I know, I know, looks horribly laggy, performance is rather underwhelming when I'm recording, but ignore that for a bit and look at the gameplay, the visuals... then have a look at 5:15. This pretty much summarizes everything I'm about to say in this post. I come across two friendly players, who are about to get skullfucked by two enemy players. One of them dies before I get there in time (dramatic speech bubble and everything), the other one gets ganged up on by the two bad guys. Until I whip out my rifle and start shooting one of them.
It takes a while until he notices me, he jumps me and starts attacking, so I switch to my stereo swords, beat the crap out of him for a while until he decides it's probably best to gang up on the other player again, hoping to get at least one kill out of it. So I switch back to the gun, kill him, then focus the remaining baddie with my new friend, kill him as well, loot some tokens of honour and revive his fallen team mate. Awesome!
Melee AND ranged!
Now, before I get to explaining why I never had so much fun playing a warrior on any other MMO: If you're one of those people who still have to ask why everyone compares every new game to WoW, you're a fucking moron and I don't even want you reading my blog! Okay? Marvelous!
Let's turn back time a bit, somewhere roughly 8 years ago. It's the closed beta of WoW. I'm a warrior, I'm fighting trogs in Dun Morogh, I whack one of them within an inch of his life bar and the little shit runs. And I click the 'shoot' hotkey. My warrior whips out that massive old blunderbuss, there's this incredibly satisfying click, followed by an even more satisfying BLAM! and the trog is history. I'm in heaven.
I fucking loved the guns in that game! I pulled absolutely everything using only a gun and I finished off all the baddies who ran away by shooting them in the back. But as time went by, guns became (even) less relevant to warriors and with Pandaria on the horizon, they're gonna take them away from me, completely. Boo! Big, fat, fucking BOO!
I'm a warrior. By definition, that should mean I'm capable of using just about any kind of weapon, as well as select furniture, to kill an opponent. In Azeroth it just means I'm able to spin around in circles at high speeds without throwing up.
Now there's Guild Wars 2. I can use all kinds of one and two-handed melee weapons and on top of all that I get to use longbows and rifles. And unlike WoW (or most similar MMOs, for that matter), GW2 actually allows me to do more than just fucking pull a baddie with ranged weapons or try and deal the killing blow with them. I get to kick ass. You have no idea how fucking cool this is!
One thing that always bothered me about large-scale pvp in WoW is how the classes are generally good at one thing or another, not both. Melee or ranged. As a warrior, I'd have to charge head-on into a bunch of enemy players, pull off some burst-damage macros and hope for a healer to keep an eye on me. As a hunter, I'd do super awesome damage from a safe distance and get my ass kicked as soon as some melee class gets too close and I screw up when trying to shake them. And let's be honest here for a second: If you look at the killboards on one of the longer Alterac Valley sessions, you'd always and exclusively see hunters on top, because it's just a tad easier to rack up tons of kills from a safe distance, shooting people, who are already fighting somebody else.
On GW2 I start attacking from a distance, shoot them until they notice me, build up adrenaline points with my attacks, then charge in with melee-attacks, spending all adrenaline on an extra powerful flurry. Works the other way 'round, too, of course. Beat the crap out of some unsuspecting thief and when he runs away I grab my gun and shoot the sucker. Makes it sooo much easier to deal with all those annoying pillar-huggers. And there's no infinite, super-annoying mega invisibility to save their lives.
Being able to equip two weapon sets and to switch them at the push of a button whenever you feel like it allows for an incredible amount of flexibility. One of my friends alternates between greatswords and longbows for massive AoE goodness and I have seen Mesmers (robed spellcasters) whipping out greatswords when I invaded their personal space in pvp. And when an elementalist summons lightning-flavoured war hammers for his team mates to swing, you know you're in for a fucking good time!
Simple and fun
Another thing I really enjoy is the trait system. Instead of going for the proverbial cookie-cutter build that some elitist forum-nerd has parsed to generate the highest DPS, you go for something that matches your personal taste and play style. Switching between weapon sets a whole lot, I started off with a trait set that raises my adrenaline and provides certain bonuses whenever I switch weapons in combat. As a neat side-effect, these traits raise my overall crit damage. In the long run I'm planning on complementing this with another trait-line, which raises my actual crit-rate as well as adds bleed damage to certain attacks. Towards the level cap I'll round it up with some defensive traits to boost my armor rating a bit. Of course we're still far away from the official release and an actual cap of level 80, but the system is intuitive and simple enough to plan ahead without much trouble or number-crunching.
