Guild Wars 2

[Grakor456]

You're going to the server for reddit?

Honestly? I just picked it because I liked the name.

[McKnighter]

I used to love Guild Wars, I bought every addon and such.

... I dunno if I want to buy Guild Wars 2. Maybe later, considering I've got a lot on my plate now and I've already have more than enough games to juggle. xD

[vizkus]

Asura Engineer Asura Engineer Asura Engineer Asura Engineer Asura Engineer Asura Engineer Asura Engineer Asura Engineer Asura Engineer Asura Engineer Asura Engineer Asura Engineer Asura Engineer Asura Engineer Asura Engineer Asura Engineer Asura Engineer Asura Engineer

[Kaghuros]

No asura in the previous betas, not sure about this one though. Also T -30 mins.

[Nostra]

I ended up prepurchasing, so I'll try it too.

Seems they opened the weekend an hour early too!

[Grakor456]

Yeah, Darkhaven's too crowded, didn't realize it'd be that bad. Probably going to transfer, or just remake my toons on another server.

[Nostra]

Playing on Petrified Forest.

Or well, I would be if I could actually log in, hehe.

[Grakor456]

Well, I found the first major snag...server transfers don't work. In addition, deleting all of your characters doesn't let you change servers either, you're still stuck on your "home" server.

I'll probably comment on the game itself later tonight, but that alone is irritating me.

[Kaghuros]

Heh, I made a point of taking a less populated server, Sea of Sorrows, which promptly filled to max in the first few hours. Also we're beating Darkhaven so handily in WvW right now that we have half of the total points possible.

Also overflow servers are dumb, and separated me from my family and friends in a lot of places :/

Edit: Still the best MMO I've ever played. Sorry CotH. I can cast abilities anywhere and enter most houses in the world as well as do /me emotes (and customize my character's appearance). Roleplay PvE for me on day 1.

[mimloopen]

Short review: best mmo ever

Long review: oh my god best mmo ever. But I must just be easily impressed since a warrior using a gun as his main weapon was enough to blow my mind

Cant wait until theres roleplay stuff happening

[Grakor456]

Alright. Beta weekend has come to a close, here's my "review" of what I've seen so far. Keep in mind that for this beta, we couldn't choose Asura or Sylvari, and I chose to primarily stick with three characters: Norn Guardian, Norn Ranger, and Charr Elementalist. I didn't get past level 16, so this is mostly based on the first zones of those two races.

If you want a TL;DR version, it'll be at the bottom.

- Events and Quests -

The first thing that needs to be addressed is that GW2 is very different from most MMOs I've played. Questing as it appears in WoW essentially doesn't exist aside from some steps in the "Personal Story," which I'll talk about later. Instead, the bulk of what I found myself doing is doing the dynamic events and filling renown hearts.

Technical explanation for those not following the game: The map has symbols on it that require filling, four in total: waypoints (tagged to enable faster travelling), points of interest (usually tagged just for free experience and to draw you to the renown hearts), skill challenges (do a mini-event for a skill point to buy more healing/utility/elite skills), and renown hearts. Tagging PoIs and Waypoints gives you experience (a decent chunk, fully exploring my home city gave me around a full level by itself.) Renown hearts are basically there to draw you in to areas where dynamic events frequently occur. You fill them in by doing certain activities in the area based on the heart. For example, the bear shine heart would partially fill any time I killed a Son of Svanir, erased a Sons' mark on the cave wall, flushed one out of hiding in a tree, got a fish and fed a bear cub, or made progress on any of the DEs that might have been happening in the area. So, even when there's no event going on, there's multiple ways to fill each heart, usually one involving killing and another that doesn't. Once a heart is filled, the NPC with said heart opens up as a merchant which will sell objects for "karma," which is the currency gained from doing events.

Dynamic events themselves are basically just an evolution of the "public quest" idea from Warhammer Online. Have an area where a repeating series of events occur that players can take part in and decide a conclusion on until the cycle repeats. This isn't a knock against the game though...one of the best things about WAR was the public quests, so it's nice to see another game make use of the idea.

So, technical stuff out of the way, how well does this work? I found this to be quite fun and enjoyable as a leveling method. The hearts and points of interest lead you to places where you need to be, and the "grind" feels less like a grind because you're always doing different things and moving about. The dynamic events seemed to loop fairly often, I was able to do most of them more than once, but I didn't think it felt very grindy.

I did run into the problem of finding events to do as a reached the end of each zone. Zones in this game are HUGE, and due to the difficulty curve of the game (see below) you don't really want to go to an event even one level above your own if you can help it. Events are always happening, but actually finding them and getting to them in a timely manner can be a challenge once you've hit all of the hearts appropriate for your level and need that extra experience to push you to the next level.

