First Impressions of Guild Wars 2

Article by Daniel Nenadovic

So, I was supposed to write a review of The Walking Dead Episode 3 yesterday, but to my dismay the game's automatic update to add the new content in also mucked up all of my saves to the point that, if I wanted to play Episode 3 with my storyline, I was going to have to replay through the entire series, which would have added about 6 hours to the job. I'm going to hold off on the review until either Telltale fixes the problem or I have a boatload of time to kill on replaying the first two episodes.

Instead, as you may have guessed by the title, I'm going to give you my initial impressions of Guild Wars 2. The game was insanely hyped before its release as something new and revolutionary to the MMO genre, but then pretty much every upcoming MMO is advertised just so. Does Guild Wars 2 live up to that level of hype? Definitely not. If you jumped into this game expecting something entirely new and different, then you would be terribly disappointed.

It's still a fantastic game in its own right, but it is very much a game that lives and breathes within the systems of gameplay established by its predecessors. What it does incredibly well with that framework is cut all of the chaff away from it and leave the player with a solid game to have fun with. Guild Wars 2 strips the MMO down to two of its fundamental ingredients: socialization and the grind. Yes, that's right, I'm bringing up that forbidden G of MMOs, The Grind. It is incredibly and transparently present in this game to the point that it almost feels like it IS the game.

You create a character. There are some great customization options and each of the races feels very distinct. You even establish some background bullet points for your character that will alter your main story a bit, which helps make the character yours.

But then you dive in. An artsy cinematic, maybe some talky bits where characters talk at each other, and you're in the game. Rather than filling a ledger up with quests for your character, you generally only have one quest in Guild Wars 2, and that's your main story quest that drives an okay narrative throughout your game. That's not nearly enough content to fill an MMO, though. So the NPC you talk to early on will mark your map with a few interesting locations. 

These "hearts," so-called because they show up as a heart symbol on your map, are tasks. To participate in a task, you go to its area and do stuff. Grindy stuff, really. Kill some monsters. Feed some cows. Put a few fires out. Kill a big monster. The catch is that, like Public Quests in Warhammer Online, everybody is participating together. You don't have to officially form a group, and you don't have to get the first hit on a monster to get experience from it. Everybody works together and gets immediately rewarded for completing the event, which helps bring friendly socialization back into the MMO genre. Where normally you would compete for kills, here you work together.

There's certainly still competition, but a better kind. In the screen above I'm attacking a giant worm. But so are at least three other people. The servers are crowded right now, and everybody wants in on the action, so trying to get any personal contribution in on a public task can be a humorous experience of trying to rush to the next target alongside everybody else.

Despite that current frenzy, this is a fantastic idea for MMOs and, while it's not a new idea, Guild Wars 2 implements it masterfully and wonderfully. The majority of your time in the game will probably be spent completing tasks, but that's awesome because everybody works together on them instead of competing. It's Massively Multiplayer incarnate. Tasks are the meat of this game and they are great. They give you MMO gameplay but cut out the middle man and the travel between quest-givers so that you can just enjoy playing the game and be rewarded for that.

But they are still a grind. A grind that I rather enjoy. If, however, you have a big problem with grinding in a video game, Guild Wars 2 is not going to be your thing. There's no way around it.

That grind is, at least, broken up by an interesting weapons system. In most MMOs, you want to find a new weapon to increase your damage and look cooler. In Guild Wars 2, equipping a new type of weapon or off-hand item changes your most spammable skills to a completely different set of skills tailored to that new kind of item. For each weapon type that your class can use, when you first equip said weapon you'll only have one skill for it unlocked, but use it a bit in combat and you'll quickly unlock the remaining abilities. This gives you an early sense of progression that wears off very early because those abilities unlock very quickly, but it also serves as a great introduction to the style of combat that your new gear is going to promote. And that weapons system allows you to spice up your game as you see fit. Get bored of using a magic rod? Switch it out and put a staff in its place. Try a sword and a pistol. Each one of these will have its own set of skills and thus its own style of combat. You will, of course, still have some core class skills that are unchanged by weapon swaps.

And travel times are vastly reduced as compared to most games. Similar to Guild Wars 1 in design, with Guild Wars 2 you simply select a waypoint on the map that you would like to travel to, pay a few measly coppers, and appear there instantly. No tedious flight paths or running to old locations. Click, appear. Wonderful and it gets you to actually playing the game as quickly as possible.

So far, Guild Wars 2 is visually beautiful. While not necessarily cutting-edge in technology, its art style is supreme. The organic standard forest fairy visuals of the Sylvari are a wonder to behold and even something as simple as the water sprinklers on human farms look wonderful in Guild Wars 2's rendering. Those visuals do chug along on my system. Be warned that Guild Wars 2 is a very CPU-dependent game.

Audio has been good so far. Voice-acting in the various cutscenes is not stellar and can often come off bored or stiff, but it works well enough. The music is good, with much of Jeremy Soule's original work returning from the first game.

In what little I have played of it, the grind has stayed fun because of the changes that Guild Wars 2 has made to the genre, but then I'm only level 10 out of 80. I hope that it stays fresh throughout, but only time will tell. There is yet more, too. I have not even touched on vistas, which are a great addition. Or the crafting system. Or the overflow system that so rightfully annoys players. Or any number of various details. More next week, then.