Yeah, I'll give you a run-down of stuff come Monday, as I'm on this beta session. A journalist friend of mine played GW2 briefly at Eurogamer, and it was mostly PvE focused at that point, so I kind of know what to expect there. I'm not usually a PvP kinda guy unless I have a group I'm having fun with, but I'll give it a decent go this weekend, and let you know.

Patiently awaiting the review I was promised.

I went in with a mild case of buyer's remorse and came out pretty satisfied. I'd say my only major concern was I couldn't lock the camera to my mouse. Guild Wars 2 still does the standard MMO tab targeting lockon stuff which is a major drawback after playing the faster paced TERA. The dodge mechanic seemed much less useful than it was made out to be. All I ever really used it for was retreating to go heal whenever I was swarmed by enemies.

For PvP you had two modes of structured play, there was no open world PvP. The first was a sort of matchmaking mode where it's 5 vs 5 and you don't actually play as your own character. You play a maxed out version of your class dressed in either red or blue gear depending on your team. The only mode I saw was a control point mode where you get points every second for however many locations your team controls. Maps were small and generally the size of a small FPS map, had the general feel of an FPS as well. The other form of PvP, the one I spent a good chunk of time with, was World vs World PvP. In "WvW" you play as your own character with your own gear, but all players are scaled up to level 80. There are four huge maps, three of them act as a home field for each of the three servers, the fourth map is a neutral field.

The little icons in that screenshot are control points. The tents are supply outposts. The towers are small keeps with large walls and a front gate. The other towers which look like a rook chess piece are huge castles with multiple gates and huge walls all over the place, they are quite big. Anyway, each control point has a pile of supplies. The supplies are not infinite and must be replenished by (vulnerable) NPC pack mules which walk out from the supply outposts. You use those supplies to build "schematics" which are purchased from one of the vendors in your home base. The schematics contain plans for things like battering rams, catapults, and so on. Using the schematic plops down a little construction site, kinda like an engineer building a sentry in Team Fortress 2. It usually takes more supply than what you can carry to finish construction so you'll need more players to help build. Every 5 or so minutes each server is awarded points depending on what they control. You get different bonuses for racking up more points.


The only actual tracked quest(s) seemed to be a main story thread which was effected by some of the choices made during character creation. One character I made was a noble who never knew his real parents. The quest had me attending a party which was attacked by bandits, investigating said bandits, and so on. Another character I created was raised by common farm folk and was disappointed he never found his sister's body after a centaur raid. That quest line was completely different as I dealt with corrupt city guards and the sketchy circumstances of my missing sister. The writing was serviceable enough, at one point I was given an Option A or Option B choice which effected the next step of my quest chain.

Quests which weren't tracked were more or less repeating area quests. They seemed kinda like a group version of the "daily quests" found in other MMO's. You do mundane tasks to the tune of "kill enough of X until this bar fills up" rather than just "kill x." Anyone in the area can join in, you don't have to talk to any NPC's to start or complete the quest. They scale depending on how many people are participating, if enough are around a boss monster of some sort will spawn.

There's also another type of quests which are more dynamic. They pop up when the conditions are right and have the potential to effect the area. An example of this is you could wreck a bunch of stuff in a centaur camp which will trigger an event where a bunch of guards will come to assist you while you defend the area against oncoming waves of centaur attacks. If you control the point for X number of waves the centaur are defeated and the area is safe for players to walk through.

Overall there's more good than bad and if you're looking for an MMO to jump into but hate subscription fees GW2 will probably meet your needs.

The small PvP essentially operates like a scaled down Alliance Battles match from Guild Wars. So essentially you have 3 capture points to get/hold, which accrue your team points over time, and a kill gets your team 10 points.

The pleasantry about this (and the reason I played AB in Guild Wars, but not regular PvP), is dominant strategy favours you constantly moving and flanking your opponents, and not mobbing them.

World vs World however, just looked like a giant mess to me, as I was playing a Necromancer, who didn't favour the lack of bottlenecks in a lot of the combat there.

It did very much play like skill spam, yeah. A lot of the general world PvE events tend to get like that in the presence of a lot of players also.

Pack mules and now whirlwinds of butt devastation? Why haven't I bought this game yet?

I was mainly referring to situations like this ( skip to 6:32 ):



It seems like it's tolerable until you get like dozens of people on your screen at the same time. There was literally like 5 fireballs crashing into the ground every second. That particular instance didn't look very skill based to me, and Lewis was only able to hit someone like 2 or 3 times before getting nuked to smithereens. I think if I get the game, I might skip WvW altogether, or just get the hell out of there once one of these nuke parties breaks out.