I've only got to play in this ultra-short stress test today, and I didn't really get anything done (lol), so a pretty uninformed review here still. Keep that in mind when I'm talking about things like money, pace, leveing, etc.

Well, this game is... different. From all the MMO's I've played, that is. Doesn't feel anything like WoW, or Rift, or whatever. You know, when you load up SW:TOR, you feel like you're playing WoW in a sci-fi setting. This, you don't really get that impression. This is more like "wtf is this', since most of your skills and experiences from other MMO's are not helpful, and you continue saying that every time you do something new. This ranges from the UI to the combat to the general pacing of the game. It just doesn't feel like WoW. It doesn't. Doesn't really feel like anything. That's the first game to do that. People who know what I'm talking about or why, know what I'm talking about.

I played a Charr Ranger with dual axes. I started off with a Charr Warrior but decided to switch later.

On to more specific points:

Character Creation:

Definitely more involved than most MMO's I've played. Kinda similar to the stuff implemented in the recent EVE expansion. On a Charr, besides the TESish "make your nose wider", you get to customize some fur patterns and horns and stuff. And then you get to dye your armor.

You also get to answer some random questions which are supposed to influence your personal story (like the thing in my sig), which is some instanced adventure, but I never got around to doing that.

Story:

I really liked the painterly opening sequence you get after you create your character. "I'm a Charr, I'm a big scary Charr, RAWR." Not really sure what's going on, otherwise. I know we're getting attacked by ghosts and also by some other legion or something. But I barely played original GW1, so I hope the game guides me in the whole story department.

I actually like the little dialogue sequences you get where they show your character and the other guy talking. Conversations are all pretty short. And you can talk to basically everyone, most of them don't say anything interesting just "For the legion" or "Work, work". Many few of them do have pretty extensive conversations (especially some NPC's give you tasks to do). Sometimes NPC's talk to each other. There are some cute little cubs running around, too.

Story as a coherent thing doesn't actually exist, it's more accurate to say that story "happens", and players make it slow down or speed up.

Quests:

Well, there are no quests...

You just walk around and randomly stuff comes up. Some of it is in household chores category (herd cattle, put tools somewhere), some more combat oriented (defend an area against waves of enemies, kill a boss). But it's not really about you since other people can do it and if someone else finishes it you can't do it anymore until it resets. It's more about the NPC's. I've always been saying they should put more NPC's into MMO's so they don't feel lifeless, seems like Arena.net did just that. And events seem to kinda cycle into each other, and some are just permanent.

And it seems when you help some specific people they send you thank you notes in the mail.

Visuals:

The game runs very badly on my computer. Originally I was 100% sure it's my hardware, but I'm not so sure anymore because I found some areas in the game where there were no players and it actually became very smooth. Not sure what's up with that. But I ended up playing on mostly low settings in the tiny window.

Also, Arena.net, wtf is up with the limited Windowed mode? Can I have more resolutions, please?

But, yeah, I didn't really get to appreciate too much of the visuals because at the point I had to lower it to, WoW looks better. There were some pretty areas and I found a pretty waterfall cave, but on my computer it all looks very muddly and blurry, and especially the Charr don't have the best architecture, apparently. Game actually looks a lot like GW1 in many respects.

I do have a better computer available, so I should see how it looks on there at the next BWE.

Difficulty:

The game is pretty difficult in terms of combat. I died or got into the downed state (the game puts you there when you're low and you have 4 weak spells to kill your enemy, and if you succeed, you'll "revive" with like 30% or so HP) all the damn time. I'm generally not exactly the best player out there as it is. Mobs hit quite hard and it's pretty easy to just get killed. Taking on multiple mobs is a gamble (although can be very fun and rewarding). I constantly got killed in a certain events where waves of enemies kept spawning and attacking a junkyard. Not only me, but many of us. Each wave you'd see a bunch of dead players on the ground, lol.

In the early area, there were a lot of neutral mobs who didn't attack you much, although my main attack was pseudo-AoEish so I kept getting myself into trouble, but it was still OK. Once I got into an area where all the mobs were hostile, it got really difficult to move through because they respawned really fast. I hope they tweak the respawn rates a bit relative to players in the current area.

And you can't do anything about it. If you get more players, the game throws you more mobs. Get more levels, the game downlevels you. lol I did get to feel more powerful over time compared to some starter mobs, but not by a very big margin and it seems to scale very slowly.

Accessibility:

One thing I want to note straight away is that everything is frigging expensive. You get very little access to money and for everything you want to do you have to pay. You have to pay to use portals (waypoints that are scattered every 5 minutes), and since you have to use a portal if you die and nobody revives you I wonder what you're supposed to do if you go broke (granted, if you just stay there and wait, there's a very high chance you get revived eventually). You also have to pay for repairs, and stuff breaks when you die. Couple that with how often you die as I mentioned above, you get the idea.

Game isn't very user-friendly, surprisingly. A lot of stuff is kinda unclear and counter-intuitive at first. Excessive clicking of random buttons is advised. Kinda hard to explain.

