M'kay, I try to give Yahtzee some leeway, and I'll admit of his MMO reviews, this one is definitely the least scathing. However as someone who's playing GW2, I think his criticism that there is no plot is a complete load. GW2 has just as much plot as WoW did at the start of its release. Yahtzee says the only thing resembling a plot was the fact the elder dragons have woken up and are threatening the world, but outside of that there's no real sense of what your role in it is. Well what did the base WoW game start you out with? Hell, I don't even remember them announcing the primary antagonist with that one, you were just supposed to follow the quest lines until you eventually were lead up to Ragnaros, or whatever his name was. It wasn't until the expansions they began letting you know who you would ultimately be fighting at the end.
The problem here seems to be Yahtzee is completely ignoring the back story in the game. I wouldn't expect him to read both of the novels they came out with and give a full synopsis of the backstory in his video, but he could at least acknowledge it. He says there's no plot outside the elder dragons, completely ignoring things like the 250 years of conflict between the humans and the charr and the tentative alliance they're now forming, the creation and emergence of the sylvari, the doom of Ascalon, I mean holy crap that's a lot to just gloss over.
Now I'm not going to give Yahtzee crap over his criticism of the personal story for two reasons. One being the lack of choices is something that I recognized before the game was even released. The second is he's already explained that he doesn't have time to play every single race/profession combination in an MMO before deadline, so I can't fault him for only going with the human storyline, which admittedly has the most stereotypical of the character backgrounds. He might have found it more amusing to play a norn that woke up one morning with a hangover after getting shit faced at the moot the other night and can't remember what happened. But at any rate, while I think the personal story -does- manage to give a player some kind of personal connection to the overarching plot, being the go-to guy/girl of one of Tyria's big movers and shakers, it admittedly does feel a little mass-produced at times. But with an MMO, you can't expect a perfectly custom tailored storyline in all aspects, and in GW2's case, I still think it's a better fit than the one-size-fits-all plot lines most other MMO's try to convince you just need some breaking in to fit you properly.
As to the gameplay discussion, yeah, Yahtzee's pretty much on the ball there. The controls are nice and tight without copious hotkey bars cluttering the screen, but once you get a comfortable loadout, you'll only need to swap skills for very specific situations. And yes, some of the skills are a little head-scratching in their nature (like why does my thief need a tripwire trap when the poison trap immobilizes the enemy anyway?)
It's also true some of the very early missions feel like standard MMO fare, making you feel like you're doing some slacker's chores for them (and like all the farmers of Tyria have lucked into finding the world's biggest free labor pool when they've got 20 players pulling their weeds and chasing grubs out of their fields for them). However, it's not long before you find yourself helping guards on patrols and defending keeps and towns, which actually get attacked, the NPC's actually getting off their lazy butts and swinging a sword...before getting knocked down in 5 seconds flat by one enemy of a kind you've been mass murdering for the last 10 minutes. But hey, at least they're trying, which is more than I can say for those dip shits in Goldshire and Durotar.
So in short, I think Yahtzee was a lot kinder in this review than he's been to a lot of other MMO's. But I think his evaluation of the game's plot is reflective of either a very tight deadline schedule or a tendency to deliberately overlook things.
