Monday, 30 April 2012

Guild Wars 2 First Beta Weekend Recap


Guild Wars 2’s first open beta weekend was great, and I’m pretty sure everyone who had a chance play through it without getting disconnected every two minutes would agree to that. I played for well over 30 hours and I didn’t really feel them, there’s just so much to see and do. I think all of us walked in not really knowing what we’d stepped into, I mean, yeah we saw the closed beta gameplay videos and knew the dynamic events were going to be something to look forward to, but I don’t think any of us really knew how much fun it would turn out to be.

Let’s start off with the magnitude of the map. The game is HUGE. It’s not so much a drag to run around though, as once you discover areas you discover way points that you can teleport to, but there’s always something new to see and explore in Guild Wars 2. The cities are what really caught my eye, I’ve never really seen that much work put into the structural sense of any game; the buildings are so detailed it’s unreal, they actually made it look like the cities different races took years to develop, rather than something that was pieced together to look cool but not really give you a plausible scenario to how people could live there for long.

The dynamic events are something to remember, there is no real linear leveling path in Guild Wars 2; you can level purely through PvP without ever having to set foot in the PvE side of the game or level purely through the dynamic events that happen throughout the world as you explore it. This allows players to develop their own story in-game, and really develop a character however they feel like it, rather than going from area to area doing the same exact quests all the other players did and all the other characters you have did. Dynamic events are events that are, well.. Dynamic, they’re events that happen at random as you go through the world, depending on where you are and what is happening around you, for example, a certain fort is about to send a carriage to a fort which is located north of there, and they need escorts to defend it on its journey.
The community in Guild Wars 2 is amazing; it’s not like in World of Warcraft where most players are complete dicks who go around spamming chats and insulting anyone who screws up in dungeons. The community in your world, in Guild Wars 2, is connected. The main reason, I think, is because you can’t really do much in-game without the help of other people…Aside from hunting down birds and killing small things, most of the game is emphasized on the community.

Character wise the game holds up strong, when I first created a character I actually felt as if I was playing the Sims for the first time, the character creation is very similar. Which is good, don’t get me wrong; it allows for some awesome and unique characters to develop. The armor dyes are another awesome thing; it gives you the opportunity to customize its colors, which I think is kickass.
-And apparently people thought my character was a walking Christmas tree- just felt like sharing that fail with y’all.

Probably the highlights of the weekend were: One- when we found the jumping bug there was when you tried jumping while you were lying down, sitting, or crying, and half a server gathered to jump together and form lines, I believe there were a couple of videos taken by Peterman and are somewhere on Youtube. Any who, the big highlight of it all had to be the weekend finale, an event that ArenaNet randomly announced yesterday on the forums, where they wanted us to head over to the Norn’s Island at 10am Dubai time today, and we spent like 3 hours running around killing elite monsters, along with a bunny who people said looked like the Monty Python rabbit. It took us, I swear to god, like half an hour to kill with over 100 people bashing their skulls against that poor thing.

Anyway, enough said for the first weekend, it was a great experience. And I have to agree with Lore who said he hoped the next beta weekend started tomorrow, I’m very sad that the servers got shut down, I wanted to shoot more things! Aside from the load of bugs and things that went wrong, it was great, I honestly cannot wait till full release, it will be insane. In the mean time, I want the next beta weekend ASAP!!


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