9th June 2012, 8:39 PM
(This post was last modified: 15th June 2012, 8:45 PM by A Black Falcon.)
Guild Wars 2
Note - this is the second BWE, and the third public-ish test, after a closed beta and then the first BWE which I unfortunately couldn't participate in.
First, I absolutely love the first Guild Wars. I played the game for over 1200-1300 hours, probably the third most of any game ever (it's behind only Starcraft and Warcraft III, specifically). GW1's in my top 10 PC games ever list. I've been worried about GW2 from its announcement, though. Well, overall, I'd say that the game IS fun -- at least it is that, so it's not as bad as I was fearing -- but I do dislike how drastically different it is from the original. I know they don't want to just make the same thing again, but these changes will take a lot of getting used to, and they're not all for the better.
First though, I want to say that I know I haven't done as much reading as I should about some of the details here; I've read some stuff here and there about GW2, but wasn't in the first BWE (my computer's graphics card died earlier this year, and I didn't get a replacement until after the first BWE), so this is my first experience with the game. Also, I haven't played PvP yet. In the first game though, I only ever played random arenas -- I never was in a guild relevant enough to play any GvG matches, so I've never done that. I did play a bit of the Hall of Heroes back in the GW1 beta when you could do that with random groups, but stopped once the game came out and it became a more organized thing. I did enjoy occasional random arena stuff, though, so I will have to try that out in GW2.
+ Good graphics - this game looks a lot like Guild Wars, but better. Guild Wars was one of the best looking games of its era, and still impresses in terms of its great art design in both the world and the concept art. I don't know if GW2 impresses me as much in 2012 as GW1 did when I first played it in May 2004, it probably doesn't, but it does look very good, with good art design, art, and graphics. I expected the graphics to be great of course, and they are.
+ Good music - a lot of GW1 music returns, but there's a bunch of new stuff too, and it's all great. The original game had a fantastic soundtrack, it's nice to see it return, with additions.
+ Though it is an MMO, the game is far more fun than any traditional MMO I have ever played. I can see getting addicted to this game for a long time. The game is addictive and fun to play - I already played it for seven-plus hours in just the first day and a half of this beta.
+ More options in character creation - customizable faces, multiple body types, etc. Very nice.
+ There's a big world to explore, once again, and it's quite different now, as expected for a game set 250 years later.
+ Permanent maps for all underground areas. Finally.
+ You can actually go into a few buildings here and there; in GW1, you can quite rarely go into buildings. In this game you only can in places which have a story/quest reason, but still, it's something.
+ The tasks you have to do for people to get the hearts -- helping the farmers in the first zone, etc -- are fun. I like that there's some decent variety there, a bunch of things to do, and some of those special timed events that appear at random in the area, too. Fun stuff. :)
+ The "incidents in the world" system is an interesting one, and leads to some fun, crazy-mobbed challenges.
+ Choices - you actually can make choices in this game, and they actually matter, at least a little. GW1 had no moral choices at all -- you were a hero, period. In this game, you're a hero, but you can at least take a few different paths with your replies. Nice. In addition, you can choose several different origin stories at the beginning, and they have an impact on some of the early quests, so it's worth trying all three origins for example.
+/- I'm not sure if this is a positive or a negative, so I put both here. One of the most interesting changes in GW2, and one I'd either forgotten about or hadn't read about before (I suspect it's the former, but don't know really), is that magic points are gone. Yeah, no MP at all in this game, you just have health, and skills that you can use based on their timers. Class skills do have special qualifications, for some classes (like the meter that powers necromancer class skills for example), but they're not the same. This is a very interesting change; MP was of course central to GW1, as with most RPGs, so removing it from the game entirely is a somewhat odd choice. I do remember one online RPG with a setup sort of like this, with a skillbar and timers but no magic points system at all, the (complete flop of a long-shut-down title) Fury, an action-focused online RPG, but that's the only one I can think of really. This removes some of the strategic depth from GW -- no more worrying about MP, no more MP recharge skills, MP steal abilities, etc -- so I don't know if I like the change, really; I mean, the game's quite fun, which is why I give it a +/-, but like some of the other changes, it seems to simplify the game versus what the original GW had. I remain to be convinced that GW2 has GW1's level of strategic depth, let's put it that way. It's certainly a very good game, but does it match GW1's level of greatness?\
- The game isn't as good as the first Guild Wars. It's maybe 80% as good, to put a somewhat random value on it.
