later

GW2 isn't P2W, as pay to win means if you pay more than me you win and that's not the case. Yes, you can purchase certain characters (which for the record, I'm not a fan of), but barring the Frontline Fighters characters by the time you could buy Torchwood, Hovergoat, and so on, everyone I knew had already unlocked them anyway, and I take an especial joy on taking out people who think being a toxic brainz mean they're going to just vanquish me and then trashing them, especially on a character like the maligned Rock Pea! I bought mostly coin packs in GW2 to show support for the game so I have a ton of coins now, but at least I have something to spend them on.

GW1 has the best economy out of all 3 games as you could only buy coins which you earned anyway. So I only did to speed things up a bit and to show support.

BfN has a terrible system if you want to get things. People were legitimately angry over the Feastivus upgrade being sold while it had so many bugs. The almost 10 million coins I have left that are only for the XP machine is terrible. The rainbow star system is dreadful unless you spend money or have an insane amount of patience (I spend some money on the game early on to again support a PvZ shooter, but barring one Sunflower costume that showed up after the September announcement, I've had everything for months). Looking at why people left the game over the past year and some change, the 2 biggest reasons are the economy and the technical issues. For me the game runs pretty well on DX12 with everything maxxed out, but it does have some weird bugs where I have to kill the game with task manager, aiming is still randomly flakely and so on, but GW2 has some bugs too (like spawning as a plant in the zombie base).

I log in to GW2 and BfN every day, sometimes only briefly, but when I login to BfN and jump into a free roam region to get some XP as I grind out the GM levels, I see so much lost potential. The quests were so good (escorting washy and the dummy dimension quest in Weiridng Woods were some of the most fun I've had in any game ever), the visuals lovely, the ideas behind things were so good, and yet, so much was missed. I was really looking forward to ops phase 3, berry brigade, Iceberg Lettuce, the toxic zombie and other character ideas that were in the pipeline that were never realized. It's quite sad as my first impressions with BfN when it was brand new was that BfN was going to surpass GW2 for me, which is a tall order, but that changed reasonably early on. It definitely got some things right that GW2 didn't (like the customization booth in GW2's UI is such a pain to scroll through, it's much nicer in BfN), but it fell off for me instead of me loving it more.

As for visuals, those are of course largely subjective, but all 3 games look amazing. The fact that made the games look like cartoons come to life and with the details, colors, and hidden (and obvious) jokes make them all a joy to look at. If the next game looks like any of the current 3, i'll be happy.

I always forget about open mics. In any game with mics the first thing I do is turn it off. We have our discord channel for friends when we play together. Random people on the internet can be awful. It was really bad in OW for example. When GW1 launched, the mics were stuck on all the time and hearing random screaming, eating, and such was a really bad time, thankfully they added PTT and the ability to turn it off quickly!

Obviously game play differences like TTK are subjective, I mean some people play Valorant and that game's TTK is horribly quick and that's a hard pass for me!