5 reasons you’ll love Guild Wars 2

 

Don’t you like good surprises? It’s fun to walk into a room and have a bunch of people yell surprise and start giving you a presents. What’s not to like?

When you first heard about Guild Wars 2 weren’t you just a bit skeptical. Hell, if you managed to gag your inner fanboi or fangoil, you were probably more than a little skeptical, you were probably outright doubtful. Dynamic events? Sure that’ll work, right? Didn’t they look a tad messy in the first beta videos you saw? World versus World (WvW) Player versus Player (PvP)? Yeah, like that’s not going to be a lag fest.

It’s alright if you weren’t one of the faithful, if you were asking some of the hard questions. After all, so many MMOs had disappointed you before and Guild Wars 2 seemed to be promising things that it seemed they couldn’t deliver.

Well, cheer up. This MMO is looking awfully solid and so far not a single aspect of gameplay has been disappointing. Here are five reasons you’ll love Guild Wars 2:

1. You’ll love the storyline

MMOs have finally figured out players love a good storyline.

MMOs have finally figured out players love a good storyline. Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) set the bar pretty high with their storylines, but based on the beta testing Guild Wars 2 gives players storylines as good or possibly better than SWTOR.

The storylines are very engaging and you’ll find yourself wanting to know what happens next. You’ll push yourself to level just so you can get to the next chapter of your story. As an added bonus, the voice acting is so good sometimes you might find yourself stopping and actually listening to the characters, and not skipping dialogue like you might have done in SWTOR.

2.Dynamic events work

It’s true, sometimes you just want go out and quest. You know, do things the old-fashioned way and gather up your quests and power level. Guild Wars 2 doesn’t cater to this, at all. Just put that notion out of your brain and re-adapt. It’s okay, honestly. After a while, you won’t care.

Dynamic events are just random “quests” that spring up in the world. Unlike traditional questing, everyone gets involved so there’s this sense you’re all in it together, helping each other out. That’s flat out awesome. You feel like there are world events springing up around you. That’s pretty cool.

After you’ve done a few dynamic events, you’ll probably never want to do traditional questing, again. Sorry, it just might ruin other MMOs for you.

3. The character creator is awesome

The Guild Wars 2 character creator is a dream. You can customize almost every aspect of your character. You can change your eye color, your hair and hair color, your nose, your character’s height and body type. You can go further and tweak the length and breadth of your nose, the roundness and width of you eyes. You can pretty much sculpt your face any way you wish, if you want to get to that detail. It also allows you to choose your armor colors, a bit of a holdover from the original Guild Wars, but still a nice option.

There are also other options that you’ve probably seen in single-player games, but are new to MMOs (Let me know if I’m wrong about that.). This game allows you to choose how you approach dialog challenges – with charm, dignity or force, choose where you were born, and which god you follow. And all these choices seem to have an impact on your character. In beta, these choices were reflected in your storyline, which help  you feel like your character is an integral part of the world and lore.

If you just want to zip out there and play, it also lets you create your character quickly without burdening you with all the options. You only have to go into all the tweaking if you want to.

This is a character creator you can lose yourself in for hours, but it’s flexible enough to let you create a nice, personal character quickly and get out there and play the game if that’s what you want. But why would you want to do that? You’ll miss a seriously fun part of the game.

4. PvP works

When a player takes a character into PvP, they are granted access to all the necessary skills, items, etc. Characters are set to the maximum level, putting everyone on an even playing field. This makes player skill more important than time invested in a particular character. – ArenaNet

One of the truly nice things about Guild Wars 2 is there’s no gear grind. Your success in the game is not dependent upon how much time you can spend grinding out dailies or PvP scenarios. You don’t get better gear just because you can spend 12 hours a day in the game. (This was possibly SWTOR’s greatest failing.). You can get nicer looking gear, but everyone in PvP has the same stats. That means PvP is based more on how you use your skills and play with your team than how many hours you put in.

That’s pretty nice.

5. It’s subscription free

Nothing has been more responsible for the death of more MMOs than the on-going subscription fee.

Nothing has been responsible for the death of more MMOs than the on-going subscription fee. Guild Wars 2 does not have one. You pay for the Guild Wars 2 game and that’s it. Sure there are things, pretty shiny things in the cash store – all prestige stuff that won’t imbalance the game, by the way – but you never have to spend a dime there if you don’t want to. Except for the initial purchase price, Guild Wars 2 is basically a phenomenal  free-to-play game.

Is Guild Wars 2 a great MMO? Based on the betas, it’s looking that way, but the true test of any MMO is endgame. Until the gaming jury gets a good look at the endgame, the final verdict will have to be withheld.

It does look like a great MMO, so far, and that’s such a nice surprise.