- Why is Kryta a medieval forest now? It's supposed to be a jungle. I know 250 years have passed, and there were some forests to Kryta's north in the first game, in areas you couldn't go to much, but still. Way to make it more generic. Divinity's Reach is huge, but design-wise is generic medieval stuff, and bears almost no resemblance to Kryta or the architecutre styles of Lion's Arch; this is more a European version of the city in Factions than anything. Towns that do return from the first game, like Beetletun, have suffered similar declines in uniqueness. I know a lot is going to change over time, and a lot of people from Ascalon have come to Kryta and that would have an impact, but still... is anything left of Kryta at all? And why are the trees all normal trees, with no sign of Kryta's jungle anywhere near where it was in the first game? You have to do down to Lion's Arch or points southeast to find the jungles this time. "Changes over time" is a good excuse, but "changes over time to something more generic" isn't a great one.
- Character creation - I wish that the old hairstyles and similar faces returned. With how customizable the faces are this time that part's not really an issue, but hairstyles are -- there are only so many of them, and very few of the first game's ones return. I was hoping to create some characters as similar to my GW1 characters as possible, but with how different the hairstyles all are, that's impossible, unfortunately.
- Costumes - I fully understand that the costumes are clearly a work in progress, so I won't complain about much here (this is something that comes together late, of course), but I do want to state my disappointment that each race has one preset, unchangeable, identical underwear set for the whole race. All Human females have identical yellow bra-and-panties sets, for instance. In GW1, underwear was class-specific, so each class looked different. Not anymore, apparently, unless they're going to add it later.
- Framerate - The framerate's ... iffy, at best. Now, I know that my computer's not exactly high end for this game, so I was expecting this -- though I have a GeForce GTS 560 now, the Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz CPU I have holds it back for sure -- but well, that's one reason why GW1's mostly-instanced design was great. The computer I played GW1 on (from the first betas in '04 until early '07 when I got a new machine) was pretty dated, and I'd often hit single digit framerates in the larger towns. Kaineng Center for instance absolutely kills the framerate on that computer, when at all busy. But out in the zones, I'd get playable 15-30fps framerates, so I could keep the graphics settings high, which I like. But in GW2, it's an MMO, so you've got lots of people on screen at once. And owrse, they try to draw in lots of people with the time-based events. During those, on this computer the framerate just completely falls apart. The game's quite playable most of the time (I don't know the exact framerate, is there something like -perf for GW1 to have a framerate display on screen?), but when a lot of stuff starts happening, it gets really, really choppy. Makes it hard to play to say the least. But if I reduced the graphics settings to minimum, it'd be kind of a waste because I want to see it looking nice, and most of the time it's playable. Bah. Just one more reason why I like GW1's design more than this, as interesting as the events-in-the-world concept is. They need an option to have the graphics scale down automatically as the framerate plummets, or something, and then have it scale up again once you're out of that fight. That'd be great. :)
- Skills - The skill system seems much more limited this time. I know that you unlock more options later on -- the ability to switch between two different weapons, additional Traits you can choose between, etc -- but still, in GW2, a lot of skills are tied to weapon types. I understood that they were trying to greatly reduce the number of skills in GW2, versus the huge bloat GW1 had built up after four chapters, and they have, but instead of letting you equip any eight you want, in this game, the skills you get depend on the weapon you have equipped. Each weapon type has a preset group of skills that it enables, three skills for the main weapon, two for the secondary, plus four class-specific abilities, and the Traits I mentioned above that you unlock later. I like some of the new options, like the class-specific stuff, and some of the changes (Mesmers are easier to use this time, for instance), but there are some real issues with this design. I mean, I want to choose what skills I want to use, I don't want to have it preset based on weapon choice! That limits skill options so much versus the first game... seems like it'd be hard for it to do anything other than reduce the strategic depth of the system. I assume they added the other stuff to try to make up for it, but while the system isn't awful, sort of like in Phantasy Star Portable (which has weapon-based skills, as opposed to the free skill selection system of PS Online and PS Zero), why did they do that in the first place? It's not as good. You have more skills available at any one time than you do in GW1, but because of the limits on what skills you have (choice is much more limited), at least early on you actually have a lot less options. Disappointing. (Also, do you ever get any choices for class skills, or is everyone in each class stuck with the same four?)
