This weekend was the second beta weekend event, so, since I had Friday off this week, I, of course, spent some time playing (and subsequently didn’t blog on Friday). This weekend, I managed to get my own account up, and was able to play with both Jessa and Sally. Thoughts, impressions, and some pictures of my new character (Drakken Crane) follow.

Drakken Crane

Drakken Cane is a human thief I put together to explore a bit more of the world. I’m actively avoiding playing a human mesmer in the beta, because I plan on Kae Listre being my main after launch, where I can explore the game in full.

Yes, he looks like a member of a boy band. Yes, that was intentional.

One of the things that I have been enjoying about the thief is the pistol and dagger setups. This gives a bit of variety in the weapon skills that I didn’t really get with the elementalist. I’m not sure if that is due to it not being implemented yet, or if I just didn’t see the scepter/dagger option, but it’s been fun to play with so far.

Gameplay

This time around, I spent more time focusing on my personal story, and doing questing stuff (compared to last time when I spent more time exploring and figuring out how to play). In general, I really liked the personal story, and actually managed to complete an entire explorable area this time around. This was a neat trick, and reminded me a lot of vanquishing from Guild Wars 1.

From what I could tell, they didn’t change the price of armor repairs or teleporting via waypoints (my main gripe with the first beta weekend), but they did seem to change the money balance a bit because I didn’t have any trouble with that this time around (though that could also be due to skill). On the other hand, I found myself more irritated by the skill limitations and tiers than I would have initially expected. First, you’re very limited in the number of skills that you can put on your bar (3 + 1 healing), and you don’t get your second skill slot until ~level 7. So, for the early part of the game, you really only get to choose 1 skill for your bar. When combined with tiers, this becomes even more problematic because you end up having to choose five skills in one tier before you can choose a single skill in the second tier leaving you with potentially wasted skill points (because you can’t equip those skills anyway) in a part of the game where skill points are a luxury that you don’t really want to waste.

The underwater combat was something that I tried out this time around as well (something I didn’t do during the last weekend event). Unfortunately, I found this to be more than a bit clunky – the controls just didn’t do it for me. It’s not that big of a deal, really, I just hope that I can mostly avoid it if I want to.

Story

As I mentioned above, I really enjoyed the personal story, but there was one thing in particular that didn’t really flow for me: Everything was urgent, but the levels were spread out. Specifically, to get through my entire storyline, the recommended levels range from level 1 – 19. So, between each quest, there’s quite a bit of level grinding (typically done nowhere near where the quest is taking place). However, the personal story quests all talk about how urgent they are… …For me, it made the whole urgency bit fall flat, and reduced my enjoyment of the story. I found that, at least in a couple of places, I was able to do the story quests at slightly below the recommended level, but it was very touch and go.

Multiplayer

Since I had my own account this time around, I was able to spend some time in multiplayer with Jessa and Sally. This was generally a positive experience, with a couple of caveats. First, I liked how parties worked, because they were persistent across sessions. Once you partied with someone, you got to keep them in your party until you chose to leave, regardless of where everyone was and if someone had restarted. I also liked how instanced material worked – everyone in your party in the same area that the instance starts from has the option to follow you into your instance. It was quick, painless, and made it very easy to take part in personal stories of other people. The main gripe I have is that multiplayer isn’t really interesting beyond observation. In Guild Wars 1, you had to stick with your party, otherwise you would die. In Guild Wars 2, this is very much not the case, even to the extent that in explorable areas, an unorganized party was less worth it than striking off on your own and doing whatever came along. In an instance, this was less true, but only because the area was much smaller, so there was less space to wander about. Still, the non-stars of the show (so to speak), had absolutely nothing to do or say in the personal stories except kill stuff when it came up. This was a little disappointing, since there was really no incentive to join another person’s personal story except to help them or hang out (which is good enough in most cases, but there’s no feeling of inclusion by the NPCs). In fact, in one mission, an NPC explicitly said there were two attempted murders (the main character and a side character) with no mention of the other PCs working on the mission with the main character.

Here’s a quick shot of our group:

Overall, I am still enjoying the game, and I’m interested to see how some of these things shake out.