Guild Wars 2 Review
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Guild Wars 2 has rightfully received a lot of attention in the months since its launch due to the way that it has challened MMO design conceits that have been in use since World of Warcraft first debuted. With the usual "text box with a quest accept button" model of delivering content shaken up in favor of dynamic events that take place across the game world as you explore, it's definitely something new in the MMO world. But like every gimmick, the additions do eventually wear thin, and ultimately Guild Wars 2 is still just another MMORPG - though a pretty good one all the same.
Story & Setting
Guild Wars 2 takes place in the same world of Tyria that the first game also took place in. Tyria is a very generic fantasy world, but it has a pretty wide amount of variety to it, featuring everything from ancient forests, to expansive deserts, to technological metropolises, to wide-open battle-plains. The game is populated by about a dozen major races, half of which are playable: asura, charr, norn, human and sylvari. These races fit roughly into archetypes familiar to almost any RPG fan, and especially fans of MMOs - norns are Vikings, sylvari are elves, charr are a beast race of cats, asura are goblins, and humans are, well, just plain old humans. Sure, there are aesthetic differences, but let's be honest, there's not much new here outside of new coats of paint on the same old stuff.
The storyline of Guild Wars 2 is equally generic. 250 years after the original game, elder dragons have awoken from deep beneath Tyria and have summoned an undead army that poses a threat to the entire world. Your destiny is to unite the five playable races into Destiny's Edge, a dispanded group of protectors of Tyria, and eventually defeat the dragon leader Zhaitan. The premise isn't exactly the most compelling, but it's not surprising for an MMO to play it safe in its story or game world.
Where Guild Wars 2 sets itself apart from other MMOs in this respect is the way that it presents its story. Depending on your racial background, you will enter into the world of Tyria in very different ways - for instance, as a sylvari, you will literally be birthed by your Mother Tree and have your destiny thrust upon you in a dream, while as a norn your story begins with an alpine hunting contest. This is further compounded by a series of choices referred to as "my story" that you'll make during the character creation stage of the game, and a number of sub-factions during your quest that you'll choose from, basically mages, fighters or thieves guilds. These decisions will all change the particular quests that you receive throughout the game.
Similar to Star Wars: The Old Republic, major story missions are presented using voice-acted sequences. These bits are not extensively animated and you don't get any dialogue options during them, but they give the game a lot of personality and help to sell what is ultimately a pretty uninteresting story through humor and light-hearted drama. From time to time you will also get the chance to choose which story missions you take on, which can often play fairly differently from one another. All of this goes a long way to making the campaign feel more personal and replayable.
Dynamic Quests & Events
The dynamic quest and event system in Guild Wars 2 is by far its most interesting feature, and the reason I dedicate a whole section of this review to it is because it's simply inseperable from the game. It's the biggest draw to it, and at least for me, defines almost everything about its gameplay. It goes a long way to make Guild Wars 2 stand out from most other MMOs, which is something that's crucial for success in what has become a pretty tired genre.
The easiest way to describe it is that, rather than receiving quests from NPCs with exclamation points above their heads, the game world simply has stuff going on in it at all times. Maybe there's an ongoing battle between two factions, with each of them taking and losing ground in an endless cycle. Maybe odd jobs around a town need doing. Maybe a hunting party is trying to make the world safer. Every region of the game world has at least 15-20 of these, and it's nearly impossible to avoid them. If you go without finding content too long, or pass by a certain location with an ongoing event, the game is friendly enough to even send an NPC to spread the word and take you to it.
One other point of interest is that these dynamic quests will have multiple stages, and different outcomes can trigger different quests. For example, perhaps in one quest you'll need to protect a scientist as he tries to summon magical energies into a golem... only for the golem to then go berzerk and start trashing his lab. Succeed in destroying the golem in time to save the lab, and you'll get a big reward. Fail, and you might have a follow-up quest to collect replacement parts to fix the lab. These are small details, but they reward you even if you don't successfully complete every single quest.
Guild Wars 2, next to other MMOs, feels vibrant and alive because of this. Whereas doing group quests in most MMOs often requires you to actively go out of your way, in Guild Wars 2, people congregate around these event hotspots. As most of your rewards and experience come from participating in these quests (and you receive more the more you participate), they naturally encourage cooperation, especially because many are balanced with larger groups of players in mind. This is the first MMO I've played where even complete strangers have been helpful and friendly more often than not - even if it's for ultimately selfish reasons.
