What makes Guild Wars 2 different from generic MMOs?

[if_then_else]

the price doesn't put me off, if i get it it will be on next pay day, just curious as a game called guild wars probably emphases the whole guild thing, and having never played any kind of mmo before, I don't have any experience with it or people to join up with, I mean at most I may be able convince 4 people to get this game, but i assume i miss out on a lot if its not big groups, like that whole world against world mechanic they have.

Actually, the "guild" in the name it's a reference to an actual war of guilds that (I think) took place during the first game, or a bit before the first game. It doesn't mean that you guilds are actually a big thing in the game, they're not, or at least not more than in other MMOs. The only place that I've seen they are really important is in WvWvW, because you can organize attacks better with a guild, plus guilds have "perks" that the leader can buy to get certain bonuses.

You don't really NEED friends to play and complete content, if you see an event going you can just play alongside the other players without the need for a party or raid group. Of course, friends can always make any game more enjoyable.

Anyway, you can always wait for a trial to come out after all the initial influx of players have settled and judge for yourself, but the game being 60 dollars just like any other game and no subscriptions fees, you can't really go wrong, I'm having such a great time playing it.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

the price doesn't put me off, if i get it it will be on next pay day, just curious as a game called guild wars probably emphases the whole guild thing, and having never played any kind of mmo before, I don't have any experience with it or people to join up with, I mean at most I may be able convince 4 people to get this game, but i assume i miss out on a lot if its not big groups, like that whole world against world mechanic they have.

Ironically enough for a game called "Guild Wars", GW2 is arguably the most solo friendly game on the market (you could probably make an argument for TOR as well, at least prior to end game). You can experience all of the content except dungeons without ever having to join so much as a group, and those are only 5 man.

 

[ramboondiea]

the price doesn't put me off, if i get it it will be on next pay day, just curious as a game called guild wars probably emphases the whole guild thing, and having never played any kind of mmo before, I don't have any experience with it or people to join up with, I mean at most I may be able convince 4 people to get this game, but i assume i miss out on a lot if its not big groups, like that whole world against world mechanic they have.

Actually, the "guild" in the name it's a reference to an actual war of guilds that (I think) took place during the first game, or a bit before the first game. It doesn't mean that you guilds are actually a big thing in the game, they're not, or at least not more than in other MMOs. The only place that I've seen they are really important is in WvWvW, because you can organize attacks better with a guild, plus guilds have "perks" that the leader can buy to get certain bonuses.

You don't really NEED friends to play and complete content, if you see an event going you can just play alongside the other players without the need for a party or raid group. Of course, friends can always make any game more enjoyable.

Anyway, you can always wait for a trial to come out after all the initial influx of players have settled and judge for yourself, but the game being 60 dollars just like any other game and no subscriptions fees, you can't really go wrong, I'm having such a great time playing it.

well that's just a misleading name then ahaha.

well yeah, it looks good, will probably pick it up next month then or soon there after, especially as its not a requirement needing to socialises ha.

and is it actually $60 over there? because that means uk actually gets it cheaper, that's a pleasant surprise.

Thanks for the info.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I actually used my super MLG pro leet 360 no scope hacking skillz to locate an online store that still had keys. (Read: checked the official Guild Wars 2 website again and got linked there.)

GamesRocket.de or something. Actually legit as fuck. I am downloading the game as we speak. (And FUCK this is taking a long time. I want to play, dammit.)

Good work! You technically bought the game retail, you just managed to find an online retailer that still had keys.

I do hope you have fun. You can be a hard guy to please at times, although not unreasonably so (your Diablo 3 review was uncommonly even handed). I do love the game, but I also recognize it cannot hope to be all things to all people.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I think I'll like it - from what I've heard till now, it should be right up my ally. One of my IRL friends loves it and trust me, while our taste in games is simular, he's a lot harder to please than I am.

Anyway, I'm keeping my expectations reasonable. I never really got caught up in the hype train for GW2, in fact, the only reason the game caught my attention is because it's Guild Wars and it has no subfee. All I'm expecting is fun combat, a varied world that's nice to look at, and engaging PvP. So far I've seen or heard nothing that argues it doesn't fulfill that criteria.

And hey, if the game does turn out to fail on me somewhere, it's not that much of a big deal, because I can drop it and return to it when I feel like it, without having to buy another month of playtime.

EDIT: Also, it wasn't really a good job on my part. All I did was go to the official site to dig around for 5 minutes and bam, I found it.