- Skills etc. - For instance, my main in the first Guild Wars was a necromancer. I focused on blood magic, so I had all skills from the blood necromancer line (and a few monk skills for healing/res). But in this game, at least for the weapon skills, you seem to have far fewer choices. Is there more to be revealed that we don't know about, or do the skills you unlock later on help give you more choice? I have no idea, but I'm only at level 5, so I'm not exactly far in the game.
- Skills/Classes, and how much they are like their counterparts from the original game - Another thing I want to mention about the skills is that the skills in this game are almost all new, it seems. The classes mostly have the same names or concepts, though there is one entirely new one in the Engineer, but the skills are all new. This is understandable, they want to do something different, but not only are the skills all different, the classes play pretty differently too. My biggest concern about GW2, ever since it was first announced back in '06 or '07, was that it sounded like it wasn't enough like Guild Wars, and that they were aiming for World of Warcraft players instead of aiming for Guild Wars players. Having played the game, I think that impression is absolutely correct. As someone who absolutely LOVED Guild Wars, but has never been interested enough in traditional MMOs to stick with them for more than a few hours, this has always been very disappointing to me. Well, the game IS good, but it's not very much like Guild Wars in a lot of ways. The classes play differently, the skills are different, the basic game design is different (preset weapon-based skillsets, unchangeable class-specific skills, etc.), the game's an open-world MMO instead of a mostly instanced game, etc. This is a good game, but it's not anywhere near enough like the great original title!
- Enemies - You can't clear out zones anymore. That is, in the first GW, enemies you killed stayed dead until you left the zone. This gave the game a sense of permanence -- Death penalty returns, but enemies respawn, QUICKLY, in this game, which means that the challenge of dying and then having to decide about whether to go in and try again, because you've killed a lot of enemies in this area and if you give up and leave you'll have to kill all the ones you've beaten already over again, or retreat back to town, get your DP healed up, and try it again from the start, simply doesn't exist in this game. The closest thing GW2 has to it are those timed missions; obviously, you don't want to warp somewhere far away (because warp points in GW2 are far less frequent than res shrines are in GW1, so you'll have a much longer trek unless someone rezzes you. At least anyone can rez someone down, though, going by the "healers are gone from this game" design.), because you could run out of time. Apart from that, the main other thing would be related to the point below. Anyway though, I liked being able to clear zones, so this "the zone is full again by the time you've gotten just a few screens past where you just were" is pretty lame in comparison. It really hurts your sense of accomplishment when an unending stream of spawning enemies keep appearing behind you, replacing the ones you killed! GW1 has no stupid spawning enemies. Better design, in my opinion. :) (And yes, I know you can't have permanent kills in an MMO like GW2. That's one more reason why I like GW1's instanced design.)
- Transport - The game has fast transport, of course, but for some insane reason, you have to PAY to use it. And it's both not cheap (well, it is, for short-range stuff, but the costs add up!), and increases in cost depending on how far you want to go. What the heck, ANet, why would you do this? This is seriously one of the worst things in this list of negatives. You should not have to pay to use the fast-travel system. It should be like how it is in GW1. Also, how about some resurrection shrines, instead of forcing you to hope someone shows up to heal you, or forcing you to warp back all the way to a warp point and then walk the whole way back to where you just were? That'd be like if in GW1 there were no res shrines in the zones, and instead you went back to the zone entrance, or the middle of the PREVIOUS zone, when you died. Um, there's a reason the first game had res points all over, it's annoying when you have to run long distances! And on the same note, it's a complete pain when the game forces you to warp back and forth for missions, paying money every single time you want to use the warps. Bad design!
