5 Reasons To Get Excited For Guild Wars 2

At the beginning of the year we ran an article about the three major MMOs this year: Guild Wars 2, World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic. World of Warcraft has a major expansion and that always equals something of a major event in the gaming world, a point where everything stops online momentarily while people find out exactly what all the new fuss is about. With Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard hope to show that their user base is still in its millions and that it’ll increase exponentially when new content is added. The Old Republic is about to go entirely free to play, another string to a very well strung bow. It’s a reaction to something though and it hints that perhaps The Old Republic wasn’t doing as well as EA and Bioware would have liked as a subscription-based game.

And that leaves Guild Wars 2. Without the numbers of World of Warcraft and without the existing IP of Star Wars, it would arguably have the hardest job of proving itself. That doesn’t seem to be the case though and it’s probably going to be the major gaming surprise success this year. We took a look at the five biggest reasons you should be excited for Guild Wars 2. August 25, 2012 is the release date of Guild Wars 2.

#1 – Great Atmosphere

One of the biggest things that kills modern MMOs is a lack of atmosphere. It’s very rare these days that you find people role playing in an MMO (and for the most part I’m glad of that), but everybody likes to feel they’re part of a great new world.

A big part of setting that atmosphere is down to the graphics and the music. Anybody who’s seen a screen from Guild Wars 2 knows just how great it looks – the developers have really put a lot of effort into making the graphics something special, something that properly represents the world they’ve set out to create. Similarly, the music in Guild Wars 2 is being composed by the great Jeremy Soule of Skyrim fame.

Soule is a great composer in his own right, having worked on a ton of fantastic games, but Skyrim is the game for which he will be best known at the moment. The atmosphere in that game, the gentle sound of exploration, is in a huge way down to Soule’s excellent compositional skills. While he worked on the original Guild Wars as well (on top of the last two elder scrolls games), I’m thinking that a decade’s worth of new experiences can only benefit Guild Wars 2.

#2 – No Subscription

Guild Wars pioneered a brand new way of playing an MMO. You’d pay for the base game itself and then have unlimited access to the game without the need for things like subscription fees or time cards. Guild Wars 2 revives that style of subscription, popular with console gamers and non-MMO gamers, and offers up a game available to everybody. It’s a really nice, open way of running an online game, especially in an age when even the least popular multiplayer console game comes with an online access code.

Of course, the benefits to the end user in this situation are obvious. If you really want the game, buy into it straight away, otherwise you can just wait until you see it at a really good price and then play for an unlimited time ahead.

An MMORPG without a subscription that looks like this? Unbelievable!

#3 – Living, Breathing World

There are more than a few things that the developers of Guild Wars 2 have done to try and make Guild Wars 2 world a more realistic place. Quests are no longer purely given out by people standing around doing nothing (although the text always says how busy they’ve been), but can always be gained just by being in the right place at the right time. Some of the quests even sound like the sort of thing you came across in Red Dead Redemption, random events just happening that you may or may not come across.

But more than that; it sounds as if the developers have tried to get away from the “kill 10 animals attacking the city” sort of quest, at least to a certain extent. If something is being attacked, it’s actually being attacked and you’ll be rewarded for protecting that place whether you kill ten enemies or one. Acting as a group in a situation like that is far more natural and it’ll have an obvious effect when you finally start playing.

#4 – Lots to See, Lots to Do

I’ve already mentioned how beautiful the graphics are (they really are fantastic) and part of that is down to how good the world design is. Guild Wars 2 is absolutely huge featuring a wealth of places to visit and a land of things to see. Cities aren’t just lifeless locations made up of walls and the occasional statue, but vast fields of buildings with interiors to explore and people to meet. Don’t settle for cities no bigger than a two minute walk from side to side. You should have to NEED a mount.

Of course, there’s more to a world than urban landscapes and Guild Wars 2 has beautiful rural locations as well. Everything from beautiful forests to unusual dungeons, all designed to keep your attention and not force you into performing the same thing over and over again for experience. Whether it works out or not has yet to be seen, but hopes are high that the developers can pull it off completely.

An asura warrior launches himself and his greatsword at his opponent.

#5 – Big Battles

In Guild Wars 2 there’s no reason to follow some mundane quest path in order to gain experience and items, you can instead take part in a spot of PvP. There are smaller battles available, but what’s really interesting is the massive World Vs. World battles. If you were impressed when MAG managed a couple of hundred players in a single match, World Vs. World battles will involve over 2000 people across a couple of maps.

Including siege weapons, resource objectives and the ability to win rewards for your server (or world), these giant battles are going to redefine what we think of when the word MMO is mentioned. Can you imagine hundreds of people battling it out for fame and glory? If that doesn’t keep people off the streets, I’m not sure what will.

Conclusion

There are a lot of reasons to be excited about Guild Wars 2; we’ve listed on a few of them. Whether you’ve already pre-ordered or if you’re holding off until the first reviews are out, there’s an awful lot to be excited about. Keep tuned to DevilsMMO (Follow us on Twitter for latest updated) over the coming weeks, no doubt as release gets closer there’ll be a ton of exciting announcements from the developers and you can be sure we’ll be covering them.

See the Video we published on our YouTube channel back in February - comparing SWTOR vs WoW vs GW2

M. Growcott

For more on Guild Wars 2, visit the official site->