Ensiferum said:
Spoony tore this one up pretty badly and really pissed off a lot of FF fanboys. His preview is worth checking out: http://spoonyexperiment.com/2010/09/13/pax-coverage-final-fantasy-xiv-guild-wars-2/
On the other hand Guild Wars 2 looks like it might actually bring something innovative to MMOs.
Saw that. Hardly a good review of the game to look at though. He based his opinion on the fact they wouldn't give him time to play, and then the stuff he did see was the tutorial segment. SE is much to blame for not showing anything good, true. Whether they just didn't bother to put any effort in because they were working on the Toyko Game Show instead or they're just lazy, I don't know.
My opinion of the game after playing it in Open Beta? It isn't
bad however, currently it is no where near ready to be launched. There is glaring technical problems left right and centre, which still haven't been fully fixed, and it's a week away from launch. It's staggering they still plan on releasing it this month.
The combat is fine. It isn't anything new to the mmorpg genre, and I doubt we will see an improvement on the hotbar any time soon in any mmorpg, unfortunately. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, I guess. Honestly, it is slow, but it's about as slow as any combat in any mmorpg. Crafting actually has it's own minigame, instead of just clicking on a list, which is nice. Unfortunately it has a bit of a learning curve, and sometimes you just feel like it's failing for no real reason, which can get frustrating. there also a lack of guidence. There isn't any big shiny '!' above quest givers heads, you have to find out the persons name from your journal, and if it goesn't give a specific location, you'll just have to run around everywhere in that area trying to find them, which is far from ideal. The UI is okay, but it isn't amazing, although again, I don't know any mmorpg which does have an amazing UI. I guess WoW was helped by it's addon support. The controls on keyboard, I'm not going to lie, they really suck in my opinion. it was definitely built to be a console game, as it plays far better on a controller, which resulted in me using my 360 controller with my PC. The limit system has already been mentioned. By all means have some limits in place to stop those powergrinders who charge to level your character up, etc, however currently they're far too restrictive.
On the positive side, the story quests are really well done. The story quest has quite a few subquests in it, which contain multiple ingame cutscenes which are done surprisingly well. Also the guildleves are quite fun to do really, I like the system, although if they don't cut down on the limit, then all that potential is lost. The music and graphics are amazing too.
TLDR
Pros - Good story missions, guildleves good in theory, graphics, and music.
Cons -
Technical faults, Keyboard/Mouse Controls suck, Guildleve limits, EXP gaining limits and little direction.
In conclusion. I think if you're at least a tiny bit interested, you should try it, however don't try it until a good couple of months after release, if only to save you from the hassle until they fix the technical problems. Also if you wait, you'll see whether they plan on getting rid of the god awful limit system. I think if they get rid of the problems and the XP limits, the game could be interesting. It definitely isn't a WoW killer, though.
