It’s been a while since I’ve written a one-week review. It’s also been a while since I’ve gotten into playing games since I finished my Masters. I started and finished Limbo back in June and the only thing I’ve played since then is Mass Effect and I didn’t get very far before Guild Wars 2 (GW2) was released. GW2 is the last game on my list of long-awaited games. Two of the games I have been waiting years for were released this year and I don’t see myself investing a lot of time in any other MMOs (or games for a while).

The rest of this post will be similar to a one-week review given I’m out of the game until my box arrives, but I’m also aiming to open up to writing a series of GW2 posts.

Character Creation
Let me first start off by lamenting that, like Diablo 3, I didn’t get into the closed beta. I’m realizing my machine is dated and doesn’t need to be tested. My patience in waiting to get the collector’s edition from Amazon paid off in late July when they finally made it available and I snatched it up without hesitation. Good thing too since it’s sold out, except by 3rd party sellers and way overpriced. I made it into the last beta weekend event, but I was still not in the mood for games and spent a good amount of time with the character creation rather than actual play. It was looking like my MMO days were over.

It was a surprise to find myself a month later strategically thinking what five of eight professions I wanted to play the most (I’ll sink in the cash or in-game money to get the additional character slots so I can have one of each profession – I’m waiting to get my money’s worth before adding more cash given I don’t have an income). What was more surprising was I didn’t know what class or race I even wanted to play first. After RIFT, I thought I would play engineer as I really enjoyed the saboteur tree, but I ended up with the more traditional thief, following in the footsteps of WoW’s rogue.

The plus of spending so much time in the character creation screen is realizing that my original first choice of playing a Sylvari (race) got knocked off the list, in particular because I’m not a big fan of their models. I really like the concept art for the Sylvari race, but the in-game models, not so much. I thought I would play Norn because of their druidic shapeshifting ability (I played a druid in Diablo 2) which was unfortunately missing in GW1 Eye of the North. In the end it was the constant, almost boring, human race and what’s more, it was their LMFAO shuffle dance emote that won me over. Not to mention, I can write a story (if I wanted) bridging the two games as GW1 only had the human race.

So, the first character I created is a female human thief, Khamae Nachtwynde, a direct descendant of Banshee Avatar, my ritualist main from GW1. I’m aiming to make Khamae have an unpredictable personality, but she started off as charming. She also started with a hood (subterfuge), but the Hall of Monuments (HoM) heirloom item is a bandana (anonymity). Interestingly, when I applied the Heritage Bandana to my starting hood, the model combined the two but as soon as I mapped out, it removed the hood. Pity, it looked kinda cool.

(Pleasant visual bug when combining the starter hood with Heritage Bandana)

Lore-wise, despite Banshee’s high status in Cantha, Khamae grew up as a street rat in Tyria. Khamae was a restless orphan who eventually set off on her own to try to find her parents. She got sidetracked and ended up leading a band of thieves, but regained her original path and set foot outside Divinity’s Reach. Growing up in the streets made Khamae very familiar with Grenth and her skillset reflects this god of death.

Guild Wars 2 and Its Influences
GW2 is an interesting mash-up of multiple games, including it’s own. It borrows architecturally from its predecessor, using instances for reach zone area rather than an entire continent. I imagine this makes less stress on servers and considerably easier to swap the hardware as necessary. The main difference between the two games is instead of town/city instances housing hundreds of players and explorable instances housing 1-12 pre-grouped players, each zone area houses hundreds of players, giving it the traditional MMO feel that players are familiar with. Additionally, way points are used instead of mounts. Way points are very similar to the map travel in GW1 but the player is not limited to towns, outposts, or missions, but multiple locations on the map.

