Who's the better dev team?

Assuming the Nightfall Dev team is the team behind Prophecies...
Is it safe to say that they are the better dev team regarding the playability and looks of the game and the amount of time spent to perfect it.

A simple example:

Look at the skillicons from Prophecies and the ones from Factions:
For the Necro for instance all the new skills were a bit of a duplicate in the way they looked.
All semi greenish with white fades in it.
Same for ele spells and so on.

Now have a look at the Nightfall skillicons.
I seem to recognise the amount of detail that were once the standards in Prophecies now coming back in Nightfall.
Ok I know what you're going to say: The Paragon and Dervish skills all look a bit similar to one another.
This is the one thing i haven't been able to swallow but apart from that it all seems ok imo

Opinions on this...
If you think i'm wring feel free to say so
I'm open for suggestions

Erm didnt both teams work on prophecies since the game engine etc had to be put together they cant have one team working on factions without a stable engine for the first game etc

Im not going to say that dev team 2 is bad till I see chapter 4. Factions was an experiment that didnt work in the end. But just like how the first dev team took the good parts from factions, I think that it is possible for the second team to learn from what they did and make even bigger improvments after seeing how chap 3 does.

That's a matter of opinion, Factions was more PVP oriented and was stated to be such from it's inception as far as I'm aware. A lot of people disliked certain elements from Factions (Gates, Slums, etc), but a lot of people liked those same elements of the gameplay.

I for one found the Kaineng City area and it's slums to be one of the most awesome environments I've ever had the chance to play in, perhaps this is due to the fact that I came to know the city well after my first character. Nevertheless you can't write Factions off as a failed experiment just because you didn't care for it.

Nightfall will be more PVE oriented, and Chapter 4 will more than likely be more PVP oriented.

Agreed, I loved Factions personally, much better than Prophecies, but again, personal preference.

Both teams were behind prophecies. Neither team are responsible for skill icons, but like one guy is. You know what they say about assumptions.

I agree

And I never understood the factions bashing.. I personally loved the whole eastern theme, artwork, music...

Silly assumption, the Nightfall dev team had the benefit of seeing all the feedback from Factions and could change things that didnt work out or didnt perform as expected.

These teams arent developing in a vacuum plus that the real important strategic decisions are not taken by one dev team.

not to disagree at all, but do you really think its as cut and dry as this? Skill Icons can be made quickly, its a simple 2d graphic block--- I dont know if the 50/50 team split is to be taken literally. animators, programmers etc yes probably are split up, but Im sure the one or two people that design all the skill icons are pretty universal to both teams... I dont know I might be looking too far into it..
Point is, Im sure there are plenty of ncsoft/arenanet worker bees who have been hard at work on all three chapters... and you cant blame "team factions" for things we dont like about it, they do as they are told by the high-ups with the grand design model.

And for the record, I dont think either prophecies or factions is better than the other- they compliment each other quite well... the sum of the parts is greater than the whole or something blah.

Plus Im sure we will start seeing threads and articles about peoples' reasons for liking factions or chp1 more than Nightfall... Itll be interesting to see what people complain about in another month or so

PROPHECIES TEAM (DEV 1)

They roooooockkKKKK!!!!

I think the setting for Factions kind of made it suck. The city slums look really ugly and are tedious in terms of clearing your way through. Prophecies was nice because you could take a path that YOU wanted through whatever enemies most of the time as opposed to following literally the same exact path every time. Hopefully, it looks like Nightfall is going to have more of this same "more free" type of exploration. Then again, that means it will be harder than Factions to get your GMC. :]

Reading is fun!

Actually it's the other way around.
Prophecies maps are alot more linear than Factions'. There's only a few parts of Prophecies' explorable areas that could be considered non-linear while almost all of Factions' explorable areas are non-linear. You are simply picking a set of 'optimal' paths and sticking to them.

I'm not saying Factions was bad... Au contraire. I liked Factions but it just seems to me that Nightfall is much better in terms of being ready. Yes this will have everything to do with the fact that it's the 3rd chapter but it feels like new air is being breathe here.

I thought the storyline in Factions was weak, but I'm not sure if the dev. team can be blamed for that. It would be nice to think that someone is co-ordinating the bigger "picture" that each "chapter" is a part of.

The scenery in Factions was gorgeous, loved the Jade Sea, and the Oni were pretty neat.

Yesterday it rained
Today it was sunny
Therefore, tommorow it will rain.

Do not make conclusions based on limited sample sizes. There is no way to determine a pattern or to figure out which team is "better" based on comparing only 2 games.

Well I like prophices better as far as layout. As in I liked how the leveling was more fleshed out instead of getting to lvl 20 quickly. I understand why they did that though because if you bring over prophices characters you don't want to spend so much time in areas that give no challenge. Still I think a lot of the Cantha quests give out too much exp.

Other than that I liked the story better in prophices also as it made more sense (at least in my opinion.)

Factions however had so pretty areas and interesting concepts... so over all.. I guess I liked prophices a tad better but Factions was cool too. It has my favorite profession after all ^^

Each had their own good points and Nightfall seems to have brought them together plus some. At least as far as we've seen.

I liked factions more. Prophecies was confusing in terms of the story. Your character leaves Lions Arch to escape the charr but then what happens to them? And for some reason you just have to go to the desert to ascend. The story just seemed to be all over the place.

