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I haven't really been following Guild Wars 2 at all. Can someone give me a brief description of what it is and what is supposed to be interesting about it?

I played a little of GW1, the PvE was awful and the PvP, while I could see the appeal, was not my cup of tea. It sounds like GW2 has more of an emphasis on PvE?

If you didn't enjoy the original, you'll probably not enjoy this.


The main difference PvE wise, is GW2 is an actual world, not a collection of invisible wall instances. If you love finding every nook and cranny of a place, this is the game for you. There's so much random stuff to discover (and be rewarded for) it should keep those exploration types busy for months if not years. There isn't an actual quest system for the most part, the entire game is Public zone events that rotate around the map. I'm told they are similar to WAR public quests, but scaled better. It works out for the most part and can get pretty silly if enough people show up. The actual dungeons are apparently a nightmare currently, I don't know if its just people not really grokking the lack of trinity yet, terrible tuning, or both.


Otherwise the other big appeal is the DaoC style RvR (which they call WvW), something that hasn't been done since well, DaoC.

I did not like GW1 at all... but so far this game is giving me a great run. (I agree with the rest of the comment).

GW1 did nothing for me -- just didn't grab me at all.  Felt sterile and empty.  GW2 feels very worldy -- lots of sense of place, people running around doing things, stuff always going on.  It's explorer-friendly (tons to see, do, collect), and I really enjoy the chains of dynamic quests, etc.  I keep meaning to check out the PVP stuff, but the PVE stuff has kept me very entertained so far.

Agree with everything above.. I'm a "rush to the end so the real game can start" kind of person.  During SWTOR I space barred my way through most of the quests.  With a family I don't have a ton of time to play and its hard to keep up with the catasses. Any game that gives me a quest overlay I rush from point A to B and skip everything that is in between as much as possible. 

In GW2, I'm actually exploring all over the place to find new quests and events.  There are very few real "quests" and to get new things to do exploring is the only real option.  I'm actually having quite a blast with it, which I didn't think I would.  If I need to log out for a bit the world does not come to an end.  Travel between "flight points" is instant and with no cool down (cost a few copper).  So I can drop myself in a relatively safe place easily.  There is no tank/heal/dps trinity so I'm not leaving my friends w/o a tank. Events scale to the number of people around you, so me leaving doesn't make it harder for other people to function. Hell if someone gets behind you can still go play with them. The game will level you down to an appropriate level for the area you are in so it never becomes totally trivial (if you're in a level 7 area it drops you down to 8ish even if your 80) and you get xp as normal.

PVE wise this is the most laid back I've been in an MMO in a long time.

With PVP auto leveling you to 80 and giving you all your skills I'm not seeing any real reason to push level cap as quick as I can. My pvp experience in this game is very limited so can't really comment on it.  Only thing I've really heard complaining about is the queue to get in. My server has a rather large population that wants to WvW so the queues are 2+ hours some days. 

YMMV

I don't mean any offense, but I really emphatically disagree with this.  I find it to be an entirely different game, in a good way.

I can't see that many similarities with GW1. I would say that, among many other differences, a big one for me is the combat. Awfully slow in GW1 (with point and click and no jumping, almost a glorified RTS), while pleasantly dynamic in GW2, with everything cast on the move and active dodge that has a big role. The different combat is enough to approach GW2 without minding the GW1 experience at all.

Yeah, I played GW1: Nightfall for about five hours total, hated the fact I couldn't jump, thought the sound effects were annoying & giving me a headache, graphics were dated (but I gave those a pass since I came to it late), and somehow ran out of quests to do that at about level 6 wouldn't kill me and my henchman friend instantly, and quit right there.

I find GW2 to be pretty much different (and improved) in every possible way, when everything is working (I saw the AH up once!  I bought like 60 silver, then it broke again.)  I don't think the two games are similar at all.  Maybe in the lore or something, but I never played GW1 enough to learn/notice any of it.

I will say this, I can see myself playing for a while for 1 simple reason:

I can easily log in, run to a new map area, complete a few quests and dynamic events, and feel like I've made really good progress on my char all in an hour or two

Yeah, I played GW1 a decent amount but I never really loved it. But I like GW2 a lot better. I'm also mostly just meandering around the map. I haven't actually paid attention to my level at all, since you autoscale down, and since I am a gathering fiend, I like crafting, and I'm exploring the shit out of everything, I'm almost always being downleveled anyway.  :why_so_serious: This is pretty unusual for me.