(Loading screen when entering a zone displaying (left to right) quest givers, way points, points of interest, skill challenges, and vistas)

Each zone has several things for the player to do and the overall design encourages players to explore the zone. Points of interest are places that players can easily overlook while traversing the map, but for the explorers like me, it helps encourage them to really explore the tiny villages or hidden caves. There are no back-and-forth quests of kill x rats, collect y barrels, but rather a bar that the player fills up by doing any variety of activities that pleases him. Don’t feel like killing rats? Go pick weeds instead. Granted, the choices are still the same as those found in MMOs, but the concept of doing whatever you want to do with dynamic events sometimes overlapping, make satisfying various quest givers easy and quick while having fun at the same time.

And if players really need a challenge, there are skill challenges that can be a simple pick-up-an-item-and-consume-it or commune with nature at a certain spot. Other challenges are group challenges against champions or elite monsters. It’s hard to figure out what you’ll get sometimes and that makes it fun.

Back to my earlier mention of GW2 as a mash-up of multiple games. Players familiar with Assassin’s Creed will recognize the mechanic of the vista points. Some of these points need a little creativity and skill in reaching, others are more simple. But once a vista point is reached, players get a real-time cinematic pan of the surrounding area.

(Khamae standing on a familiar-looking wooden ledge to get a good view of the land)

There are jumping puzzles, but I only encountered one and entirely by accident. I was questing in the Sylvari beginner zone and started jumping around a tree, not realizing it was one of the many jumping puzzles hidden in the game. The one thing I wish this game had is a grab and climb option. Many times I kept thinking I was playing Altair or Ezio, but the bright, colorful graphics of GW2 was a quick reminder that my character lacked particular life-saving skills. Instead, it is more like the traditional platformers of the late 80s, early 90s (think Mario), but in 3D. Grab and climb would be much more helpful, especially when GW2’s camera has a tendency to make me nauseated. (I spent one whole day feeling sick because I was trying to explore all of Divinity’s Reach and the camera is punishing in those cramped rooms.)

As I hinted above with the lore of Khamae, during character creation there are a handful of questions to answer that determine the initial path of the character. GW2 borrows from Bioware’s Mass Effect and Dragon Age series where decisions a player makes affects how the quests will line up. As GW2 is MMO-based and not so linear as with GW1, there’s a main storyline that the player can follow [if he chooses? – I haven’t quite determined if it’s necessary].

I finished the street rat series of quests and am in the middle of the lost parents series. The one thing I am not liking is the difficulty level of these quests for the thief class, especially when soloing. My thief is proving to be way too squishy and part of it may be my inability to play correctly, but I have seen posts from others who are having similar problems. Notably, the last quest of the street rat series had me stuck until I could recruit a friend to help out. We even wiped once, then we both died right after taking down the second-to-last boss! (We were both above the recommended level of the quest – I’ll discuss level scaling in another post.) What bothers me more is the NPCs who parade around as guards (Seraph, Shining Blade) just watch you die. However, I am enjoying how the story is panning out since it connects very nicely.

Khamae’s parents ended up being valuable assets to the human kingdom. Given Banshee’s heroic influence 250 years ago, it’s not hard to see her descendents continuing to be a part of keeping the order.

Sound and Music
I’m still playing the game with its soundtrack. I have found it nostalgic listening to pre-Ascalon music in the two human zones I’ve been to so far. And what is it about making a strong intro (2-3 chords or notes) on the log in/character screen? I’ll find myself humming it as the game loads up the screen, not realizing what it is, and then hearing it echo back to me.

I still haven’t figured out all of the various sound effects. Every so often, I’ll hear a pleasant chime and eventually realize someone is speaking in the main chat window (I created a custom chat window that blocks out most of public chat as people are quite chatty in the map channel and whispers get lost). I thought I figured out the sound when harvesting tools break, but it just hasn’t settled in yet. Some of these sound effect clips aren’t noticeable (the chime is sometimes too soft) or hard to figure out so that is why I have been taking more time than usual acclimating myself to the important sounds.