Character System & Combat
Unfortunately, while Guild Wars 2 has a well-presesnted story and vibrant game world, the character system isn't quite as successful. The game has eight character classes: guardian, warrior, engineer, ranger, thief, elementalist, mesmer and necromancer. These should be pretty self-explanatory, as they map to very typical archetypes. All of the classes have fairly unique skills as well as bonus abilities. For example, as a necromancer, I was able to enter Death Shroud mode, which allowed me to use the special Life Force resource to fuel special attacks, while as a Ranger, I was able to summon a pet to help me in battle. These gimmicks are fun, but don't fundamentally change the way you play and all classes can solo most parts of the game as they have a very wide palette of abilities.
Leveling in Guild Wars 2 isn't quite the same as in some other MMOs. Each time you level up, you gain both a skill point and a trait point. Skill points are used to unlock, well, your active skills, which aren't presented in a traditional skill tree format, but instead divided into level-restricted tiers. Traits are your passive benefits, and you gain bigger "capstone" bonuses the more you invest into a particular one. Health, damage and other attributes scale automatically as you increase in level.
Most of the customization comes from your equipment, which is primarily responsible for increasing your attributes, but also determines the weapon skills you have available. Different weapon types give different skills which must be unlocked, but you'll manage to get them all pretty quickly. These skills tend to be honed for certain play-styles - for instance, my necromancer used daggers for a while due to their higher direct damage and life-stealing, but later I switched to staves due to their area-of-effect and support capabilities. This makes weapon choice more than just cosmetic, which is definitely appreciated when so many RPGs these days reduce weapon types to a single DPS number. The arguable downside is that there is little permanence in character building, though it could be said that it's a good thing considering how much time you'll need to spend with it.
The problem with Guild Wars 2, with respect to its character system, is that it lacks a good sense of progression. Part of this is to blame on the design of the skill system. Because of the way skills are divided into tiers and all skills on a given tier have equal cost, it's pretty easy to get the skills you want to use very early on, and by even around level 45 I had been using pretty much the exact same skills for several weeks with no problems, or modifications required later on - I switched out more due to boredom than necessity. The same issue applies with respect to the weapon skills, as once you've fully unlocked them after an hour or so, there is basically no progression on gear except for attribute increases as the game goes on.
Another controversial choice is that Guild Wars 2 scales your character in relation to the environment. This means that if you are beyond a certain range in an area, you will be leveled down to match it (or in the case of PvP areas, leveled up to 80). This has both upsides and downsides in my opinion. The good is that you can go into low-level zones as a higher-level character and still enjoy the content - you won't steamaroll everything, and the experience and other rewards you'll get will still be worthwhile. This gives exploring the whole game world far more incentive.
On the other hand, though, this can significantly diminish the sense of progression and, to a degree, really limit the parts of the game world you can explore. I often found that I simply couldn't visit parts of the game world because the enemies would clobber me in seconds, but after leveling up a few times, and making no changes to my character or equipment, those same enemies posed no threat whatsoever. The game world does open up once you get a bit more experience under your belt, but it rarely feels like you did something right with respect to your character or strategy - it's a very artificial sort of gating. Unfortunately, some areas also tend to be oversized and lack any real gameplay other than hunting down collectables - if that's your thing, it's nice, but I wish there was better use of some areas, especially the larger cities.
Combat in the game is very standard MMO stuff built in the World of Warcraft model, with lots of constant skill-spamming, waiting on cooldowns and hotkey-mashing. However, Guild Wars 2 is a good deal faster-paced than a lot of other MMOs, and the addition of dodge moves (limited by a recharging stamina bar) makes it a bit more dynamic than some. Unfortunately, the limited skill load-out size and small number of weapon skills means that combat grows repetitive very early into the game. There is also very little strategy required even in big group battles, as most boss enemies are only "hard" because they have extremely bloated health bars. Most boss fights can take five or ten minutes, yet you'll be doing nothing of interest in them. Considering how much combat you will be doing throughout the game, it simply isn't good enough to remain compelling beyond the early stages.
PvP, Crafting & Economy
Guild Wars 2 also has a pretty obvious PvP focus based on name alone, although it's not emphasized quite as much as you might think. PvP is divided into a couple different systems which have some overlap with one another but offer slightly different experiences.
The first, standard PvP play, offers conquest mode revolving around capturing and holding points. This is fairly basic, but entertaining, and like similar team-based shooters there is a certain strategy in selecting your skill load-out and picking which points to defend or capture. The rewards are relatively limited, however - successes gain you glory points, which is a curreny used to unlock entirely cosmetic loot. There are only four maps, with new ones promised to be added in patches, and while they are fun, I grew tired of them fairly quickly.
World vs. World is the game's more ambitious, and far more interesting mode. Rather than pure PvP, it's a blend of PvP and PvE activities which also allow you to gain experience and rewards for use in regular PvE play, which immediately makes it more compelling. World vs. World puts hundreds of players from three different servers in battle across a number of maps simultaneously, and score is increased every 15 minutes based on the number of points held.
