This past weekend brought many of us something that we had been anxiously awaiting for quite some time, a chance to play what is ramping up to be one of the most anticipated MMO releases of all time. Guild Wars 2 takes a unique approach to many aspects of the MMO genre, and beckons players into a world full of lore and beauty.
It is difficult to not begin with the visual art style the developers have chosen. The world of Tyria is presented as if painted onto a canvas with beautiful strokes from the finest brush. The forests, mountains, and cities in the background are given life with an artistic watercolor styling, leaving them distant and unobtrusive, yet alive and impossible to miss. When other game take an “artistic” visual approach, it often ends up felling cartoonish and animated. GW2 takes an “artistic” visual approach and transports you into a world that is actually a work of art.
The cities, towns, and wildernesses you visit are all wonderfully rendered, as are the inhabitants of these areas. Tyria is populated with a wide variety of characters that each feel unique and alive as they roam the streets completing whatever daily tasks they have to that day. The character models are finely detailed, and movement animations are smooth and realistic. From the smallest creature, to the largest monster, you can see scales, hair, and battle scars that show the attention to detail the developers have spent precious time creating.
Your own character will not be a plain compilation of polygons that you can count from across the room either. The character creator is quite robust, and you can alter your appearance with options that range from body type, hair styles, and tattoos, to body mass, facial detail sliders, and your characters background, attitude, and beliefs. Character creation is more than deciding how your avatar will appear in-game, it is also creating the beginning of your story, a story that you will then live out as you play the game.
From the opening cinematic, GW2 is presented as an interactive story. You adventure through the world, exploring new areas, and encountering new people and creatures. As you journey through the lands, you come upon areas which contain objectives to complete, such as helping a farmer water his crops, or stopping a band of rampaging centaurs from destroying the water supply. There are static quest objectives all around the map that grant you experience and rewards upon completion, as well as dynamic world events that randomly appear in an area. Either type of world quest objective can be completed alone, but any players in the same area automatically assist each other towards reaching the completion goals. You do not have to drop in and out of groups, and you will not have to fight other players for mob spawns or random drops. The world questing is designed so that co-operation is simple, unobtrusive, and absolutely beneficial. Guild Wars 2 does not overburden you with a bloated quest log of tasks you must complete by travelling to distant locations. You find tasks to complete AS you explore the world. You will receive quests that ask you to report to someone at another location, but you are primarily creating the narrative of your story by journeying through the world, and discovering the adventures that wait for you.
In order to complete your objectives, you will, of course, be using your skills and abilities. Guild Wars 2 has introduced a combat system that is both simple to use, and elaborate enough to keep players interested. Each class has a number of weapons from which they can choose, and wielding different types of weapons opens up the use of different abilities. If you want to run around as a Warrior, for example, wielding a giant two-handed hammer will give you 5 activatable abilities that inflict damage using the tremendous power of the large blunt object you are swinging, or wielding a one handed sword will provide 3 abilities to slice and dice your opponents, while your off hand slot can be equipped with a war horn, shield, or another sword, all of which provide 2 more usable abilities depending on which item you currently have equipped. You learn how to use the abilities each weapon provides over a short period of time by simply using the abilities currently available to you. This system provides each class with a large variety of useful skills, allowing them to take part in any capacity that is needed, without having to have more abilities keybound at one time than you could ever possibly use. After level 7 you can have a second set of weapons at the ready, and swich between two weapon sets for high versatility on the fly, and while out of combat you can rearrange which sets are equipped, and prepare yourself for a different combat experience.
Along with your weapons skills, your character will also be able to choose profession skills based on their class. These are abilities unique to each class, providing healing abilities, buffs, and powerful Elite skills. You can complete tasks to acquire skill points which unlock and upgrade new abilities that can be slotted onto your action bar. Here again, there are a large number of skills available, but only a handful can be equipped at once. While many may feel limited by the pre-set number of abilities that can be on the action bar at once, I believe that there are more than enough slots to create viable skill compositions, and that planning what weapons and skills will be available for a fight adds another level of strategy to the game, and keeps it from becoming a button mashing mess that overshadows the game itself, and the story that it is telling.
Story and storytelling have become buzzwords recently in the MMO community, and there are those who believe that the era of quest text is gone, and that voice acted dialogue is a must for story to be present. While those are the ramblings of folks who are too impatient to truly enjoy their games, I will have to say that there is something to be said for voice-acted quest dialogue, and it does draw you in deeper to the story. Guild Wars 2 features hours of voice-acted dialouge from characters who become real to you as you progress through the story and get to know those involved in your journey. These voiced scenes are presented with characters appearing before an artistic background, rather than in the game world, and when I first heard about this choice, I was not very optimistic about it. I thought that it would bring me out of the game world, killing my immersion. To my surprise, that was not the case, and the scenes did an excellent job of telling the story without distraction, or loss of immersion. There is still a “Work in Progress” logo on the voice-acted cut-scenes, but from what I’ve seen thus far, I have every confidence that the final product will be excellent.
The overall experience from this past weekend was by far the most positive and interesting MMO experience I have had in years, and I feel confident that once Guild Wars 2 launches, I will finally have a new MMO to permanently call home for years to come. My experiences so far have left me wishing that I had played the original Guild Wars so that i would be more familiar with the great depth of lore in the GW2 universe that I am unaware of, but at the same time, I am excited by the new world I have to explore, and I look forward to discovering the history and mysteries that await me. The next-generation of MMO has arrived, and it is called Guild Wars 2.
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