Guild Wars 2 First Impressions

For those who know me (and now those who don’t), you will know that I am quite into MMORPG’s. I can sink hour after hour in the worlds that are created. Sadly, Guild Wars could never capture me. I played it for a little while but I think back then, I was too young to really get into it and always ended back in World of Warcraft. Well, with Guild Wars 2 coming out and with a lot of my friends (and better half) getting ready to jump into the world, I thought I might as well give it a shot!

Prior to launching the game, I had seen exactly three minutes of gameplay and nothing huge. Just a few bits of running around and fighting, therefore, everything was new to me. The first thing I was tasked with was character creation and this is more or less the moment I decided I was going to like the game.

Customisation
I’ve always been a fool for customisation. I use to spend ages customising my characters in Saints Row and would spend a lot of in-game money in Second Life on clothes. When I found
out that Guild Wars 2 had in depth customisation, I peed a little bit. I then spent the next half
an hour changing every little detail about my Ranger until he was perfect and I could truly call
him “mine”. I then raged for a further twenty minutes after I found out that somebody had taken
my name!

Quests
Rather than having a quest log shoved in your face that you will most likely ignore and then just
complete the task, you are treated to a conversation style cinematic that you can still skip if you
so desire but I think will help a lot more people get into the story of their hero.
On your main quest line, you’ll find yourself entering Instances. These are areas that you own
and only you and your party can enter and control what happens within them. It makes quite a
nice change from all the times I have been trying to grind boars and other heroes would have
wiped out the entire area.

A lot of the quests are open world and you can choose to complete them or not. As you enter
the area of the quest, you will see it appear on your quest log and your progress on it. This
made it easy for me to jump in between quests and know what I was killing and why. Not only
this, but you don’t have to travel back to the quest giver to finish it. As soon as you hit 100%,
you will receive an in-game mail saying thanks and giving you your reward.

Along with open world quests there are "Events". Events are quests that anybody can partake in
as long as you stay within the area.

Trading
One thing that I am quite disappointed about in Guild Wars 2 at the moment is there is no
direct Player-To-Player trading system. You either have to go through the Black Lion Trading
Company (which I haven’t played around with yet) but from what I hear, can be painful and,
currently, buggy or through in-game mail which, as most of you will know, is very unsecure and
prone to scamming. I can see the use of middlemen raising their heads pretty soon!

One Shared Account
One thing that I really do like about Guild Wars 2 is the shared account style. What I mean
by this is that you can collect resources or items on one hero and then access them easily on
another via the bank. This to be incredibly useful when trying to increase my skills on other
characters.

There is a lot more to be found within Guild Wars 2 and I have only scratched the surface of the game and am really looking forward to getting my teeth into it!