- Exploration - One thing I really loved about the first Guild Wars was exploring the world, and having that exploration matter as I revealed the black areas of the map with each character. Some areas didn't have permanent maps, like caves, the Underworld, etc, and that was annoying, most most did. In GW2, however, exploration is mostly removed from the game. Instead of being able to explore for yourself, the instant you step foot in a zone, the entire zone is revealed to you on your map. It's tremendously disappointing, and is a significant design flaw in my opinion. They try to keep some shreds of an exploration element by having Waypoints (places you can transport to) to find, and by marking certain points on the map for you to reach and reveal their names, but those points are marked on your map already from the instant you get into the zone, so there's no surprise, and no actual exploration. This is Guild Wars, Dumbed Down Edition. Now, I know you can look up maps online, but still, being able to explore the zones myself was so much fun in the first game. "Go to the exploration points marked on your map" is a pale, pale shadow of that. Pretty sad.
- Guild Wars 2 doesn't have "click on the ground to move" -- it's been removed from the game, you have to move with the movement keys only. Now, I didn't use click-on-ground-to-move all that often, but I did use something else relating to it all the time, as did everyone -- in GW1, you can click on a character or enemy and then hit the button, and your character will automatically run over to that character and attack or interact with them. In GW2, this is entirely gone -- you have to manually move over to whoever you want to interact with. In crazy-hectic battles with my screen completely full of action, this makes for a challenge, because just figuring out where the enemy I just selected even IS can be tough. I assume this is to add more skill to the game in some way, because of all the other changes I've mentioned that seem to reduce strategic options, but seriously, this just ends up being really annoying. I don't think that forcing players to move to enemies themselves, and entirely getting rid of all auto-move functions, is a good change. At least autorun on R makes a return, but that's about it as far as I can tell.
- 80 levels instead of 20 was unnecessary. They obviously increased the number in order to compete with WoW and such, and people who expect lots of levels, but GW1 showed how all of that stuff isn't necessary to make a great online MMO. Of course PvP is at a flat par, as expected -- all players are lv. 80 in PvP from the start -- but for the single player, it's a pointless change.
+/- Missions - I don't know enough about this to give it a rank. The initial main story missions, the ones in instances that is, seem to be single player only affairs. I assume that that might change later on, but I don't know. Of course, in the early years, one of the best things about GW1 was working with player groups to beat the missions. However, once the Heroes were added, and once the playerbase were scattered around four different campaigns, that all broke down, and actually finding a player group for just about anything after the initial launch period became unlikely. This really hurt the game, in my opinion -- yeah, you can beat most missions with just heroes and henchmen, but it's not the same. Well, anyway, in GW2, the first few instanced missions are solo, or solo with an AI ally. If there are instanced co-op missions, have they come up with anything to deal with the problems GW1 had? It seems like one solution they had were the random missions that pop up in the main map, those random incidents that draw in players that I've mentioned above and that is one of the game's key original gameplay mechanics, and that's a good one, but those don't seem to be story missions. Is the story single player only? That'd be kind of disappointing, honestly, despite GW1's issues as I have said, but would be one solution I guess.
Overall, the game's very fun and addictive. The numerous problems I mention above, and some others I surely didn't get to mentioning, are issues, but they don't ruin the game. As I said I do think the first game's better, so far, but ... well, seven hours in a day and a half? It's been a long time since I've played a PC game that much... I've gotten a whole stack of stuff from digital-download sales, and a bunch of used older ('90s/early '00s) PC games too, but somehow it's been several years since I've played one a lot, like I did with Guild Wars back in '04 to '07 or so. Well, this could be that game...but no, it isn't Guild Wars, it's something quite different with similarities in name, graphics, and music, pretty much. I wonder if ANet will succeed this time. I mean, Guild Wars was successful, but ANet clearly wanted it to match World of Warcraft, but that didn't happen. So, the sequel is much more of an MMO this time. Will that make it more successful than the first game as a result? I loved GW's mostly-instanced design, but I wouldn't be surprised if this game does do better, because a lot of people seem to prefer MMOs like this to GW's style.