EDIT 2: Another also; I might write my second user review about GW2. If I have enough things to say that haven't been said a thousand times before.

Moderating expectations is key. There was some pretty pie in the sky rhetoric bleeding out of the GW2 community about how the game was going to be a panacea for every ill in the genre, and obviously it's not. The first day I played it way back in BWE1, I was disappointed. The second day, I was intrigued. The third day, I was having fun. The fourth day, the beta was over and I was whining to my girlfriend about how I missed my GW2.

Biggest issue you're likely to run into is just flat out server load and crowding and the effect that has on dynamic events. Too many people and it's just "LIGHTS! NOISES!" while you smash your buttons and hope not to die. It's fun in a visceral "things are happening!" sense, but it has zero tactical depth when it's like that. Those same events with a small group of people can be quite bracing, though.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Mmmh, well that's to be expected of an MMO at launch. I'll see for myself when this download has finally finished (still at 58% despite a steady download rate of 2.5-3MB/s, how fucking big is this game?), but I think I'd probably be more worried if the game WASN'T suffering from some server overloads and the likes right now.

If the servers are struggling now, they will probably recover during the next week. If no one was playing (and the servers were fine), it's very unlikely the game would ever get a proper population.

400K concurrent users during head start, which is an MMO launch record and likely way north of their wildest expectations. It has resulted in some serious creaking on their back end though.

The game is huge. Something like 25-27 world zones, six cities, eight dungeons. The average zone is Barrens sized, using WoW parlance. The cities are 2-3 times the size of their WoW equivalents. Easily the most content rich MMO launch since WoW, and the largest world size since Everquest.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I wonder how much it cost them to make the game. Between the world size, how long it was in development, the advertising, the hundreds of tiny and big innovations that took a lot of work to perfect... I mean, the budget must be massive. It'll be interesting to see if this game makes it's money back.

I've never really been able to find an official budget number in my lazy Google searches. GW1 was a pretty solid hit for NCSoft, so I imagine Arena Net had some budget leeway along with all the development time they were given. I've heard it guesstimated at about 1/10th of TOR's cost, which would put it around 30M, which seems low to me. If I had to make a completely uneducated guess, I'd say somewhere in the realm of 50M to 75M. If it had broken 100M we'd have heard about it, that would put it up there as one of the more expensive games ever made.

They're using their own engine, and they relied predominantly on community buzz for marketing, and they don't have to pay TOR's staggering IP fees, so I imagine they've kept costs manageable for themselves. If the game had been too expensive to develop, I would've anticipated a more punitive cash shop.

 

[zumbledum]

I think its the lack of choice rather than the number i mean GW let you have 6 or was it 8? been a few years since i played but you got to pick them, i started as a necro and i basically have 3 sets to choose from and well im a bit bored of them already at level 12.

GW1 gave you a deck of 8 skills, in which you chose all 8.

GW2 gives you a deck of 10(15) skills, in which you elect the first 5 from a choice of 2-10ish, elect one from a choice of 3-4, and elect the last 4 from a choice of 25. These are further altered/effected by traits.

You don't have access to all your skills until level 30, and even then you won't have access to all of them until you've picked up sufficient skill points to unlock them, which can take quite a long time. The top rung elite skills take 30 skill points to unlock.

yeah i know it sounds better but in practice im finding it extremely limiting

take my necro's first 5 skills which are the meat of the combat abilities
gw 2- 10 possible combinations
gw 1- 78960960 combinations for basic set and taking all xp's in it rises to 50035863369 possible combinations

then the heal and elite which are limited to 3 options each mostly, just leaves you 3 free picks and these are limited almost exclusively to utility/rare use

obviously a lot of those GW1 builds wouldnt be at all viable but still i feel theres painfully too little choice in GW2.
And GW2 offers a weapon swap but how practical is that? once you have all the traits picked to match one weapon combo swapping to another is going to cripple you.
But even if we add them in that only raises the options to 90 which is over 800 thousand times less than Gw1 offered.


i want to see them add more choices in the weapons give each a pool and let us pick the 2,3 or 5 we want, adding in some late game "elite" skills to the weapon pools we get from dungeons or whatever. would also leave something to get after level 6
sure we have the elite skill to unlock at 30 but they are all mostly long cooldown +dps buttons anyway. the type of skill i had the freedom to avoid before.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

And GW2 offers a weapon swap but how practical is that? once you have all the traits picked to match one weapon combo swapping to another is going to cripple you.

