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| Concept art from Massively |
For a few days now I am trying to find a way how to put my GW2 experience into words. What I want to tell you about is not the parts of the game and how they are implemented; there are a lot of posts/articles about that already. But I'd like you to understand why I decided on Sunday to go and preorder the game.
After playing a lot of different MMOs, I have quite a few expectations for a new game.
- I want to be able to pick up playing easily without memorizing 30 keyboard shortcuts.
- I want to be introduced to the game slowly. NOT another battle, please!
- I want a character progression system that is complex and possibly multi layered, so that I don't get bored by the time I reach lvl 20.
- I want to see how much content there is - as in, world map. See play style, below.
- I hate long conversations. It's wasting my time, see the one below.
- I like to see progression. I don't usually have much time to play on an average day, but I want to feel that I accomplished something.
- I don't really care about the looks of the character, at least not in the first 3 months.
Also, I have a a certain play style that must be satisfied for me to be able to enjoy the game. I am an Explorer, I always want to know what is behind the next corner - and I want to find something interesting there, not just "more of the same". Tiny zones suffocate me.
With that in mind, let's see what it was like to log in the game the first time.
After the long load pressing the Play button was a relief. The game jumped to the character selection screen, where I obviously didn't have a character, so I started with creating one. I picked a Male Charr Necromancer (bc. my daughter liked the skull icon) and jumped into the game.
Well, of course there was a battle. Why do the developers think that it is a good idea to put the player in a confusing and dangerous environment right when he/she logs in the first time? For me it's definitely not a good experience, I don't even know yet how the game works, but I need to run and kill things. Also, it was raining.
This was definitely a negative experience for me, but not enough to be disappointed yet.
On the other hand, when I was talking to the NPC, the display switched to a kind of up-to-personal view, which is - in my opinion - better than having a dialogue window. I've had some minor issues with this later, but altogether it is a good experience.
After killing some ghosts I've noticed the big [Search (F)] splash on my screen, so I pressed F, and looted some stuff. Ok, that's one good point, I didn't need to check the shortcuts to be able to find out how to loot. It is also working with right click, but sometimes F is simpler. Again, there are some minor issues with this one, I'll talk about these later.
After the next NPC I've found a .. cannon, or something similar standing close. I've checked it, got a splash that I can use it with F, pressed F, got in a cannon view. I didn't notice at first, but my skill bar also changed, there was only one action there, which was Shoot. Pressed it, placed the green circle close to some people fighting ghosts, and watched the effect - which was basically an explosion there, and some "dead" ghosts. Needless to say, I was staying there for a while shooting at everything. :)
Some times later I advanced forward, looted the corpses of the ghosts I've just killed (whoa!) and descended to the Crypt. At first it was confusing, I knew that I need to join some people down there, but all I have found was some corpses. I kept going forward, and ran into the group that I was supposed to find.
This was when the fun started. We moved into a room and started killing ghosts. It was ok, up until the moment when I found myself lying on the floor, fighting for survival - this is usually the moment in a classic MMO when you see the load screen and respawn at the closes respawn point. This was a good and bad experience at once - good, because I could still do something, but also bad, because I had no idea what, and I've seen that the red bar is quickly running off. Finally I survived by spamming one of the abilities, almost exactly the same time when the whole fight ended.
End of the tutorial area, enter the actual gameplay. I talked to some npc to further the main quest, then started to explore the environment. Found some onions, but couldn't harvest it yet, same for copper, then saw the "New event nearby" warning on my screen, and started to look for it. As a remark here: I love the minimap. The information that is shown there is relevant and stylish.
The event itself was to defend the armoury from some enemies. I didn't have the faintest idea what to do, or who these people are, but jumped in, fought some, found some unexploded mortar shells, picked it up and threw it in the crowd, fought some more, and noticed the cannons.
I think we won that event because of the cannons. There were about three of us there, and the enemy was pouring in on us, but we a few well positioned shells I've successfully decimated them. Obviously, without the other two guys holding the enemy in one place, the cannons wouldn't have helped, but this way they did.
In overall, my first event was a very good experience. I simply jumped in, found out what to do, did exactly that and worked together with other people, without actually messing with party invites and stuff. Also, I've had a feeling that this was something important, because what I have done had an effect on the world. In essence, it was very similar to the city raids in Tabula Rasa, although the scale was smaller here. But definitely a selling point for me.
On the other hand, the new quest system didn't impress me much. Mainly because it was just there, I basically filled two hearts without realizing that I am doing it. If I can say something like this: it was too seamless, not visible enough. Later I've found out that some hearts are actually pretty hard to fill, but the first two was very unimpressive.
Now, let's break the timeline here, and jump to some important things: There are events in the world that you need to repeat once or twice to get the whole story behind them. Also, there are others when you literally just find some guy behind the trees, and when you talk to him, that starts a new event. Some events you can do solo, some others require a handful of people to finish. All in all, events are interesting, and a good addition.
My main issues with the overloaded F button was showing when I joined a few npcs to kill the enemies, and by the end of the battle a few of the friendly npcs died. I went there to revive them, but after reviving the first he stood in front of me, changing the previous Revive action to Talk - without actually having any more talk options than "Ok, bye". Similarly, the corpses of the friendlies were mixed together with the lootable corpses of the enemies, so I had to move around a lot to be able to revive all of them. (I wanted to do that first, because I was expecting the next wave of enemies coming soon)
The problem with the dialogue screen is somewhat similar: When you are talking to a bunch of people at once, you always see who is talking to who, but without the names. It was sometimes very confusing that I couldn't recognize which Charr is talking to whom. I may have missed some visual clue, though.
Crafting becomes interesting when you reach 25 with the crafting skill, and start experimenting with the components. Until that point it's a bit too simplistic, but the good news is that it's fairly simple to get to that point.
As a conclusion, I can say that this game is good for a casual player, but I don't know how immersive it is for a hardcore player who likes to do things in groups. It suits me almost perfectly, action oriented but good for the explorer types, can easily jump in for a quick session, but could keep me occupied for a few hours in one sitting, should I have the time for it.
