A few thoughts on Guild Wars 2

After having played Guild Wars 2 for about a week, there are a few points worth mentioning.

The first thing that should be very obvious, is that this is not a clear sequel fin terms of gameplay. Story wise these 2 titles are linked by a 200 year gap, but they are rather different beasts under the hood.

The original Guild Wars was a story driven online coop game. Towns worked mostly as hubs for forming parties, some trade etc. The rest of the game was instanced for each party. As a pro this meant less lag in the actual game parts, and events could make changes to the world. Another plus was no loot or kill stealing.

One big con was that players bailing, a system crash, life, or being total gits while in these instances usually meant going back to get a full group again.

Now Guild Wars 2 is more of an open world MMO. It has done away with some of the trappings these games often have. Resources and loot are personal spawns/drops. Kills are shared, so kill stealing is more or less a non issue.

The UI size options are back, so that's a plus. There is a lot of pop up text, and that is a problem for me. More than once I completely missed some notifications, or missed/could not find an event that. Contrast isn't always that good, some things are pretty hard to spot on the map. On a whole the game relies a lot on maps, so that makes life harder for us nearly blind buggers.

Mouse over text does not always show up in the same relative position. I could hover my mouse over some gear, and the info pop would be all the way to one side where I cannot see it.

The dye panel could imho use some work. It would be a lot easier if the panel itself would go from light to dark background and the colours going the other way. That way light colours had a dark background, and vice versa.

What keeps boggling my mind, is why MMO's do not come with built in voice chat. Plenty of shooters have it now, so why not in these games that rely on team work as well?

Guild Wars had a very cool feature, where you could switch between various instances and regions for an outpost semi instantly. This made playing with your friends a lot easier. It also helped with getting a party together, or play with people in another timezone when your region was a bit deadish.

Sadly this feature is now gone. You are stuck on your home server. Right now you can switch, but ArenaNet have already made it clear this will be locked down. Once populations have settled there will be a 1x per week transfer limit. These transfers will also cost a rather absurd amount of gems based on how full the target server is.

There will be a guest system at some point, but that requires having a friend on the target server.  So no switching to find other people for a specific quest, or because your timezone is asleep etc.

A very touted feature are the dynamic events. I've seen a few, so far they are mostly either enemy/wave spawns, NPC escorts, or some boss.  There are a lot of players in the starting areas at the moment, as such I haven't seen the fail state for these events yet.
Succeeding often triggers a follow up event, so far mostly NPC escorts.

Because of the reset frequency these events for me have a limited impact on the world. it's cool the first time, but they reset so often it doesn't really matter after a while.
 While crafting in one outpost the same event triggered 3x in a row. You cannot interact with certain NPCs/crafting stations, while these events go on. (Unless you already have the window open.) It was simply less hassle to go somewhere else, than keep doing the same event.

Now don't get me wrong, they are fun. There is also pretty good humour in this game. It's just that you can only do the same thing so many times before it gets a bit old. (although I will never get bored with hearing some of the skrit.)

I've mentioned gems before, these are the micro transaction currency GW2. You can either use money, or game gold. Right now the exchange rate is only going up. My level 20 character has 34 silver coins, using this all up would get me 101 gems. An extra character slot costs 800 gems, a server transfer will cost 500+ gems based on the wiki: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gem_Store

Note the cost of bank tabs. You start with a very limited amount of bank space. Banking gear for alts isn't very practical unless you keep it on another character, or buy extra bank space.

The black lion keys are another pretty obvious cash sink. You get black lion chests as loot/rewards, but the keys for these are pretty rare drops. The chests themselves sometimes give another key. still, having several of these chests in the bank is a tad annoying. Even more since they use up that limited space.

Is it that important? Nope. The items inside aren't all that vital etc. I do think that they, like most things in the item shop are overpriced right now. There also isn't enough up for sale, but that will no doubt resolve itself over time.

A very nice feature is being able to directly send (most) crafting materials directly into the bank. Just right click on them and pick the "deposit into collectibles" option. Strangely enough the opposite doesn't work. While crafting you must have the materials in that character's inventory.
This causes the opposite problem I had in SWTOR: There I could craft directly from bank, but reverse engineering+gathering filled up my character inventory with materials.

Guild Wars let you map travel to any unlocked outpost. Part 2 uses a waypoint system. Fast travel now costs a gold fee, except for waypoints within the same city.

Death now has a fight to survive mechanic. It has some issues, most because of limited camera controls in your downed state. More than once I could not get the camera facing the correct, or any enemy.

The camera in general can be a bit tricky. Circle strafing some monster with my thief's pistols, I'm constantly fighting to see my target. Jumping puzzles are also often fighting the camera. On that note: I think I fell mostly from camera trouble, and accidental dodges. (The game sees several quick movement adjustments as a double tap, and as such does a dodge roll/jump in that direction.)

Dying also puts a pretty hefty dent in gear durability. One rather devious jumping puzzle in particular had me more or less without any gear by the time I reached the other side. (Even worse was there being a mini boss battle at the end of this jumping puzzle.)

The last point for today is the level scaling. Had it been semi optional that would have been fine. The game now drops you so far (req+1) that you gain almost no benefit from being a higher level. You keep your skills, but any stat boosts from these are also more or less removed.

The scaling also makes going for better gear feel semi pointless. On paper the stats are great. In the game there is no real effect since all your stats are lowered. Now this is probably different while doing things at, or slightly under the area level. Since I try to do everything I'm almost always over level.

Now had this only been for world/area events it could make some sense. Even there only allowing stats 1 level higher is a bit much imho, but ok.


The number of useful consumable items for fights where you are outnumbered, is limited if you aren't a crafter. Even more so when you keep the scale caps in mind.

Getting player help is tricky at the moment between party system bugs, and overflow servers. Half the time I'm on a server with hardly any people that speak English. Now I could try switching to some US server, but I'm already having lag on this euro one.