always a good cause to laugh. Dialogues/reactions are just hilarious sometimes.

Regarding the lore: there’s a so-called personal story which accompanies you up to lvl 80, then there’s “living world”, smaller events and single maps being rolled out every once in a while - so far there’s 2 seasons available, and 1 being “historical”, not playable anymore. In that season, they fucking crushed the main capital city. It changed forever. It was an epic event, which I missed, but watched people’s videos later. Then season 2, then HoT, then season 3, and now we’re waiting for PoF, second expansion. The updates have picked a nice pace and are frequent now.

There’s just so much to do. Just go, dive into the world and drown forever. :3c And meet me on the bottom. x’DD

GW2 feels different from Wakfu, but I found similarities for myself. It’s a sandbox after all, and later endgame has a lot of strategy. GW2 is never tank-and-spank. You just, literally, can’t facetank shit here. You gotta use your skills wisely, time your dodges, play with traits/passives until it all flows together. You’ve got a HUGE BUILD FREEDOM. There’s 9 classes, each having at least 3 defined roles, with more variations. You don’t just go ranger (oh archer it’s like a cra rite??) and do pew pew from max distance. Well, yes, you have a bow and can pew pew.. Or you can be a melee fighter, you can be a full blown healer/support.. As a ranger, yes.

I’ll be wrapping up now, I swear. GW2 is true f2p. Which of course does have a few restrictions (can’t trade or use map-chat), but you can get to 80, gear up and explore to your heart’s content before you decide to pay. I personally played for 5 months, every day, before I bought HoT.

Why’d you buy an expansion? More story, more maps, new class traits, gliding in HoT and mounts in PoF. The expansion and living world content has been constantly improving, visually, mechanically and lore/writing-wise.

Other than that, there’s a gemstore offering cosmetic and convenience items (gems can be bought for cash OR ingame gold). There are infamous rng boxes, but none of those are p2w. GW2 is oriented at the western consumer, which means, yeah, they know that we hate p2w and they’ll never do that to us.

*breathes out* I had to get that off my chest. I wanna talk about GW2 forever, but it’s exhausting to do one-on-one. :P Hopefully someone’s still reading this!

Now lemme remind you that now I have those partner links, if you use this to create a new account and play for free (for an hour or two months? w/e), or this to buy an expansion, I’ll get paid a bit. Not much, but it definitely helps!

And I was gonna write this wall of text regardlessly of the partnership one day, now I just have more incentive. x’DD Plus, we’re gonna have a beta weekend on 11-13 august, where you can preview the second expansion for free! It’s a perfect timing to write this post and try convincing you. You’ll just need a f2p account, and you’ll be given a lvl 80 boost and whatnot for that beta weekend. I’m not sure yet, but I assume you WILL. Just please register using my link above, so that I get paid for the two hours I spent on this post. :D