Guild Wars 2 Digital Deluxe [Online Game Code]

‘Fun & Addictive’ doesn’t begin to describe GW2, August 27, 2012

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Rebecca Morn “Technowitch” (Placitas, NM, USA) – See all my reviews

  

I’ve played MMOs going all the way back to Ultima Online. EQ, EQ2, Asheron’s Call, World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies (left before the big expansion), Anarchy Online, Eve, Horizons-Istaria, Dark Age of Camelot, Star Trek, Star Wars: The Old Republic… You get the idea.

Admittedly, GW2 has the problems and bugs endemic to first launches, and to see them during the Early Access phase comes as no surprise. Players are reporting some bugged Dynamic Events (DEs). Guilds are pretty messed up at present, mostly with people being unable either to join or to assign their characters to represent a given guild. The auction market is down at the moment, as is the Wiki help system (8/27). Also appear to be some issues with the online registration system.

Anyway, if you want a less buggy game to play, wait a few weeks or so. Personally, I don’t care because this has been the most fun I’ve had playing a MMO in more years than I care to admit. It’s as if the designers tried to come up with nearly every detail that annoyed players in the past and deal with them differently.

For example, there’s no competition for resource nodes. If it’s there for you, it’s there for everybody — but only you see that it’s been exhausted if you went ahead and mined for copper or chopped down a tree.

There’s no kill-stealing. Everybody who helps kill something gets credit, and everybody can get loot off the same body, depending on random chance. There’s incentive to jump in and help someone in trouble, or to resurrect them if they’ve fallen.

The dynamic events don’t require people to create a pre-made group. Anybody can just join in, and the event will automatically change to become harder or easier depending on how many folks are present. I’ve had a huge amount of fun running with the traveling zergs, escorting traders or NPC adventurers, or fighting off invasions.

High level people can’t dominate or farm in low-level areas because their levels and damage are rescaled downward on the fly to fit the area. I saw a Level 20 Elementalist get swarmed by Level 4 fireflies in the Silvari starter area because he was careless with an AoE spell — and he went down.

There are no mailboxes you have to go find. Your mail finds you wherever you are. And speaking of travel, moving around in the world is aided with Asura travel gates and the ability to spend a few coppers to instantly shift to a previously found waypoint location. (Waypoint travel inside cities is free, however.)

There are no restrictions on which races can play certain professions. You can be an Asura (gnome) warrior or a Char (big hulking cat-bull things) illusionist. And each profession can be played in a variety of ways. By the way, no healing-only class; everybody has some healing abilities, and it’s almost always enough for even challenging solo play.

Combat: Moving around matters, and as far as I can tell there are no restrictions even when casting channeled abilities for you to have to stay in one spot. It is entirely possible to evade incoming attacks, although the amount of stamina you have is limited. And for once in a game there aren’t a ridiculous number of spell and ability bars and icons to keep track of. 1-5 = attacks, 6 = healing, 7-9 = utility abilities, 0 = long-cooldown ‘elite’ ability, and F1-F4 activate other abilities or switch between sets. (As you level, these gradually unlock, with just 1 and 6 at the very beginning of character creation.) Equipping different weapons and off-hand items results in different attacks and abilities being available.

Open world: Unlike in SWTOR, quest lines and missions don’t feel ‘linear’. You can do stuff in any order you want, except for your personal story line — of which I believe there are 27 different variants for each of the five races, and each of these usually offer you a few choices in key situations. There was one I just completed where I was given a choice to sneak in to an enemy camp or to do a frontal assault. Since this was my Elementalist (kinda squishy), I opted for sneaking in while disguised.

There is no subscription. Buy the game, play it all you want. Sure, there are items you can buy via gems purchased with real world cashy-money, but you don’t have to. And in fact, you can also acquire those gems in-game by exchanging in-game gold for them.

