Guild Wars 2 Diary: The Beginning

Step aside, TERA, there’s a new MMORPG in town. Guild Wars 2 is the very definition of the term long awaited, with thousands of people spending hours and hours pawing their way through interviews, screenshots and trailers looking for a nugget of excitement they haven’t relived a million times before. Thankfully, it delivers – it really, really does. How does extended play work out though? Is it something worth buying now? The answer to that latter question is pretty obvious if you’ve seen the gaming charts lately, or if you’ve bothered to read any of the thousands of professional/amateur reviews available on the internet since launch. This is the first in our new weekly series on Guild Wars 2. In it we’re going to examine the world, the characters, the people and the culture, hopefully learning a little bit about what makes it such an exciting game. Where’s the best place to start? The beginning of course: from character creation onwards.

The Characters of Guild Wars 2

You get five character spaces in Guild Wars 2, enough to create a decent variety of characters without actually having to backtrack on your adventure at all. There are five different races to choose from, some that are best at attacking, and others that seem more spiritual creatures. From there you have the choice of having a male or female character, and a choice of what sort of fighting style they use. Thieves are more stealthy and wear medium armour, whereas warriors are a little more gung-ho and are equipped with bigger weapons. It’s fairly standard MMO stuff and – just for the sake of being boring – I chose to start my adventure as a human. I know, I know.

Creating a character in Guild War 2 is quick and easy, although to those who like to spend hours creating a mirror image of them in the game world; I have to say I found it a little bit tricky to create anything that didn’t look at least recognisably similar to the base characters you build upon.

Starting an Adventure

One of my favourite things about the opening to Guild Wars 2 is that it drops you right in the middle of the battle from the very beginning. My character, voiced by Nolan North (thanks Mr North), explains a little bit about the state of the world, the state of his life and then we’re both dropped into the middle of a village engulfed in fire. The centaurs have attacked, blast them, and without my help the whole village is going to be a mess of death and destruction.

Other MMOs would have you wonder around for a little while, doing mundane tasks for people you don’t much care about. “Kill 10 small animals to progress. Oh, you’ve already killed 10? Now there are 25 small animals that are causing a different sort of problem to the one you solved earlier. And don’t worry, I see another 50 small animals on the horizon, so once you’ve done with the 25 I have another job for you.”

No small animals here. Centaurs are fairly easy to kill, but mainly because you have a ton of backup. Your allies are both computer controlled and real human beings, and together the battle doesn’t last at all long. This is the second thing I love about Guild Wars 2.

Working as a Team

As mentioned above, the quest system in most games is utterly, terribly broken. We’ve spoke a hundred times in the blog section of this site about the idea of the single player MMO, about the way that many games are designed to isolate you from the other playing. In many games, the fact that you can see other human beings is an annoyance more than an advantage and Guild Wars 2 rectifies this issue straight from the get go.

There are hundreds of people playing at the moment, and that’s a good thing because quests tend to be done as a group, rather than as individuals.

The example given pre-launch was that a farm is being attacked. Rather than each individual player saving the farm alone, being given experience and told to go on their merry way, you now protect that farm as part of a group. Every player who takes part in that quest is helping (and at the end you’ll get a medal based on how active you were). It’s an important difference, and while I don’t necessarily feel any closer to the people I’m playing with (I don’t recognise their names, I don’t even look at their characters, I’m too focussed on what I’m doing), it at least forces me to interact with others.
At this early point in the game, I can get away with being a lone wolf within a bigger pack. As the monsters grow (and as the armies needed to take them on become equally as sizable), conversation will become a much bigger part and, at that point, the massively part of the game really comes into being. During the opening part of the game, we were all forced to battle an elemental and it was one of the most entertaining opening moments in MMO history. Just me and a bunch of strangers fighting for our lives; "Now how more real can a fantasy MMO get?"

Recovering Veteran

Defeating the elemental results in us all being knocked out and needing time out to recover. It’s disappointing, to a certain extent, that the story is still delivered as if I’m the only person that matters in the world, as if I hadn’t just been battling alongside others. It’s a problem that I half-expected Guild Wars 2 to rectify, given that they’d focussed so much on the massively part of the MMO genre, but, alas, it’s still there.

Outside the hospital is a nice man who wants to tell me about the goings-on in the village. Since the centaur attack, lots of monsters have been popping up and unscrupulous bandits are trying to take advantage of weakened farmsteads. Rather than offering me the quests individually, so that I have to go back to the man each time I’ve saved a group, these quests are all added onto my map simultaneously and I can choose the order in which I complete them.

Check out the video accompanying this article to see some of these quests in action, and the next part of the game.

Conclusion

I’m looking forward to really getting stuck into Guild Wars 2. I like the idea of playing alongside allies, of fighting enemies as a team, and of quests that don’t always result in little more than “fetch this for me, there might be monsters.” The early parts of a game can sometimes be misleading, but, for what it’s worth, I can’t help but think Guild Wars 2 deserved all the hype surrounding it.