Guild Wars 2: Beginning your journey

Beginning your journey

A little help, please

 

After you’ve created your new character, you’re ready to start your great Guild Wars 2 adventure.

Everyone starts with a short introduction that focuses mostly on foundation of your personal story, what makes you special. As a norn, for instance, you win the great hunt by slaying a formidable beast. It’s a small introduction to the game, pretty basic, and it’s clear what you need to do. You won’t get too lost in this part of the game. But after you’re done with this introduction to your personal story, you’re thrown out into the wide-open world of GW2.

Welcome to the deep end of the pool.

It’s good that GW2 establishes the importance of your story from the beginning, since it’s such an integral part of the game. It’s bad that the game pretty much leaves it up to you to figure out almost everything else that follows. Even if you’ve played MMOs since Everquest, there’s so much that’s new about GW2 and so many different aspects to the game play, you’ll probably feel more than a little lost.

And if you’ve never played an MMO? Have you ever tried sailing without lessons? You might catch on eventually, but it’s going to be awfully confusing in the beginning. Hope you can swim.

There is a little contextual help and the guides – the people with the spyglasses – give you some good information, but it’s simply not enough, and, frankly, in-game hints and help is one aspect of GW2  where ArenaNet did a less than stellar job.

Eventually, you do catch on; it’s not quantum physics, but a little more help from ArenaNet would’ve been helpful. There’s now a nice online guide (It didn’t exist at launch.) and the wiki is beginning to fill out, so if you’re just starting you have some nice online help, now. Too bad it’s not in the game, itself.