Combat:

First thing I want to say is that everything actually dies rather quickly. This includes you.

I read a few threads on melee combat in GW2 around here,and it seems I'm joining the group of people that don't know what to do with it. I started off with a Warrior and I had a sword, and I kept trying to figure out how it worked and what was the right way to go about it but I couldn't, really. I even tried practicing on low level mobs and avoid them hitting me but it didn't really seem to work out. I kinda circle around and roll places and try not to get hit but I don't know. The melee combat system feels kinda Gothicish, and those do take a while to get into. Add on top of that there was a lot of framerate lag, and during that time I also got connection lag so my character wasn't responding. In the end I dropped it and started using a Shortbow instead. Then I just rolled a Ranger.

With my Ranger, I was pretty happy. I did get a pet that I'd rather not have, since it died every five minutes. The most annoying thing about it dying is that it just keeps walking around like it's alive but I actually have to revive it. I was told this is not a bug, well, it should be. It's a bit stupid to see a bunch of Rangers with their pets walking around with revive icons above them... I especially hate how I want to revive players but keep bumping into their damn pets.

Anyway, back to the Ranger. GW2 combat is sort of a mix of free form and tab target (again, very similar to Gothic if you played that). You can hit air, but if there's a target it's going to start locking onto that target. Sometimes that makes aiming kind of annoying. So I took dual axes as I said, and they have some neat skils on them. Axes are kinda multiple-target oriented, but all right for single target, too. The main attack skill bounces on targets if they are available. My 2nd skill was throwing axes in a line and causing bleed. And another multiple-target skill came from the offhand axe, it sent an axe forward and then had it come back as a boomerang. These were really useful against large waves of enemies and dealt a crapton of damage to some Flame Legion guys and some Tar Elementals. So I had a lot of fun with that. I did try some other weapons but preferred the axes.

One thing that's hir or miss is that on every weapon, you initially only have skill 1 available, and you have to use that skill to get the other skills available.

I also later got a free skill slot and got myself a trap that hurt and slowed enemies. It was a really cool trap but my pet sometimes distrated mobs from it... there's a more extensive system with traits and crap that I didn't get to.

Crafting:

The money issues I had were mostly due to crafting, because with crafting you end up salvaging nearly everythng in your inventory, so you don't sell it. Further, you have to pay a lot of money for the salvage kit, which has limited uses. And you have to buy your harvesting tools, which are also limited uses. And if you want to craft certain things, you have to buy these bundles of tin ore or of jude (june? jute? wtf is that anyway) from vendors that cost like a salvage kit. Gold sinks. Gold sinks, everywhere.

I didn't really get much done with the crafting, I managed to get myself a longbow and then the test ended. It's pretty standard "get a bunch of ingredients to make x" system, and a lot of the ingredients are also crafting components so you have to make them, first. It also has a discovery mode where you throw some ingredients at it and try to come up with a recipe, but I didn't get to use it because every ingredient I used had a crafting skill requirement, lol. And there was a lot of stuff I could make already as it is.

I also want to note that if you have a lot of something to craft (I had like 33 bolts of jude/june/jute to craft), it speeds up the process over time. In WoW I usually had to start some crafting session and go make coffee.

MMOishness:

Didn't really get to see much, all I can say is that you will be doing stuff with other places 90% of the time simply because they're there. It's a lot like rifts in Rift, except everything is a Rift and everyone is already in the public group, and all resources are distributed Diablo III style.

I actually ended up in a party for a short while and we roamed around and eventually got owned by some harpies.

There are players everywhere in the initial area and you can frequently see 10+ players on some event hacking at something. With a lot of corpses. Especially pet corpses. As I've said, very Rift-like, except you don't have to click any extra buttons and it applies to even attacking a habitual mob, chances are you'll have some other player come along and attack it, too. Stuff's a bit chaotic, people dying and reviving and dying and reviving.

Pace of the Game:

Have to mention this separately because the game feels very slow. It seems really badly suited for something like this stress test, because you're kinda trying to rush through it and get some stuff done, and the game's response is to hit you on the nose and be like: "No, no, no, NO". Everything kinda takes a while. I ended up barely getting out of the first zone.

Getting money takes a while. Getting places (without a portal) takes a while. Leveling crafting takes a while. Getting ingredients for crafting takes a while. Your skills are not available straight away, you have to use other skills to unlock them, so that takes a bit of time (and was very aggravating in the stress test). Leveling out of an area took me a while. Everything's kinda slow.

Feels more like a game where you'd sit down and relax and get some coffee and spend a few hours exploring the city or something. Or you'd pick up a bow and do some practice on weak mobs for a while. Everything takes some time to get into and the stress test just didn't give that time. In consequence, this game will be eating up lots of hours.

Conclusion:

If you're tired of WoW-clones and want a themepark MMO to play, please get this.

Good review.

