Canthan (Factions PVE) Rant

Intro

OK, first of all this is a rant about PVE Factions. The PVP part of Factions is actually very good, I really do enjoy Alliance Battles (albeit not visually sometimes). I've divided this “essay” into two different sections to keep it tighter than the average incredibly-long-boring-rant. First I'll talk about the glitches; mostly in the missions, (which are already listed in the GuildWarsWiki) followed by examples of clipping glitches outside of missions.

After that is the Visual Styles of Cantha, and what they could have done to fix it. I like to think I've got a good visual eye when it comes to graphics - I'm an illustrator/graphic designer after all!


Bugs

Missions:
First of all, Factions only has 13 missions - Prophecies has 25 and NightFall has 19. 13 missions? I guess they spent the rest of their work time on side missions and PVP, as Factions actually has a larger number of Elite & Challenge missions, but 13 is still woefully small. How many people do you know who regularly play Faction Elite, Challenge or even Competitive missions? I had to wait a month to get into a Competitive mission, and even then it was to map the area (I think this was before American District options, but still).

Now for glitches, I count that Factions PVE missions in total have around 16 glitches, all from GWWIKI. That's not including some of the stranger glitches that aren't listed as bugs, such as:

"In Tahnnakai Temple, though all of the Bound bosses except Naku and Vizu have skills named after them (e.g., Jaizhenju Strike), none of them use any of their namesake skills."

"At the end of the Sunjiang District mission, it is stated that both the Spear of Archemorus and the Urn of Saint Viktor were destroyed, when in fact, they both can be seen if a player is holding the items, or is dropped on the floor near the cutscene area, within camera view."

By comparison, Nightfall has half the glitches, 8 mission bugs, but has near a third more of the missions?

Clipping:
There are some areas (majority in the city) where you either disappear into the backgrounds, or you're suddenly cut off from somewhere for no apparent reason. An example is in the Nahpui Quarter mission I think - I'll be running up a staircase and get to the top where suddenly I have to go around an invisible wall. Its too many obstacles and it gets annoying. Now I would go around all of Cantha and document these clipping bugs, but there's a reason I don't do that: The Canthan storyline is too short, it's glitchy, incoherent and ugly.



Visual Styles

Shing Jea:
OK, OK, not all of Cantha is ugly. The starting area is actually very nice - they should have made more of Cantha in this style. They could have done with expanding the cave areas, but otherwise Shing Jea is probably my favourite area in Cantha.

Kaineng City:
So we get off the boat from Shing Jea (or LA for that matter) and what do we encounter? Its a... uhmm, a brown mess. This has to be one of the worst and least thought out areas in the whole of Guild Wars. Seriously, this is a massive dent in Arenanets portfolio. If it wasn't for the dead ends, completely disproportional objects and ugly stretched out textures, it might just be OK.
Also this city is completely under populated for its size. On our travels we can see, what? A hundred residence? OK so there's a plague on the go - why don't we see refugees leaving the city, or even dying people on stretchers, maybe even mass graves!? OK so that's a little too far... I apologise.
The main reason the city is so rubbish is the age old difficulty of capturing a populated city within the constraints of a video game. There are too many demands on the developers and on our machines.
Although I've thought of ways around this - they should have followed their concept art, and kept some areas of accessibility on the city rooftops, or in areas where loads of the city has burnt down, or deep down in the sewers where its not so populated. There are probably other ways of conveying a busy city, but Arenanet just didn't get it right. At all in my opinion.

Ecovald:
Next is something slightly better, but still pretty bad overall. A petrified forest is a nice concept, and introducing the gothic theme I have no qualms with. But again they didn't get the visual style right - the colour scheme is all over the place! At least the city has a consistent red and yellow theme. Here there are bright luminous greens contrasting with dull blues and reds and even purple skies.
And that's another thing, the skies are full of tacky 2D tree sprites. It might work on small twigs but the trees in Ecovald are huge - it doesn't work. If they had just stuck to a simple colour palette - maybe something inverse to Jade Seas theme of blue and orange (dull green and bright purple?) - it would improve greatly I bet. If they then put a little more effort into the trees - maybe a claustrophobic cave like mashing of the trees over head, or collapsed areas... I dunno. Ecovald Forest is a good idea that just wasn't well executed.

Jade Sea:
The Jade Sea I actually like better. Granted, the sea looks like something that came out of a icicle, but it LOOKS pretty. They also brought back some of the visual themes from Shing Jea - some genuinely nice hilly areas to explore. They also got the colour scheme right, there is the strong combo of blue and orange tones throughout - even the grass in the hilly areas lean towards yellow in the spectrum.
But there is one thing I don't like about it - again there are tacky 2D sprites at work here. Its in the foam of the frozen crashing waves. If they thought about it a little more, all that foam would have eroded away into dust - in fact the Jade Sea would be slowly turning into a Jade Desert.... random Jade sandstorms would be awesome, think about it.



Story

The story isn't bad in Factions, albeit a little bit random for it's short time span - they introduce very forgettable characters who seem important, only to reappear once at the end, seemingly having contributed little.
When you compare this average story with Prophecies and NightFall, it actually diminishes it quite a bit. Another thing; the Factions story is meant to introduce amazing visual changes to Cantha - its almost have the power of it... and yet, well, see above.
I was also disappoint about the Mantids - What are they? They look cool, why don't they feature more in the story? I'd personally have loved to go into a Mantid hive and nuked em. I remember the first time playing through Factions feeling a little disappointed at the lack of Mantid involvement. Arenanet could have easily integrated them into an extra mission on either kurzick or luxon sides - Shiro takes control of Mantid hive and they go apeshit, etc.
In fact I think Factions almost mundane story is probably the main reason I don't play Factions PVE that much.

Difficulty

Lastly there's the difficulty in Factions. A lot of the missions have (unoriginal) time based bonus's, making them some of the hardest mission in Guild Wars. Swarming is another issue I feel - especially early on there seem to be large numbers of enemies that simply swarm in and overwhelm - NF and prophecies tend to have less of this, introducing enemies at well thought out group sizes. I think the introduction of Heroes have stopped this, but I remember before NF, Factions was extremely hard, especially after Shing Jea.

Conclusion (TL:DR)

To wrap this up, the glitches can be avoided if you visit GWWIKI. The Difficulty isn't so bad because of the introduction of later helpful content. Its not the Visual Styles and Story that put me off so much (because they're workable and I've seen worse). Its the possibilities they could have made from what is already there that really gets me. And you know, it's an Arenanet game, I expect something at least above average, not something that seems cobbled together like Factions PVE is. There's something else about Cantha that I just can't put my finger on - maybe it's the fact I don't play it so much because I feel its so awful in comparison to Arenanets other great games.