I’m sure there will be a lot of blogs like this this week, but I wanted to give a quick look at my first impressions of Guild Wars 2. This weekend was the first open beta event, and Jessa and I had one account between us, so I played a Charr Elementalist (Dalgren Crow) and she played a Norn Ranger (Carolina Lee). A couple of pictures and my main likes and dislikes below.
First, some pictures. This is a couple of pictures of Dalgren Crow on the Plains of Ashford, the low-level area of the Charr.
One point of fact – the hat I’m waring is either really bizarre or broken. It’s supposed to be a cowl, but I think it’s upside down. Or just weird.
It’s worth noting that I’ve only played the game for a weekend, so the below list really is just first impressions. I’ll definitely be playing the game when it comes out and I plan to spend some time with everything, but here are some things that I noticed while trying it out.
The World
Generally speaking, I liked the way the world came together. There were a lot of little pieces that I really enjoyed. First, the world events were really quite a treat. I never felt like there was nothing to do, and actually enjoyed re-doing some of the group events when I saw them come up (sometimes three or four times). As I was doing them, though, I really started to wonder about the sharded structure of the game – would this be more fun with everyone in the game, rather than just my shard? Or would it be more fun with just my friends, a la Guild Wars 1 where everything was instanced? I’m not sure, though both of those things did come up in my mind, so it’s something I want to think about more in the future.
At first, the “heart” quests rubbed me the wrong way – weren’t these just “gather 20 lizard gullet” quests? It felt like an intentional grind, and it bugged me. After a few though, and finding the letters I got from various people for helping them, it didn’t bug me quite so much. Instead, it drove me out toward more challenging spots, and generally kept my wealth up and action content high. Once I got to thinking about it more, these quests reminded me of the battlegrounds from Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest – less a grind, and more a consistent way to get experience points and rewards. A nice way to say, “You’ve finished this area, you’re prepared, move on.”
Mechanics
Most of the mechanics were pretty cool – weapon skill leveling, exploration, and utility slots – these were much neater than I expected. I was initially very wary of having five slots dedicated to weapon, one slot being forced to be a healing skill, and only being able to choose the other four, but this arrangement didn’t work too bad. I especially enjoyed leveling up my weapons, as this was a neat way to spend time and earning a reasonable reward.
There were, however, two things that really frustrated me: broken armor and waypoints. First, every time you died, your armor took damage, and eventually broke. It cost money to fix, and if it was completely broken it disappeared from your model. This seemed an unnecessary money sink (especially early in the game), and was a constant problem for me (more on that later). At one point, very early on, my character (at level 3) was very nearly broken because I couldn’t fix my armor (no money), and most of what I was up against could one-shot kill me because all my armor was broken. This sort of thing really shouldn’t happen, and, on the whole, seemed a pointless setback. Second, waypoints: it costs money to use them. This, again, seemed really unnecessary in the early game. I often found myself in a quandary: I’d died and my armor needed repair before I could be useful again. I could warp back to town to fix it, but if I did, I wouldn’t have enough money to fix my armor. So, I had to walk. But since the world is incredibly huge, this took quite a while. Then, once my armor was fixed, I had to walk back. Over the course of the weekend, I spent more time running back and forth between the armor repairer and the content than I really care to admit. Again, at least early game, this seemed a punishment for new players when money was already too tight.
Personal Story
I didn’t get very far in my personal story, and I’m not sure if it was solely because I wasn’t very good, or if things were just harder than I expected. For example, I spent most of my personal story stuck on the quest A Spy for a Spy (page may not be there yet). This quest was rated as level 4 or 5, and I got slaughtered (one-shot kill by the first enemy) time and again until I was level 11 (and even through my invulnerability and increased armor he nearly killed me in one shot). Either the quest scaled to my level (I hope not!), or the personal storylines are designed to be on the high end of difficulty. I’ve been led to believe that it’s possible to bring other people into your personal story instance, which might have helped, so I’ll be keeping an eye on that.
From the observation that there may be hundreds of different personal stories, based on choices at character creation and forking possibilities, I’m a little worried that it might be hard to bring people into a personal storyline. Going forward, I’m interested in how this works out – Jessa and I have always enjoyed playing Guild Wars together for the shared experience. It seems like if we are both pursuing different quest lines, it would make this less easy, so I am tentatively excited to see how the multiplayer personal storyline stuff works out.
In any event – Color me excited about the release in June, Guild Wars 2 drops about the time my EVE subscription expires, so I’ll doubtlessly be playing that a bit.