What's the difference between this and Guild Wars 2 (besides the art direction and lore, I'm talking gameplay and game design) ?
Actual question.
Similar but some things are different. ESO world feels bigger and more like a real world, and you just explore however you feel. GW2 is a bit more planned and gamey, and there are skill points in out of the way places, one in each region, that you have to fight towards and collect. It makes exploration more methodical. And you have to do some sort of 3rd person platformer jumping to reach some places. The quests are a bit more dynamic than ESO, and things happen in the world like a wagon will travel from one town to another and it will be ambushed, and people nearby will get a notification to go and get involved, if they want to. But mostly I found it to be gimmicky and boring. ESO has open world bosses that people go to and fight which I found to be more fun. But still kinda mindless.
GW2 tried to destroy the concept of combat roles, so nobody can tank or heal. It sounded good on paper but I thought the reality sucked. In a dungeon everyone just runs around like headless chickens, if they get attacked they run away and the enemy attacks someone else. Basically everyone tanks a bit. Everyone does damage a bit. And most people have a little heal they can use on themselves etc. I would guess it became meta at some point and people figured out some tricks or something, but when I played at release, it was really stupid and a huge failure in terms of improving the trinity concept. ESO is more traditional, tanks, healers, dps. ESO dungeons are highly scripted, highly tuned, bosses throw lava at you and you have to dive out the way etc. Really challenging too, weak groups can fail over and over. I can't really remember the GW2 dungeons but I think it is similar, only not as good. GW2 has some fun PVP maps where you have to capture locations and stuff, like WoW battlegrounds. I don't think ESO has that. But ESO has a big open world PVP region which is much better than GW2's open world PVP region. This might have changed since I played though, I haven't played GW2 since it was released and everyone thought the open world PVP was stupid and a clusterfuck, so maybe they changed it.
GW2 depresses me because the beta was super difficult. Killing one enemy by yourself was pretty 50/50 whether you could survive. It did so much damage to you, and you didn't do much back. So you had to dive all over the place and run in circles and run for your life and then blast it and run some more and repeat until it is dead. I loved it because it meant that you really had to focus on perfecting your combat routine, every hit point mattered, and I was really motivated to become as strong as I could. And I would spend an hour to fight across an area to get a skill point and I would feel like YESSSSSS!!!!! because I really needed the boost. But the players said it was too hard so it got nerfed. And then it got nerfed again. And then on release it nerfed a third time. And I think since then it has been nerfed some more... So when I last played it, you just run through groups of mobs and press a few buttons and they all explode. You don't even need to fight to skill points anymore, just run there and ignore anything that attacks you. Sad times. But lots of normies like it so whatever. It isn't for me. I think ESO is a lot better but even that I only played for about a month. I would have loved ESO if the end game was better. I think if I got into the pvp I could have played it a lot longer, but I have so much other stuff to play.