Overall, though? Never seen an MMO take this particular manner of leveling. It's very refreshing to see, very different.

- Combat -

This is an action game, no other way to put it. Sort of a blending of action combat with the skills available on a full MMO. Most attacks can be dodged, either with the dodge roll, or by moving out of the way (projectiles naturally lead to their target, but it's possible to change directions and make them miss if you're far enough away.) Melee attacks are all essentially AoE, since they have an arc. This is probably one of the few games I've played where movement is greatly rewarded.

One thing I wanted to address, though...this game is hard. Like, of all of the MMOs I've played, this is probably the most challenging. Not in terms of grind, but this game can and will try to defeat you every chance it gets. This becomes especially true when dynamic events scale upwards for too many people...bosses start one-shotting with their more powerful attacks and the sheer number of people in the DE area cause gigantic waves of enemies that can concentrate fire and kill someone in less than a second if you're not careful. I found this made playing a melee character particularly challenging, especially with attacks doing so much damage in this game. Even my heavily-armored guardian felt like he was wearing toilet paper for armor, since nearly everything could make his health plummet. I imagine things would be more balanced if you were dealing with small groups as opposed to the large ones that flooded the noob zones during the beta weekend, but there you have it.

The level scaling in this game is strange. Wayfarer Hills is the Norn starting zone, and is ranged 1-15. However, different sections of the zone are designed for different levels (and you can generally tell by the level of the nearby renown heart.) If you're over that level, you're dropped down to that level automatically. So, if I'm in a level 3 area, and I ding to 4, my stats are dropped back down to level 3 until I leave to an area with a higher level. I...didn't like this, as it really made it feel like I wasn't getting any stronger in comparison to the competition I was facing.

Overall, though, this has some solid combat mechanics. The lack of solid healing will be a bit of a pain, but I think it may have been wise in the long run to have everyone healing themselves primarily.

- Story -

The personal story is made up, near as I can tell, of disjointed fragments based on your answers to the biography. This can make the story not seem to flow very cohesively. For example, my Guardian viewed Strength as the most important trait to a good hunter, and wanted revenge on someone who defeated him in a past moot. The story starts off with your choice on what you viewed as most important: in this case, "strength" meant my norn was on a quest to defeat a giant king. After that segment is done, it shifted gears to talking about the revenge plot.

I'm not sure if there would have been a better way to do it. There are still common threads in all of the stories; all of the Norn paths have you befriending Eir and going through the same areas. So there's some cohesiveness...still, I haven't seen anyone do better in this field, so I can't really complain.

Personal story quests are essentially all instanced. They're sort of like the "missions" from the first Guild Wars, being instanced areas that you do with NPC buddies (based on the story section) and possibly anyone you take with you. I found the stories themselves to be rather strong, and there are choices that you can make within the story that will further affect the outcome. Without seeing more of it, I can't really comment further.

- Characters and Customization -

I liked the character creator for this. There are preset body builds, faces, etc. that you can choose from, and then you can customize certain aspects of the face with sliders and color changers. Nicely done, overall.

There's quite a bit of customization in terms of character play-style within the game. Your first five skills are tied to your weapon type (so any Ranger with a greatsword has the same first five weapon skills,) the other five are freely chosen within certain slots: one healing, three utility, and one elite. I only got high enough to play around with one healing and two utility slots, as the slots unlock as you level up. Weapon skills have to be unlocked as well, though not with skill points: you start off with the basic attack for that weapon, and killing enemies with that weapon makes you slowly learn more abilities. It felt somewhat grindy on my Elementalist since you have to do this not just for every weapon, but also for every attunement of every element on each weapon, but I managed to complete most of the weapon skills by the time I finished the first area. Not including the aquatic weapons, since there were very few events in the starter zones that took place underwater (I believe there was one in the Charr starter, none in the Norn.) I didn't get to mess around with the trait system very much since it only opens up at level 11, but that looks fun too.

As for the specific classes I tried...

Guardian - I mentioned before that he didn't turn out very tanky. Nonetheless, I did have fun with this guy. I found that I wasn't using the virtues very much and just let them run passively. I quickly discovered that abilities that heal others are, at best, regeneration boosters. 50 healing is a drop in the bucket when a single attack from an enemy is dropping you by more than 150.

Ranger - Pets die too quickly. One AoE from a boss and my poor wolf would come limping back to my ranter's side. You can switch pets on the fly, and when you do the pet is auto-rezzed, but there's a cooldown so it's still irritating. Pets are easy to tame, though...just talk to one of the juvenile versions of the pet in question. The trick is just locating them.