What makes this interesting is that while it's competitive, you don't have to actively be involved in PvP fighting to contribute. For example, many locations are guarded by NPC enemies to defeat, and the maps all have factions of neutral NPCs that can be swayed to your side by performing a particular mini-quest. There are also supply routes and convoys that need defending, siege weapons that need building, and so on. Interestingly, success in World vs. World actually grants passive bonuses to your entire server, such as better results when crafting items or more gold rewarded for completing quests, so there's another reason to take part beyond the battle itself.
Crafting is fairly standard as far as MMOs go. There are eight possible crafting professions, and you can only have two active on a character at any given time. Crafting materials tend to be harvested in the environment, dropped by enemies, and received from completing quests, and no matter what your discipline, you will have plenty of supplies. My only real complaint with crafting is that, aside from being simply menu-based and relatively non-interactive, the things you can craft are rarely significantly better than anything you can buy in a given store. Still, money can be hard to come by, even at high levels, and there are a decent number of other gold sinks available, so it can be a worthwhile alternative if you want to put the time into it.
Last, the game also features the Black Lion Trading Company, which is basically an auction house and cash shop accessible from any point in the game world. Due to auto-balancing features in the economy, prices are very strictly relegated based on supply and demand. Because some items get better prices in NPC shops, it's also not always the best idea to put things up for sale to other players. Though there is a cash shop, very few items available in it directly affect gameplay, and are mostly cosmetics or XP boosts, so I have no real complaints - it's there if you want it and easy to ignore if you don't.
Presentation
Guild Wars 2 is a beautiful game. Although it's not the most technically advanced title around, it features enough bells and whistles and a very appealing, watercolor-like art style. Environments clearly aren't just built for gameplay function, but with a rich, lush art style as well. Color palettes are bright and vibrant, and levels themselves are varied, featuring plenty of different types of terrain and cities to explore, some more adventurous than others. Characters and equipment are not so inspired, but somehow the game makes the varied races fit together consistently, which is commendable considering it features everything from tiny goblin-like creatures all the way to massive armor-clad warrior-cats. Spell effects are very flashy and visible, which is good when playing on your own, but in large battles it often becomes impossible to tell what's going on. All in all it's fair to say Guild Wars 2 has an art style of its own, without looking especially derivative of World of Warcraft or similar titles.
The sound and music in the game are equally effective, but lack the same sense of personality. Voice acting is competent, but the number of actors is relatively low, so you'll probably grow tired of the same 10-odd voices after a while. Weapon and spell sound effects are all suitably punchy-sounding and distinctive from one another, and environmental ambiance is rich and detailed, making exploring various locations that much more enjoyable. The game's soundtrack, composed by Jeremy Soule, is also quite nice, but at the same time it feels like a list of Elder Scrolls B-sides, with some pieces sounding almost identical to themes from that series. I would have appreciated a soundtrack that was a bit more original and unique to the game, but what's here is perfectly effective even if it is uncannily similar to that certain other popular RPG series.
On a technical side, I had few problems with Guild Wars 2. In my hundred-ish hours of playing over the course of about two months leading up to this review, I experienced a handful of crashes, and once or twice I got suddenly logged out from the game for reasons I couldn't determine. Playing as a necromancer, I found my minions wouldn't attack enemies from time to time, which was puzzling. There are a decent number of customization options related to interface and controls, which is great, although I noticed that some fonts didn't display properly when using the "larger" interface size and there was some ugly stretching of some elements. Overall, it's a very polished package considering the size of the game and the fact that it is still relatively new for an MMO.
Closing Thoughts
All the hundreds of other little things to discuss aside, is Guild Wars 2 fun? From someone who has primarily a single-player background in RPGs, the answer is definitely yes. I don't think you need to be heavily into the multiplayer side of things to enjoy the game, and in fact, it can serve as an effective bridge for those who prefer single-player but want to check out what all this MMO stuff is cracked up to be. The dynamic events are a genuinely innovative addition to the game and they make most other MMOs feel dead and lifeless in comparison.
I do think the game has a lot of room for improvement, though. The fact of the matter is that those dynamic events and the interesting World vs. World system only go so far. Ultimately you still have a pretty formulaic MMO underneath those gimmicks, and even before the novelty wears off, and you've exhausted the story missions, you may find yourself getting frustrated with the repetition of the combat or the emptiness of certain parts of the game world.
Even with flaws, I can recommend Guild Wars 2, especially because it's not a subscription-based game - without monthly fees, you can always come back to the game in a few months if you get tired of it. Guild Wars 2 is the first MMO in quite some time that I've really enjoyed more than a week or two, and is a breath of fresh air for a genre that's long been too obsessed with finding ways to extend the grind. It might not keep you busy for years on end, but it's a good first step on the road to an MMO free from the worst of the genre's trappings.
