guild-wars-2-end-of-dragons-review

I’ve played a lot of MMOs over the past 15 years, and one thing always tends to hold true for me: I’m a major alt-aholic. I can’t tell you what it is that I enjoy most about rolling a new character. Maybe I like playing around with the character customization options the game offers. If there’s many races and starting areas, I like to see them all.

Most of all, I tend to suffer from class envy. I’ll just be questing along on my happy way and suddenly see some guy storm into the area and clean up all the mobs like a solo whirlwind. I’m so impressed that I check out what class he is. Then I have to go roll one to try it for myself.

Do you do that, too? You’re in good company, then. That’s why it’s so odd for me to play a game like Final Fantasy XIV where game mechanics discourage rolling alts. Well, maybe “discourage” is a bit too harsh a word, but it certainly doesn’t encourage alt rolling.

In FFXIV, you can play all jobs, crafting classes and gathering classes on one character. This is actually the feature that got me interested in trying FFXIV in the first place. Overall, this works well. There really is no need to have extra characters because you can be all things on one.

In fact, you can get a little price break ($12.99 vs $14.99) on a monthly subscription fee if you choose the Entry membership tier. This tier allows you to roll only one character on a server for up to eight servers. So, you can have alts, but they just can’t be on the same server.

So should you roll an alt in Final Fantasy XIV? As a player who has a few alts, let me give you some pros and cons.

Awesome Aesthetics

There’s no doubt that FFXIV has some good looking character customization, with a variety of races to choose from. Though the Fantasia potion is a robust way to change an existing character’s… everything… it can get IRL costly.

It’s pretty obvious that rolling a new character gives you a clean slate when it comes to aesthetics. So, if you just need a change of character scenery, or you’re a roleplayer who wants to write up a whole new backstory, this is one major perk of creating an alt.

Main Scenario Questing

How long has it been since you revisited characters and locations from the early main scenario quests? Did you ever play through each of the starting locations to see the differences in the story?

Rolling an alt gives you the opportunity to go back and do these things. Once you complete a part of the main scenario in FFXIV, you can never go back to revisit it… well, beyond watching it on YouTube. Though it may not be for everyone, I personally enjoy the main scenario, and find it very interesting to play through it again and see all the things I missed the first time. It’s also very useful to roll an alt if you want to quest along with a friend who is new to the game, which is exactly why I rolled my first alt in FFXIV to begin with.

For some people, however, being forced to play through the main scenario quests and dungeons again is a big turn-off and the reason they won’t roll an alt. So this could be seen as either a pro or a con.

Faster and More Engaging Leveling to 50

While you can level every job on one character, and there is bonus experience to help you do this, there’s only so much dungeon running and FATE grinding a person can stand. The main scenario quests got a big boost in experience and gear rewards since the Heavensward expansion was released, and are only available on a new character once you’ve completed them the first time. So rolling an alt feels like a faster and more engaging way to get a character to level cap.

More Inventory Space

Heavensward brought us more classes. It didn’t bring us more free inventory space. The lack of inventory space, especially for gear, is one of my pet peeves in FFXIV. There’s just not enough room for all the gear, especially if you are leveling several jobs, crafting and gathering.

One way to get past this is to create a role-based alt. I know several folks in my free company do this. You can roll a character on which you will only level the magic-based classes. Or make that character just for your tank jobs. Then you only keep the armor associated with tanks on one character, and only keep light armor on the magic-based character. This helps free up a lot of space in your inventory in the long run.

More Daily Levequests

Leves are useful quests to help supplement leveling, and are especially useful for crafters and gatherers. Each character is limited to up to 100 allowances at one time. As you use these allotments, you earn 3 allowances every 12 hours. So this means, if you burn through them, you have to wait a while before you see them return.

Rolling an alt allows you to earn and use double leves. I know one fellow in our free company who was very eager to level his crafting classes. He chose to roll an alt in order to have leves for his crafting on one character and leves for leveling gathering on the other.

Free Companies

Rolling an alt can be both a good and bad thing when dealing with free companies. While our free company welcomes alts, some do not. In a game where you can do all things on all characters, some free companies may prefer you to focus on building one character and may have a no-alt policy.

However, when you roll an alt in FFXIV, that alt is in no way tied to the free company your other character is a part of. If you’re discontent with your free company, or if you’re uncertain if the free company is a good fit, rolling an alt may allow you to meet new people and experiment by joining other free companies to find one that better fits your play style.

End Game Juggling

The biggest con for rolling an alt comes when you get to end game. Reaching max level on multiple characters isn’t so much the problem, and may be faster than leveling many jobs on one character. It’s the gearing up of several end game characters, especially if you don’t have time to dedicate to it, that can become frustrating and bordering on burn-out.