I wasn't sure about the combat system at first. 9 hotkeys is all you get, half of them buffs, utility-skills and a self-heal, which are all situational and not part of any rotation. My entire attack "rotation" consists of two or three buttons, the rest is situational (riposte, harmstring, you get the idea) and I spend most of my time dodging attacks and trying to hit enemy players without getting hit too much in return. It's a little easier in pve, since baddies generally don't do a lot of running around, but as a rule of thumb, it's always a good idea to anticipate and doge attacks instead of just standing there to soak them up. As a warrior, I do get a larger pool of health than Claire's thief and I do get the heavier armor, but in a tricky situation, this usually means I just might be able to survive a really nasty ambush with a leftover HP or two and I get to revive Claire. That's as good as it gets. I don't get to stand in the middle of a dozen enemies and just laugh at them as I shield-bash my way across Tyria. If I get hit, it fucking hurts!
Everybody is capable
I wasn't too thrilled when I saw that Claire rolled a thief. The first thing I thought was "rogue" and what Blizzard has done to that class in just about every fucking MMO ever since. Rogues are all about griefplay, about being a dick, about fucking up the fun for everybody else. Spend 20 minutes in the arena waiting for the enemy team to come out of stealth? Thanks a lot, rogues! And by WoW's definition of "fun" it's perfectly okay to get sapped, stunned and disabled an infinite amount of times in world "pvp" when you're just trying to get somewhere. Usually by a complete and utter trolling pussy, who has absolutely no intention of fighting you. And every random dungeon group needs at least one dumbass rogue, who always, without fail, attacks his own bunch of bad guys and ignores the tank completely. If he dies, it's generally the fault of the tank or the healer and everyone is a noob.
Sure, everyone does identical DPS these days, everyone has identical HP and armor doesn't even fucking matter anymore - and everyone just stays hidden in the arena for an eternity now. Hunters, mages, druids... oh the variety!
But as a rule of thumb, rogues were annoying glass-cannons, played by even more annoying assholes.
So that's what I was expecting to see from Claire on GW2. Poke, stealth, disappear for a fucking half hour, come back, one-shot a baddie with obscene amounts of damage done by some grey 2dps dagger, stealth again. And now my significant other was playing a thief, which I was fully expecting to be the exact same thing.
Well, to cut a long story short, I'm absolutely in love with her character! Thieves aren't dicks. They're very stylish swashbucklers. Okay, I suppose you don't really swash and buckle a lot using dual daggers, but watching her charr rip bad guys to shreds with some insanely cool combat animations is just so much more satisfying than the same old slow-motion poke and stab mega crit bullshit on that other game. We think she's doing slightly more damage than my warrior, while my health and armor are slightly higher than hers, but once again, the difference is relatively small and while it does affect gameplay and the overall feel of the class, there are no extremes here. No insane DPS or insane defence, no having to choose one or the other - everyone can do damage, everyone can survive a few hits, everyone can self-heal, but nobody is a specialist at any of those things and completely sucks at everything else.
It's unbelievably cool when she whips out her dual pistols, I ready my rifle and we take down the first 2 or 3 baddies from a whole pack of bad guys, then switch to daggers and swords, respectively, charge in and hack them to bits. And both of us have to keep an eye out for enemy spells and projectiles, we gotta keep moving, dodging and evading hits or we're toast. But that's another sweet thing about how it all works: If one of us screws up and dies, the other one gets to use their revive ability. Everyone can revive fallen teammates (or any random fallen player or NPC).
World vs World (vs World)
Entering the smaller-scale pvp areas (think WoW battlegrounds) immediately boosts you to level 80 and puts legendary pvp gear on your toon until you go back to pve. You get to pick all kinds of runes, sigils and gems (think enchantments), choose your favourite weapon types and try out every single ability and skill, including all the stuff you haven't even unlocked outside of the staged pvp. So there's no need for character planners and theory crafting - just go try out any combination of weapons, upgrades and skills you want, join a battle and make adjustments as you see fit. Until you know exactly what you like best and focus on unlocking exactly that outside of pvp.
Of course the real meat and potatoes lies in the Eternal Battlegrounds, aka WvWvW. The inhabitants of three different servers fight over territory. Think Alterac Valley, but it lasts two weeks rather than ten minutes, with hundreds (!) of participants and with working siege engines, trebuchets and battering rams. Once again, every player will be upgraded to level 80 whilst taking part, but you keep your original gear and skills, meaning you don't get access to endgame stuff and every single ability for free. You gain experience and item tokens whilst playing there, so it's perfectly possibly to ignore most pve content and exclusively level up and get stronger in the eternal battlegrounds.
It is safe to assume that a player, who actually leveled his character to the cap and has access to powerful abilities and items will have an edge over a level 10 player, who gets boosted to level 80 in wvwvw. That said, even an inexperienced player will have the power and the stats to fend for himself, to help make a difference for his side or at the very least, to try and make a run for it without getting one-shotted. There is no ganking here, no other players one-shotting you regardless of personal skill, simply because they're fully kitted out in purple stuff and you are not. The deciding factor in every fight will be player skill. So if you get your ass kicked a lot, it's not because of the other guy's class being overpowered or because he has farmed tier 328 conquest gear - you probably just suck.
