Thread: Guild Wars 2

I wrote a short piece on my impressions on the game so far in another forum, thought I'd post them here too:

Level 30 in Guild Wars 2 now. It's not perfect but it passes the sniff test. I'll probably not commit to it in the long term but the game is pretty cheap and no subscription fee so I won't feel bad. I have yet to try PvP or a dungeon but just being out in the world is pretty fun.

Some cool things are that, outside of your personal storyline quests, you don't have to go talk to NPCs to get quests or rewards. You just look on your map, find an area suited for your level, go there (and probably do a couple of random events on your way) and just start doing whatever you're supposed to. When done, you get your reward instantly and move on.

You don't really get much experience by just killing mobs by yourself, which is a positive. You gotta get out there and do some questing, exploring, crafting and stuff. You get way more from those. Random events are plentiful and very rewarding. Escorting a trader moving between towns, help defend a town from a centaur invasion, gather armor pieces for some weird npc who wants to build a big battle droid or something, kill that big wyrm that just spawned in a cave... There's plenty of variety.

One fun aspect to me right now is going out to find so called vistas. They're lookout points where if you visit you get some experience and a small cinematic showing you the surrounding area. Sometimes you have to go through a big jump puzzle in order to reach them but that's part of the fun.

Once you finish all the quests, see all the vistas, visit all points of interest and gather all the waypoints (obelisks that you can teleport to in an instant) in an area you get a massive reward. This has awakened something within me, that "I'm just gonna clear this zone before I go to bed" mentality, making it feel like less of a grind.

Also nice is that if you visit a lower level area, you effectively scale down to match that level. Therefor you can't just visit another low level area and rampage through everything. You still have got to use friends and other players moving around in order to accomplish things. Quest rewards are still pretty good in terms of experience and karma (a type of currency rewarded from questing) when doing that kind of stuff that it feels worthwhile.

Some of the bad things are how god damn near impossible it is for you to play with your friends. Every area has a limited number of players allowed and if exceeded, which is pretty much always this early on, you get moved to a random overflow server. So you basically can't play with anyone you know for a good 40 minutes or so when you eventually can go to your real server. And if you leave that zone to craft, put stuff in your bank or things like that you'll be back in the overflow.

The Auction House has yet to work for more than a couple of hours at a time even though I've played for a week. Guild chat works 50% of the time, you'll generally be limited to private messages. Some quests on the personal storyline are (for some players) just ridiculously hard and since you always scale back to the level of your quest you'll never be able to just level up and get it done by having a better character, you just need to figure it out and get the appropriate amount of luck to finish it. If you're on a populated server, as I am, you might find the random events a bit unfulfilling since everything just get zerged by a dozen players nuking everything in sight. There's literally no strategy or tactic involved. I imagine that will change once people start spreading out in terms of their level and what area they're in, but right now it is what it is.

Overall, it's a good game that'll keep me around for a couple more weeks. Most of the big issues right now seems to be the kind that will get worked out eventually. I might not sink my future into this game but it does enough to entertain me and is different enough not to feel like another WoW clone. I'm getting to the level where dungeons are available to me, it's gonna be interesting to try that out since the characters are so vastly different from the usual Tank-Healer-DPS roles that I'm accustomed to.