One daily roulette dungeon run turns into two or three daily roulette runs. What drops in a raid on one character can’t be shared with another. Those Tomes you earned on one character can’t buy gear for another. Hunt seals can’t be shared. So, you’ll basically be multiplying the things you have to do to gear up by the number of characters you’ve rolled.

Sure, you can just ignore all this and not gear up or level alts to play end game. Some people may not care about end game or gearing up, and that’s totally cool. But if this does matter to you, that’s a big thing to consider before you roll another character. Chances are, you’ll end up favoring one character more than another, leaving them to languish. Which is what ended up happening to me.

Still, what did I do during this lull between major FFXIV patch releases? I rolled another alt. Ooops.

Guild Wars 2 is approaching 10 years old. At its release, it offered an MMORPG focusing on group event-based play and a player-driven story. Its third expansion, End of Dragons (EoD), released at the end of last month, I decided it was time to dust off my Mesmer and see if this aging MMO still has relevance in today's new era of MMOs.

End of Dragons starts with a bang. You arrive in Cantha in suitably chaotic style and soon get to work solving mysteries, hunting monsters and bizarrely… filing paperwork. We first visited Cantha in the original Guild Wars; it's a country set far to the south of the lands previously explored in Guild Wars 2 and featured heavy influences from eastern Asia. However, the events of End of Dragons are set 250 years since players last visited Cantha, during which time it has been isolated from the outside world.

The first area, Seitung Province, continues the Asian influences with beautiful temples and manicured gardens. In fact, the art design is impressive throughout the expansion and flying to the top of a mountain just to gaze at the scenery is always a worthwhile exploit for adventurers who have had enough monster slaying, or paperwork for that matter.

The four new areas are all nicely varied. In addition to Seitung Province, you have the futuristic New Kaineng City, the dark labyrinthine Echovald Wilds, and the fossilised jade sea of Dragon's End. New Kaineng City is perhaps the weakest, with a bit too much verticality made up of plain walls, but moments of wonder can be found in all four zones.

Each area is still packed with events and there's always something to do, there's also plenty of secrets hidden if you care to look. The meta events – larger series of events requiring the help of almost every player on the map – are particularly fun. I really enjoyed the giant jade robot you fight in the Echovald Wilds which is capable of taking out entire groups of players with huge sweeps of its arms. The final fight in Dragon's End is huge in scope and is a lot of fun. As well as posing a significant challenge. Its currently a bit too long at nearly two hours with a fairly high failure rate, however, the developers are making some changes to make the fight a little more manageable.

You're introduced to these areas through your personal story which is the best it has ever been. The instanced areas are all imaginative, and although a few of the quests did feel a bit like filler, it's held together by some truly tremendous voice acting. The script is generally good and attempts at humour normally land fairly well. The themes of the story continue Guild Wars 2's familiar ideas of teamwork, and how our differences are our true strengths – an idea that the real world could certainly do with more of.

The boss fights – often serving as an introduction to the new Strike Missions – are also challenging without being overwhelmingly brutal. Previous example excluded. The conclusion of the personal story is particularly sweet and is a really enjoyable send off for characters that players will have known for nearly a decade now.

The level cap remains at 80, as it always has done, with a further five masteries providing the horizontal progression philosophy designed to avoid power creep. Unfortunately, this is where I felt NCSOFT started to run out of ideas. The first expansion, Heart of Thorns, allowed us to glide through a monster filled jungle, the second expansion, Path of Fire, gave us mounts allowing us to race giant velociraptors, and since then players have been able to tame and fly fire-breathing wyverns.

In comparison, End of Dragons gives us the ability to fish and drive a boat. A decent enough distraction, but wyvern-taming, it is not. To be fair, there is a giant war tortoise to unlock which looks like it could be enjoyable, especially as friends can jump on the back to operate artillery. But even that isn't enough of a draw to give End of Dragons the showpiece wow-factor of the other expansions.

Lack of imagination also seemed to be an issue with my Mesmer's new specialisation class – the Virtuoso. The class loses its go-to ability to create copies of itself, instead summoning a whirlwind of magical knives that fly around the character. This creates a much more direct playstyle but loses a lot of the Mesmer's identity and certainly didn't seem as exciting to play as the time-wielding Chronomancer or the hypermobile Mirage from the other expansions. Though it should be noted that some of the other classes' new specialisations are held in higher regard by the community.

Guild Wars 2 End of Dragons is a solid expansion which builds on a decade of experience to make it, in some respects, the best Guild Wars 2 has ever been. Its storytelling, voice acting, and art design overcome its ageing graphics to show some of its newer rivals how MMORPGs should be done. On the other hand, it also feels like this may be as far as NCSOFT can take things, with many new features feeling underwhelming. EOD is reasonably priced and for anyone who has previously enjoyed Guild Wars 2, this will be a nice slice of the GW2 cake. Even if it's the last one they'll enjoy.

We hope you enjoyed our Guild Wars 2 End of Dragons review. Check out our MMO gaming archives for more great GW2 content.

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