Guild Wars 2 Review

Review by Daniel Nenadovic

Oi, it has been a long while since I wrote anything up for this here podcast blog site, hasn't it? No excuses. Lots of phenomenal games have come out in the last month and the fall video game rush seems to be in full swing. Tis the season for an insane wealth of great game releases. Borderlands 2, Torchlight 2, FTL, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Mists of Pandaria, and more. These have kept me rather occupied.

But it's a testament to Guild Wars 2 that, despite all of the new awesome games, I keep coming back to it when I just want to have some fun.

One big selling point? The monetary price of playing. I've heard many people call Guild Wars 2 a free-to-play game, but I don't think that this is an accurate portrayal. Free-to-play lets you get into the game for no cost and then entices you to spend money on it if you enjoy that first taste. Many MMOs have moved to the free-to-play model and done well with it, but the behemoth called World of Warcraft has managed to stay on top despite charging their players $15 a month AND full entry price. Guild Wars 2 still makes you pay a hefty entrance fee of $60 and tax, but it eliminates that monthly subscription fee. This is an important note in Guild Wars 2's favor, allowing MMO gamers to dabble into other games that require subscription fees without feeling like they're putting too much money down on monthly subs.

The MMO genre is incredibly crowded. WoW's shadow looms over everything. Several F2P offerings like Lord of the Rings Online and Age of Conan offer a great deal of content for no money down. EVE Online maintains its hefty playerbase of dedicated space ship captains. So what makes Guild Wars 2 worth your time in the middle of this genre?

I've been playing it since release, and to put it simply: Guild Wars 2 is really fun. I'm not going to dive too far into details of the game here, as countless other articles have done so and if you follow video gaming at all you probably know most of those details. Instead, I'm going to paint a broad stroke of some of my favorite parts of the game.

Character creation provides you with a solid variety of options for customization. The spread of races is great. The Norn have a very sophomoric and bawdy feel to them. They're your stereotypical sophomoric drinking northmen. Normal old Humans dive into a sociopolitical story about the leadership and plights of Divinity's Reach wrapped inside of a Shire-like setting of beautiful farm fields and rivers and quaint architecture. The others each have their own unique allures, but I have not dived into them.

Meet my character, Liara Agathon:

She's a human engineer who uses her flamethrower to burn things, and then burn them some more.

Since she's not too tanky herself, she uses the leftmost turret to draw the ire of nearby enemies and distract them so that she can burn them. The middle three-barreled turret shoots rockets at my enemies' faces while I burn them. The one on the right heals me and my teammates so that I can spend more time burning things.

This is just one way to build an Engineer, although I'd argue one of the most fun. If you'd like you can focus an Engineer on using a sweet rifle or some dual pistols. You can make an engineer that focuses on throwing grenades or running around dropping medpaks for team mates.

And you can switch between these with incredibly ease, assuming that you've saved an appropriate weapon. Rather than throwing a new skill at you every level and letting you use them all, Guild Wars 2 associates five of your skills with the weapon that you have equipped and lets you choose just a small number of additional skills to complement those. But those additional skills can create huge variations in gameplay. My flamethrower, for instance, is not my primary equipped weapon. That honor is left for a pair of dual pistols that can unleash a healthy combination of damage and crowd control whenever I feel like putting the flamethrower away. Instead, the flamethrower weapon kit is one of those additional skills that I choose to complement my character's build, and that one skill gives me a whole new set of skills that entirely change the way that I play the game.

It's an insane and awesome amount of gameplay customization, and since there are no healers or tanks in Guild Wars 2 my build is determined solely by what I enjoy playing.

I talked about some of the innovations that Guild Wars 2 brings to the table in my first impressions. Easy travel, social play without formal groups, and largely eliminating quest-givers are all huge game-changers for the MMO genre, and they make this my go-to game for simply having fun when I have some time to spare. Mists of Pandaria draws me back for its sense of progression and the immensity of Azeroth. Guild Wars 2 doesn't shine as much as WoW for me in either of these categories, but I still come back to it for simple fun. The game's active combat requires flimsier characters to dodge and beefier characters to actively block attacks and its pace keeps you much more on your toes than WoW does. The innovations that Guild Wars 2 brings to the table mostly streamline your game experience to get you into that fast-paced and active combat as quickly as possible and push you to do it with the people who are around you without having to worry about competing for kills and resources. It's just fun and it's pushing you to have fun as quickly and often as possible. While we play games for many reasons, one of the purest of those reasons is to have fun.

The game is visually beautiful as well. While visuals aren't necessarily a game-breaker on their own, they can certainly help a game or hurt it. And Guild Wars 2's visuals help it along quite a bit. Its audio effects and ambiance are great and its music is phenomenal (I have a thing for Jeremy Soule's music, but some people disagree with me).

Problems are there, and for the most part they're worn on the game's sleeves. It's very easy to recognize that Guild Wars 2 is a long grind. The game makes little effort to hide it and its focus on that fast combat actually emphasizes it. There are performance problems on some set-ups. The WvW system lets you get killed by invisible players because of a technical hiccup in the way the game works with large crowds of people.

It gives me an immense amount of comfort that the game is being updated and supported extensively and quickly. There have been an intense number of patches and fixes since the game's release and Anet has already responded to player feedback on a few big issues by implementing helpful changes.

If you're tired of MMOs, Guild Wars 2 probably isn't going to change your mind. It fall short of its pre-release claims of no grinding and being a total game changer, and it's definitely not going to kill WoW (nothing will, that behemoth will end on its own). Despite falling short of those claims, Guild Wars 2 is a solid step forward for the MMO genre, letting arbitrary distractions like story and sense of place fall to the side in favor of letting the player have an immense amount of fun. Seriously, the best way that I can summarize the game is by telling you that it's an MMO that gets out of the way and lets you have fun. And doesn't charge you a monthly fee for that. I highly recommend Guild Wars 2.