Lately, I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2, after having given up on The Secret World, which I kept hoping would be much better than it turned out to be.
The interesting thing about Guild Wars 2 is that it is essentially free to play, AFTER you buy the original game. So, $60 later, I was allowed to enter the game. This isn’t a complaint, but it’s a reality of how the game is designed. Fortunately, there are no $15/month charges for playing the game, so let’s just say that it makes things a lot easier.
The game is quite polished and fun. There are a couple of problems here and there, but no more than when I’ve played any other “recently” released game. The other day, I was stuck on a mission because a raging bull didn’t reset, but they quickly took care of the problem on the next maintenance cycle, and it was fixed. So, they’re looking at the problems that come along, and so far I haven’t been too concerned that they’re just going to abandon the game.
As for the game itself, it’s another one of those sword and sorcery kinds of games with a bit of today’s technology involved. One of my characters carries a rifle and creates all sorts of 19th century kinds of turrets and traps. Another character is a necromancer, which definitely hits the sorcery part of the mix. But both interact well in the environment, so it doesn’t matter what kind of character you create; they all seem to exist well within the storyline.
And the storyline is actually pretty decent. It has that same Tabula Rasa feel of “you’re the only hope, and this is your story” type of writing within the game. Unlike World of Warcraft, it’s not just a theme park of fedex missions or “go kill 30 of that monster you’ve been killing for the last 45 levels”. There’s a lot of diversity to the game, including crafting and exploration. My biggest learning curve is figuring out all of the different things to do in the game, because it is a huge world and it has so many choices of things you can do.
One of the nice things is that it scales down your character if you out level an area, so that you can interact with the environment as a level 5 (if it’s a level 5 area) instead of the level 80 you might be. Unfortunately, it doesn’t scale up, so you can’t run into a level 80 area if you’re a level 5. You’d die quite quickly.
Anyway, so far I’m finding it an interesting diversion. Not sure I’ll be with it for years to come, but if they work on the end game and work on making sure there are always things to do, I can see myself staying with it for awhile.