On the pet problems I found the bear to be more surviveable than the other starter pets.  Also you can charm juvenile animals and when you have two pets you can hot swap them.  Helps with the revive problems because when they are swapped out they regenerate.  Many of the cities have juveniles to be tamed and there are many others out in the wild.

This is a good and fairly honest review, although I have to disagree with the pacing issues.

I don't see why they should do all of the work necessary to adjust this for one 7 hour event if that side of the game is not what they are testing.

Originally posted by Irus

I've only got to play in this ultra-short stress test today, and I didn't really get anything done (lol), so a pretty uninformed review here still. Keep that in mind when I'm talking about things like money, pace, leveing, etc.

Well, this game is... different. From all the MMO's I've played, that is. Doesn't feel anything like WoW, or Rift, or whatever. You know, when you load up SW:TOR, you feel like you're playing WoW in a sci-fi setting. This, you don't really get that impression. This is more like "wtf is this', since most of your skills and experiences from other MMO's are not helpful, and you continue saying that every time you do something new. This ranges from the UI to the combat to the general pacing of the game. It just doesn't feel like WoW. It doesn't. Doesn't really feel like anything. That's the first game to do that. People who know what I'm talking about or why, know what I'm talking about.

I played a Charr Ranger with dual axes. I started off with a Charr Warrior but decided to switch later.

On to more specific points:

Character Creation:

Definitely more involved than most MMO's I've played. Kinda similar to the stuff implemented in the recent EVE expansion. On a Charr, besides the TESish "make your nose wider", you get to customize some fur patterns and horns and stuff. And then you get to dye your armor.

You also get to answer some random questions which are supposed to influence your personal story (like the thing in my sig), which is some instanced adventure, but I never got around to doing that.

Story:

I really liked the painterly opening sequence you get after you create your character. "I'm a Charr, I'm a big scary Charr, RAWR." Not really sure what's going on, otherwise. I know we're getting attacked by ghosts and also by some other legion or something. But I barely played original GW1, so I hope the game guides me in the whole story department.

I actually like the little dialogue sequences you get where they show your character and the other guy talking. Conversations are all pretty short. And you can talk to basically everyone, most of them don't say anything interesting just "For the legion" or "Work, work". Many few of them do have pretty extensive conversations (especially some NPC's give you tasks to do). Sometimes NPC's talk to each other. There are some cute little cubs running around, too.

Story as a coherent thing doesn't actually exist, it's more accurate to say that story "happens", and players make it slow down or speed up.

Quests:

Well, there are no quests...

You just walk around and randomly stuff comes up. Some of it is in household chores category (herd cattle, put tools somewhere), some more combat oriented (defend an area against waves of enemies, kill a boss). But it's not really about you since other people can do it and if someone else finishes it you can't do it anymore until it resets. It's more about the NPC's. I've always been saying they should put more NPC's into MMO's so they don't feel lifeless, seems like Arena.net did just that. And events seem to kinda cycle into each other, and some are just permanent.

And it seems when you help some specific people they send you thank you notes in the mail.

Visuals:

The game runs very badly on my computer. Originally I was 100% sure it's my hardware, but I'm not so sure anymore because I found some areas in the game where there were no players and it actually became very smooth. Not sure what's up with that. But I ended up playing on mostly low settings in the tiny window.

Also, Arena.net, wtf is up with the limited Windowed mode? Can I have more resolutions, please?

But, yeah, I didn't really get to appreciate too much of the visuals because at the point I had to lower it to, WoW looks better. There were some pretty areas and I found a pretty waterfall cave, but on my computer it all looks very muddly and blurry, and especially the Charr don't have the best architecture, apparently. Game actually looks a lot like GW1 in many respects.

I do have a better computer available, so I should see how it looks on there at the next BWE.

Difficulty:

The game is pretty difficult in terms of combat. I died or got into the downed state (the game puts you there when you're low and you have 4 weak spells to kill your enemy, and if you succeed, you'll "revive" with like 30% or so HP) all the damn time. I'm generally not exactly the best player out there as it is. Mobs hit quite hard and it's pretty easy to just get killed. Taking on multiple mobs is a gamble (although can be very fun and rewarding). I constantly got killed in a certain events where waves of enemies kept spawning and attacking a junkyard. Not only me, but many of us. Each wave you'd see a bunch of dead players on the ground, lol.

In the early area, there were a lot of neutral mobs who didn't attack you much, although my main attack was pseudo-AoEish so I kept getting myself into trouble, but it was still OK. Once I got into an area where all the mobs were hostile, it got really difficult to move through because they respawned really fast. I hope they tweak the respawn rates a bit relative to players in the current area.

And you can't do anything about it. If you get more players, the game throws you more mobs. Get more levels, the game downlevels you. lol I did get to feel more powerful over time compared to some starter mobs, but not by a very big margin and it seems to scale very slowly.

