Joe Robinson finally gets some hands-on time with one of this year's most anticipated MMO's
29 March 2012 | By Joe Robinson
It’s a very special sense of satisfaction that you get when, after countless demonstrations and limited demos, you finally just get to sit down and play a game for an extended period of time – in this instance I got to grips with Guild Wars 2, one of this year’s highly anticipated releases and a game that’s in danger of succumbing to its own hype if it doesn’t hurry up, as many have done in the past. For the record, since this was only a weekend and time was limited, this preview is based on experiences as a Human Engineer class. Time permitting we’ll cover some of the other races and classes at a later date.
As a class the Engineer is both interesting and fiddly – basically a mixture between a ranged and support class, the Engineer relies on turrets and tools in order to support battle, and is not really suited for mêlée. These tools can range from anything to med kits, wrenches, bombs, grenades… and there’s a wide variety of turret types you can also lay down. This makes the class rather fiddly to wield though, as using a tool replaces your armed weapon skills with another skill set specific to that tool, and you’ll often find yourself switching from one tool to the next, so perhaps hotkeys are essential. Still, once you start to get the hang of it this class is an extremely fun class to play, especially if you can get friends to group with so you can play to your strengths more. Plus – at the higher levels you get a mortar, I mean, who needs anything else when you have one of those?
The first thing that you really notice about Guild Wars 2 is just how epic everything seems, and we don’t mean ‘epic’ in the sense that it’s really good, we mean ‘epic’ in the sense of ‘grand’. Even the log-in screen, with its dramatic music in the background and the flashy ‘2’ in the form of a dragon does its best to make you think you can take on the world. It really does sum-up the attitude of the game in general – this is no run-of-the-mill MMO, this is Guild Wars 2, bitches, and it means business. Even choosing your character as an air of the dramatic about it, and the tense and action filled opening gameplay segment really makes this game start with a bang.
Something which we did not expect, which is a direct result to how ArenaNet handle questing, is that progression through the world isn’t as good. You’ll often find yourself wondering into a zone that’s slightly too high for you. Further to that, there’s very little incentive to explore anymore… say what you want about the traditional quest format, a lot of the time those quests were there to get you to go places, and then do stuff in those places. In Guild Wars 2 though? If there isn’t an on the map telling you that there’ something there of interest to you, then more likely than not there’s really no reason to go there, unless you want to grind any mobs you find there for XP, but then there’s plenty of that all over the place so again there’d be no incentive to grind there for grinding’s sake.
We can’t be sure if this is related to just the human start area being a bit poor in general however - talking to people who’ve tried other races, apparently their start areas are more interesting, but that’s something we’ll have to look into in the next beta session. That’s not to say the starter area is all bad – your first 15 levels take from the village of Queensdale, just outside of Kryta, all the way around the surrounding forest, swamps, and outlying settlements where you need to deal with a variety of tasks, problems and crises. Then of course there’s your personal story, which will generally start of in Kryta and the immediate area, and then send you further afield. It’s the dynamic content that’s the most fun though, and the diversity here, even at the start, is pretty impressive. From defending water pipes (or defending engineers to fix the pipes should they be broken), to rescuing hostages, to defending a monastery from a demon invasion (man, that one was hard), you never really know what’s going to happen next as you travel through.
Sadly, we ran out of time before we could test out the PvP thoroughly – whenever we did jump in there was hardly anyone around, and even when we did find a party there was terrible lag and we got thrown out. A shame, but to be expected at this early phase if they don’t have the infrastructure in place yet. Still, we had a look around, and we’re impressed by what we’ve seen – Guild Wars 2 is one of the few MMO’s that really makes use of interacting with the environment, and the same holds true for PvP – The ‘Eternal Battlegrounds’ is one huge sprawling map complete with outposts, keeps, supply camps and other controllable areas (there’s also three smaller zones connected to the large one via portal, for beginners), and each ‘world’ (three servers are pitted against each other) must fight over these controllable locations. You can use supply points to buy siege engines and trebuchets, to knock down gates, you can find and intercept convoys that try to resupply a base…
The wait for Guild Wars 2 has been long, but we dare say it was worth it. The new stance ArenaNet is taking on several traditional MMO gameplay conventions is going to be jarring for many, as it was for us, but we imagine this is something that you simply need to get used to as opposed to something that needs changing (although a little more sign-posting wouldn’t hurt). Still, what we’ve played so far has not disappointed, and we can’t wait to try out the other races and classes. Guild Wars 2 is coming to PC sometime this year, although we’d be happy to bet on somewhere around the summer.
