pre-ordered GW2 the other day somewhat reluctantly, the last 5 mmos i've paid full price on - Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, Aion, TERA, & The Secret World, I collectively played less than WoW in a slow week (which I haven't played since TBC)... maybe i'm just over MMOs lol, it's hard to say, but I'm pretty sure those games just weren't much fun... here's to GW2, it's truly my last hope!
Every person is different. I won't try to persuade you of anything, but I disliked all of those MMOs too (havent played TSW tho) and many others too.
To me Guild Wars 2 is one of the best online games ever made. For one specific reason;
It encourages cooperative play. It encourages social play. It encourages exploration and discovery.
This might not seem like a big deal, but if you look at most MMOs in the last 9-10 years (since SWG and EVE) there has been nothing that this.
This is why Skyrim was such a wakeup call for MMO gamers. Because a single player game had become a better virtual world than any MMO. The MMO genre had sold itself out in favor of the EQ model of doing the themepark way. Every player going through the same path. from zone to zone, doing prefixed quests like they would do in a linear single player game. It had become more about filling boxes, doing random tasks and just getting stuff done, like a factory worker who wastes his life producing and producing until he can't take it anymore.
In GW2 you literally have to just go out and explore. There is no set path or right way to do it.
If you want to play with your spouse, your friends, your family, people who you met in the game, you can!! You really can.
Gone are the levelling obstructions. Gone are the barriers that make us able to play together. You don't have to split from people due to different types of servers, different race and class restrictions over factions, or something else. You can even join multiple guilds at once.
Other players cant take anything for you. They cant take your resources, your objectives, your kills, your loot, your fun. they can only add to it. You are all one big group, and the more people hang out, the bigger the battles get. In yesterdays stress test, we did a simple event with bandits trying to blow up a bridge. We had over 40 players at once, which made the game spawn countless enemies, which turned the game into a epic large scale battle like something out of lord of the rings.
It is quite simply, the most fun I've had in an online RPG... well ever.
Guild Wars 1 was a flawed masterpiece. It was unforgiving and only worthwhile to a select few (even though it has sold over 7 million copies and is a resounding success). Ultimately GW1 was an act of defiance. It came from the mind of the original World of Warcraft game director who left the project to make something innovative.
Guild Wars 2 eases up on the defiance part, but its still different. It's not as coarse, but it also kills many of the problems with GW1. What you are left with is a very meaningful experience. Like Minecraft, Left 4 Dead and Battlefield 1942, it's like art in the online scape. This one. Not because of hype, or graphics or such things, but simply because we can have fun together is the reason why it's so great.
My best advice. The best thing I can possible say is this. Allow yourself to discover. Games like World of Warcraft have ruined peoples ability to go out and explore. This is bad. Guild Wars 2 will reward you for even trying. If you go off in the distant mountains to fight trolls, and you participate in an even which you are not strong enough to win, amazingly, it's still not time wasted. Because the way dynamic events work, is that you get rewarded for trying. which means, even if you do not defeat the trolls, you can still win a gold medal, coin and most importantly see the next step of the event. if the trolls win, they will further their agenda. they will move to the next step. perhaps they will begin the assault to capture the maidens of the nearby village. this is the next event and you can then participate in that. maybe more players will be there, and then you might win. then the event gets pushed back, and you do the event you lost before when you first encountered the trolls. then you win it, and you move the event in the other direction.
events are mutli branched pendulum swinging triggered objectives that are at their most when you just go out and explore.
if you go out and explore in wow you will quickly have a bad time. you will go off the beaten path and instantly be killed by a higher level mob. your own skill will mean little in the pure numbers crunching. it will be time wasted resulting in death, corpse run and armor repair. this kills the intiative to want to explore the world differently.
in gw2 you can win by being a dedicated player. thats a big difference. This is such a fun game. I'm in awe of it. Just dont ruin this game by being a completionist who thinks the right way is to wiki everything. then you ruin it for yourself. then your turning it into world of warcraft. levelling is not the factor. the game doesnt begin at lvl 80 (max!). one click and your a lvl 80 in the pvp lobby. you have no reason to not just play the game at your own leisure. dont worry about missing stuff. you will get scaled down appropriately when you return to older zones. this makes the early game competitive an worthwhile all throughout. which kills the ghost-town mentality once everyone is high level. just explore. dont go around doing the hearts. just explore. if you see a mountain or some weird fortress in the distance go explore it. the game wont always tell you to go there. but do it.
you get so many skill challenges, vistas, achievements, titles, coin, hearts, events, map coverage, resources and so on for doing so. its the wrong way to go about it if you just talk to the scout npc and do the 5 hearts on the map and then wonder what to do next.
also remember that crafting rewards xp. you could go all the way to lvl 80 from just crafting. and boy is crafting good. what an amazing surprise. the discovery system is amazing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFU_b4e2bxU
and you can also get xp from just doing structured pvp in the pvp lobby. you get boosted to level 80, but you still get xp for the real world. so if your level 4 and you fight in pvp as a lvl 80, you get xp towards your level 4. its wonderful.
However that is good advice about going straight to guildwars2.com and just using your serial number there to create an account or download the client. The Best Buy PC App is on the lame side...
