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I used to play this a lot before WoW spoiled me with its sheer depth and quality. For those who don’t want to pay a subscription or just want to dip their toe in the world of MMOs, GW is definitely the best place to start. :)

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There will always be the everpresent hardcore grumblers who will NEVER be satisfied with anything, who will swear blind that the game has gotten worse with each update, or has been abandoned by the developers.

These people should usually be ignored. There was a major patch released for the game just last week, rebalancing swathes of PvP and PvE skills, addressing bugs, and added some minor bits and tweaks.

The game may be past its retail prime, but Arenanet are still heavily supporting it. I really do reccomend that anyone who hasn’t played it yet get the Complete Edition pack (again, £25 for the whole series) and give it a spin. It’s soloable if you want, but best played with at least one buddy.

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That being said, it IS a lot harder to get into pvp now than it was 4 years ago, simply because most of the people still playing are very very good by now. The level of skill that got my guild into the top-300 3 years ago (and very briefly in the top-100, after a very lucky win against RusCorp, who were ranked no. 3 at the time and therefore gave us lots of points for beating them ;p ) wouldn’t even put us in the top-1000 now!

Anyway, GW2: I was stupidly, ecstatically happy to see this! With all the trouble NCsoft West have been having (Tabula Rasa and Motorstorm closing, for instance, they must have bled money badly from those!) and Jeff Strain recently leaving, I was beginning to wonder if maybe GW2 would never materialise. I’m happy it has and I’ll be first in line to buy it.

At everyone who was asking how the instancing in the original Guild Wars works: basically, the hubs (cities, outposts, villages) are public. You can get hundreds of people in them at the same time, and frequently multiple copies of each of them. But when you go out into the wilds, it’s just you and your party against the world.

The advantages aren’t just restricted to the ones people already listed (no queues to kill quest mobs or waiting for a boss to respawn, no ganking, no griefing). For me, the most important advantage instancing had was the stuff that it allowed them to do with storytelling. You can have an important NPC tagging along to help you with the mission. You could have horrible high level monsters wandering around a lowbie zone simply because you’re at that point in the game’s plot where armageddon has basically happened and you need to clean up the mess. There’s something very deeply disturbing about seeing a green, idyllic place where you spent a couple of happy levels a few weeks ago suddenly terrorised by absurdly powerful monstrosities! And, without wishing to spoil anything, everyone who has seen the Searing in the first game experienced a powerfully visceral sense of shock and dislocation which I doubt ANY other MMO can provide! Most games, you struggle valiantly when you’re level 30 to save the little village of Boghampton from the smelly sewer monsters, butchering hordes and hordes of them and killing their king, who dropped a blue +3 plunger of malice for you. Then, months later, when you’re level 400, you happen to pass through Boghampton again. Do they hail you as a conquering hero and decorate you with toilet roll? Do they line the streets to cheer you as you ride through their green fields? Nope, they’re still holed up behind their walls with sewer monsters wandering around bored and miserable outside, and there’s probably a repeatable quest to kill 900 of them for 300XP that you can pick up. Not so with instancing: if you carve up your game, you can grill each slice of it to each player’s exact taste!

Plus, from a pvp standpoint, instancing gives amazingly low latency, so you can have the fastest, most fluid and amazing gameplay I’ve ever seen in an online game! I don’t think any other MMO expects people to be able to consistently interrupt skills with activation times of 0.75″, or their healers to have a reaction time of 0.25″ in order to save them from certain death!

I am a little concerned that there’ll be a persistent world, tbh, because I don’t see how you can do it without affecting balance. Guild Wars was built for teams, and the fact that you had to define your skillbar and pick 8 skills to carry before leaving town (not just for yourself but for your AI henchmen too, since Nightfall introduced customisable ones) was crucial for balance, because Guild Wars relies on the fact that no build can be an allrounder: you’re built to do something specific, and each of your teammates has to fulfil a different role. If in GW2 you’re sent out into the world alone, you’ll have to be more of a generalist, and that’s worrying, as it implies they might have changed some fundamental game mechanics. I know the EG article said you can have a sidekick, but it specified that you only have one and can opt to not bring him at all if you like! I hope they haven’t messed with the 8-skill build!

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ArenaNet founders were guys from the core Blizzard team, although right now only O’brien remains iirc, so I think many companies can learn a thing or two from their work on GW, trailers and the rest ;)

@Gabe

Considering the Warcraft lore is mostly a patchwork of existing universes (warhammer especially), and that it has been frankly sold out to the hardcore carebears in WoW, I can only advise you to try GW (as said before, Nightfall is a solid standalone) or even LOTRO, which are far more solid and interesting, background wise.
EvE too has a nice background if you want to devote some time exploring it, but you have to like sci fi and internet spaceship games.

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and ever since the pve/pvp skill split there’s been a lot less complaining about ‘they nerfed this!’, ‘they overpowered that!’.

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there was a skill balance patch just 10 days ago

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