Crystal Oasis - mini review.

[Andy.5981]

So like most people, I fired up Guild Wars 2 last Friday and entered PoF.

I'm not going to include any plot spoilers in this thread, its just my initial personal observations. If you reply please respect players who may not have done any content and avoid spoilers please.

Really only played in Crystal Oasis so far. Its a large zone, and really does bring back the excitement of exploration. The graphics are really nice. One thing that I did notice from the start is that the lighting is very very harsh. I know its a desert environment and it is supposed to convey blistering heat, but when I first entered Amnoon, I thought that the shadows on things were too harsh, not just on objects around the place but also NPC's the shadows are really dark. Something not quite right with the lighting effects.

Music is really nice as well as the sound effects.

You don't seem to be bombarded with events happening like HoT which is a good thing. However the downside is that there appears to be no overall main event in the zone. Sure there are lots of bounty events, but nothing that seems to pull the players towards a build up - not even anything (or at least I've not seen it yet) like the World Bosses in the original GW2 zones.

There seem to be quite a few quests dotted all over the place - but again , none of them seem to be the start of event chains. That was one of the things I liked about the original GW2 zones. You did an event, people helped out, you completed the quest, you followed the NPC back to base, some people ran off (always wait). The canny people stayed and listened to the NPC chatter and then shortly after the NPC or an assistant started another quest and off you went. Sadly it doesn't appear to be the same in Crystal Oasis.

Oddly the zone map chat is ominously quiet. I don't know why. There are the odd requests for information or help, but in the main, it is deathly silent. You would expect with a lot of new content that people would be chatting away nonstop. Nope.

People are out there, but it just seems odd that they're very quiet. I asked for some help on a Bounty boss. Two people turned up!

NPC difficult appears to be fairly easy, not noticed any break bars other than Champions and Legendary. Running a Berserker Warrior and nothing really has given me any issues. To be honest, probably a little underwhelmed by the difficulty level of the NPCS.

I think the zone could do with some running events, there is enough space to have a sequence of events running from Friendly to Enemy Territory and perhaps the other way. Capture and Defence of outposts and as a result quests only becoming available as a result.

As regards the unlocking of Elite Specialization. In HoT I fought for those unlocks. In PoF, I sat in Lions Arch and clicked away unlocking the lot before I even got into a PoF zone. Think this was a bad decision.

Anyway that's my initial thoughts.

If I were to give Crystal Oasis a score, it would be 7/10 - needs some improvement and some way to unite the players.