Visuals
The range of GW2 to be able to play on old and new hardware is as impressive as it was with GW1. I’m able to play it using the integrated graphics card on my dad’s HP machine, but of course the quality is not so great. I have really enjoyed playing it on my machine because the detail of the armor and the environment makes for a visually engaging experience. My one regret is my graphics card is not quite able to render objects further away in all of its glory. There have been a few vista points that look great close-up, but when viewing the cinematic, it removes a lot of the detail as it zooms out quite far. A friend says GW2 is more CPU intensive than GPU, so my graphics card may be just fine, but as my CPU (first gen Intel quad core) is 4 years old, it’s time to update.

(Vista point of waterfalls in Kessex Hills, close-up it is much more impressive)

Game Play
Rather than go into the mechanics of game play as I’m still figuring it out myself, I’ll talk a little more broadly about the grouping system. Since GW2 is still in its early days of release, it is flooded with players. GW2 employs overflow servers to accommodate the large amount of players rather than force them to wait in a queue. This is a great idea. Recall that each instance is its own zone, so players may be on their home world server while in one zone, but moved to overflow in another. It doesn’t receive as much attention as it should because I think people don’t quite realize the function of each zone being its own instance and instead view the world as a whole. Of course, there are little pauses for the loading screen when moving from zone to zone or even way point to way point within the same zone, but these are trivial compared to the larger experience.

The last two days of my grace period, I played a bit with some friends/guildies. We discovered that meeting each other in a zone was not as smooth as it could be and is one of the kinks that they will have to figure out. I have a feeling that as the initial surge of players eventually subside, these small kinks may simply go overlooked. Although, ArenaNet has been posting updates on fixing the more obvious kinks like not being able to see a party member’s portrait or location on the map. After some fiddling, we were able to meet up in the same zone and proceed with the personal quests.

An additional note on the personal quest is, as I have been leading (and my buddy has been following me into the instance), all of the choices I make are entirely mine and advance my progress. My buddy told me that he was asked if he wanted to keep the choices I made or simply play catch up afterward. We are both human players, so I imagine other races will not have these options when grouped.

I have yet to go into a dungeon. I believe the first dungeon players encounter is when they reach 30. I am not sure if the personal quest line will send players into it. I’m excited to find out as my goal before losing access was to hit 25, but ended up at 27 from running around. Last I checked, I was at 23 hours of gameplay when I was level 22. Someone in chat mentioned it takes about an hour of casual play to level up and that’s pretty close, especially if you factor in the time I spent in Hall of Monuments taking screenshots.

Review
-5 character slots initially (more can be purchased using gems)
-Each zone is its own instance
-References to Bioware’s story-driven games (Mass Effect, Dragon Age), Assassin’s Creed, platformers like Mario
-Visually beautiful and detailed
-Unclear on various sound effect cues
-Grouping isn’t perfect
-About an hour of casual play spent per level

Other notes
I have used up all five of my character slots, being paranoid about players claiming the names I’d eventually want. I abandoned my WoW naming scheme of using “kamaitachi” as my base, instead keeping with variants of “Khamai” (as it’s my vent name) and trying to make it sound less like “Cammy” (as vent’s text-to-speech pronounces it) and more how it’s intended to sound. “Nachtwynde” is the surname of my various mule alts in GW1. I didn’t want to use “Avatar” as I always saw Banshee as a medium for channeling spirits from the Mists, which this generation of characters is not (thief != ritualist). I also used the RP guide to GW2 names so you will see some with last names and some without. Without further ado…

-Mahkk – Asura necromancer, skull face, Dignity, College of Synergetics, created a Transatmospheric Converter, mentored by Blipp
-Khameh Nachtwynde – Charr engineer, universal multi-tool, Ferocity, Ash Legion, spars with Dinky, sired by a Loyal Soldier
-Nachtwynde – Sylvari ranger, fern hound pet, Charm, saw the Green Knight in a dream, believes she must act and act with wisdom, awakened during cycle of the night
-Kham Nachtwynde – Norn warrior, wears no helm, Ferocity, strength to defeat ancient foes, lost an heirloom at a moot in Hoelbrak, saw the Bear spirit in a vision

And if you are interested in keeping up with the visuals, my personal GW2 screenshot album is available, including screenshots of all 5 of my characters.