Accessibility:

One thing I want to note straight away is that everything is frigging expensive. You get very little access to money and for everything you want to do you have to pay. You have to pay to use portals (waypoints that are scattered every 5 minutes), and since you have to use a portal if you die and nobody revives you I wonder what you're supposed to do if you go broke (granted, if you just stay there and wait, there's a very high chance you get revived eventually). You also have to pay for repairs, and stuff breaks when you die. Couple that with how often you die as I mentioned above, you get the idea.

Game isn't very user-friendly, surprisingly. A lot of stuff is kinda unclear and counter-intuitive at first. Excessive clicking of random buttons is advised. Kinda hard to explain.

Combat:

First thing I want to say is that everything actually dies rather quickly. This includes you.

I read a few threads on melee combat in GW2 around here,and it seems I'm joining the group of people that don't know what to do with it. I started off with a Warrior and I had a sword, and I kept trying to figure out how it worked and what was the right way to go about it but I couldn't, really. I even tried practicing on low level mobs and avoid them hitting me but it didn't really seem to work out. I kinda circle around and roll places and try not to get hit but I don't know. The melee combat system feels kinda Gothicish, and those do take a while to get into. Add on top of that there was a lot of framerate lag, and during that time I also got connection lag so my character wasn't responding. In the end I dropped it and started using a Shortbow instead. Then I just rolled a Ranger.

With my Ranger, I was pretty happy. I did get a pet that I'd rather not have, since it died every five minutes. The most annoying thing about it dying is that it just keeps walking around like it's alive but I actually have to revive it. I was told this is not a bug, well, it should be. It's a bit stupid to see a bunch of Rangers with their pets walking around with revive icons above them... I especially hate how I want to revive players but keep bumping into their damn pets.

Anyway, back to the Ranger. GW2 combat is sort of a mix of free form and tab target (again, very similar to Gothic if you played that). You can hit air, but if there's a target it's going to start locking onto that target. Sometimes that makes aiming kind of annoying. So I took dual axes as I said, and they have some neat skils on them. Axes are kinda multiple-target oriented, but all right for single target, too. The main attack skill bounces on targets if they are available. My 2nd skill was throwing axes in a line and causing bleed. And another multiple-target skill came from the offhand axe, it sent an axe forward and then had it come back as a boomerang. These were really useful against large waves of enemies and dealt a crapton of damage to some Flame Legion guys and some Tar Elementals. So I had a lot of fun with that. I did try some other weapons but preferred the axes.

One thing that's hir or miss is that on every weapon, you initially only have skill 1 available, and you have to use that skill to get the other skills available.

I also later got a free skill slot and got myself a trap that hurt and slowed enemies. It was a really cool trap but my pet sometimes distrated mobs from it... there's a more extensive system with traits and crap that I didn't get to.

Crafting:

The money issues I had were mostly due to crafting, because with crafting you end up salvaging nearly everythng in your inventory, so you don't sell it. Further, you have to pay a lot of money for the salvage kit, which has limited uses. And you have to buy your harvesting tools, which are also limited uses. And if you want to craft certain things, you have to buy these bundles of tin ore or of jude (june? jute? wtf is that anyway) from vendors that cost like a salvage kit. Gold sinks. Gold sinks, everywhere.

I didn't really get much done with the crafting, I managed to get myself a longbow and then the test ended. It's pretty standard "get a bunch of ingredients to make x" system, and a lot of the ingredients are also crafting components so you have to make them, first. It also has a discovery mode where you throw some ingredients at it and try to come up with a recipe, but I didn't get to use it because every ingredient I used had a crafting skill requirement, lol. And there was a lot of stuff I could make already as it is.

I also want to note that if you have a lot of something to craft (I had like 33 bolts of jude/june/jute to craft), it speeds up the process over time. In WoW I usually had to start some crafting session and go make coffee.

MMOishness:

Didn't really get to see much, all I can say is that you will be doing stuff with other places 90% of the time simply because they're there. It's a lot like rifts in Rift, except everything is a Rift and everyone is already in the public group, and all resources are distributed Diablo III style.

I actually ended up in a party for a short while and we roamed around and eventually got owned by some harpies.

There are players everywhere in the initial area and you can frequently see 10+ players on some event hacking at something. With a lot of corpses. Especially pet corpses. As I've said, very Rift-like, except you don't have to click any extra buttons and it applies to even attacking a habitual mob, chances are you'll have some other player come along and attack it, too. Stuff's a bit chaotic, people dying and reviving and dying and reviving.

Pace of the Game:

Have to mention this separately because the game feels very slow. It seems really badly suited for something like this stress test, because you're kinda trying to rush through it and get some stuff done, and the game's response is to hit you on the nose and be like: "No, no, no, NO". Everything kinda takes a while. I ended up barely getting out of the first zone.

Getting money takes a while. Getting places (without a portal) takes a while. Leveling crafting takes a while. Getting ingredients for crafting takes a while. Your skills are not available straight away, you have to use other skills to unlock them, so that takes a bit of time (and was very aggravating in the stress test). Leveling out of an area took me a while. Everything's kinda slow.

