Well after talking to some of my friends on G+ who are just over-the-moon in love with GW2, I decided to take things a little farther today. Once again, my experience was a mixed bag. The good news is that most of the stuff that frustrated me was bug-related and so ought not be there when the game launches.

I wound up playing through the level 10 phase of my Story Quest (which I ended up completing at level 11). I found the story quests to get really challenging “at level.” My warrior just can’t stand up to the beating the swarms of mobs give him and lag makes rolling out of “hot spots” a challenge. I had to just grind out a couple of phases…run in, kill a mob or two and die. Respawn, kill a couple more and die, and so on. The last one I ended up totally cheesing out and equipping a bow and plinking away while the NPCs took the hits.

The story was pretty good, though!

Outside of my quests, I still died an awful lot. For a lot of the time I was playing I was somewhere too easy or too hard for me. The first zone is labeled level 1-15 so really it’s just a matter of learning where to go at each level. I re-did some of the “Heart” events that I’d done yesterday, only at the advice of friends I’d hang out after the event was completed and wait for further (and more challenging) phases to spawn. Ended up in some pretty tough boss battles with swarms of other people. Those are both fun and really demonstrate that ArenaNet still has lots of optimizing to do; things tended to turn into a slide show with all the spell effects and stuff on-screen and it gets really tough to see what’s happening.

It really takes until level 8 or 9 before you start seeing the cooler events, and level 10 before you start seeing the power struggles of the world. I tried to stave off an invasion of Ice Elementals that were attacking an outpost. This was pure combat…there wasn’t an Event with a capital E or anything. Nobody knew where they were coming from or why. Sadly we (myself and a few other random players) got wiped out and the nearest revive spot was a good distance away. I gave up and did something more level appropriate.

ArenaNet, btw, has managed to pull off a miracle: they’ve made escort quests that are actually FUN. Really! In one I was hired on as a caravan guard. We had to fight off robbers and even some belligerent drunks while clearing road blocks and running up to hill tops to destroy ballistas that were firing down on us.

I think the reason Escort Quests work is because anyone can join in at any point. No more standing around waiting for the NPC to respawn and then being on your own. People run up, escort for a bit and if they get bored they go elsewhere and do other stuff. Or they stick around for the whole route and get maximum rewards.

Another absolutely awesome design decision is this idea that anyone can revive a fallen character. You don’t have to be a special class or in that person’s party. And you don’t even have to do it alone…if a few people attempt to revive a down character the process just goes faster (it’s pretty slow in combat, pretty quick out of it). So why is this a big deal? Because it binds the community together. When you die and you’re quietly cursing to yourself and suddenly 2 strangers are there helping you to your feet, you can’t help but smile. And when you see someone has fallen in battle, unless you’re a total jackass you’re GOING to try to save them (bonus: you get experience for doing so).

The only real ‘downside’ today was the Overflow system and how hard it is to get with friends. Hopefully they’ll tweak that out. Combat isn’t as fun as it could be, mostly due to lag. When you have an active dodge system it needs to respond quickly and so far GW2’s sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t. That’s a beta problem though, as are the numerous glitches you’ll encounter. What probably isn’t a beta problem is that the game seems to favor ranged combat over melee, in terms of things being interesting. Even in heavy armor my poor warrior dies left and right while ranged characters hang back and avoid taking much damage.

I also think some of the events are a little too clever for their own good. There’s one where you have to throw snowballs at kids, and dodge the snowballs they through at you. Sounds funny right? It is for the first few minutes, but it goes on for far too long as you try to fill up an Event Gauge.

On the other hand I had an absolute blast in a quirky event that took place underground that was all about helping a dude build an ice sculpture of himself in order to convince the local beings that he was their god. There were a few phases to it, it was both funny and fun to do the fighting, and the rewards were good (not only the usual stuff but the local baddies became friendly once they thought a Norn was their god).

I guess that’s enough for tonight. It’s really late and my brain is going fuzzy. I didn’t remember to take many screenshots but here’s a section of one from a courtyard in Hoelbrak. Heroes from GW 1. The statue of the Norn lady in the middle is supposed to be Jora. Click on it for a 1080 pixel wide version.

Well, the servers are coming down for a patch so that’s my cue to write up a blog post.

I started late and only got to level 4. Keeping that in mind, here’s my list of pros and cons so far. Let’s start with the bad stuff.

Cons:
The game is a lot more beta than I’d anticipated it being. It’s pretty janky in places. Attacks lag a lot at times (generally in crowds) and the game is missing that indefinable smoothness that a quality finished product has. I’m sure they’ll get there before launch, but based on what I’m seeing I’m guessing they still have a few months work to do. I’m going to predict August or September at this point. Though maybe they can pull it all together sooner.

Angela spent probably more time than she should have tweaking her character (that’s a good sign for the character creator) and suddenly the game just reset her at the start of character creation with all her changes lost. Overloaded servers probably, but it bummed her out. I think we both thought the game was going to be closer to launch-ready than it is.

