Beta Test: Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2: First Impressions

Part 2

From here... Go anywhere.

Alright, so most people who aren't me saw that a mile away; its the most used action-movie tool for advancing the plot - the Hero Guy defies all odds by winning against certain doom, only to be blown up and knocked unconscious. 

My character revives in the inn, and I'm greeted with a short cut-scene explaining how I "barely made it out alive," and that I'm now the Hero of Newbievi... I mean Shaemoor.  I feel all warm and gooey at the compliments sprayed haphazardly about my face.  I'd include a screenshot but... that'd require an adult rating for this blog.

Ahh, the Hero of Shaemoor.  I just ran into a couple hundred of you...  By the way, you have something on your chin.

Trapjack, using his incredibly non-douchebaggy voice, thanks the commoner and I moved him out of the inn.  The world's now come alive; there's light music in the background, chattering ambient sounds, townies walking around like they own the place...  A smorgasbord of color and light and action-adventuriness.

A short walk down the path and I run into a scout, who opened my map up and showed me several townsfolk in need of some serious hero-ing.  My quest log updated, indicating that the main story for my character hinged on providing kindly service to the local yokels.

Meh, hell with that noise.  Let's kill people.

A note about OPTIONS

This game has a wonderful system dedicated to allowing players to advance in any conceivable way they want.  You can spend hours and hours exploring the vast lands of Tyria, visiting POIs (Points of Interest) marked on your map and getting experience on-the-go.  Or you can quest along your main story-line and participate in world events that happen nearby as you quest.  You can grind on sets of mobs, loot their gear and salvage the parts for crafting (which will also grant experience).

Or, if you're like me, you'll fixate on PvP (player vs player) content.  Specifically, WvWvW, which pits three servers against one another in an all out war, spanning four HUGE zones.  If you've ever played Dark Age of Camelot, there are a lot of similarities.  I'll cover that in a little bit.

There's another style of PvP that's more in line with your traditional MMOs like World of Warcraft (WoW)'s battlegrounds and Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR)'s war zones.  However, unlike those two MMOs, upon entering the PvP area you are automatically adjusted to level 80 (max level) and given a default set of gear.  You're also able to customize your skills to suit your needs, and this will allow you to get a good look at what abilities you want to spend your skill points on as you level (and you will level in PvP content).

Back to Business: The Mists

So I decided to put adventuring on the back burner because, really, I was dying to see the WvW content.  I craved it.  I needed it in my life like I needed water to drink and air to breathe.  I've waited damn near a decade for a game to introduce game mechanics similar to, or exactly like, Dark Age of Camelot(DAoC), the hallmark of PvP games in my opinion.

So I looked up how to get to the correct areas, and after browsing a handy little tutorial online about it, I headed into The Mists, the PvP hub for getting just about anywhere you want to be.  I walked into a portal marked "The Eternal Battlegrounds" as I was instructed to do so, and promptly arrived at a small fort in the northern end of the map.

The WvWvW Map, zoomed out to %20ish percent

I tucked my rifle under my arms, blew a kiss to the nearest female-looking guard and strolled out to find some newbie flesh to perforate with bullets.  It didn't take very long to find the hot spots; on the mini-map, a pair of crossed swords appeared to guide me toward the fray.  As I drew closer, other symbols appeared; one that looked like a trebuchet, another that looked like a cow of some sort, and another that kind of looked like a tower symbol.

Here's the thing - in PvP, it's good to have options.  It's so good, in fact, that a couple of additional options in your repertoire might mean that you survive long enough to beat your opponents, or save an ally or two.  Having not spent any time training my skills or collecting any worldly experience, I charged heedlessly toward my enemies; a gaggle of five green-team newbies engaged in combat with three newbies from my side (red team).  

And I munched on dirt sandwiches in about twenty seconds flat.  Yummy.

"How many'd I get?" Trapjack asked.  "You got the fence, some corn and the cow," said helpful ally guy.

I went down, hard, and was in the middle of my downed state when I saw one of the enemies move up to me and, raising his hands high in the air, performed a coup de grace that immediately ruined my day.  As I sat there, lifelessly admiring the dead cow next to me, the battle continued between my comrades and the vile green team.  Reinforcement red team members came to their rescue and routed the green team, and I got to see the guy who offed me get his own taste of bitter defeat.

A couple of the red teammates came over and, kneeling over my body, sought to revive me.  In GW2, not even death is permanent; I was back on my feet in moments, though I had suffered some gear durability loss and had some death fatigue (a small debuff of decreased maximum hitpoints that wears off in a couple of minutes).  I spent the rest of my hour-long session engaging in feverish battles involving canons, mortars, trebuchets, rams and pots of boiling oil.  There were throngs of bad guys to kill, area-of-effect spells lobbed willy nilly, people getting knocked off of cliffs and keep walls.  

Good, old fashioned, no-nonsense siege warfare at it's finest.

Moments before they all walked into my rifle turret, TF2 style.

The Other Stuff

I went on to play four different classes and two races this play period and will try many more combinations in the next beta weekend, which hasn't been announced.  There's a lot more stuff that I did do that I haven't touched on in this write-up, such as crafting, leveling in general, dynamic events and guild stuff.  But honestly, I wasn't in it this time to try out all of that.  I was there this weekend to blow off some steam and knock a few heads around, and I was thoroughly satisfied.  I played WvWvW until the servers shut down at 3:00AM this morning.  My face looks like oatmeal splattered on a wall, and I'm a little queasy from the ride, but damn-it, this was worth the money for a game that I've got no idea when it's coming out.