Note - this is the second BWE, and the third public-ish test, after a closed beta and then the first BWE which I unfortunately couldn't participate in.
First, I absolutely love the first Guild Wars. I played the game for over 1200-1300 hours, probably the third most of any game ever (it's behind only Starcraft and Warcraft III, specifically). GW1's in my top 10 PC games ever list. I've been worried about GW2 from its announcement, though. Well, overall, I'd say that the game IS fun -- at least it is that, so it's not as bad as I was fearing -- but I do dislike how drastically different it is from the original. I know they don't want to just make the same thing again, but these changes will take a lot of getting used to, and they're not all for the better.
First though, I want to say that I know I haven't done as much reading as I should about some of the details here; I've read some stuff here and there about GW2, but wasn't in the first BWE (my computer's graphics card died earlier this year, and I didn't get a replacement until after the first BWE), so this is my first experience with the game. Also, I haven't played PvP yet. In the first game though, I only ever played random arenas -- I never was in a guild relevant enough to play any GvG matches, so I've never done that. I did play a bit of the Hall of Heroes back in the GW1 beta when you could do that with random groups, but stopped once the game came out and it became a more organized thing. I did enjoy occasional random arena stuff, though, so I will have to try that out in GW2.
+ Good graphics - this game looks a lot like Guild Wars, but better. Guild Wars was one of the best looking games of its era, and still impresses in terms of its great art design in both the world and the concept art. I don't know if GW2 impresses me as much in 2012 as GW1 did when I first played it in May 2004, it probably doesn't, but it does look very good, with good art design, art, and graphics. I expected the graphics to be great of course, and they are.
+ Good music - a lot of GW1 music returns, but there's a bunch of new stuff too, and it's all great. The original game had a fantastic soundtrack, it's nice to see it return, with additions.
+ Though it is an MMO, the game is far more fun than any traditional MMO I have ever played. I can see getting addicted to this game for a long time. The game is addictive and fun to play - I already played it for seven-plus hours in just the first day and a half of this beta.
+ More options in character creation - customizable faces, multiple body types, etc. Very nice.
+ There's a big world to explore, once again, and it's quite different now, as expected for a game set 250 years later.
+ Permanent maps for all underground areas. Finally.
+ You can actually go into a few buildings here and there; in GW1, you can quite rarely go into buildings. In this game you only can in places which have a story/quest reason, but still, it's something.
+ The tasks you have to do for people to get the hearts -- helping the farmers in the first zone, etc -- are fun. I like that there's some decent variety there, a bunch of things to do, and some of those special timed events that appear at random in the area, too. Fun stuff. :)
+ The "incidents in the world" system is an interesting one, and leads to some fun, crazy-mobbed challenges.
+ Choices - you actually can make choices in this game, and they actually matter, at least a little. GW1 had no moral choices at all -- you were a hero, period. In this game, you're a hero, but you can at least take a few different paths with your replies. Nice. In addition, you can choose several different origin stories at the beginning, and they have an impact on some of the early quests, so it's worth trying all three origins for example.
+/- I'm not sure if this is a positive or a negative, so I put both here. One of the most interesting changes in GW2, and one I'd either forgotten about or hadn't read about before (I suspect it's the former, but don't know really), is that magic points are gone. Yeah, no MP at all in this game, you just have health, and skills that you can use based on their timers. Class skills do have special qualifications, for some classes (like the meter that powers necromancer class skills for example), but they're not the same. This is a very interesting change; MP was of course central to GW1, as with most RPGs, so removing it from the game entirely is a somewhat odd choice. I do remember one online RPG with a setup sort of like this, with a skillbar and timers but no magic points system at all, the (complete flop of a long-shut-down title) Fury, an action-focused online RPG, but that's the only one I can think of really. This removes some of the strategic depth from GW -- no more worrying about MP, no more MP recharge skills, MP steal abilities, etc -- so I don't know if I like the change, really; I mean, the game's quite fun, which is why I give it a +/-, but like some of the other changes, it seems to simplify the game versus what the original GW had. I remain to be convinced that GW2 has GW1's level of strategic depth, let's put it that way. It's certainly a very good game, but does it match GW1's level of greatness?\
- The game isn't as good as the first Guild Wars. It's maybe 80% as good, to put a somewhat random value on it.
