Guild Wars 2: 30 hours and 36 levels later

Having spent practically every waking minute since the beginning of the GW2 headstart phase, I have tackled much of the content, explored huge parts of the game world and made it nearly halfway to the level cap of 80. And if you're familiar with this blog and my Facebook spam, then you'll know I'm having a great time on there. Most of that initial excitement still persists and I'm looking forward to ignoring work, my pets and basic needs such as food and sleep for many more hours, although parts of the game are beginning to feel a bit repetitive and samey. But let's get into that bit by bit, shall we?

Personal story

O noez! One of my fallen comrades has come back as a zombie!

Every two to three levels you'll get to play quests, which tell your character's personal story. Not only do they tell what kinda guy or gal your avatar is, but they also give you plenty of opportunity to answer these questions, yourself. The first steps are determined right at character creation. As a charr, I had to decide which one of the three warbands I want to be part of, tell the game whether my father was an honourable soldier, an outcast or a noble shaman and who my personal best buddy is. All these choices dictate how your story quests play out until about level 30. Each playable race gets a different start to their personal story, with different choices and options. After level 30, all races are faced with the same story, but depending on your choices, you get to continue your adventure from one of three different perspectives.

The good guy/bad guy options may not be as deep as the choices you make in The old Republic, but I did have the opportunity to slay or spare one of my main enemies after a nice showdown in the arena.
Most decisions , however, just involve following one faction or another. An order of thieves and assassins may ask you to prepare an ambush for the enemy and wait for them, the leader of a military band might urge you to attack them head-on. This may not have a huge impact on the actual gameplay, but the game does a great job placing you in charge. And with so many parallel storylines, replay value is definitely there!

The actual story is popcorn entertainment. You won't be moved to tears and you're not gonna lose sleep until you find out how it all ends. But my journey so far has been anything but boring! It's great when little cutscenes and dialogue sequences explain why you're killing a bunch of bad guys and why you should hate a certain boss, avenge a friend or go hunt for treasure. Nobody gives a crap about walls of text, but seeing all characters act it out, seeing your character as he or she speaks, issues commands and kicks ass, gets you that much more involved.

GW2 uses animated stills and cutscenes for storytelling. No fancy CGI here!

World Events

GW2 refers to quests as 'events' and, for the most part, this description is fair. Think WoW for a minute. Tanaris, possibly pre-Cataclysm. Remember that quest where you had to kill X pirates, slay their leader and loot some crates scattered around their camp? You'd whack the required amount of guys, grab all the stuff you need and they'd all just keep on respawning around you. Even the boss comes right back a minute later. When you leave the place, it feels as though you've never showed up in the first place. Much of that has been fixed with phasing now, with the added side-effect of scattering the adventuring population across countless little instances of the same zone.

I have come across a similar event on GW2 last night: A bunch of pirates was raiding a village and torching the whole place. I had to kill all of them. No "kill 10 of them and spare the rest", no respawn. I had to hunt down every last one of them, including their leader, and douse the flames while I was at it. At the end of the event the pirates were dead, the village was safe, the NPCs would come back and continue on their daily business. Anyone who showed up after I was done would actually miss the event. The whole thing doesn't just reset every five minutes. Sure - at some point the pirates will come back and attack the village again and players will get the chance to fend them off. And if they fail, the place will be torched all over again. The big change here is how I, as a single player, can actually change the world to some extent. If I save an outpost under siege, the place will have merchants and possibly more event NPCs and a waypoint. If I fail, the place will be occupied or even destroyed by the enemy. It's a huge deal!

Many world events will quickly escalate into large-scale battles!

For as fun as most of these events are, there is also a fair amount of repetition. Escorting a merchant and his transport of ale, food or some other generic goods is fun the first time. You may get jumped by baddies at any moment and if you make it all the way to the destination, you'll be lead to follow-up events, there's more to see and more to do. Ten escort quests later, I'm starting to wonder just how many more of those things I'm gonna have to protect before I hit level 80.
And not all events are incredibly heroic. Try helping out the local farmers! They'll ask you to feed and water the cows, feed hungry chickens or bang them over the head with a shovel when they start eating the lettuce. Spray dog-sized parasites with Grub-BGone, burn wasp nests and weed out the bad crops. It's actually a lot more fun than it may sound and gives you a bit of a change of pace from all the fighting, but after half a dozen farms, my urge to feed cows has somewhat worn off.

Elite Baddies & Bosses

There are two kinds of boss baddies and both of them suck. There's the veteran or champion type, which usually takes a full five or more minutes to kill, hits harder than regular baddies at his level and requires a lot of kiting and ranged attacking. Keeping most bosses at a safe distance isn't very difficult, you can even solo them without much trouble. It may be fun or even challenging the first time around, but after a while, those battles are simply annoying and time-consuming.

The other kind of boss baddie is group-based. Like this guy here:

Since you're toast after only one hit, the only viable option is ranged attacks. Absolutely every class gets at least one ranged weapon, so it's not a huge deal. Having to spend a whole ten minutes running away from a guy and shooting him until he finally drops dead doesn't feel epic, though. The giant on that picture up there might look epic. He's just killed an entire town's population. He's probably killed a dozen players, who were dumb enough to attack him with melee weapons. But run, shoot, run, shoot, run, shoot and watch a massive health bar deplete one pixel at a time simply isn't fun. There's no strategy involved here, you don't have to figure out his attack pattern or use the environment to beat the guy. It just drags on.