Feels more like a game where you'd sit down and relax and get some coffee and spend a few hours exploring the city or something. Or you'd pick up a bow and do some practice on weak mobs for a while. Everything takes some time to get into and the stress test just didn't give that time. In consequence, this game will be eating up lots of hours.

Conclusion:

If you're tired of WoW-clones and want a themepark MMO to play, please get this.

good review but

lol2 this last part "if your tired of wow clones ...and want a THEMEPARK mmo to play..plz get this"

umm..i dont get it..every mmo that comes out people seem to bash the hell out of if for being wow like / themeparkish but this title..ya this themepark is what you should get and play..lol btw wow is a themepark ..so if you like themeparks like wow youll love gw2..this is what you should had said..but i understand you prolly didnt want to piss off the gw2 community seeing most think this is the best thing evar

this is just another run of the mill themepark..it just goes round and round like a merry-go-round ..its just the music playing over the speakers is rock'n'roll instead of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbUFSMV5wG8

but yes it is a good review..will i play it ..no only cuz it rly dont offer anything new...still praying that arche age wont fail lol

very good review.

Just to clarify : if you die and you are broke, you can respawn at the nearest waypoint for free.

And i agree with the dead pet problem. They should make them regenerate health slowly when they are dead. They run everywhere and they are impossible to revive. Pet swapping seem really useful to keep a pet alive though.

Good review, and you bring up a good point that many of us GW2 fans may not see.

Specifically, when I played the game I had zero problems with the controls or figuring out what I needed to do.  But this is becase I religiously followed this game for like a year prior to release and I knew its systems in and out.

Most players...will not have that kind of knowledge, and I think that GW2 is a bit lacking in the "tutorial" department.  They really could have something for new players to help ease them into the game better.

I have to say the fact I only had 7 hours on this stress test was really cramping my style compared to the BWE.   I would agree abou tthe pace of the game, its far more enjoyable when you are not trying to hit some price point or level point or what have you on some time constraint.

I have played the game extensively on all low settings and I would say even on all low the game looks far better than WoW.  I can play it on high but its a little choppy so I usually lower it.

I have to say that the whole TERA vs GW2 combat thing is kind of stupid after watching some video of the combat in TERA and playing GW2 I can tell you that they turn out QUITE different.  As the OP stated kill speed is quite fast in GW2.  Although for some Champion mobs this is not so much the case. 

In TERA the kill speed is much much slower and movement is much more of a total defense.  Everytime you see something in GW2 you have to think about whether you are gonna die from it if you don't handle it right.  Eventually you get to a point where you can flawless single mobs but if you miss one thing you can easily wind up with half life instead of full life.  TERA doesn't work this way at all, you can take a number of small hits.  It takes easily double or triple the time to kill something.  There is prodiggous amounts of healing and movement is such that you can easily solo a large number of easy mobs.  Similar to the way Dragon's Nest works.

You pull 10 small mobs like they kill easily in TERA you are in some serious shit in GW2.  Really serious.  Like run for your life.

Similarly while TERA has some nice effects on some of theit big mobs like flying up in the and doing body slams and strafing runs.  It also takes literally 10 minutes of basically repetitive movements to kill the thing.  Mostly its herding and circle strafing, which is fine I like that kind of gameplay.  But GW2 doesn't work that way at all.

Herding things into tight groups is nice but it doesn't have the powr that it would in TERA or Dragon's Nest because you cannot stagger them and keep them constantly behind with just that attack.  And AoE cripples/chills that you can keep permanent are pretty hard to come by and are usually their own skill.

Circle strafing is useful, things don't just auto face.  But its not the complete defense it would be in Dragon's Nest/Vindictus/TERA.

In the end in GW2 you need both movement and some effects to survive.  Either extra toughness or some extra movements or something that negates damage or a bit of all of them.

When you get that it becomes night and day.

Originally posted by Delvie

Good review.

On the pet problems I found the bear to be more surviveable than the other starter pets.  Also you can charm juvenile animals and when you have two pets you can hot swap them.  Helps with the revive problems because when they are swapped out they regenerate.  Many of the cities have juveniles to be tamed and there are many others out in the wild.

Specifically the Black Bear.  All Bears get Defy Pain which negates all damage for a bit and they can do that once per 45s.

Black bear also get a species specfic skill that put weakness debuff in an AOE once per 24s.

This means a black bear could probably survive about twice as well as some other family of animal companions.  Unlike GW1 there are vast differences betwen companion families and even between species within a family.

Edit: Brown bear also gets Shake it Off (remove condition form itself and allies) which maybe equally useful for defense I am not sure. 

Some points:

1- rangers can get more pets charming the young animals - all the problems we are seeing with rangers with dead pets it is because rangers are not swaping pets; anyway, some pets are more dps kind and others (bears) are more tank kind; and at higher levels a ranger can get skills taht give pets more armor/hit points/damage, so pets will not die so fast.

