Guild Wars 2 impressions

I didn’t get around to writing about any of these three games Guild Wars 2, Awesomenauts and Smite, which I can absolutely recommend. So finally, here I go. Starting with Guild Wars 2 in this post. The others to follow quite soon.

Heavily anticipated by a lot of people, MMORPG and role-playing, and Guild Wars 1 gamers as well as others, glancing onto this new kind of MMORPG – changing several aspects of gameplay.

In the end, it became a great and very dynamic MMORPG, with no monthly fee, a big world and a lot of options in choosing your preferred play-style. You will not (absolutely) need to play a certain and specific way, or play in every way possible. Choose between the different classes and weapons resulting in different play-styles. Choose from the races to get different starting areas and story-beginnings. Play your own story, alone or with others, or simply roam around the world and participate in whatever NPCs or other players ask you to – local tasks, occasional events. If you don’t like fighting get a profession and construct or cook stuff and play the natives games.

Of course all these things have limits and not everything is new. Events lead to other events but will eventually cycle back in the event-chain. Others have had stuff like a persistent world for everyone, professions and some games experimented with dynamic events.

What Guild Wars 2 does differently is that it’s very fair, makes gameplay/combat easy to access but still skill-full through action-orientation and meaningful positioning and actions (dodging becomes more and more important for example). And it does this while encouraging team-play and participation very much!

If you can change your mindset from grinding and haste to diving into the world, exploring it, looking out for what is happening you can have a very great experience. A memorable moment I had was when I was about to sell some stuff I didn’t need to an NPC in an outpost, when I heard two NPCs talking in the background – realizing it only a moment later, what they were talking about and what it means. “Did you hear that?” And suddenly, from underground the outpost a machine rose in the middle of it, suddenly unloading a ton of enemies. They were trying to loot the outpost.

After fighting them back, and the digging/transportation machine was destroyed, a mech-kind-of suit rose trying to avenge his folk – kind of a boss battle. After defeating him, I bought a fireworks bomb for a bit of karma and could fire off some fireworks for quite some time. That’s the kind of – sometimes sudden, unexpected and exciting stuff that can happen.

Events lead to other events but will eventually cycle back in the event-chain.

I won’t talk about PvP here, jumping-puzzles, or more about the crafting/professions. But I will mention that I also like the constant level progression and love the level- and loot-adjustment. Feel free to explore low-level areas while still having an experience similar to that in an area of “your level”. Don’t want it to get too long, so let’s get to a conclusion.

It’s a game you can play in many styles, with different focus. I love the move to more skill-full combat and the very dynamic world, very dynamic combat and gameplay. It’s perfectly playable as an after-work game, playing just some minutes, one or two hours. Recommendation!

Some screenshots I put up on Steam – mainly environment though._