I'd say play this if you enjoy MMO's.  Your hero feels heroic, leaping and slashing around.  The world feels 'wordly'.  You might go to a farm and they might mention their neighbor (who has an event).  Play this if you like moving around, exploring the map, looking for resources and off the beaten path areas.  Play it if you like crafting, the system is pretty good and the AH, when it's up, is different and interesting. 

The game just turns MMO's on their head and IMO puts a very fresh, dynamic feel on them.  It certainly has it's bugs and flaws, but it's a great ride. 

tl;dr  If you like wandering the land as Kung Fu righting wrongs this is your game.

I will also add this since i didn't see it mentioned, the lack of monthly fee makes a huge difference for me too.  Comparing this to the TSW, as much as i liked the setting that Funcom came up with, i couldnt see justifying a continuing monthly fee for that game based on my beta experience.  I dont play that much and there were enough questionable parts to me to make me not want to drop a box fee + monthly.  SWTOR was similar though they at least got one month out of me.  GW2 doesnt have that problem, plus IMHO it's  a better game than either of those two.  In fact i may have to spring for a second box purchase just to get my kids off my account...

I didn't like GW1.

I sort of like this. It's not MMO Jesus or anything but it's an improvement over the current status quo in modest but soothing ways. I usually test as a Bartle-explorer, this is tickling my explorer-side more than anything else in a long time. I still don't feel like there's some huge world out there that isn't a machine for levelling, but there's at least some room to breath in it. I don't think it will keep me entertained for a really long time but it's fun enough and I don't have that psychic dread that a subscription brings hanging over me.

I like the fact that everything matters in the zone. Kill stealing just does not exist. There is no reason NOT to help out someone beating on a mob... or rezzing a dead NPC or player... or not to wander into that cave...

This is really a nice change from the chores in other games... here, they are given importance.

This game is a watered down Guild Wars 1 so its far more accessible for the rest of the rabble (i.e all of you). Regardless its defiantly the only real next gen mmo out there, is an actiony as a console game with all the scale of EverQuest and WoW without any of the moronic "you level here now" content no mmo has or problem will incorporate for a very long time. I've had my fill of the beta and waiting out launch to play in 2 months (when the whole waiting for WvWvW que is settled among all the other "omg millions of people" problems gets fixed or tampers off). PvP is like a new blend of moba style gameplay with the trappings of an fps. Made to appeal to both type of gamers and for the more cerebral type there is plenty of inter-class play and stacking to abuse, though not as flagrantly as GW1. Plus there is RVR to abuse your choice of vent and skype.

Well you'll be happy to know they've kept to the tradition started with 1 as far as sound goes. The sound effects are mindbogglingly stupid. I love the game but come on, the sound designer was on another planet for this project.

I'll echo what has been said about the 1 and 2 comparison.  I couldn't play 1 for more than a few hours.

The main reason I would recommend GW2 to someone who hasn't played it is simply for the way it has cut the bullshit out of MMO gameplay.  Awhile ago I made a LOZ: A Link to the Past reference with the "duck whistle" that streamlines the game experience as time goes on.  GW2 employs a global duck whistle and the overall effect is you don't feel punished or sentenced to hard labor for wanting to play a game. Try it and you'll see.

The longevity remains to be seen, but for now I feel like someone has finally gotten it right.

THIS.  This makes it MMO Jesus.

Last night, there was a bugged dynamic event in Bloodtide.  I had everything on the map (skill points/hearts/pois/vistas) except the one skill point at the bottom of the submerged waypoint, Castavall.  The DE was a "Get the explorers out of the cave" and it started out with 8, one was left and the DE had overpopped the living shit out of this underwater cavern (btw, there's no drowning in gw2, you have a rebreather).  It was a nightmare on the level of EQ vanilla Plane of Hate mob smear rush insta death beatdown; literally over a hundred mobs in this tight area.  It had been this way all day.  I didn't want to wait on a server reset and hope the same thing didn't happen tomorrow.  I called out on the map to meet at Castavall, need help at castavall.  People just started showing up and lending a hand.  If you tagged a mob, you got full exp; If you partipated in killing a single event mob, you got quest completion exp.  People had no qualms about just coming and helping, you didn't have to group up or coordinate classes.  You just got in there and did your thing.  I was shooting for range and mostly watching the situation and pulling mobs when we could handle it.  We got the last explorer out of there and once she was out, a champion popped.  That took about 10 minutes of beating on her, at which point, we had about 25-30 people working her down.  We all succeeded, and it only took 30 minutes total from the call to arms to leaving the cavern.  It was phenomenal; a real sense of teamwork and accomplishment.  For once in a game, you're thankful when someone comes up and assists you in whatever your doing, from just killing a mob to completing a group collection quest.  You care about other people, especially when they are downed; you will run over and revive them in a hurry because that's one gun out of the fight and they aren't "cutting in" on your share of exp: you all get full exp regardless of damage.  I love this game.