Exploration

GW2 supports just about any play style you could imagine. I usually just walk in any random direction until I bump into a world event and just go from there. Since the game level-scales my level 36 ass when I suddenly end up in a level 20 area, all battles are always challenging, I get experience points for just about everything and I don't have to worry about where to go next. I just play it by ear. Maybe I'll throw in a bit of pvp while I'm at it. Maybe I'll gather and craft a bit. Everything rewards me with experience points and level-scaled loot, so no matter how I play, I progress.

Claire, on the other hand, goes for 100% completion of every area. She finds every single event, every waypoint, every point of interest and while this may seem time-consuming and not very rewarding to players like myself, completing an entire map rewards players with a metric shitload of experience, high quality items and transmutation stones, which do what transmogrifying does on WoW. Most of all, Claire gets rewarded with discoveries like that:

This is an actual ingame screenshot. Looks like concept art, doesn't it? So, what do you think this place is? Some faction's capital city? Some really important quest hub? Wrong! It's a shitty little village, which may not even have any events going on when you happen across it. You may never come back there again.
GW2 may not feature any stunning, photo-realistic visuals, but in a game where even unimportant little landmarks look so incredibly stunning and picturesque, exploring feels that much more exciting and rewarding. Kudos!

Player vs Player

The small-scale 5vs5 pvp is incredibly busy and highly skill-based. I won't go into how everyone gets boosted to level 80 and has all skills unlocked again, level playing field, yada, yada, yada. It works, it does exactly what you'd expect from it and if you're into battlegrounds-style player battles, this is where you'll want to be. To be honest, I have zero motivation to even go there for two reasons:

First of all, taking part in small-scale 'sPvP' only boosts your sPvP rank, you get rewarded with glory, glory can be traded for sPvP items. The whole thing is completely detached from the rest of the game. I can level up in a billion ways, obtaining gear is dead simple and I just don't feel like collecting yet another meta currency for some pretty items, which are exclusive to this particular game mode.

Secondly, I disagree with the team colours. The game makes such a huge deal out of cosmetic gear, finding and customizing that look you want and then your character turns completely red or blue for sPvP. Which makes sense, since you'll want to tell the good guys from the bad guys, but it also means my character looks silly, I don't get to show off, I can't express myself. Naturally, most normal folks won't give a crap about such petty little problems and just enjoy sPvP. To each their own and all that.

WvW(vW) is a massive zerg-fest with very little skill involved

The World vs World battles, whilst massive in scale and incredibly fun to play, feel a bit like Asterix Online. You form a massive zerg of 50+ people and just start rampaging across the landscape, conquering towers, camps and entire fortresses until an even bigger enemy zerg crushes you and you start all over again from the nearest resurrection spot. The main problem with this kind of gameplay is how it doesn't matter what class you play, what build you use or how awesome you may or may not be at playing your character. In WvW you switch to a ranged weapon, you spam AoEs like an idiot and you hope for a few lucky kills.

Sure, there will be the occasional lucky moment where you find yourself in a 1vs1 situation and you can actually show off your skills in a fair fight. But if that's really what you're after, then you'll want to play sPvP, not WvW. The latter is spectacular, there's a whole lot of gold and experience to be had from breaching a castle wall and slaying all its defenders, but it's certainly not the most sophisticated tactical gameplay you've ever experienced. Seeing as this is gonna be GW2's "endgame", I'm not too sure about the game's longevity. I like the large battles and everything, but I can't see myself enjoying this particular bit month after month whilst waiting for content updates and expansion packs.

Verdict

This game feels incredibly massive in every way! I have explored so many visually impressive zones and landscapes, fought so many battles, yet looking at my map it turns out I haven't even seen a third of Tyria. GW2 rewards exploration, crafting, pvp and pve battles handsomely and gives you a sense of progression, no matter what you do. Some of the more powerful items are a little harder to obtain and may require karma-points, which you earn by taking part in events or they may cost a hefty amount of gold at the cultural armor vendor, but there are no epic, insanely powerful, godly items, which only the most dedicated players can obtain. Everyone can have awesome gear - you may have to work for it, but not excessively so. It's perfectly doable for even the most casual player.

Tier 1 Charr cultural armor. I'm sexy and I know it!

Some of the events, particularly escorts and stuff involving farmyard animals, are starting to get repetitive. Boss battles are tedious and not very fun. WvW is a huge spam-fest, where skill doesn't matter as much as numbers.
I'm looking forward to finishing my personal storyline, exploring all of Tyria and getting more and more awesome-looking, completely over the top armor on the way. So what if I don't like some of the quests and WvW doesn't really appeal to me? There is plenty of other stuff for me to do and I'll definitely play all the way to the cap.

Will I keep playing after that, possibly roll another toon or just go for 100% completion in every area? I doubt it. I never liked WoW's carrot on a stick, which dangled in front of me during raids and arena seasons, but it gave me a purpose. It gave me something to do when I was at the level cap, no matter how much I hated it all in the end. On Guild Wars 2, my goal will be a cool-looking character, since there is no super-rare epic stuff to be had. So what's my motivation when I'm done with all that? Why should I keep playing? Frankly, I have no idea. But should I end up taking a break, doing so is as simple as uninstalling and returning at a later date. With no subscription fees, there is no need to cancel or reactivate an account.

-Cat