- Why is Kryta a medieval forest now? It's supposed to be a jungle. I know 250 years have passed, and there were some forests to Kryta's north in the first game, in areas you couldn't go to much, but still. Way to make it more generic. Divinity's Reach is huge, but design-wise is generic medieval stuff, and bears almost no resemblance to Kryta or the architecutre styles of Lion's Arch; this is more a European version of the city in Factions than anything. Towns that do return from the first game, like Beetletun, have suffered similar declines in uniqueness. I know a lot is going to change over time, and a lot of people from Ascalon have come to Kryta and that would have an impact, but still... is anything left of Kryta at all? And why are the trees all normal trees, with no sign of Kryta's jungle anywhere near where it was in the first game? You have to do down to Lion's Arch or points southeast to find the jungles this time. "Changes over time" is a good excuse, but "changes over time to something more generic" isn't a great one.
- Character creation - I wish that the old hairstyles and similar faces returned. With how customizable the faces are this time that part's not really an issue, but hairstyles are -- there are only so many of them, and very few of the first game's ones return. I was hoping to create some characters as similar to my GW1 characters as possible, but with how different the hairstyles all are, that's impossible, unfortunately.
- Costumes - I fully understand that the costumes are clearly a work in progress, so I won't complain about much here (this is something that comes together late, of course), but I do want to state my disappointment that each race has one preset, unchangeable, identical underwear set for the whole race. All Human females have identical yellow bra-and-panties sets, for instance. In GW1, underwear was class-specific, so each class looked different. Not anymore, apparently, unless they're going to add it later.
- Framerate - The framerate's ... iffy, at best. Now, I know that my computer's not exactly high end for this game, so I was expecting this -- though I have a GeForce GTS 560 now, the Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz CPU I have holds it back for sure -- but well, that's one reason why GW1's mostly-instanced design was great. The computer I played GW1 on (from the first betas in '04 until early '07 when I got a new machine) was pretty dated, and I'd often hit single digit framerates in the larger towns. Kaineng Center for instance absolutely kills the framerate on that computer, when at all busy. But out in the zones, I'd get playable 15-30fps framerates, so I could keep the graphics settings high, which I like. But in GW2, it's an MMO, so you've got lots of people on screen at once. And owrse, they try to draw in lots of people with the time-based events. During those, on this computer the framerate just completely falls apart. The game's quite playable most of the time (I don't know the exact framerate, is there something like -perf for GW1 to have a framerate display on screen?), but when a lot of stuff starts happening, it gets really, really choppy. Makes it hard to play to say the least. But if I reduced the graphics settings to minimum, it'd be kind of a waste because I want to see it looking nice, and most of the time it's playable. Bah. Just one more reason why I like GW1's design more than this, as interesting as the events-in-the-world concept is. They need an option to have the graphics scale down automatically as the framerate plummets, or something, and then have it scale up again once you're out of that fight. That'd be great. :)
- Skills - The skill system seems much more limited this time. I know that you unlock more options later on -- the ability to switch between two different weapons, additional Traits you can choose between, etc -- but still, in GW2, a lot of skills are tied to weapon types. I understood that they were trying to greatly reduce the number of skills in GW2, versus the huge bloat GW1 had built up after four chapters, and they have, but instead of letting you equip any eight you want, in this game, the skills you get depend on the weapon you have equipped. Each weapon type has a preset group of skills that it enables, three skills for the main weapon, two for the secondary, plus four class-specific abilities, and the Traits I mentioned above that you unlock later. I like some of the new options, like the class-specific stuff, and some of the changes (Mesmers are easier to use this time, for instance), but there are some real issues with this design. I mean, I want to choose what skills I want to use, I don't want to have it preset based on weapon choice! That limits skill options so much versus the first game... seems like it'd be hard for it to do anything other than reduce the strategic depth of the system. I assume they added the other stuff to try to make up for it, but while the system isn't awful, sort of like in Phantasy Star Portable (which has weapon-based skills, as opposed to the free skill selection system of PS Online and PS Zero), why did they do that in the first place? It's not as good. You have more skills available at any one time than you do in GW1, but because of the limits on what skills you have (choice is much more limited), at least early on you actually have a lot less options. Disappointing. (Also, do you ever get any choices for class skills, or is everyone in each class stuck with the same four?)
