I finally broke down on impulse and bought Guild Wars 2 to try and it and, boy, was that a good decision. I don't know if I will convince any of you to partake, but I really hope you do. This is my favorite game of all time, displacing Skyrim, World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy VII, and it's now all I do during my gaming time. In my review, I will also hit on some WoW comparisons, because if you're like me, there will be some audience overlap. Here goes nothing:
Class Selection and Definition
The game calls classes "professions" and, from the beginning, each one is differentiated and engaging. I won't write about each one, but I have mostly played an engineer for now. He gets a blend of bombs, grenades, turrets to help him and allies in combat, toting a rifle or a shotgun for his own protection. The magic classes have vast arrays of spells. Every class has some type of heal, even if it's minimal, but for each class your gameplay gets you into the character you are. Warriors are rewarded for staying in combat. Engineers and ranged classes WILL get killed if they don't move. There are eight focused classes, I've tried three, and I've heard they are all great. People have not complained of an "OP class", which I'll help explain by hitting on combat.
Combat Dynamics
Battles are much longer than in Warcraft and you can't really one-hit kill people. It takes a while to beat a person into submission. When a player runs out of health, they fall onto the ground and get a last chance to fight back, or call for help from allies. If you see a wounded ally down, you can pull them up. Also, if a wounded enemy is making their last call for help, you can do a finishing move to kill them for good. If you die, you restart at a waypoint that you have discovered and take a small equipment hit.
Race Selection and Definition
There are five races, and each is beautiful and differentiated. I have looked at three. Character design is really fun, and when you run around zones, players look really different as a result. I am playing as Charr, a cruel animal species. Each class/race combo gets its own story that is instanced. There are 40 in all (8x5). Mine involves trying to create secret plans for a weapon. The first part was an instanced fight where enemies invaded my house. It was amazing.
NPC Conversations and Cutscenes
The game is loaded with conversations and cutscenes, all of which go to beautifully animated character interactions that are all spoken. They are really breathtaking.
Gear Dying
You start with a small number of dyes that you can use to change the color of your gear at any time, for free. As the game progresses, you can discover new dyes that you can learn permanently. It is really fun and allows you to give your character a really differentiated look that can change over time.
Questing Structure
Guild Wars really did a great job in overhauling the traditional "gather 10 sandwiches for me" quests in wow. When you talk to NPCs, you get objectives, which, yes, track in the upper-right hand corner like in WoW. However, the number of things you need to gather and the "annoyance" - grindiness of it really is gone. You have to try it to see what I mean. Additionally, if someone else is working on the same quest and picks up things to help the objective, you get credit too. It's a really great system.
World Events
In addition to traditional questing, when you walk around, circles will appear on the map alerting you to a group quest. These involve much harder/larger objectives that are really fun. When the objective is achieved, you are graded from nothing/bronze/silver/gold on your contributions and get gear. These are great so far and have included killing a huge warm and stopping waves of intruders from penetrating a base.
Zone Exploration and Leveling
Each zone has multiple quests and objectives. You discover them organically by walking around although, it's not a "npc-find-fest" in that you can really feel free to roam and get alerts when you're near neat objectives. You don't need to hit all of them, although you get large bonuses for completing all tasks in a zone. You never have to go back to NPCs to turn things in - your quest just triggers complete when finished.
Swimming/Underwater Exploration
Usually this would be a sidenote, but it merits special talking points in Guild Wars. Underwater animation is gorgeous and, for each profession, you have a special underwater weapon. I spent 40 minutes yesterday just swimming underwater and firing my classes weapon: a torpedo launcher. The graphics work and realistic swimming interactions are great. Also, when you exit the water, you get a "splash" across your screen that fades out, a neat small touch of how you need a moment to regain vision after being deep in the water.
Vistas
In each zone, there are points called vistas which you get xp for finding. These are amazing vantage points that give you a view of a particularly beautiful part of a zone. These can be hard to get to often - they will be on top of a mountain that requires delicate jumping, or they are up a path on the top of a mountain or castle. When you hit the vista, you get a cutscene showing the beautiful view of that little area plus an xp bonus. These are really fun to go after and encourage zone exploration.
XP Generation
While I'm at it, I should mention how much I love the xp system. You get XP for everything. You get XP for gathering wood or berries. You get XP for crafting. You get XP for pulling up fallen comrades. You get XP for kills. You get XP for completing certain number of achievements each day. It's really nice because you feel like doing ANYTHING is rewarded and it makes you choice of what to do always feel rewarding. Also, and I'll hit this in achievements, you can often build up to goals for a day or month without knowing it and it feels so awesome when a reward kicks in.
Environmental Interaction
Every environmental object means something in guild wars. If you find rocks and trees around the landscape, hiding behind them makes bullets miss you. If you have a height advantage, you hit for me. There is no clipping. The idea that literally everything you see is important and plays a role in combat decisions is wonderful. Also, the environments are each very well thought out and look gorgeous.
Character Dolls
Guild Wars uses a pretty standard MMO doll, but with compressed item slots. There are about 15, if I had to guess off the top of my head. Most of the usual things like head, shoulders, etc, rings, trinkets are there. A neat feature is items you can upgrade with automatically pull to a window on the left that lets you upgrade. Also, after level 7, you can have two weapons that you can toggle between using a hotkey equipped at once. It allows a really cool range of battle choices.
Talents/Abilities
Talents are neatly broken down into three areas: abilities gained by using a weapon, class abilities, and traditional talents (player bonuses) in the Warcraft/MMO sense. For each weapon, you get abilities from 1-5 on your hotbar. You start with ability 1, the first time you pick up that weapon. As you use that ability, you unlock ability 2, then 3, etc. It is a nice delay because you get them pretty quickly, but it's just enough time that you can get used to each of the five abilities. For abilities 6-10, you unlock a choice for each slot as you level. To choose abilities for those slots, you need skill points, which you get as you level. You can unlock about 5-10 choices for each of the slots and can change between them, but you only have 10 abilities at once. I actually like this a lot better than the 20-30 ability madfest in wow, although you can alter to try different gameplay styles. For traditional talents, you get these at level 11, and you get to improve a specific area of your character. For my engineer, for example, these included bomb strength or grenade strength, as an example. The abilities you get are really neat. Right now on my engineer, I am playing with a bullet turret, medic turret and flame turret, along with the five abilities on my shotgun.
World Weapons
On the landscape, you can sometimes find random objects to interact with, like crowbars, bottles, crates, swords of other players, etc. Many of these are things you can pick up, and they will give you five new abilities for the left side of your ability bar. It's an amazingly fun feature.
Looting
Looting is similar to other MMORPGs: some, but not at all, enemies will get shiny after death and you just press f to loot them. However, for many larger world quests, you get a popup that you received gear. Also, after completing certain quests you will get mail from npcs thanking you. It's neat to get those. You can open your mail at any time on the overhead.
Gear Design / Presentation
Gear looks great although the level of item differentiation does not get great until higher levels, as is true in other MMORPGs. Much of the lowbie stuff looks the same, but I have seen screenpics of high level stuff and it's gorgeous.
Crafting and Professions
Guild Wars focuses you on just two professions. I chose cooking and leatherworking. You need to actively gather items in the landscape in order to boost most skills. The recipes and things you make are really fun. It's actually fun to craft. You can take new ingredients, experiment with combinations, and learn new recipes. You can also buy recipes in more traditional ways. Another neat thing is that when you want to craft, say, 10 of something, the first one takes a while, in the way a wow bar would take a second, but then each additional craft speeds up so it goes REALLY quickly.
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