2- dieing too much: I think players will need adjust tatics and strategy at this game, old MMO tatics and strategy will not work, there are no healers/dps/tank classes; players need learn to swap weapons, to dodge, to use some skills they gain; players too need learn to work as team with everyone that appear at a place for help the event or heart; 3 examples, when I set my warrior to use greatsword and rifle, swaping that weapons when I see it, my warrior survivalibility get a lot greater; and my necro, this last beta test, was using staff everytime other players come to help, staff have some razoable support attacks; and when playing an elementalist, it is good to have a staff and water skills trained, when other players appear for help that is a good support.

3- "Stuff's a bit chaotic, people dying and reviving and dying and reviving." And that makes GW2 a lot fun!

4- the game is not optimized - currently the game don't use the graphic card, it is all on the CPU; maybe that explain the problems you had with graphics.

---

Originally posted by Irus
I've only got to play in this ultra-short stress test today, and I didn't really get anything done (lol), so a pretty uninformed review here still. Keep that in mind when I'm talking about things like money, pace, leveing, etc.
Well, this game is... different. From all the MMO's I've played, that is. Doesn't feel anything like WoW, or Rift, or whatever. You know, when you load up SW:TOR, you feel like you're playing WoW in a sci-fi setting. This, you don't really get that impression. This is more like "wtf is this', since most of your skills and experiences from other MMO's are not helpful, and you continue saying that every time you do something new. This ranges from the UI to the combat to the general pacing of the game. It just doesn't feel like WoW. It doesn't. Doesn't really feel like anything. That's the first game to do that. People who know what I'm talking about or why, know what I'm talking about.
I played a Charr Ranger with dual axes. I started off with a Charr Warrior but decided to switch later.
On to more specific points:
Character Creation:
Definitely more involved than most MMO's I've played. Kinda similar to the stuff implemented in the recent EVE expansion. On a Charr, besides the TESish "make your nose wider", you get to customize some fur patterns and horns and stuff. And then you get to dye your armor.
You also get to answer some random questions which are supposed to influence your personal story (like the thing in my sig), which is some instanced adventure, but I never got around to doing that.
Story:
I really liked the painterly opening sequence you get after you create your character. "I'm a Charr, I'm a big scary Charr, RAWR." Not really sure what's going on, otherwise. I know we're getting attacked by ghosts and also by some other legion or something. But I barely played original GW1, so I hope the game guides me in the whole story department.
I actually like the little dialogue sequences you get where they show your character and the other guy talking. Conversations are all pretty short. And you can talk to basically everyone, most of them don't say anything interesting just "For the legion" or "Work, work". Many few of them do have pretty extensive conversations (especially some NPC's give you tasks to do). Sometimes NPC's talk to each other. There are some cute little cubs running around, too.
Story as a coherent thing doesn't actually exist, it's more accurate to say that story "happens", and players make it slow down or speed up.
Quests:
Well, there are no quests...
You just walk around and randomly stuff comes up. Some of it is in household chores category (herd cattle, put tools somewhere), some more combat oriented (defend an area against waves of enemies, kill a boss). But it's not really about you since other people can do it and if someone else finishes it you can't do it anymore until it resets. It's more about the NPC's. I've always been saying they should put more NPC's into MMO's so they don't feel lifeless, seems like Arena.net did just that. And events seem to kinda cycle into each other, and some are just permanent.
And it seems when you help some specific people they send you thank you notes in the mail.
Visuals:
The game runs very badly on my computer. Originally I was 100% sure it's my hardware, but I'm not so sure anymore because I found some areas in the game where there were no players and it actually became very smooth. Not sure what's up with that. But I ended up playing on mostly low settings in the tiny window.
Also, Arena.net, wtf is up with the limited Windowed mode? Can I have more resolutions, please?
But, yeah, I didn't really get to appreciate too much of the visuals because at the point I had to lower it to, WoW looks better. There were some pretty areas and I found a pretty waterfall cave, but on my computer it all looks very muddly and blurry, and especially the Charr don't have the best architecture, apparently. Game actually looks a lot like GW1 in many respects.
I do have a better computer available, so I should see how it looks on there at the next BWE.
Difficulty:
The game is pretty difficult in terms of combat. I died or got into the downed state (the game puts you there when you're low and you have 4 weak spells to kill your enemy, and if you succeed, you'll "revive" with like 30% or so HP) all the damn time. I'm generally not exactly the best player out there as it is. Mobs hit quite hard and it's pretty easy to just get killed. Taking on multiple mobs is a gamble (although can be very fun and rewarding). I constantly got killed in a certain events where waves of enemies kept spawning and attacking a junkyard. Not only me, but many of us. Each wave you'd see a bunch of dead players on the ground, lol.
In the early area, there were a lot of neutral mobs who didn't attack you much, although my main attack was pseudo-AoEish so I kept getting myself into trouble, but it was still OK. Once I got into an area where all the mobs were hostile, it got really difficult to move through because they respawned really fast. I hope they tweak the respawn rates a bit relative to players in the current area.
And you can't do anything about it. If you get more players, the game throws you more mobs. Get more levels, the game downlevels you. lol I did get to feel more powerful over time compared to some starter mobs, but not by a very big margin and it seems to scale very slowly.
Accessibility:
