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If you've been reading CT for a while, you know that I got into Guild Wars when it first came out, and played through all of the expansions. I still log on from time to time, but over all, the game had lost its luster and I was ready for Guild Wars 2 to come out already! When they announced that pre-purchasing the game would grant access to all of the beta weekends, plus a three-day head start, I let out a little squee of excitement and placed my order.
Over the past few months, I've played in 3 beta weekends and two mid-week stress tests. Sadly, all of the beta events are gone, but happily the game finally has an official release date of August 28th, so I don't have to wait too much longer for my next fix.
The majority of my beta time was spent playing Einmyria Ogsdottir, a Norn ranger who wielded a bow and had a pet giant lizard. At first I thought my Norn would just be a way to kill time until the Sylvari race was made available for beta play, but I actually came to really enjoy my character, reaching level 20ish before she (and all other characters) were deleted before the last beta weekend. I'll probably recreate her when the game comes out, especially since I have friends who want to play Norns as well, and it will be good to start out in the same area.
GW2 shares a world and some classes with the original GW, but otherwise a lot has changed. The world is no longer entirely instanced. Your own personal storyline quests are instanced, but everything else is public. However, the mechanics of the game foster cooperation rather than competition, so that everyone gains exp and has the chance to get loot from a kill. Resource nodes are also set up in such a way that they show up to each individual player, then disappear for that person after they've been used up, but remain for other players to find.
There's also no more dual-classing. Honestly, I very rarely used any secondary class skills on my GW characters, so I don't miss that mechanic, but people who enjoyed combining classes and developing unusual builds may be disappointed by that change.
Skills also work differently. At any given time, you have up to 5 skills related to the weapon(s) you have equipped, one healing skill, and a number of utility skills (you unlock more as you level up). Granting everyone a healing skill makes it easier to solo the game, although I still found myself dying fairly often due to slow skill recharge times and my own poor gameplay skills. Utility skills serve a variety of purposes, including buffs (self and party), traps, summons and more.
The weapon-based skills are an interesting mechanic and one that I'm not sure how I feel about it. Each type of weapon that you can use has its own skills that unlock as you use it. This means that you can get really awesome using a staff, but then find a magic wand that has better stats - but that you only have one skill for, because you haven't unlocked the rest. Skills unlock the more you use the weapon, but it's hard waiting to unlock them all when you're in a serious combat situation.
This became an even bigger problem when I made my Sylvari in the third beta weekend (more on Sylvari themselves later). I chose to be an elementalist, which meant that I could attune to different elements (starting out with just Fire and Water but eventually unlocking Air and Earth). Switching elements opened up new skills to be unlocked for each weapon! Given more time I probably could have settled down and developed all of those skills, but since I had just one weekend to play her (and it was a weekend busy with other things going on outside the game), I quickly settled into using fire attunement and a staff, because that combination allowed me to cast a meteor swarm spell. Any problem that could not be solved by meteors was not a problem I cared about! My character was especially effective in large group events, where I could hit multiple opponents with meteors and count on my fellow players to help kill all of the monsters that I had just angered. In actual game play, I would probably take the time to develop a separate build focused more on fighting single opponents, and switch between them.
I didn't really have any time to craft as my Sylvari, but Einmyria the Norn spent her fair share of time making things. GW2 allows players to gather all materials, and to choose two crafting disciplines. Since I was playing a ranger, I decided to be a huntsman and a leatherworker, as those two skills allowed me to make my own weapons and armor. Due to my focus on adventuring over crafting (which I usually did right before logging off to use up whatever resources I had gathered), the gear I created was not as good as what I was receiving as loot, but I was able to make myself extra bags, so that was awesome. Through the course of gathering, players can also find gems, which can be socketed into your items as upgrades.
Crafting can be a bit tedious. You have to refine your materials, then use them to build components which can then be combined to make boots, rifles, or whatever else you're creating. You can learn new "recipes" by purchasing them from NPCs, or by throwing random ingredients together in a window until it tells you that this looks like it might generate a new recipe (for instance, putting all of the pieces for a pistol and a festering insignia into the window will let you learn how to make a festering pistol. Combining boot straps and warhorn mouthpieces will net you nothing, because that's silly). Discovering new things is fun, but managing your resources properly to make sure you can craft all of the necessary pieces is a bit fiddly.