Work in progress
The usual login-problems and server crashes you see in every hyped MMO aside, the GW2 beta felt pretty solid and stable. The game only runs on DX9 right now, performance isn't super-smooth so far and while the game looks nice, I have still encountered the occasional blurry, muddy texture even on ultra detail settings. That said, I didn't have any crashes, except for one graphical lockup with screen-shattering of proportions I haven't encountered since Age of Conan. Friends have reported hardware and overheating issues, as well. Apparently there are some graphical glitches with ATI cards and anti-aliasing - Claire's ATI card caused occasional black screens, while my Nvidia card was fine, which is consistent with forum bug reports.
There were constant hiccups with the auction and item shop system as well as the ingame mail system. The actual game, however, was near-flawless. On some very rare occasions, voiceovers would fall silent or the characters would read out what seemed to be an entirely random line of text. But we didn't encounter any actual crashes, there were no missing items or NPCs, everything just worked! In fact, the beta is already more stable and finished than a fair few other MMOs have been upon release. I'm looking at you, Star Trek Online, Final Fantasy XIV, Age of Conan... the list goes on and on and on.
It looks alright
I know, I know, some of you will want to jump me for saying 'alright', but come on now. GW2 has beautiful landscapes, the characters look great and some of the higher level gear looks fantastic. I'm not denying that. That said, the game isn't setting any new standards, there are no graphical milestones here and technically, the game doesn't do anything you've never seen in any other game. That said, there is a lot of love and detail in everything. GW2's capital cities actually feel like fucking cities and you get the impression that people actually live there! Most role playing games give you a bunch of houses and a few NPCs, who seemingly live on the street and that's it. If you ever want to feel completely absorbed or maybe even at home in a virtual world, the new Tyria is probably for you. It feels huge and varied, offers lush, green forests, sandy beaches and snowy hills and while they might not be as jaw-dropping as Skyrim, they're all pleasant to look at.
My personal highlight is character creation. See, I love the Tauren and Worgen in World of Warcraft. I really do. But no matter how you fiddle around with their fur, ears, horns or whatever they get - they all look exactly the same. If you see a Worgen wobbling by on all fours in his heavy armor, you're not gonna pay attention to whether he's missing the tip of an ear, what his eye colour is or whether he has grey or black fur. The beast race on GW2, the Charr, can be anything from big and hulking, well-trained, fat, tiny, skinny, they get all kinds of different fur tones and patterns and you can make them resemble tigers or hyenas or cheetahs or just about anything wild and beasty you could possibly imagine. Of course, thick layers of armor will hide most of your appearance on there just as much as it does on WoW, but playing around with your size, body shape and proportions alone allows for lots of variety and it's easy to stand out. Besides, you get to dye your armor. Yes, some of you cringe at the idea of a hulking Nord warrior in spiked pink battle plate, but it's all in the name of variety and individualism.
The music is... well. How you like the music depends entirely on how you feel about Jeremy Soule. To me, every single soundtrack he has ever created sounds exactly like the next one, some admittedly brilliant theme tunes aside. So when I'm exploring Tyria and kill stuff to GW2's background music, it almost sounds like I'm playing Morrowind or just about any other game where he was in charge of the music. It's not a big deal, I'm sure most of you don't really pay much attention to that kind of thing, but I'm not a fan of Jeremy Soule. It's entirely possible that I am simply jealous of how he sells the same pieces of music over and over again and gets away with it.
Retail yes, beta not so much
It took me a day or two to warm up to Guild Wars 2. Turns out the Charr starting area is relatively weak both regarding the actual landscape and detail as well as the levels and placement of quests and baddies. I found the game incredibly hard at first (I was recording every step of the way, so crappy performance might have been part of the problem) and I simply wasn't having a lot of fun. But once I got used to the fast-paced combat, started unlocking traits and learned new abilites and - most importantly - discovered the joys of wvwvw, I was hooked. I am seriously in love with this game, I can't wait for the retail version and while I have absolutely zero plans regarding a Pandaria purchase, there is absolutely no way around GW2 for me. I didn't regret my pre-purchase, I just wanna get into it now and I want to spend as much time in pvp as somehow possible.
That said, I don't think I'll be participating in many beta events from here on out. First of all, I'm not a big fan of experiencing the first 20 levels over and over again. That's fun once, twice, maybe three times, but if I keep on doing that, I'll be sick and tired of the game before it's actually released. Besides - beta characters get wiped. It's their fate to get deleted, only to be reborn as complete level 1 noobs again, time and again, until the next inevitable wipe. And I get too attached to my characters. So it's easier for me to have a quick look at everything during future beta events, maybe have a quick peek at the other races and classes, but I won't do any intense gaming until the retail product goes live and I get to create my real, actual Charr warrior. I can't wait!
-Cat
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