I've never seen the words Thank You (or the abbreviation) written so many times in my gamer life.

Yup, and I've seen a surprisingly large number of folks stick around to help people who showed up just too late to complete a skill challenge battle despite getting nothing but some mob xp for doing so.

GW1 was my favorite game that I never played.
I bought the original game, and had a pretty good time playing PvE until about level 12, when I hit a brick wall and could not get any more xp. Monsters were either worth no Xp, or kicked my ass in sideways.
Now, helpful people would say "Buy so and so expansion!" ... and I thought to myself "Buy an expansion to fix the base game?"  :why_so_serious:
I eventually did buy an expansion to get the improved companions, but by then I was burned out and fed up.

GW2 is such a different beast. It's fully playable in PvE out of the box. It has a ton of neat little improvements to the MMORPG schtick that add up to it being very fun. Like the open world quests that 'snowball' as more people join in spontaneously. It's kind of the opposite of WoW, in that WoW is about making a group and hiding yourself away in an instance for hours. GW2 is about getting out in the world and doing stuff with other players.

I really like the fact that theres no competiton for mobs or resources.  That mining node over there?  You and everyone else can extract the resources from it.  No need to run to it and hope you get there before the other guy.  Same for the harvesting and wood resources.  Theres no "kill stealing" either.  You get xp and loot whether you did 100% or 1% damage.  No competition for mobs/resources means you'll see much less of the MMO rage monster in other players (and you).

Heh, that's a really good observation.

Once when doing the secret piratey thing in Lion's Arch I substituted "I love you" for "Thank you," because man, I really wanted that rez.

This definitely needs to be said again. Must be the water... or the art style.

This game also is good about not letting dumb, extreme, racist, sexist names for characters exist. I can put up with the dumb stuff, but the other ones... reporting actually seems to work here.

Yep, all this stuff. It just seems like such a nice game once you start removing the competition from the co-op parts of the game.

I'm sure somewhere people get crabby like regular mmo, I'm just glad I haven't seen it. And my fiancee is surprised I haven't been frustrated by the other players yet. It's kind of a big deal.

I've reported a few names myself such as...Bigliggernips.  That was probably the worst of them.  Seriously, they just spent $60 only to piss it away by using a stupid ass name? :facepalm:

That plus the mechanics.

There's very few ways to piss somebody off on purpose much less by accident. There's almost zero time-investment to being actively helpful nor by letting someone camp/gather ahead of you. No lines or sequences created by players to fill in gaps that cause problems when someone jumps ahead. There's no ninja looting, kill stealing, any need for dkp, no resource costs for rezzing, no veterans farming newbie content away from them. There's not even things that passively annoy a select vocal groups like twinking, someone price-gouging for services, or powerleveling. And without clearly defined roles in fights that themselves typically have fluid starts, it's hard to directly point the finger at someone and publicly humiliate them for doing something you deem as wrong.

Shit, even chat is pretty much your bog standard MMO graffiti. There's almost as little need to chat here as there is in casual ME3 Multiplayer.

All of these are things other games have solved to various degrees. But Anet layered in an over-the-top gorgeous world and a crazy fun spammy wtf-does-this-skill-do combat system. Together the closest game they remind me of is WoW. Every diku-inspired MMO since has either been saccharine pretty with a generic world and ok game mechanics (Tera, SUN, etc), or very cool game mechanic, interesting world but bland or depressing graphics (AoC, LoTRO, Rift, TSW, etc).

So with all that, maybe it is just optimism without penalty. :-)

Finally finished the storyquest  :grin:
But the "Why would I play this?"-part was that when the last part required doing a 5-man dungeon (which was somewhat epic) I could do it with a pug without worrying about which classes the party consisted of (no need to wait for that healer/tank that never shows up)

This game is just plain enjoyable, no matter what it is in an MMO that you like to do. Personally, I like to do it all and I've yet to find any of it that isn't fun and rewarding.

I'm pretty much going to say that this is the best MMOG I've played.

It's just fun to dick around in.  I feel absolutely no pressure to do anything, but there's plenty of incentive to do everything.

I'm really liking the feeling of cooperation in this game too. It's the first game since everquest where it seems you can randomly meet someone, get chatting and end up friends. Kind of like EQ where random strangers would help you get do a corpse run and you'd end up guilded with them and still playing with them 2 years later.