While making stuff is not always fun, making characters IS! GW2 offers really strong character customization for each race. Not only can you choose from various body types, hair styles, special markings, etc, but you have all of these sliders for adjusting your face beyond the preset options. Given the large variety of presets I'm not sure why you would really want to fiddle with the length of your nose and depth of your brow, but I guess it would allow you to make a character who looks just like you, or your favorite celebrity, or the hero on the cover of your favorite book.
I ended up making characters in each of the 5 races available, although I only really played my Norn and my Sylvari. I'm not really a fan of the Charr (large cat people), and I didn't have any time to explore the Asura (little guys who like to tinker but are not gnomes). I played my human a little bit, but after playing a Norn whose starting quests involved doing favors for animal spirits, chasing bandits off of human farms felt a little, well, boring. Besides, I played humans all through the original GW (as much as my necromancer looked like a Sluagh from Changeling), why should I play one now?
But the Sylvari were far and above my favorite. When the game comes out I might just fill all of my character slots with Sylvari. They're magical plant people, everyone! And they're SO COOL LOOKING. I gave my Sylvari an avant-garde swoop of leafy hair that grew from a stem at the back of her head, but she also could have had cactus spine hair, or a mushroom hat, or a long leafy ponytail. The Sylvari really have an awesome, alien botanical look about them, and their starting area is all magical and forested, and the main city has a floating plant elevator. Look, I like dryads, ok? I am going to geek the hell out about how freaking cool it is to play a plant faerie. A plant faerie who can summon meteors, by the way. It doesn't get much more awesome than that.
Ok, one more girly geek-out... I really love the new dye system. You could dye your armor in the original GW. Each armor piece could have one color applied to it, and the colors were made by combining bottles of dye that you found as loot or purchased from NPCs or players. This meant keeping a bunch of bottles of dye in your vault and hoping that you would have enough of your favorite color(s) when you purchased a new set of armor. I would just like to take this moment to also point out that in 6 years of playing GW, I never received a single bottle of black dye as a loot drop, which is a little ridiculous.
In GW2, armor pieces have three areas that can be dyed different colors, and at character creation you can choose from a nice basic color palette to customize your armor. As you find and equip new armor, it takes on the palette of your old armor, so you don't look all mismatched. And throughout the game, you can find new dye colors as loot! Double-clicking once identifies the color in the dye bottle. Double-clicking again unlocks it, consuming the bottle. Once a dye color is unlocked, you can use it on your armor whenever you want, even if you're out in the wilderness. Whenever I unlocked a new dye, I used the next lull in combat to completely re-color my armor to test it out. I am pretty sure that these dyes can be traded to other players instead of unlocking them, if you get a duplicate or a color you don't like, or if you find a rare color and would rather have the money.
This is getting pretty long now, so I guess I should wrap it up with a bullet list of other things I like and dislike which I can get into more detail about in my review of the game when it actually comes out.
Other awesome things:
Gaining EXP for exploring, harvesting resources, reviving downed players, NPCs, and pets.
Personal storyline quests provide a story and a goal.
Events happen all the time all over the place, so there's always something to do.
Sylvari are awesome!
You can swim, and get different weapons and skills underwater.
Graphics are beautiful.
Game runs well on my computer, which is almost three years old and has not been upgraded since its initial construction.
Not awesome things:
Overflow queue. If an area has lots of people, you can get pushed off into overflow, but your party mates might not, and there's nothing you can do to get together and adventure.
Personal storyline quests sometimes feel like a single-player game treating you like the one special person who has stuff happening to them, even though every single player is also some variant of "the chosen one."
The number one not awesome thing: playing all weekend, having a great time, then waking up on Monday thinking to yourself "Oh man, I cannot wait to log in and play after work tonight!" only to remember that the beta weekend is over and you cannot, in fact, log in and play.
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