Saturday, September 8, 2012

Guild Wars 2 impressions part 2

After, according to Guild Wars 2, I've been playing for 39 hours over 8 days. That's quite a bit of time when you think about it, nearly two days. I've reached rank 2 in PvP, I've 100%ed two zones, and 17% of the world. And yet, I'm only level 31, going on 32.

Story aside, I feel like I've honestly been doing the same thing in every zone. You could make the argument that that's what happens in every MMO, but let me explain. In WoW, as you level up, you get gear, you get new abilities, etc. In Guild Wars 2, as you level, you get gear, and every now and then you save up enough for a new ability.

Where in a game like WoW, or SW:TOR, you have a set of skills based on your class that you'll earn as you level, Guild Wars 2 gives you skills, based on your class, according to which weapon/weapons you have equipped. While this seems clever at first, you don't earn anything past the original skills for weapons, and it can become a bit bland to continue using the same ones over and over and over.

I did take the time to try the PvP. As for the, I believe it's called "sPvP", and I've yet to figure out why, it's fun, frantic, and fast paced. Your goal in the ones I've played in is to capture as many of the three points as you can, and hold them slowly increasing your team's score. You also get points for killing other players, and in some of the fighting grounds, killing the other team's "Lord".

For the most part, PvP seems really balanced. This is in part to the fact that once you enter the PvP area, you are boosted to level 80, and given an entire set of PvP gear, which makes the playing field much more even. Something that just feels weird, though, is the way teams are balanced. If multiple people leave one team, the teams will be balanced by shifting some players around. This is done quite often in other multiplayer, but it still feels odd, and it's not pleasant to go from the winning team to the losing team.

As for the World versus World...It felt very zergish. While there is some skill to it, I'm sure, it seemed that the larger mob of people generally won the day. I didn't do much in it, so it's really hard to talk about it, but gear aside, any bonuses given by it are really only good for WvW.(AN EDIT HAS APPEARED! Here it is: As it would appear, I was wrong in this regard, as it would appear the bonuses given by WvW actually do apply to everyone, which is honestly a nice touch. I will keep the rest of this how it was before, instead of redoing this entire section, as I find that would break flow) Which really isn't something to criticize. In a game like WoW, you raid to earn gear to raid more. That's how it works.

And on the story front, things seemed to have taken a turn for the generic. For awhile the voice acting was actually really good, and the Charr voices, especially my character, seemed to deliver well enough, but then, once I hit a big choice where SPOILERS! you're supposed to choose between three factions to join for the rest of your leveling experience, things got much worse. Every Norn's voice actor seems intent on giving a horrible preformance, humans are hit and miss, and Asura and Sylvari are just bland. Charr seem to be the most consistant, and even their voices can be poor, or just plain flat.

The cutscenes are bland as well, two characters stand staring at each other while they speak and fling their arms around. When a different character starts speaking, one of the two vanish to be replaced by the new speaker. It's very....Dull. The story itself was actually getting to be very interesting, but now after  I picked my organization, it's not moving very quickly.

Something that I've constantly been thinking about, is that if you took out the item shop, and the free to play model, and shoved in a subscription fee, would people still be going gaga over this? I honestly don't think so. Honestly there's been very few times that the game has shown its F2P teeth, but when it did, I grew very annoyed.

For instance you start out with five slots to put bags in. Your sixth slot is locked until you pay for it, for about $5 in gems, or about a gold of in-game currency. If I had never spent a piece of money, by this point I've probably earned about a gold. Income has increased, but of course with that spending increases slightly, and leveling my cooking takes a bunch of that. My second time seeing it, was when I tried to buy more space for my bank.

You start out with 30 slots for your bank. That's honestly a decent amount, until you realise that your bank is account wide. That's not 30 slots for one character, that's 30 slots for all of them. To buy more space, you need to spend 600 of the game's premium currency, or about $7.50 in real money, and considering you can't buy them in that amount, you'll end up having to buy the $10 pack of 800 gems. Or you can spend about 3 gold for the gems.

In the end, is Guild Wars 2 still fun? Yes. I would say I've gotten my $60 worth. But it is not without its flaws that I've not seen anyone mention, so perhaps I'm the only one that sees them? Or perhaps the only one who really cares.

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