With the added benefit that they will never out level you and vice versa.

I'm gonna do a longer write up on this when not on my phone but this game is an interesting beast
On one hand there are a lot of things that should annoy me or make me feel like its not worth playing and yet I still enjoy playing. Maybe it's just I'm addicted to achievements.

The game is fun but I don't think it will have stickiness personally. It's simplified from GW1 and actively discourages grouping most of the time since there is little point to it.

This game encourages grouping, it's just implicit rather than explicit. Until you get to dungeons and PvP.


That's a good thing because it looks like that's the end-game in most ways. Getting 100% map completion, getting all the dyes, two crafts to 400, all the titles and achievements will give the game it's longevity. It will be interesting to see if the bulk of the player-base decides they are all cosmetic and just skips them. But I think they've worked out that what many players want is a goal and recognition of achievement even if it doesn't give them character power.

ArenaNet "running out" of keys is making me want this more.

You know, it's funny, I'm not a huge achievement hunter. But for whatever reason, GW2 makes me want to actually go out of my way to complete maps and shit (and it isn't because of the reward you get when you finish a zone, because I still have yet to get a thing I actually want to use from it <3).

Went into an underground area while exploring, a few people were getting slaughtered at the entrance, so I just went on through (with my guardian). Met a guy who kept dying in a ways, so I helped him out a bit. He offered to group, and we cleaned the place out, got a couple chests, a skill challenge and a couple hits on a rich vein. Explored an underwater tunnel that led to the surface, waved and went our separate ways.

That's organic grouping right there.

I don't feel encouraged to group. I don't feel *discouraged* from jumping in to help someone, but if there's an advantage to actually grouping other than getting a chat line, I'm not aware of it. Grouping didn't seem to change my event contribution for the better, or give me any xp for mobs I didn't hit personally.

So I hit 80 a couple days ago and I'm at a loss at what is fun at endgame.  WvW is the only thing that I log in to do now. 

You could wash the poop out of your sock!  :grin:

I blame unemployment.  Crafting makes leveling pretty fast though.  I actually went from 78 to 80 in an hour of crafting.

It had the opposite effect on me. I opened up the website tonight planning on buying it after a friend spent all day talking it up only to find that they were "sold out" of keys and my only options were to buy the expensive CE or find it in a B&M store.   :oh_i_see:

Instead of $60, they'll get nothing. I'll reconsider in a few months if MoP and the Rift expansion are flops.

I almost did the same thing until I saw amazon was selling the digital copy.  Started playing a few hours later.

Most places are only selling the CE at this point, but it looks like Bestbuy.com still has product keys for the regular download. We'll see.

I like the dots on the map, helps cohesion when doing difficult areas of the map with a couple other people.
Hurray for rhinoplasty!

They aren't "sold out". They stopped selling because of crowding problems. I'm sure they would love to be selling digital keys right now, this isn't a decision anyone makes as a marketing decision.

Met my first "rude" person today.... A Guardian laughing at me because my damage is so low :p
(It's not, it just wasnt as high as his)

Black list him/her.  :awesome_for_real:

Report him/her for "offensive" name in a foreign language.

The different coloured names helps me a LOT too. I find when there's a large group of players it's almost impossible to tell what is what, except for my own group members.

I am having major problems with the colours. It's amazing how many times I've dodged out of a beneficial AoE because I saw the circle appear on the ground and didn't know what colour it was.

And let me turn on my name and guild over my head! It's such a small thing but it bothers me that I can't see my name and guild tag on my own character.

Hence the quotes. I can understand a third party like Steam running out of keys, but not the developer of an MMO. Regardless, that's how they frame the situation when you visit their website to buy the game.

Blizzard hadn't "run out" of boxed copies of WoW at the beginning of 2005 when they put a halt to U.S. sales either. But that halt allowed them to keep their existing customers playing while they addressed the capacity issues and added more to the word of mouth creating a buzz.

That is not to say GW2 is going to have anywhere near the success or longevity of WoW, but it is not a totally bad thing to have them put the brakes on while they fix their issues.

You know, this bugs the hell out of me too. I like to see my name, guild and title over my character's head. Why do I not have that option?

I wish you could see guild NAMES rather than just tags.  :heartbreak:

I wish you could see titles above/below names too, COH-style.

Mostly because I want to show off my Closer to the Stars title, dammit. :p

Yeah I don't really understand the point of a title if it isn't going to be displayed.