Guild Wars 2 Diary #6 : Random Events, Random Teams

The job has finally been done and Two-blade Pete is no more. It’s a shame that stopping a local thug from filling a city’s water supply with poison has resulted in the death of a close friend, but the world is a little cleaner after the brawl in a local pub finished him and all his horrible schemes. This leaves only one option: you must move on, deal with your grief and continue to help the world as best as possible. Along the way you’ll see many things in Guild Wars 2; meet lots of people, but the people you saved from poisoning will never forget you, and the deeds you’ve done will always be spoke of.  You’ll be moving on soon enough, but first there are still people that need your help in Divinity’s Reach and, for now, it’s worth staying put.

Guild Wars 2 Diary Episode 6 - Gameplay Video

More Levelling

I’m not entirely sure how the developers expect Guild Wars 2 to be played. Personally, I like to play through a game’s quests as best I can, while doing the side quests I come across if the story gets boring or if I’m in the local area for a while anyway. I tend not to enter PvP or dungeons in Guild Wars 2 until I feel confident enough with all the game’s systems and with my characters skills to not be a burden on anybody. Despite doing everything I come across (and a hell of a lot more besides) I’m still coming to quests and being told I’m not a high enough level to survive the inevitable encounters with drunken low lives and dangerous centaurs.

So, to stop making a complete fool of myself (again) in an instance I’m not yet ready for, I thought it’d probably be worth going out into the world and being a general do-gooder in order to gain experience and learn more about the surrounding areas. I had to go a little bit out of my comfort zone this week and ended up fighting monsters that were quite a bit of a higher level than I was. Thankfully, I wasn’t alone.

Random Events

Sometimes, while wondering around in Guild Wars 2, you’ll come across random events. These events usually involve killing certain, stupidly powerful monster or defending a location from swarming attackers for a certain length of time. They usually give a decent amount of experience and a few other rewards as well, but the important thing is watching how these random events bring people together in Guild Wars 2. As soon as one of these events pops up on the map – it does so to everybody within a certain radius – teams of people swarm on the location to help out. It’s an amazing thing to watch, seeing so many people use so many different skills and, props to ArenaNet; I’ve yet to see any slowdown.

These battles will usually last anywhere up to five minutes, and it’s great fun to see so many people working together towards a single goal. At their best, these events showcase everything that’s so fun and original about Guild Wars 2. At their worst, it’s you against 9 or 10 centaurs, but that hardly ever seems to happen.

Spreading Out

The other thing I’ve noticed, as I’ve explored the wider world of Guild Wars 2, is that every town and village I come across is different. They share common themes – like villages and towns in close proximity do in the real world – but the attitude and energy of each new location is amazing to watch. Whether it’s the rough and tumble nature of the farms, the hectic lives of monks at the brewery or the odd mix of classes in Divinity’s Reach. All these “people” are similar and the conversations you hear are often about the same sort of things, but in the way they’re clothed, the things they’re doing, even the way they speak, they’re a million miles apart.

The renown heart quests, on the other hand, are often very similar. They tend to boil down to “kill so many monsters,” although it’s nice to have the option to do other things if you want to. Asides from killing, you’ll find yourself drinking beer, putting out fires, feeding animals and a lot more besides. It helps that, when you get bored of cleaning graffiti or whatever it is you may be doing, you can just run around slaughtering things. Ah, if only real life was that simple and that rewarding…

The Floating Grizwhirl

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