First up let me give you a bit of a background. I primarily play First Person Shooters. My first serious game was Unreal Tournament. I still remember the intro music. Played that to death on my awesome store bought dell computer with a rockin' 56k modem. Epic. I've played everything from Socom, to Battlefield 2/3, Warhawk, Bad Company 1/2, Counter-Strike: Source, DoD, TF2, L4D/2, Mafia, Payday: The Heist, Portal. The list is massive. What I like most about these is the fact that you can sit down, pick up a game and stop playing whenever you want to.
I do also dabble in MMO's on occasion. The problem when I played WoW after a few years was the fact that I had to spend hours raiding to get gear, new expansion, more hours raiding, etc. After a while that got old. I haven't played in about 3 years.
So to scratch my itch I grabbed Swtor hoping it would be a great place to spend time with my friends. At first it was pretty good. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. We raided somewhat often but not enough that I felt like it was a second job, that was nice. I also PvP'd ALOT. It wasn't bad being a healing Bounty Hunter. I felt like I was contributing to the team. Then came 1.2. That pretty much did it in for me. It felt like too little too late.
As of late I was on the fence about Guild Wars 2. I had heard the hype surrounding it but for some reason it didn't really interest me. My first foray into the original Guild Wars went pretty badly. I started a character, got in game, walked outside the gate and got immediately hammered by some weird ass worms in the ground. I tried to do my quests but everything was so different. I felt it lacked any direction at all. I gave up after a few days. A few months later I tried to come back, lost my password and tried to retrieve it and ran into a mess of problems effectively killing my desire to ever touch the series again...
I didn't want to be tricked again into pre-ordering another failed game. I'd been burned too many times. After reading and doing research, crawling GW2 fan-site forums, and watching youtube videos I bit the bullet. I decided to pre-order to get into the first BWE weekend.
GOOD GOD people. World vs. World (really 3 servers vs each other) was fantastic. I could pvp, level and get gear? And I can do this all at the same time... from level 2? What nonsense is this? I literally spend $30 bucks on energy drinks and 5 hour energy shots and played till I couldn't keep my eyes open. It seems they've done everything right in world PvP. For those competitive PvPers out there structured PVP is comprised of 5v5 in a smaller map. Currently it's a conquest mode where you fight over flags, each flag giving points over time. This mode really shines and it shows.
Unfortunately I didn't PvE much. I didn't want to spoil my main story. The great part about PvE however are dynamic events. They can start from a mob running up to you, or from discovering hearts on the map. The group mechanic affects everyone in the area. People helping you out with a mob actually benefits both parts, and loot is split. Reviving players/npcs gives exp. These dynamic events range from small to map changing events depending on whether players are successful or not. Some events span a whole zone. The encourages players to get together, without having to form groups. There we plenty of occasions where I was alone and all of the sudden a group of players roll in and help assist with whatever it was I was doing. It was a welcome change from trying to tag a mob first to ensure I get the kill.
There's so much more to cover. I didn't touch crafting at all. From what I've read bags can be made for specific purposes if you choose. I would comment more but I'm woefully uneducated about the system.
There were things I wish were a bit clearer. To begin with the introduction tutorial could use more work. I also had a hard time discovering how to begin WvW pvp once I got through the tutorial. The maps don't have icons on the world map. Everything seems to have to be discovered and after that you have to remember where things are for the most part. Local chat speaks to everyone in the zone regardless of teams, and no one really paid attention to team chat. It was a bit buggy during the beta weekend. There was no say chat either which I thought was odd. Sometimes I'd want to thank a guy for helping me out. I didn't want to shout "Hey thanks!" to everyone in the whole zone. Another thing I noticed was the lack of an inspect of any characters. I would have loved to see some of the sweet gear that I saw and possibly work towards it myself.
In essence I'm excited for this game beyond belief. Small issues aside it was a solid beta and I couldn't get enough. From the brief time I had this weekend I have to say this will be a game that I will be playing for years to come.
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