- Skills etc. - For instance, my main in the first Guild Wars was a necromancer. I focused on blood magic, so I had all skills from the blood necromancer line (and a few monk skills for healing/res). But in this game, at least for the weapon skills, you seem to have far fewer choices. Is there more to be revealed that we don't know about, or do the skills you unlock later on help give you more choice? I have no idea, but I'm only at level 5, so I'm not exactly far in the game.
- Skills/Classes, and how much they are like their counterparts from the original game - Another thing I want to mention about the skills is that the skills in this game are almost all new, it seems. The classes mostly have the same names or concepts, though there is one entirely new one in the Engineer, but the skills are all new. This is understandable, they want to do something different, but not only are the skills all different, the classes play pretty differently too. My biggest concern about GW2, ever since it was first announced back in '06 or '07, was that it sounded like it wasn't enough like Guild Wars, and that they were aiming for World of Warcraft players instead of aiming for Guild Wars players. Having played the game, I think that impression is absolutely correct. As someone who absolutely LOVED Guild Wars, but has never been interested enough in traditional MMOs to stick with them for more than a few hours, this has always been very disappointing to me. Well, the game IS good, but it's not very much like Guild Wars in a lot of ways. The classes play differently, the skills are different, the basic game design is different (preset weapon-based skillsets, unchangeable class-specific skills, etc.), the game's an open-world MMO instead of a mostly instanced game, etc. This is a good game, but it's not anywhere near enough like the great original title!
- Enemies - You can't clear out zones anymore. That is, in the first GW, enemies you killed stayed dead until you left the zone. This gave the game a sense of permanence -- Death penalty returns, but enemies respawn, QUICKLY, in this game, which means that the challenge of dying and then having to decide about whether to go in and try again, because you've killed a lot of enemies in this area and if you give up and leave you'll have to kill all the ones you've beaten already over again, or retreat back to town, get your DP healed up, and try it again from the start, simply doesn't exist in this game. The closest thing GW2 has to it are those timed missions; obviously, you don't want to warp somewhere far away (because warp points in GW2 are far less frequent than res shrines are in GW1, so you'll have a much longer trek unless someone rezzes you. At least anyone can rez someone down, though, going by the "healers are gone from this game" design.), because you could run out of time. Apart from that, the main other thing would be related to the point below. Anyway though, I liked being able to clear zones, so this "the zone is full again by the time you've gotten just a few screens past where you just were" is pretty lame in comparison. It really hurts your sense of accomplishment when an unending stream of spawning enemies keep appearing behind you, replacing the ones you killed! GW1 has no stupid spawning enemies. Better design, in my opinion. :) (And yes, I know you can't have permanent kills in an MMO like GW2. That's one more reason why I like GW1's instanced design.)
- Transport - The game has fast transport, of course, but for some insane reason, you have to PAY to use it. And it's both not cheap (well, it is, for short-range stuff, but the costs add up!), and increases in cost depending on how far you want to go. What the heck, ANet, why would you do this? This is seriously one of the worst things in this list of negatives. You should not have to pay to use the fast-travel system. It should be like how it is in GW1. Also, how about some resurrection shrines, instead of forcing you to hope someone shows up to heal you, or forcing you to warp back all the way to a warp point and then walk the whole way back to where you just were? That'd be like if in GW1 there were no res shrines in the zones, and instead you went back to the zone entrance, or the middle of the PREVIOUS zone, when you died. Um, there's a reason the first game had res points all over, it's annoying when you have to run long distances! And on the same note, it's a complete pain when the game forces you to warp back and forth for missions, paying money every single time you want to use the warps. Bad design!