Not only practical but outright necessary for some classes, like Elementalist attunement swapping. Weapon swapping is built right into many trait lines. I have no idea how you came to this conclusion, but it's way off base. I would go so far as to say never weapon swapping will cripple you.

But even if we add them in that only raises the options to 90 which is over 800 thousand times less than Gw1 offered.

Ah, the illusion of "choice". First, in reality, 99.999999999999999999% of the 80 billion possible specs are not going to be remotely viable in anything resembling a competitive environment. Second, 95% of players generally adhere to a tiny handful of communally recognized optimal specs in the end anyway, and those who don't struggle. This is a problem currently faced by TSW. It's all well and good to give people a million choices, but if you've not balanced all million choices with one another and accounted for all possible issues, then all you really have at the end is a tiny handful of good choices and a whole fucking ream of terrible ones. Sometimes a simple, clean and BALANCED system can allow for great tactical depth. Look at chess. That said...

i want to see them add more choices in the weapons give each a pool and let us pick the 2,3 or 5 we want, adding in some late game "elite" skills to the weapon pools we get from dungeons or whatever. would also leave something to get after level 6

Yeah I'd like to see this too. They need to balance what they've got first, but down the road I would very much like to see this. Again though, enough with the level 6 nonsense. You can make an argument for level 30, and realistically it's closer to level 40-50 when you'll have the full breadth of your abilities available, if not your talents. But at level 6 you've barely scratched the surface. I have a hard time even unlocking all my different weapon skills by level 6.

The game is a bit of a cash grab. Maybe that's an understatement.

How exactly is it a "cash grab"?

 

[Croaker42]

You use the same skills in interesting ways, rather than accumulating five hundred and firing them off as soon as they cool down.

Levels are something you gain no matter what you do - exploring, crafting, questing, etc. - and are just a factor of progress rather than the point of the game.

Quests are something that happens when you're there, not something you chase down, queue up, and hammer out. You happen upon a patrol, or a travelling cart, or a horde of (ever-so-common) marauding centaurs... and you just naturally fall into the rhythm of the task at hand.

Monthly fees are what you pay for non-"i" pads, not a continual price hanging over your head, marking down hours.

There are never too few rabbits to kill, or too few trees to chop. There are never too many people in an area for you to have any fun. This is an MMO - the ONLY MMO - where no matter what you decide to do, you can do it. Without waiting, without competing with other players - this is an MMO for the single-player gamer. And I'm damn happy with it.

Nicely put.
So many little things make GW2 stand out that it become difficult to point at one overarching reason and say "That". Best thing OP can do is play the game and understand.

 

[auron200004]

Hm. In the opinion of those who've played GW2, will there likely be a point - similar to SW:TOR - when many players decide there's nothing more to do, and leave?

The best part of it, in my opinion, is that they actually can leave without worrying about it. And then come back, months later if need be, without having to pay for the time in between. No subscription. So you can play it when you want, without worrying about wasting any money. It feels less like a job in that regard, much like WoW became after a while. You show up because you want to, not because you feel obligated.

 

[Friendly Lich]

Hm. In the opinion of those who've played GW2, will there likely be a point - similar to SW:TOR - when many players decide there's nothing more to do, and leave?

The best part of it, in my opinion, is that they actually can leave without worrying about it. And then come back, months later if need be, without having to pay for the time in between. No subscription. So you can play it when you want, without worrying about wasting any money. It feels less like a job in that regard, much like WoW became after a while. You show up because you want to, not because you feel obligated.

This ^

 

[afroebob]

The tone of this post sounds a tad confrontational, like you're spoiling for a debate, so I'm hesitant to weigh in here, but I'll give it a shot.

I'm not trying to be confrontational, I'm just extremely skeptic about it. I hope its everything its hyped up to be, though.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I'm not trying to be confrontational, I'm just extremely skeptic about it. I hope its everything its hyped up to be, though.

Rock Paper Shotgun discussed the hype in their glowing review:

None of these are deal-breakers, of course. It?s simply that when the hype around a game is this heavy, it?s easy to expect perfection. Guild Wars 2 is not perfect. It is however the most fun I?ve had with an MMO in a very, very long time, and the first to turn social questing into something even solo-minded misanthropes like myself can do on a whim. That alone makes worth it playing, and this is just the start of its story. I can?t wait to see where it goes next?

Pretty much echoes my own feeling on it. I've never really been one to hold hype against a product, though.