The crafting system is nicely complex, and if you put some time into it, you can be crafting your own bags, armor, weapons and accessories pretty early on. I like the fact that with the shared bank, all of your characters can gather everything and put it all into one location for everyone on your account to use. (Hint: Make sure at least one of your characters takes on armor crafting, tailoring, or leather-working. You will want those early 8-slot bags. Great thing though is you can change professions later and your progress is saved, so if…

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Guild Wars 2: My Favorite PC Game Ever, August 27, 2012

I finally broke down on impulse and bought Guild Wars 2 to try and it and, boy, was that a good decision. I don’t know if I will convince any of you to partake, but I really hope you do. This is my favorite game of all time, displacing Skyrim, World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy VII, and it’s now all I do during my gaming time. In my review, I will also hit on some WoW comparisons, because if you’re like me, there will be some audience overlap. Here goes nothing:

Class Selection and Definition
The game calls classes “professions” and, from the beginning, each one is differentiated and engaging. I won’t write about each one, but I have mostly played an engineer for now. He gets a blend of bombs, grenades, turrets to help him and allies in combat, toting a rifle or a shotgun for his own protection. The magic classes have vast arrays of spells. Every class has some type of heal, even if it’s minimal, but for each class your gameplay gets you into the character you are. Warriors are rewarded for staying in combat. Engineers and ranged classes WILL get killed if they don’t move. There are eight focused classes, I’ve tried three, and I’ve heard they are all great. People have not complained of an “OP class”, which I’ll help explain by hitting on combat.

Combat Dynamics
Battles are much longer than in Warcraft and you can’t really one-hit kill people. It takes a while to beat a person into submission. When a player runs out of health, they fall onto the ground and get a last chance to fight back, or call for help from allies. If you see a wounded ally down, you can pull them up. Also, if a wounded enemy is making their last call for help, you can do a finishing move to kill them for good. If you die, you restart at a waypoint that you have discovered and take a small equipment hit.

Race Selection and Definition
There are five races, and each is beautiful and differentiated. I have looked at three. Character design is really fun, and when you run around zones, players look really different as a result. I am playing as Charr, a cruel animal species. Each class/race combo gets its own story that is instanced. There are 40 in all (8×5). Mine involves trying to create secret plans for a weapon. The first part was an instanced fight where enemies invaded my house. It was amazing.

NPC Conversations and Cutscenes
The game is loaded with conversations and cutscenes, all of which go to beautifully animated character interactions that are all spoken. They are really breathtaking.

Gear Dying
You start with a small number of dyes that you can use to change the color of your gear at any time, for free. As the game progresses, you can discover new dyes that you can learn permanently. It is really fun and allows you to give your character a really differentiated look that can change over time.

Questing Structure
Guild Wars really did a great job in overhauling the traditional “gather 10 sandwiches for me” quests in wow. When you talk to NPCs, you get objectives, which, yes, track in the upper-right hand corner like in WoW. However, the number of things you need to gather and the “annoyance” – grindiness of it really is gone. You have to try it to see what I mean. Additionally, if someone else is working on the same quest and picks up things to help the objective, you get credit too. It’s a really great system.

World Events
In addition to traditional questing, when you walk around, circles will appear on the map alerting you to a group quest. These involve much harder/larger objectives that are really fun. When the objective is achieved, you are graded from nothing/bronze/silver/gold on your contributions and get gear. These are great so far and have included killing a huge warm and stopping waves of intruders from penetrating a base.

Zone Exploration and Leveling
Each zone has multiple quests and objectives. You discover them organically by walking around although, it’s not a “npc-find-fest” in that you can really feel free to roam and get alerts when you’re near neat objectives. You don’t need to hit all of them, although you get large bonuses for completing all tasks in a zone. You never have to go back to NPCs to turn things in – your quest just triggers complete when finished.

Swimming/Underwater Exploration
Usually this would be a sidenote, but it merits special talking points in Guild Wars. Underwater animation is gorgeous and, for each profession, you have a special underwater weapon. I spent 40 minutes yesterday just swimming underwater and firing my classes weapon: a torpedo launcher. The graphics work and realistic swimming interactions are great. Also, when you exit the water, you get a “splash” across your screen that fades out, a neat small touch of how you need a moment to regain vision after being deep in the water.

