First of all I want to say that Guild Wars 2 will not be the MMO for everyone. It will not kill World of Warcraft, it is a different kind of MMO. It is an MMO where you can truly choose what you want to do that night. If you want to assualt a fort in WvW, you can do that, if you want to spend all night there, you can do that to. If all you want to do is a few dynamic events thats fine, or you can grind levels on your character for hours. The sPvP is very fast paced, and fun, WvW required little to no investment to be beneficial to your server, and most dynamic events range from a few minutes to about 10 to complete. The idea that I got from the game is that it is a very casual experience that you can take hardcore if you want to. You can enjoy it in bite sized chunks, or you can spend 5 hours on it. This is the way that every aspect of the game felt. PvP matches felt like they took 10-15 minutes (although I wasn't really paying attention) which was great because it allowed you to only play one match if you wanted to, or you could choose to go on and grind rank.
I loved the fast paced nature of the game, I loved that I could do anything I wanted with few restrictions. I loved that WvW felt like a very viable way of leveling my character. I loved that sPvP felt like what MMO PvP should feel like (and that everyone was on equal footing. More on that in a bit though) The game overall had a very fast pacing to it, and it was great. It allowed you to feel like you were accomplishing something.
Now heres why it won't kill WoW. Guild Wars 2 is a skill based game. "The best gear" will not be hard to come by. The game also features no Holy Trinity (tank, dps, healer) and features a very... different kind of endgame from WoW. Arena.net praises all of these things as good things, and for the right kind of person they are. But some people still like WoW's gameplay. Some people like Tank, Healer, DPS. Some people love Raiding. And most of all some people like getting better gear. Not just gear that looks better. For those people, WoW will remain to be the best game on the market. Guild Wars 2 also features no subscription fees though. A lot of people, myself included will be playing both WoW and Guild Wars, because of this. I can't afford two subs, but I have plenty of time to play two MMO's. At least for a few months I will be playing both games.
Now, I did have a few issues with the game. Only 5 characters kind of bothers me, compared to World of Warcraft where I can have 50. I ran out of characters fast in the beta, and I won't even have enough slots to make one of each class without buying more slots. I also didn't like that names are game wide instead of server wide (although this is made up for by a high character count in names, and the ability to have spaces). I also think that the game isn't very clear on what the main form of content is right away. You are supposed to mainly do Dynamic Events, but at first hearts appear to be the main form of content, so it leads people to feel like there isn't enough content to stay current level with the next heart. Even though you should be looking for dynamic events.
Enough of that though. I just wanted to share some thoughts after actually playing the game, and to be clear, I do expect the game to do well. It might beat WoW, it might not. What I do know is that the game is a blast to play, and I will log many many hours into the world of Tyria.
No comments:
Post a Comment