Guild Wars 2: BWE#1

There are some games that are over-ambitious, some games that flop, some games that never quite live up to expectation.

Guild Wars 2 is not one of those games.

We'd been waiting eagerly for this beta event ever since ArenaNet announced that they would have an open beta, just over a year ago. The 27th finally came along. However, beta is beta, so connecting was   difficult, as any participant will tell you.

After getting a stable connection in the early hours of Saturday morning, my pals and I blitzed through our personal stories with each other's help. Though the personal story is good, its not what makes the game special.

This... Is what makes the game special.

The world. It's picturesque, infinitely explorable and astoundingly detailed. It's a labour of love without equal. I used to think World of Warcraft had a well-crafted space to level up in, but Tyria is now in a league of its own. If I had to pick a place to stick around and play the auction house all day (Let's hope that never happens), I'd want to do it in one of the game's architecturally phenomenal cities. Hoelbrak, The Black Citadel, Divinity's Reach and Lion's Arch (see above). We haven't seen the cities of Rata Sum and The Grove yet, but as soon as they release them for the beta client, I'll be busy exploring and cataloguing every nook and cranny, every floating science-cube and every sentient seed-pod I can cram into my screenshot folder.

I played this beta as a Norn warrior. The Norn start in the Wayfarer Foothills, in which they commune with the animal spirits and try to maintain the balance of nature... while cracking the skulls of the Sons of Svanir, the servants of the ice dragon, Jormag. I was constantly switching weapons to learn all of the skills, incase I needed to switch tactics later on. With a sword and shield, I could charge into a pack of enemies, apply bleed effects, immobilise and I could activate my shield wall to prevent all incoming damage. I wasn't a 'tank' per se, but I was the designated mob-gatherer, to allow my elementalist team mate to clean up with a meteor shower. Our engineer would also slow them by shooting a massive globule of glue at their feet.

That's the great thing about the combat: the combo system. Certain spells have in their descriptions the words 'combo field', or 'combo finisher'. By charging for a shield bash onto a foe within a fire caused by another player, I gained a fire-shield that burned nearby foes, allowing my shield block to yield some damage potential, despite being a defensive spell. This also works with all projectiles, which take on the effects of all allied combo fields they pass through, eventually leading in some cases to a archer-line style of play, lighting their arrows as they send them flying. There are also some other key things to note that may not at first seem of much importance. Harking back to WoW, you had to learn the spell icons for every single spell of every single class in the entire game to have a clue what was going on in PvP, or PvE for that matter. Instead of this saturation-of-the-spell-effect-icon syndrome of the past, the only icons that are displayed are the effects of the spells. I.E, if an engineer applies three stacks of his kind of bleed effect, and I as a warrior apply three of my own to the same target, six stacks of the 'bleed' condition are displayed, which saves a great deal of time, brain power and precious U.I space. It's in these small, convenient details that I think Guild Wars 2 really sets itself apart. The dynamic event system is compelling and; funnily enough, dynamic, but it's when I notice details like the rate at which you craft large amount of items rapidly increasing, or the elimination of mounts via the use of 'way-points', I constantly think,
'Why didn't anyone think of this before?'

The dynamic event system is not to be overlooked, either. The pace of the game is exactly what you want it to be, and you're not limited by having to travel back to some druid's holiday retreat at the northernmost point of the continent just to pick up and hand in quests. Besides, why would you? Your rewards are sent to you through the mail system, and you don't even need to go to a mailbox to open it! Fantastic. I wish they'd do away with item durability in PvE though. That has never been   and still isn't fun. Shortly after I started playing, I found myself picking up fish from traps by the river and feeding them to bear cubs. I suddenly felt like I had lost man-points, but I didn't care. Forty other people were doing it, too.

As an MMO, you would expect the game to have a large amount of Player-versus-Environment content, but you wouldn't expect it so literally, as it can often appear in Guild Wars 2 in the form of platforming puzzles. We completed just two of them during our time on the game, but each one took about twenty minutes to hop, skip and jump our way through. The rewards range from achievements (which I don't really care about) to skill points. Boy, do I care about those. Your character is not simply given a skill point to spend each level, he only gets a trait point to spend on passive bonuses. Instead, you have to find the places in the world shown on the map, and complete the challenges to acquire all the skill points you'll need to max-out. Of course, this only increases your versatility rather than your power, as you can only have five utility skills equipped at any one time, but it makes the RPG completionist in me want to get out and explore the world enough to get every single one.

A Pose after a tough climb.

I said earlier that it's the world that makes this game special, didn't I? Change that to *worlds*. The world versus world versus world (WvWvW) content could be released on its own and still be a great game. There are four zones or 'shards' within the Mists (the seperate WvWvW map), three of which belong to a particular server at the start of each week, and the middle one is contested. Everything except a server's spawn location for each shard can be captured, upgraded, destroyed, intercepted and besieged. You see guild groups of around fifty players roaming around with siege golems when invading enemy territory, which will get ambushed by arrow carts and ballistas, and the battles kick off. They can last for twenty minutes or so even without walls or static defences. If you're a small group, you'll never stand a chance against a massive, coordinated army like that, but you can go around and intercept enemy supply caravans towed by creatures called Dolyaks, which are Guild Wars 2's resident work horses. There is always something for you to be doing, and the matchmaking system for the servers means that if you're getting dominated by one server, you won't have to deal with them next week. It's this, and the structured PvP that has me most excited for the final release of the game.

I suppose I should shamelessly plug our guild here.

We are 'Vi Et Armis', a guild full of experienced MMO players that want to deal with all of the challenges Guild Wars 2 has to offer, and it can be challenging, believe me. We will be frequently running both PvE and PvP groups and eventually getting a larger group together for some serious WvWvW action. You can find us at http://vi-et-armis.enjin.com/

See you next beta.