Vistas
In each zone, there are points…

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Guild Wars 2: Worth the Wait??, July 23, 2012

I have been playing the original Guild Wars since 2007. I have played all of the expansion packs. The game was awesome for a first time MMO gamer such as myself. Of course after a while it got boring. (4 years of gameplay is pretty good, though!) So I have been anxiously awaiting the release of GW2, which has been “coming soon” for at least 3 years.

**I am basing this review off of the limited content of the beta weekend events, and after more gameplay after the release I will come back and edit my review.**

Based only on playing 2 different beta weekend events I have to say…my first impression is WOW! Not to be confused with WoW. But, “Oh my this is amazing!”

Having only played GW1, and having no other MMO experience, I can’t really compare it to EverQuest, WoW or The Old Republic. So if you’re looking for that kind of comparison, I can’t help you.

Where to start? The graphics are amazing. The skills look so very cool. They finally look like their descriptions. When your skill says “Send a Phoenix” the game has a very cool fiery Phoenix that flies out and attacks. Ground turning to lava? Yup, the ground turns to lava. A fountain of water? Yup, a big geyser pops out of the ground. It is very easy to get caught up in just trying out your skills to see what they look like. And you have the ability to jump, which means you also have the ability to jump from heights and die. You can then choose to respawn to a waypoint, or wait for someone to rez you. And, yeah, every character in GW2 can resurrect you, which is pretty cool. No more having your group almost wipe but for one person who didn’t bring a rez.

With GW2 you no longer have to cash in quests. No more “talk to this person, do this, then go to that person or someone else for your reward.” The world in GW2 is open. Events and quests are ongoing. As you run around you run into quests and events. You help with it, you get credit, you get a reward emailed to you. You don’t help with it, you don’t get a reward. You can’t stand around or camp your character and get credit from what I can tell. You have to participate to get credit. Events can fail, and then you have to wait for the event to happen again. This open gameplay is something that I really enjoy. No more teaming up, begging for a group. You can just run around and help people if you want. Or run by if you don’t want to help. Either way, it’s pretty cool. So far people aren’t very friendly, but I’m hoping that will change after the beta events end and the game goes live.

If you have played GW1 I don’t think you will be disappointed. They have kept a lot of what made GW gameplay unique (including the NO SUBSCRIPTION FEE!). Their MMO land is a land where every “real” player is your ally. No killing other player characters. You will not level up just to get stomped by another player. If you get stomped, it will be by AI (unless you are in PvP land). This was exciting for me, after hearing my hubby complain about most MMO’s.

The beta events have had kind of limited access to the other races, but I have finally played all 3. The Asura are by far my favorite. They are cute and tiny, and have the best laugh emote. I am completely disappointed with the Sylvari, which looked fantastic in the concept art, but are pretty ugly in game. The Norn and Charr are big and lumbering. You never feel like you’re running because they are so big. The humans, as in the original GW, look fantastic. The ability to customize your character is nice. Not only do you have a lot of basic options for face, hair, etc, but you can also then customize them further, much like the Sims, by changing their features around.

I am disappointed in the armor thus far. Hopefully this is just part of the beta, but everyone looks the same. You have light, medium and heavy armor, but they all look the same. And then you start finding or buying armor but they are not class based, so every one still looks the same. Granted, I have not gotten any of my characters very high level because I really wanted to try out ALL of the races and classes (that and they deleted all of your characters from the first Beta, so I didn’t want to get too attached or spend too much time on them).

What else? You don’t have a multi-class option anymore. No switching your secondary class. Each class is the same, with the same skills unlocking. This is kind of disappointing, but in my opinion is made up by the different skills unlocked with each weapon or weapon set. It was fun to try out each set of weapons available for each class.

Oh yeah, can’t forget the underwater! Swimming in this game is so fun! When you dive into the water you immediately sport a mask (your pet doesn’t, so apparently they all have gills). You have different weapons and weapon sets, just like above water. Underwater is really pretty cool!

We didn’t do a lot along the storyline,…

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