Guild Wars 2 Diary #4 : Looking Around

After being absolutely destroyed in PvP, I decided to spend my time getting destroyed in the PvE game instead. Those of you who read/watched last week will remember that our good friend Quinn was being attacked by Two-blade Pete after they found out that he’d helped us discover their plans to poison the water. We’d hidden our identity with the help of a Mesmer and gone undercover, discovering the specifics of Two-blade Pete’s gang, and then we’d been given a very difficult choice. Either save Quinn or make sure the water didn’t become poisoned. That wasn’t really a choice at all – especially considering Quinn had done almost everything in his power to keep working with Two-Blade Pete after we saved Quinn a few weeks ago. We rushed out to save the city. Read it all in this weekend's Guild Wars 2 review.

It wasn’t that simple though, and given that the quest was recommended to players level 9 and above only, I ended up getting slaughtered. So it was time to buff up, to farm experience. That’s never fun, in any RPG, right?

Skritts

Skritts are anthropomorphic rats and the bane of my existence at this point in the game. There are several quests involving them, all of which take place within a small Skritt nest. They’re quick, they’re mean and they’re easy to kill – individually – but get surrounded by four or five of the little devils and you’ll find your health disappearing before you know it. One quest harks back to the quests we did a few weeks ago – a farm is having problems with Skritts and needs our help. Easy enough to complete, just kill as many Skritts as possible, knock over their shiny things and the bar showing your progress will bounce right up and you’ll be done before you know it.

Guild Wars 2 Video Review Episode #4

At the same time you need to recover a set of farming tools that have been taken by the Skritts. Sometimes you’ll find them just sitting around on the floor, other times you’ll need to actively search a Skritt for them, but this one takes quite a while. Longer than the first, I found. Once you’ve got the right amount – I didn’t count, sorry – a countdown will begin and the tools will be “transported.” You’ve got 30 seconds, although by this point there won’t be many Skritts milling around and, to be quite honest, you could probably die and still pass the quest, although I didn’t actually try that.
While on the subject of Skritts, there’s a rather odd quest available if you climb above the Skritt nest. It involves killing a windmill Skritt which just attacks by spinning round and around. It’s easy enough, especially if you have a few friends with you, and it won’t take long. A complete curve ball and one I’m not sure I fully understand – I think I may have missed an introduction.

More Centaurs

If you remember back to our first Guild Wars 2 diary and to several instances since then, the area of Queensdale has a problem with centaurs. The half-horse half-men are attacking, constantly, and that’s no different on the trade routes either. When you’re tired of the stink of Skritts – and I can’t imagine it’ll take long – you’ll want to shake things up by visiting Lexi Price, just south of the fort. There’s a waypoint outside which you’ll want to pass through – things are going to get hairy, very hairy, and you don’t want to have to travel miles and miles if (when) you die.

So the war has taken a pretty harsh toll on Lexy Price’s trading post. It used to be a clean, safe place for merchants and travellers, but it’s gone downhill since the centaurs attacked. Merchants and travellers can’t walk along the roads anymore for fear of being attacked by a gang of centaurs or a pack of wolves. Wirse than that though, the centaurs have killed the cat that kept the rats away from the trading post, so add rat killing to your list of chores if you want to complete this renown heart quest.

Like in previous quests, simply keep killing and you’ll end up passing the quest soon enough. You’ll get small cash reward, a little experience and, hopefully, the chance to level up so that you can go and save the water supply, an instance you’ll see in this week’s video.

Vistas and Exploration

I just want to use the end of this week’s Guild Wars 2 diary to comment on the way exploration works in this game. I’ll be honest, usually I find looking around in MMOs really quite dull. There are exceptions – Lord of the Rings Online is fantastically created and is well worth looking around, while TERA has beautiful enough graphics that you can’t help but just wander aimlessly – but for the most part there’s no a lot of things I’ll see that aren’t either directly related to quests or at least a point of interest.

Guild Wars 2 is another to add to the list of games that are worth exploring.

This is in part thanks to a rather fantastic map system. It doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been done before, especially in single player games, but the novelty of it is enough to upgrade it from a handy tool to a must-use feature. Hitting the M button will cause the mini-map in the corner to expand and take up the entirety of the screen. From here you can continue to move, you can use the mouse to get further information on local attractions/points of interest and you can use the waypoints that are scattered around the land (for a very small fee). How accessible it is and how you can practically keep playing while it is open makes all the difference, and I’ve found it a much more important part of the game than I ever have maps in other titles.

On the subject of exploration, if you want to see the absolutely nicest views Guild Wars 2 has to offer, you need to hunt out and find the vistas. Upon finding them, you’ll be urged to press a key and as a reward you’ll be given a short cut scene of the surrounding area. Not quite as long or impressive as the TERA Pegasus flight, but still well worth looking into.

Conclusion

The thing that disturbs me a little this week is that I’ve done everything that I’ve been asked to do – side quests, main quests, renown heart quests, monster battles – and I’ve almost universally received gold medals for my level of participation in each battle: so why have I suddenly hit a brick wall where enemies are suddenly too strong for me? For now it’s not a big issue, I could easily finish the two quests I’ve most recently come across, but it worries me that this is going to become a regular occurrence and I’ll be forced to just grind.

For now I’m withholding my judgement, but it’s a fairly big disappointment if my concern turns out to be valid.

Guild Wars 2 Diary Recap:

1. Episode 1: The Beginning
2. Episode 2: New Wave of MMO Story-lines
3. Episode 3: Understanding the World