My Personal Story

1. The Story

Of course Guild Wars 2 begins where every RPG begins; character creation.  But beyond just styling your character's hair you can make some very deep character choices as well, such as whether your character regrets not avenging their sister's death by centaurs, searching for their true parents, or running away to join the circus.  This is amazing and much more immersive than say coming up with your own backstory or being able to write your own biography in a profile for other players to see (ie City of Heroes, R.I.P).  Why?  Well, because of your Personal Story!  

Your personal story will lead you along the game, through  different zones, with beautiful cutscenes, all the way until the climatic ending, after cutting down swathes of zombies, to eventually confronting the Prime Evil himself, Zhaitan.  You can be sure no player will experience the same story either, because the multiple choice questions you answered at character creation probably offer somewhere between a billion different combinations of story!  Also it stops at level thirty when you must choose one of three factions to align with anyway, which then a short while later they realize they must combine themselves into one Pact, under Treeguy (close enough), to face the zombie apocalypse.

2. The World

There is no denying the world of Tyria is beautiful.  From the snow-capped Shiverpeak Mountians to beyond the Sea of Sorrows where Orr lays.  Okay, Orr may not be as beautiful, and it could be hard getting to a vista to enjoy the view, but trust me it is worth it.  The world is divided into rather large zones.  But don't fret, you won't have to waste agonizing minutes traversing them on foot, or even mount.  No, each zone has a number of waypoints from which you can instantaneously teleport to at will, as long as you have the coin.  The color of your coin matters a lot as well, (seriousily some NPC's won't shut up about it..) because as you level those waypoints start using more of the silver ones not the copper ones.  If you need to waypoint back to a city though there is no need to waste coin, just travel to The MIsts where you can hop to Lion's Arch and then travel to any other city for free.  It makes sense in some Asuran way I'm sure.  

Beyond some breathtaking vistas and personal story though these zones also have plenty of other things going on in them.  You're pretty much guarenteed to never see the same thing going on twice.  Sure the hearts are the same and you can only complete them once, but the Dynamic Events are where it's at.  Each zone has scripted events that could be going on at any time, many chained into more.   None of these events spill over into other zones though, so you don't have to worry about something crazy like zombies flooding out of Orr into the rest of the world, and thank the gods for that because if you havn't seen Orr there is definately an unending amount of zombies!  These events make the world of Tyria so much more immersive though.  I feel like I'm right there, and there is always some friends nearby ready to help.  I'm serious, like they're always there, attacking even when nothing else is there.  Of course as soon as something is there...they teleport into action!   

3. The Combat

Holy-Trinity begone!  This isn't WoW, this is...Diablo?  Yes, the typical tab target system is swapped for a more action based hack-and-slash system.  Your skills are limited to your choice of weapon and their related skills, as well as five other skills you can select among from a small pool and switch up at any time outside of combat.  And then on to the oh glourious combat!  

Your shots may miss, an enemy may step in front of projectiles blocking your target, your heals must be aimed at teammates in need or placed on the ground under them.   And your teammates better be able to watch the ground because there will be a lot going on there or they're sure to find themselves there.  You won't be able to target teammates to save them.  If you want to succeed in this combat system you best get your typical MMO combat out of your mind and start thinking Action RPG!  Dodging, positioning, using defensive cooldowns, using your teammates as meatshields, paying attention to combo fields on the ground.  Tank and spank is what the NPC's do now, not you.  Luckily, like any ARPG, there will surely be plenty of uber gear you'll be working towards to better cut down your unfortunate foes!

4. The Loots

What? Legendary weapons and those awesome looking dungeon armors have the same stats as any other exotic gear at level eighty?  Ok, well I guess that's not so bad, they're just cosmetic.  At least we still look like a badkitten right?  I mean I'm used to Legendary Weapons being kitten anyways coming from Diablo 3.  And just like Diablo 3 we can simply farm up enough gold and get the best gear off the Trading Post, so that's cool.  Whenever I needed new gear I could just dish out a few coins and get some Greens off the Trading Post that I could basically resell to vendors to break even later.   I knew there was a reason for those vendors...

5. The Crafting

So maybe we can craft some good gear at least?  Yes we can!   And it's rather straight-forward to.  You gather materials like most other MMO's, from nodes, trees, bushes (not suspicious ones though those only contain bandits...they drop lots of materials in bags though so that's cool).  You can learn all crafts on one character if you so choose as well, so you need not worry about relying on any other players.  You are a very self-suffiecent crafter, except for the materials you have to buy from NPC's because they have a monoply on them for some reason.  And don't worry all material nodes will be marked on your map so gathering is easy to!  You'll never have to worry about surveying for materials, them having their own stats, trading with other players for them, purchasing gathering machines for them, setting up your own shop to sell them, or anything as ridiculousily  involved as all that (ie Star Wars Galaxies R.I.P).  See, pretty straight-forward right?

Mystic Forge.   What. The. Kitten. Is. This?   Well at least we don't need other players to learn how to use this bad boy.  Only google.  A lot of google.  Okay, well I don't really need to use it though right?    I already have the best gear.  So I'll just wait till someone else makes something cool and then I'll just do that.  Yeah, that works. 

6. The Conclusion

Sure the core of ARPG's is better and better loots, RPG's to progress your character and their story, and MMO's to offer a social world to immerse yourself in with many others.   So what if Guild Wars 2's loot doesn't keep becoming ever-more powerful, or it has a scripted story that ends once you reach the last zone, or a world built for Mario and Luigi (Yoshi not allowed) only they never have to team up to save the princess?   Who cares!  It's still kitten pretty!  And honestly why else do we all play MMO's?