Here’s another MMO with a prologue and once again I didn’t like it very much. The character I stuck with was a Norn Fighter and he has to fight a Worm at the end of his prologue. He got knocked on his ass almost immediately, spent the whole fight unconscious and yet in his story line he’s called “The Slayer of Issomir” (or whatever the worm was called).

Not a fan of Overflow Servers, really. I spent all night in an Overflow Server, as far as I could tell. We rolled on a really crowded server, unfortunately.

[EDIT: I think I need to give more detail here… if you only encountered the Overflow Servers on initial login I’d think they were a great idea to avoid queues. But that’s not the case. Whenever you zone there’s a chance you’ll be put back into them. For instance I had a quest to deliver an item to an NPC in the next zone. I went over there, handed in the item and the next step of the quest was back in the zone I’d just left. When I went to zone in I was told the server was full and I had the chance of either queuing for it in-game, or going to an Overflow Server.

With a few tweaks (making sure you and your party end up on the same Overflow server, or lettings friends volunteer to join you on the overflow server you’re on) the system will be fine. Great, even. But in it’s beta state I didn’t like it much.]

Pros:
The game is gorgeous.

The story for my Norn Warrior is actually pretty interesting.

There’s a lot of “organic grouping.” I never Grouped but I fought with a lot of other players. It doesn’t feel like we’re competing for mobs..instead we’re acting like characters should act: banded together against a common enemy. I love that anyone can res anyone else.

Character progression is entertaining. You use a weapon to unlock skills that utilize that weapon. When you get a new category of weapon you get a whole new series of skills to unlock. At level 4 I’ve been working on Sword, Shield and Axe skills. So far Sword looks best for single enemies and Axe looks best for groups.

Combat feels pretty good. If I hadn’t spent last weekend playing Tera I’d say combat felt great, but I’m a little spoiled now. Still, fighting stuff is fun even at level 4. I’ve never seen an MMO where the combat DIDN’T get more fun as you leveled up, so I expect the combat gets really entertaining after a few more levels.

You can get (and I believe send) mail from anywhere. No more looking for a mailbox!

You can travel around the maps really quickly once you’ve done some exploring to unlock teleporters.

Quest rewards are either currency that you can spend on exactly the gear you want, or a select of gear that’s all applicable to your character’s class. None of this typical MMO situation where you get quest rewards that are only good to sell or salvage.

Stuff I need to acclimate to:

Not every event is for you! As you run around the world doing your pre-ordained story quests you’ll see events pop up. If you’re like me you’ll immediately change direction to take part in the event. And sometimes get your ass handed to you. LOL. I was trying to do this one event and I died over and over again until I stopped to look.. I was fighting clusters of level 7 mobs when I was level 2. Well THAT explains it! LOL

In Closing

I probably won’t put much more time into this beta weekend. I’ve seen enough to be comfortable with my pre-order and I’m looking forward to the day I play “for real” but I think I want to save the storylines for launch.

[Update: See the comments. An Anonymous commentor says that in beta you could roll characters on multiple servers and that ArenaNet’s blog post is just poorly worded. If that’s the case, it invalidates this whole rant. I guess we’ll see on Friday.]

So the social networks are abuzz with the upcoming beta weekend for Guild Wars 2. I’m as excited as anyone…I’ve pre-ordered the game based on the level of excitement being projected by people who’ve had the chance to play at conventions or other non-NDA avenues. [Waves at Jazz]

But before we can have fun, we have to endure the rigors of server selection. Guild Wars 1 had no server selection and I have to confess that even though GW2 is a much different game, I was expecting it to follow the same route. I mean, if EVE, Star Trek Online and Champions Online can all run serverless, why not GW2?

Well, World vs World PVP for one reason. In order to have that, you kind of have to have worlds. So OK, at least there’s a reason for it.

BUT… Guild Wars 2 winds up being one of the worst MMOs I’ve played in terms of picking a world. Why? Because you can be on only 1 world. Once you pick a world, ALL your characters will be on that world. So if half your friends are on World A and half are on World B, it’s time to choose which of these groups are your BFFs and which are the wannabes. You’re going to have to ditch someone.

Now to be fair, you can change worlds once a week and at a cost of 1800 coins (not a clue what the real-world equivalent of that is… if it’s $1.80 then no biggie, if it’s $18.00 then we just found out where their revenue is coming from) but when you change worlds, ALL your characters move to this new world.

I’m really not a fan of this system..I have a bunch of different circles of gaming friends and most of them have little to no contact with each other. It breaks my heart that, unless I suddenly become a master diplomat and coerce them all to be on the same world, I’m going to have to pick which friends I play with, and shun the others.

[Edit: I guess I should mention the Guesting system where you can join a friend on their server as a guest. You can’t do WvW PVP that way, but at least you can play with friends. But why not just let me roll a character over there?]