One thing I want to note straight away is that everything is frigging expensive. You get very little access to money and for everything you want to do you have to pay. You have to pay to use portals (waypoints that are scattered every 5 minutes), and since you have to use a portal if you die and nobody revives you I wonder what you're supposed to do if you go broke (granted, if you just stay there and wait, there's a very high chance you get revived eventually). You also have to pay for repairs, and stuff breaks when you die. Couple that with how often you die as I mentioned above, you get the idea.
Game isn't very user-friendly, surprisingly. A lot of stuff is kinda unclear and counter-intuitive at first. Excessive clicking of random buttons is advised. Kinda hard to explain.
Combat:
First thing I want to say is that everything actually dies rather quickly. This includes you.
I read a few threads on melee combat in GW2 around here,and it seems I'm joining the group of people that don't know what to do with it. I started off with a Warrior and I had a sword, and I kept trying to figure out how it worked and what was the right way to go about it but I couldn't, really. I even tried practicing on low level mobs and avoid them hitting me but it didn't really seem to work out. I kinda circle around and roll places and try not to get hit but I don't know. The melee combat system feels kinda Gothicish, and those do take a while to get into. Add on top of that there was a lot of framerate lag, and during that time I also got connection lag so my character wasn't responding. In the end I dropped it and started using a Shortbow instead. Then I just rolled a Ranger.
With my Ranger, I was pretty happy. I did get a pet that I'd rather not have, since it died every five minutes. The most annoying thing about it dying is that it just keeps walking around like it's alive but I actually have to revive it. I was told this is not a bug, well, it should be. It's a bit stupid to see a bunch of Rangers with their pets walking around with revive icons above them... I especially hate how I want to revive players but keep bumping into their damn pets.
Anyway, back to the Ranger. GW2 combat is sort of a mix of free form and tab target (again, very similar to Gothic if you played that). You can hit air, but if there's a target it's going to start locking onto that target. Sometimes that makes aiming kind of annoying. So I took dual axes as I said, and they have some neat skils on them. Axes are kinda multiple-target oriented, but all right for single target, too. The main attack skill bounces on targets if they are available. My 2nd skill was throwing axes in a line and causing bleed. And another multiple-target skill came from the offhand axe, it sent an axe forward and then had it come back as a boomerang. These were really useful against large waves of enemies and dealt a crapton of damage to some Flame Legion guys and some Tar Elementals. So I had a lot of fun with that. I did try some other weapons but preferred the axes.
One thing that's hir or miss is that on every weapon, you initially only have skill 1 available, and you have to use that skill to get the other skills available.
I also later got a free skill slot and got myself a trap that hurt and slowed enemies. It was a really cool trap but my pet sometimes distrated mobs from it... there's a more extensive system with traits and crap that I didn't get to.
Crafting:
The money issues I had were mostly due to crafting, because with crafting you end up salvaging nearly everythng in your inventory, so you don't sell it. Further, you have to pay a lot of money for the salvage kit, which has limited uses. And you have to buy your harvesting tools, which are also limited uses. And if you want to craft certain things, you have to buy these bundles of tin ore or of jude (june? jute? wtf is that anyway) from vendors that cost like a salvage kit. Gold sinks. Gold sinks, everywhere.
I didn't really get much done with the crafting, I managed to get myself a longbow and then the test ended. It's pretty standard "get a bunch of ingredients to make x" system, and a lot of the ingredients are also crafting components so you have to make them, first. It also has a discovery mode where you throw some ingredients at it and try to come up with a recipe, but I didn't get to use it because every ingredient I used had a crafting skill requirement, lol. And there was a lot of stuff I could make already as it is.
I also want to note that if you have a lot of something to craft (I had like 33 bolts of jude/june/jute to craft), it speeds up the process over time. In WoW I usually had to start some crafting session and go make coffee.
MMOishness:
Didn't really get to see much, all I can say is that you will be doing stuff with other places 90% of the time simply because they're there. It's a lot like rifts in Rift, except everything is a Rift and everyone is already in the public group, and all resources are distributed Diablo III style.
I actually ended up in a party for a short while and we roamed around and eventually got owned by some harpies.
There are players everywhere in the initial area and you can frequently see 10+ players on some event hacking at something. With a lot of corpses. Especially pet corpses. As I've said, very Rift-like, except you don't have to click any extra buttons and it applies to even attacking a habitual mob, chances are you'll have some other player come along and attack it, too. Stuff's a bit chaotic, people dying and reviving and dying and reviving.
Pace of the Game:
Have to mention this separately because the game feels very slow. It seems really badly suited for something like this stress test, because you're kinda trying to rush through it and get some stuff done, and the game's response is to hit you on the nose and be like: "No, no, no, NO". Everything kinda takes a while. I ended up barely getting out of the first zone.
Getting money takes a while. Getting places (without a portal) takes a while. Leveling crafting takes a while. Getting ingredients for crafting takes a while. Your skills are not available straight away, you have to use other skills to unlock them, so that takes a bit of time (and was very aggravating in the stress test). Leveling out of an area took me a while. Everything's kinda slow.
Feels more like a game where you'd sit down and relax and get some coffee and spend a few hours exploring the city or something. Or you'd pick up a bow and do some practice on weak mobs for a while. Everything takes some time to get into and the stress test just didn't give that time. In consequence, this game will be eating up lots of hours.
Conclusion:
If you're tired of WoW-clones and want a themepark MMO to play, please get this.