Elementalist - Don't let anyone say that these guys can't melee. RIDE THE LIGHTNING, WOO! Seriously, double-dagger eles might as well be melee, that's the range of all of their spells. I actually enjoyed playing this guy, which surprised me...usually, I hate all "nuker" characters, but they play quite differently with daggers. Quite fun, if very dangerous since you're entering melee in cloth (and if you thought guardians were brittle, man...)

- TL;DR, Summary -

Quite fun, eagerly awaiting release. There are some hiccups...I don't like the way it handles level scaling and the difficulty gets wonky at times, but nonetheless this is probably one of the best MMOs I've ever played. Will be interesting to see this game later when it's become more polished.

[Xigo]

The level scaling in this game is strange. Wayfarer Hills is the Norn starting zone, and is ranged 1-15. However, different sections of the zone are designed for different levels (and you can generally tell by the level of the nearby renown heart.) If you're over that level, you're dropped down to that level automatically. So, if I'm in a level 3 area, and I ding to 4, my stats are dropped back down to level 3 until I leave to an area with a higher level. I...didn't like this, as it really made it feel like I wasn't getting any stronger in comparison to the competition I was facing.

As a long time City of Heroes player, I for one love this. This means that you don't have to roll a new alt to help a friend level up, or even just play with them. Just hop on your main and get to it.

However, I can see the difficulty in this as far as roleplay goes. After all, you can't go to the lowbie zones to RP if your level is automatically decreased.

[Grakor456]

As a long time City of Heroes player, I for one love this. This means that you don't have to roll a new alt to help a friend level up, or even just play with them. Just hop on your main and get to it.

However, I can see the difficulty in this as far as roleplay goes. After all, you can't go to the lowbie zones to RP if your level is automatically decreased.

Oh, I like the level scaling as well, I just wish it wasn't so...strict, so to speak. I'd at least like to be one or two levels above the area so I have some sense of progression, rather than levels not really making any difference aside form letting you wander to the next zone without getting insta-gibbed by the higher level mobs.

[flammos200]

As a long time City of Heroes player, I for one love this. This means that you don't have to roll a new alt to help a friend level up, or even just play with them. Just hop on your main and get to it.

However, I can see the difficulty in this as far as roleplay goes. After all, you can't go to the lowbie zones to RP if your level is automatically decreased.

Oh, I like the level scaling as well, I just wish it wasn't so...strict, so to speak. I'd at least like to be one or two levels above the area so I have some sense of progression, rather than levels not really making any difference aside form letting you wander to the next zone without getting insta-gibbed by the higher level mobs.

Arguably, it gives the world a constant sense of danger. In WoW, as a level 80, you can take on and slaughter a million level 10 Defias thugs. That's unrealistic. Scaling you down(but letting you keep your gear) is realistic, since in the end, the enemy is still a threat. You haven't become an all-powerful god-being that can rip humans to shreds with your farts. You should not be able to take down armies of creatures, regardless of level.

Much like in RP we're generally told that despite the fact that we have level XX characters, we shouldn't go running around dangerous areas, even in low-level zones, because our characters wouldn't survive IC-ly, even though they would OOC-ly, in the exact same way, areas are meant to stay dangerous and challenging even after you've passed their tier.

It also brings up the interesting point of revisiting low-level zones, or going to other low-level zones that you haven't been in yet, just to experience them as you would have if you'd have started there.

I like scaling down. It's not as brutal as WAR's Chickening, and your character never becomes godlike.

[Kaghuros]

My feelings on the Human plot, and how it actually all fits together pretty well. Possible Human plot spoilers ahead!

Spoiler:

I felt the Human personal storyline was much more engaging and relevant. I played a Human Noble Elementalist whose sister was supposedly killed by centaurs. My first section dealt with a party in my honor, at which bandits attacked and kidnapped my socially awkward but loyal childhood friend. This led to an investigation with the Seraphs (the guards, basically) in which I helped take down a minister. However, that minister had some sort of backing from higher up, and the Seraphs promised to continue looking while I went off on my merry way. Then I was contacted by the Human hero Logan Thackeray, a Seraph commander, who said that he'd found a journal that mentioned my sister being alive and kidnapped in the wreckage of a centaur camp (and since he knew me from our collaboration he recognized her last name). I went through some travails in that regard and it turned out that the same corrupt official had led to my sister's apparent death was organizing strife throughout the land.

So basically, the Human story ties up really well in that all of my misfortune is being caused by someone trying to destabilize Kryta by allying bandits and centaurs in an effort to depose the queen.

My dad also played a Human but instead was a street-raised gangster. His old gang was hired by the same shadowy noble to poison a ton of people by ruining a well and he had to get his friends out of the gang as well as helping Logan stop them if he so chose.