(1)
Quests are one of those things that have gone from being a brilliant new idea to an over sued idea that's indicative of lazy design. It's easy to forget the genesis of the quest, how the idea started in pen-and-paper games and MUDs and moved to Ultima Online's escort quests and then to Ever Quest (which was designed as a theme park in the modern sense of the word) and was improved to the point that World of Warcraft's use of quests was seen as ground breaking. It was content that you could control to some extent.
GW2 eschews quests, just as it eschews the trinity. The quests make up for the lack, and the game gives you a lot of things to do in any given area, but the part that's supposed to replace quests outright is the dynamic events.
Matt Daniel did an excellent job discussing this in his at-launch review of GW2; he quite eloquently stated that the game's dynamic events are really static events occurring at random times. But that's only half of the problem. The other problem is that these are meant to be the bread and butter of your leveling content, and in that they do not work for two reasons.
The first is that they get annoying when you want to do anything else in the world. Warhammer Online's public quests had a similar issue: When there are only a handful of them in a given zone, you're going to be seeing them repeatedly. The same is true if you have two dozen events in a given area. Stay around long enough and you'll see them happen time and again, with nothing more interesting the second time than the first. The game seems to assume you're going to be moving on to another zone by then, but dynamic events alone won't get you the levels you need because there just aren't enough of them.
And that leads to a connected issue and the other reason that the events don't work as designed: They're often reliant on someone kicking off the chain or a bunch of people being around. When that doesn't happen, the events don't work. Either they expect a bigger population to successfully complete the objectives or the series never kicks off. Or the event starts and stops before you know it's happening, meaning you walk in just as it's wrapping up.
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The net result is that they feel as repetitive as RIFT's repeated, well, rifts, but with the sense that skipping one isn't optional. Instead of breaking out of the rut of going to various quest hubs and picking up another quest, they drive you into a rut of dashing around looking for events and eventually giving up while filling out maps.
If you go back and fill out maps, of course, you'll have no problem leveling. But that leads to a different issue.(2)
Area flow is problematic
The way that maps work in GW2 is a distinct sign of cleverness. The level 10 area doesn't become irrelevant when you hit level 50; your return to that area will level you back down so that you still have to face a challenge from enemies in the area. In theory, you could easily wind up hitting the level cap long before you have moved on to higher-level areas.
Unfortunately, this can be problematic, starting with the fact that the game never forces you to move on.
See, to do all of the work necessary to clear a map -- something the game explicitly encourages you to do -- you're going to be there for longer than the recommended levels, especially if you get lucky with zone events. Because of the way that level scaling works, you're going to keep getting experience rewards that scale nicely with your real level, avoiding the usual issue of diminishing gains. Factor in the rewards for the daily achievements, and if you feel like clearing all of the starter maps right away, you may very well be into your 30s before you head into your first zone above level 10.
This all sounds well and good, but then you realize that the karma vendors scattered throughout every zone are in place to help you get level-appropriate gear. Fill a heart, and you get access to gear that's reasonable for that level. Rather than waiting on the luck of the drop, you can just fill in blanks there, right?
Except that as you stick in lower-level areas, you get lower-level items... until you're utterly under geared for areas that are actually at your level.
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This also comes into play with relative power levels. While gear and trait bonuses scale down to your level, they don't scale down City of Heroes style, where you lose access to abilities much above your current level. They're just reduced by a percentage. And as higher-level gear gets more and more powerful and adds to more and more stats, you wind up with a much more robust and powerful character in the lower level ranges as it stands.
But let's assume that you're not worried about all of this. There's still an issue with the area flow, centering chiefly around the fact that it doesn't exist. Nothing is pushing you from one zone to the next except clearing the first zone. There are no breadcrumb quests, no reasons to move on, nothing but a vague need to fight higher-level enemies and get slightly better resources from harvesting.
Your personal story, in theory, helps direct you to your next destination, but in practice it jumps all over the place, and it's far easier to just ignore your personal story, for reasons that I'll address a couple of points down. It also will lead you to only a handful of places on the map, leaving you to just decide on wandering one way or the other until you get somewhere too high-level.
The fact that you can do that is awesome. The fact that there is nothing else to force movement? Significantly less awesome.
Crafting is a freaking mess(3)
My favourite crafting system of all time is the one in Final Fantasy XIV. (At least, the version of it that I've played; I've not yet tried the remake's alterations.) Despite that, it had some major issues. I bring this up because GW2's crafting inherits all of the issues of Final Fantasy XIV's system, strips out the most interesting parts, and then mixes in a whole bunch of other mistakes.
What issues? Well, you've got a set of recipes that require you to make four or five transitional items to get to the one thing you want to make, so that's awesome. But more notably, the game doesn't tell you how to fit those items together; it just leaves you to work through the Discovery interface. The idea here is clever, but the execution is lacking. You click items and hope to put together a working item from what you've got on hand, but that's literally all you can do here. FFXIV's lack of a recipe list of any sort was a major issue with the game; here, it's just improved by the fact that the game stores the recipe after you've made it once.
But then there's actively leveling a craft. And that's when crafting becomes an exercise in hair-tearing frustration because creating one level 20 recipe does not increase your level to 21 as it would appear. No, you get experience toward level 21, meaning that the problem of leveling up by making useless items is exacerbated.
Oh, and usually you can only salvage finished products, not parts. For one or two crafting items when you easily sank 10 pieces of raw material into the craft. By comparison, Star Wars: The Old Republic lets you salvage a reasonable portion of what you used to craft, levels your craft faster, and gives you several options to harvest needed resources whenever and wherever you need them.
The idea is that crafting is supposed to be an effort, but as it stands, it's more effort than it's worth. You can deposit crafting materials from anywhere, and that's nice, but you blow through stacks of materials ridiculously fast trying to just level yourself into competence. Short of buying gold and begging at the trading post, there's no way to actually harvest goods fast enough to keep up with the demands of the game compared to your level. Some resources even become nigh-impossible to harvest, especially leather: Since loot that drops is around your level always, you stop getting lower-level leather pretty quickly, and there aren't any nodes to harvest for it.
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In other words, if you want to craft, odds are good-to-definite that you will out level every single item you can make until the level cap, at which point there are a handful of relevant things to make and a lot of lower-level junk you don't need. You know, exactly like crafting in World of Warcraft or Star Wars: The Old Republic or several other games, except that the road to get to selective obsolescence takes a lot longer and winds up being far more obnoxious.
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