Most Anticipated Feature: Seeing a fully populated PvP session with no lag – should be epic.
As a class the Engineer is both interesting and fiddly – basically a mixture between a ranged and support class, the Engineer relies on turrets and tools in order to support battle, and is not really suited for mêlée. These tools can range from anything to med kits, wrenches, bombs, grenades… and there’s a wide variety of turret types you can also lay down. This makes the class rather fiddly to wield though, as using a tool replaces your armed weapon skills with another skill set specific to that tool, and you’ll often find yourself switching from one tool to the next, so perhaps hotkeys are essential. Still, once you start to get the hang of it this class is an extremely fun class to play, especially if you can get friends to group with so you can play to your strengths more. Plus – at the higher levels you get a mortar, I mean, who needs anything else when you have one of those?
 |
The first thing that you really notice about Guild Wars 2 is just how epic everything seems, and we don’t mean ‘epic’ in the sense that it’s really good, we mean ‘epic’ in the sense of ‘grand’. Even the log-in screen, with its dramatic music in the background and the flashy ‘2’ in the form of a dragon does its best to make you think you can take on the world. It really does sum-up the attitude of the game in general – this is no run-of-the-mill MMO, this is Guild Wars 2, bitches, and it means business. Even choosing your character as an air of the dramatic about it, and the tense and action filled opening gameplay segment really makes this game start with a bang.
Something which we did not expect, which is a direct result to how ArenaNet handle questing, is that progression through the world isn’t as good. You’ll often find yourself wondering into a zone that’s slightly too high for you. Further to that, there’s very little incentive to explore anymore… say what you want about the traditional quest format, a lot of the time those quests were there to get you to go places, and then do stuff in those places. In Guild Wars 2 though? If there isn’t an on the map telling you that there’ something there of interest to you, then more likely than not there’s really no reason to go there, unless you want to grind any mobs you find there for XP, but then there’s plenty of that all over the place so again there’d be no incentive to grind there for grinding’s sake.
We can’t be sure if this is related to just the human start area being a bit poor in general however - talking to people who’ve tried other races, apparently their start areas are more interesting, but that’s something we’ll have to look into in the next beta session. That’s not to say the starter area is all bad – your first 15 levels take from the village of Queensdale, just outside of Kryta, all the way around the surrounding forest, swamps, and outlying settlements where you need to deal with a variety of tasks, problems and crises. Then of course there’s your personal story, which will generally start of in Kryta and the immediate area, and then send you further afield. It’s the dynamic content that’s the most fun though, and the diversity here, even at the start, is pretty impressive. From defending water pipes (or defending engineers to fix the pipes should they be broken), to rescuing hostages, to defending a monastery from a demon invasion (man, that one was hard), you never really know what’s going to happen next as you travel through.
 |
Sadly, we ran out of time before we could test out the PvP thoroughly – whenever we did jump in there was hardly anyone around, and even when we did find a party there was terrible lag and we got thrown out. A shame, but to be expected at this early phase if they don’t have the infrastructure in place yet. Still, we had a look around, and we’re impressed by what we’ve seen – Guild Wars 2 is one of the few MMO’s that really makes use of interacting with the environment, and the same holds true for PvP – The ‘Eternal Battlegrounds’ is one huge sprawling map complete with outposts, keeps, supply camps and other controllable areas (there’s also three smaller zones connected to the large one via portal, for beginners), and each ‘world’ (three servers are pitted against each other) must fight over these controllable locations. You can use supply points to buy siege engines and trebuchets, to knock down gates, you can find and intercept convoys that try to resupply a base…
The wait for Guild Wars 2 has been long, but we dare say it was worth it. The new stance ArenaNet is taking on several traditional MMO gameplay conventions is going to be jarring for many, as it was for us, but we imagine this is something that you simply need to get used to as opposed to something that needs changing (although a little more sign-posting wouldn’t hurt). Still, what we’ve played so far has not disappointed, and we can’t wait to try out the other races and classes. Guild Wars 2 is coming to PC sometime this year, although we’d be happy to bet on somewhere around the summer.
Most Anticipated Feature: Seeing a fully populated PvP session with no lag – should be epic.