- Exploration - One thing I really loved about the first Guild Wars was exploring the world, and having that exploration matter as I revealed the black areas of the map with each character. Some areas didn't have permanent maps, like caves, the Underworld, etc, and that was annoying, most most did. In GW2, however, exploration is mostly removed from the game. Instead of being able to explore for yourself, the instant you step foot in a zone, the entire zone is revealed to you on your map. It's tremendously disappointing, and is a significant design flaw in my opinion. They try to keep some shreds of an exploration element by having Waypoints (places you can transport to) to find, and by marking certain points on the map for you to reach and reveal their names, but those points are marked on your map already from the instant you get into the zone, so there's no surprise, and no actual exploration. This is Guild Wars, Dumbed Down Edition. Now, I know you can look up maps online, but still, being able to explore the zones myself was so much fun in the first game. "Go to the exploration points marked on your map" is a pale, pale shadow of that. Pretty sad.
- Guild Wars 2 doesn't have "click on the ground to move" -- it's been removed from the game, you have to move with the movement keys only. Now, I didn't use click-on-ground-to-move all that often, but I did use something else relating to it all the time, as did everyone -- in GW1, you can click on a character or enemy and then hit the button, and your character will automatically run over to that character and attack or interact with them. In GW2, this is entirely gone -- you have to manually move over to whoever you want to interact with. In crazy-hectic battles with my screen completely full of action, this makes for a challenge, because just figuring out where the enemy I just selected even IS can be tough. I assume this is to add more skill to the game in some way, because of all the other changes I've mentioned that seem to reduce strategic options, but seriously, this just ends up being really annoying. I don't think that forcing players to move to enemies themselves, and entirely getting rid of all auto-move functions, is a good change. At least autorun on R makes a return, but that's about it as far as I can tell.
- 80 levels instead of 20 was unnecessary. They obviously increased the number in order to compete with WoW and such, and people who expect lots of levels, but GW1 showed how all of that stuff isn't necessary to make a great online MMO. Of course PvP is at a flat par, as expected -- all players are lv. 80 in PvP from the start -- but for the single player, it's a pointless change.
+/- Missions - I don't know enough about this to give it a rank. The initial main story missions, the ones in instances that is, seem to be single player only affairs. I assume that that might change later on, but I don't know. Of course, in the early years, one of the best things about GW1 was working with player groups to beat the missions. However, once the Heroes were added, and once the playerbase were scattered around four different campaigns, that all broke down, and actually finding a player group for just about anything after the initial launch period became unlikely. This really hurt the game, in my opinion -- yeah, you can beat most missions with just heroes and henchmen, but it's not the same. Well, anyway, in GW2, the first few instanced missions are solo, or solo with an AI ally. If there are instanced co-op missions, have they come up with anything to deal with the problems GW1 had? It seems like one solution they had were the random missions that pop up in the main map, those random incidents that draw in players that I've mentioned above and that is one of the game's key original gameplay mechanics, and that's a good one, but those don't seem to be story missions. Is the story single player only? That'd be kind of disappointing, honestly, despite GW1's issues as I have said, but would be one solution I guess.
Overall, the game's very fun and addictive. The numerous problems I mention above, and some others I surely didn't get to mentioning, are issues, but they don't ruin the game. As I said I do think the first game's better, so far, but ... well, seven hours in a day and a half? It's been a long time since I've played a PC game that much... I've gotten a whole stack of stuff from digital-download sales, and a bunch of used older ('90s/early '00s) PC games too, but somehow it's been several years since I've played one a lot, like I did with Guild Wars back in '04 to '07 or so. Well, this could be that game...but no, it isn't Guild Wars, it's something quite different with similarities in name, graphics, and music, pretty much. I wonder if ANet will succeed this time. I mean, Guild Wars was successful, but ANet clearly wanted it to match World of Warcraft, but that didn't happen. So, the sequel is much more of an MMO this time. Will that make it more successful than the first game as a result? I loved GW's mostly-instanced design, but I wouldn't be surprised if this game does do better, because a lot of people seem to prefer MMOs like this to GW's style.
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