Guild Wars 2 Impressions - Almost a little step forward for MMO's

Several months ago I got caught up in all the hype surrounding Guild Wars 2 and I decided that I needed to place a preorder and get in on the ground floor.
I have to admit that my excitement for this non-subscription based MMO has since dwindled significantly, but I was still looking forward to jumping into the game this weekend, when the head start launch kicked off.

It's now Tuesday evening, I have probably spent around 10 hours playing GW2 in total and I can't say that I am feeling a massive pull from the game.

Don't get my wrong though, in lots of ways I think that GW2 is a very competent game and I even believe that it is showing a positive innovative way forward in certain areas.
But at the end of the day this is another 3rd person fantasy MMO where you click on skills on your skill bar, run quests for various NPC's that seem incapable of completing even the most basic of tasks without your heroic assistance and generally spend your time doing things that you have done hundreds and thousands of times before in WoW, Rift, SWTOR, Everquest and so on and so forth.

Guild Wars 2 proudly carries on the MMO tradition of completely practical armor designs for female characters...

When I first started playing GW2 the thing I immediately enjoyed was that the combat is much more fast paced than in most MMO's. If you've played Tera Online (which you probably have not, if the sales figures are to be believed) then you have an idea about the GW2 combat system.
Instead of simply standing around and mindlessly clicking your skills until such time as either you or your enemy keels over the combat in GW2 relies much more on you moving around, dodging attacks like a medieval Max Payne. It's a nice change of pace, and together with skills being dependent on cooldown timers rather than a mana/wrath/discipline/etc-meter it creates a faster flow in the games combat.

This also means that the traditional "holy trinity" of MMO's with a dedicated tank, healer and damage dealer class has been mostly gotten rid of. In GW2 every player is expected to do a little of everything and not be narrowly focused on one of these specific roles. Another great move in my opinion.

GW2 tries to be a somewhat story focused MMO, much like Star Wars: The Old Republic, but whereas I found SWTOR's narrative effort to be somewhat interesting but ultimately flawed, the story in GW2 is just straight up bad.
The small cutscenes that move the story forward feel very flat, as does the uninspired voice overs. And the stories themselves completely failed to captivate me, to the point that I could not even tell you what is going on in my current main characters story, I simply don't care and find myself skipping much of the dialog.

Not sure what is going on here, but you can't go wrong with frigging huge spikes sprouting from the ground

I have only dipped my toes a little into the PvP of GW2 but it seems to be a really robust system and I imagine that this will be the biggest pull for GW2 players, much like it was in the original game. It feel like a much more integrated part of the game than in most other MMO's and certainly a lot better put together than the decidedly mediocre efforts of SWTOR.

I think that GW2 is ultimately not really the game for me. I appreciate the efforts it makes to distinguish itself from the greyish nondescript porridge that make up so much of the MMO space, but at the same time it doesn't go nearly far enough to really excite me.
If I'm honest there is probably more appeal in me playing the soon-to-be free-to-play version of SWTOR, since that at least has a story that I find enjoyable, even if the pacing is quite bad.

But if you are looking for a good quality fantasy MMO, and if you don't mind that GW2 works 80-90% like most other MMO's you've played, then I think you can find a lot of entertainment in Guild Wars 2.
It's not going to shake the foundations of the MMO industry, but it's a very qualified subscription-less MMO and that will probably be enough to secure it a decent degree of success.



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