And yes, everyone worked on prophecies and after that, they split. One grp maintained prophecies and the 2nd on factions. Remember, it took a full year till the release of factions since prophecies came out. But again, I don't work for A.net so I'm not sure if that is even a cut and dry line between the dev teams. There could be one dude who is the lead guy and decides how each chapter progresses.

Some of you people have a totally wrong idea how staggered teams work.

Yes, there are two dev teams, but that doesn't mean that each ANet staff member is assigned strictly to one team. I'm sure they switch team members depending on work load, and what phase of development the campaign has reached. For example in the early phase of each chapter there is a lot of concept art work to be done. Lots of drawing for Daniel Dociu and his team. Towards the middle of a campaign most of the art design should be near finished, and some artists can already be switched over to the next campaign. Many artists that are now working on campaign 4 have previously worked on Nightfall, and previously on Factions, and previously on Prophecies. And that goes not only for artists, but also programmers, game designers, environment designers, ... everybody.

Most importantly, the key decisions for game design are made by the same people for ALL chapters. People like Mike O’Brien, Jeff Strain, Patrick Wyatt, James Phinney, and many others are supervising the development of all chapter, and make the overall guidelines.

So, to put it short, the question which dev team is better can't be answered, because IT'S ESSENTIALLY THE SAME TEAM.

ill fence sit for this one...

Prophecies is (was) amazing, in depth, exciting and well face it NEW!!!!
Hence Factions and Nightfall will always be in its shadow.

Factions imo is designed for PvP players, and is excellent at it! Just what was needed to make GW exciting again for us!(Bravo Boys)
While Nightfall will now give us PvE'ers the much needed exploration and quest areas we desire!

Imo there is no better version or expansion, they are just suited to certain players. Look at the expansions for what they are and you will soon realise that GW is more for the individual than anyone can imagine!

Now I’m off this fence and onto the computer...

my god, just look at the dervish and paragon skill icons. they all look almost identical.


examples:
paragon: for they eyes = help me
dervish: almost all of the scythe attack skills.


in factions, they at least used differnt pictures with the same color schemes. nightfall, on the other hand, used the same pictures AND the same color schemes.

PvE is not really my forte, all i do is pvp. But i look forward not to the new missions/quests/ useless grinding in nightfall, but more to the new armor, weapon, and sheild skins. i think the artwork really defines the development team moreso than anything. nightfal was a bit dpressing in the skin department (the 15k armors are cool, but take a look at the greens.)

Can't wait to get anotyher 15k for my necro
#4 on it's way

Dilemma: what will i be saving now?
Gems? Spiritwoodplanks?
That's it i'll go for the latter

I going to wager that nightfall will out sell factions big time!

Well with all the junk about the teams swapping round, this discussion is pretty null and void. NightFall looks like it will Prawn the previous installments.

-Heroes
-Better Proffessions
-Better VO
-Lip Syncing
-CONTROLLABLE GIANT WURMS
-Heroes, needs another mention..
-Scythes ^^
-Better environments
-Better levelling. Slower than Factions, faster than Prophecies.
-Many More

And I haven't even bought the bloody thing.

It frustrates me when people refer to the Nightfall and Factions teams as the "good" team and "bad" team respectively... at this rate there's going to be a lot of negativity built up towards Chapter 4 before we even get to play it

Only people who don't understand the basic concept of a PVE oriented title, followed by a PVP oriented title... The Factions team did a great job IMO, I loved every minute of the Factions storyline myself, so much so that all of my characters have gotten to Cavalon, most of them are sitting at Unwaking Waters though :?

Nevertheless it's a matter of opinion, the people who "hate" Factions are just a lot more vocal about it than the people who did like it. I've noticed no shortage of people who liked Factions, they're just not so concerned with their own opinion as the people saying "OMG teh g4t3s is teh suxorz"

I doubt anyone with a brain will be hating on Chapter 4 until it's out, and then we can drum up more controversy over speculation. OMG, Chapter 4 is teh weak sauce, I am going to stop playing GW over this ____!

Thank you. I think that sums it up. Me, I'm just content to have fun in Cantha, and only go to Tyria to trade stuff in LA these days.

Also very accurate IMO.

Like others have said, Prophecies was the whole team, and I don't think people realize how much overlap there is between teams either. It isn't so much a top level creative split as it is a workload split - many key people work on *everything*. It takes about a year to develop a game. Two teams, release every 6 months. So Ch. 1 comes out, and everyone heads for Ch 2 asap. 6 months later, they start on 3, so that a year later (6 months after ch 2) it comes out. Ch 2 team starts on ch 4, ect ect. It's not like there's two teams that are cloistered away from each other in different buildings and not talking to each other.

ANet likely learned a lot from the two chapters so far, and could apply that to Nightfall, whereas by the time Factions development likely started, they didn't have as much to go by. One lesson I came away with from Factions was that finding a good team could be a challenge, that sometimes there simply weren't enough people (one of my biggest gripes is the inability to find a team sometimes). Something like that *could* be a factor in the concept of Heroes - not everyone can find a team to team up with, and sometimes hench are teh suck.

ANet as a company has now had some time to get feedback, digest it, and come up with how they can eliminate shortcomings in the game. They've also grown a lot as a company in terms of number of people, so they have whole new foutains of ideas and perspectives.

Bottom line: apples and oranges. I'm judging each chapter on it's own merit, and am WAY too excited for Nightfall.