dat GW2

Oh man, where to start.

So if you don’t know the acronym in the title of this blog or did not look at tags perhaps you might not notice that this blog is about the much anticipated MMORPG from arenanet in 2012:

Guild Wars 2 (referred to as gw2 in the rest of this blog) doesn’t try to be super original, but takes concepts that work, make the foundations solid, and then add their own twist on things.

Apologies in advance for my screenshots, I was running it on my thinkpad, since I currently don’t have access to my desktop unfortunately.

Last weekend, between April 27th and April 29th, was the first Open Beta event for gw2 – this meant that anyone that prepurchased the game had access, and wasn’t bound by a non-disclosure agreement, so all the people that were in the event could go out and publicize it more, getting them more $.

Needless to say I prepurchased and was able to get into the beta, and I have to say, I have not played a game where every free moment I had I was basically going upstairs, opening the gw2 folder and playing the game. It’s that addicting.

Fundamentally gw2 is very standard – there’s 5 races, 8 classes, 2 sexes, so you take your pick between 80 different character types. Only 3 were available during the beta.

We have the Charr

which are giant humanoids, the Norn

statuesque vikings, and of course are run-of-the-mill humans.

The other two are the Asura (sorta like dwarves but more house-elf (harry potter) looking) and Sylvari (elves).

The 8 classes are fairly typical, ranging from warrior to engineers to necromancers. I went with a female human elementalist (classic mage).

Your character also starts with 1 of 3 main story lines, altered slightly depending on your background, virtues, etc. You get boons by choosing specific gods, etc. It’s very much like Kingdoms of Amalur: reckoning if any of you played that game.

As soon as you enter the game you’re essentially thrown into a village that’s under attack by centaurs. Centaurs are a large part of the game. For the first 20 or so levels there will be centaurs everywhere. Centaurs are not cute. They use ballistas and cannons and shoot at you. They don’t like humans. Humans (seraphs) don’t like them either. Perpetual war ensues.

When you meet up and get your first quest you are thrown into your first “world” event. Now there’s about a dozen or so of these worlds, (I’ll explain WvWvW later). You choose a home world and you STAY in this home world — to get out means you need to purchase a transfer (1800 gems, exact currency exchange for gems unknown using real money, although you can purchase gems using coins, the in-game currency).

Now, back to events — events are basically instant quests that pop up at several locations. These usually revolve around killing things, or gathering materials. Either you defend an objective from x amount of waves of centaurs, or protect a target from point a to b, or collect apples to bake pies, or free prisoners from bandit slave traders, there’s always an event going on somewhere. Once you approach the event area, everything you do will earn you participation points, and once an event finishes, you are awarded seals (for use at special shops at various locations).

There also aren’t side-quests, they’re considered “hearts” instead. Essentially if you do something in a region that’s next to a heart – kill monsters, catch fish, etc. you help the citizens of the region and you gain their favor. Once full you’ll have completed a portion of the map and you’ll be able to access said special shop where you can use your seals.

The main story-line is of course dependent on the path you chose in the character creation screen. I won’t reveal any of it ’cause it’s spoilers.

As any class, you have a huge amount of skills. The skills change as you switch types of weapons, and you have to keep killing stuff to unlock more skills.

As an elementalist, you have 4 different types of magic. Earth, air, fire, water, and as you switch weapons you get different skills for each weapon combination.

For example, staff only grants a skill tree, scepter and dagger, dagger and dagger, dagger and this bell shaped thing that I forgot the name of, or scepter and the bell.

You can also use skill points to purchase seals, usually on the 6 key, which depends on the god/goddess you chose, or your character class. i.e. for thieves it’s by default stealth like skills, for elementalists it could be heal, or buffs, etc.

You can also purchase other types of skills, again, depending on your class.

You also have traits, which are general buffs that your character gets as they level up. You essentially focus on a type of trait – either power, regeneration, armor, you get the drill. Once you invest enough trait points you unlock passive buffs.

There’s a lot of stuff to kill in this game.
From deer:

to bandits

If you notice I was cheating on an event — no one was nearby, I was on top of the cliff and the 1200 range on my air spells was just enough for me the break the barrier without the bandits even getting aggro on me. 😀

to armored fish under the sea

When you’re in swim mode you use a different weapon and thus different skill sets again.

of course there’s also stuff like mining, crafting, cooking, runescape stuff

but it’s a lot more fun and less time consuming, you gather stuff as you travel.

Emotes are also a really cool part of the game, NPCs wave at you, other people can sit or you can sleep at some really random places:

I wish I took more screenshots but oh well.

WvWvW

So now WvWvW or world pvp is essentially a Player versus Player game mode where players from three different servers, or worlds, battle in the Mists for rewards. Worlds in WvW are matched up based on their ranking, so that high-ranked worlds will battle other high-ranked worlds, and low-ranked worlds will battle other low-ranked worlds. This ensures that every world has a fair chance of winning matches despite differing levels of player participation or skill.

I feel like this is really cool – there’s actual competition, unlike in games like MapleStory where you just go to the world where your friends are. If you and a friend play on different worlds, you can simply get a guest pass and play with your friend. You won’t be able to do World PvP but you’ll be able to adventure and chat with them – no server change needed.

Anyway, those are my first impressions. I was really happy that I prepurchased and now I can’t wait for the full release!

Diablo 3 on May 15th folks.