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All this from a few hours of play lol.

Rush rush why?

And yes no instant satisfaction or uberness sorry GW2 is not like other mmo's.

Combat you have to learn ive played warrior and learn to back off when needed and dodge alot also get a gun/pistols so you have melee and range switch between them.

Im gald its not easy getting money no EZMODE in GW2 sorry:)

Ranger pet you can call him back pay attention to his health backoff in time to regen and revive him if you manage him well is not that offen then most think here i had a bear as pet.

An interesting review-glad you liked the game. I would offer you get a better computer or at least replace components that allow you to play the game better.

What you say is true that the game isn't about rushing around. It's about enjoying the game and all that it offers. I can see why you would think that the game is slow for that reason.

Enjoy the game!

Originally posted by Irus

MMOishness:

Didn't really get to see much, all I can say is that you will be doing stuff with other places 90% of the time simply because they're there. It's a lot like rifts in Rift, except everything is a Rift and everyone is already in the public group, and all resources are distributed Diablo III style.

Damn good review for a few hours of play. I though this part was funny. If I had not played GW2 already I first had to buy Diablo III to know what you mean or risk reading a D3 review with tells me that resource distibution is just like GW2 :P

Originally posted by claytos

very good review.

Just to clarify : if you die and you are broke, you can respawn at the nearest waypoint for free.

And i agree with the dead pet problem. They should make them regenerate health slowly when they are dead. They run everywhere and they are impossible to revive. Pet swapping seem really useful to keep a pet alive though.

Yeah, but repairing the gear still cost you so you might be in dire straights a while if you don´t have any loot either...

I loved the fact there was very little hand holding but that might be annoying to some people.

And yeah, dead pet got annoying when I tried the ranger... I dunno if there is a spell you can unlock to revive it or something, that would solve the problem.

Originally posted by Loke666

Originally posted by claytos

very good review.

Just to clarify : if you die and you are broke, you can respawn at the nearest waypoint for free.

And i agree with the dead pet problem. They should make them regenerate health slowly when they are dead. They run everywhere and they are impossible to revive. Pet swapping seem really useful to keep a pet alive though.

Yeah, but repairing the gear still cost you so you might be in dire straights a while if you don´t have any loot either...

I loved the fact there was very little hand holding but that might be annoying to some people.

And yeah, dead pet got annoying when I tried the ranger... I dunno if there is a spell you can unlock to revive it or something, that would solve the problem.

You just switch the pet for the other one you have. Rangers that didn't switch their pets were pretty annoying, so please don't leave your pet to just wander around. ;)

From the wiki:

While an animal companion is in a defeated state, a ranger still has the ability to switch to another companion to continue the fight. This allows for quick adaptation during fights. If the animal companion is in a defeated state, the recharge time to bring it back out will be longer than normal. A defeated pet that was swapped out will be at full health when it is swapped back in. If the pet isn't injured, the recharge is about 20 seconds.

not sue regarding the visuals

btw the last build was based on CPU and not GPU .

It ran flawlessly on my computer I have i5 2500K and ATI 5850 HD on crossfire

Thanks for the review! :)

Just a few tipps from a fellow charr ranger:

- try to unlock all the skills from all weapons, it is helpful because of the difference between skills and because some weapons gives you more range than others!

- try to tame one juvenile pet from all species you will find along the way cause some are good as melee units, some because of the conditions they add to enemies or buff they give you and friends around you while others are good ranged units.

The wonderful thing is that you can set 4 pets (2 for underwater and 2 when you are on land) and swamp between them.

So if one is dead and you are not in a pet swap cooldown, just switch quickly to the other one and you will have immediately assistance again with the previous "dead/defeated"  pet, healing in the background.

- when you are in a downed state, one of your skills lets you heal yourself so in case you are not still taking damage, you can heal yourself again without problems.

Another one is a command that lets your pet heal you instead.

- after you reached a certain level you can switch between weapons you have equipped as first and secondary weapon in the weapon slots.

- the "soulbound" marked items you are getting as drops (like a centaur hoof or something) are mainly stuff you are selling for gold so gold shouldn't be a issue

- craft yourself 8 slots bags to make more room

- your armor "breaks" only after you got into the defeated status 6 times already

- the difficulty is fair as long as you are not running into mobs that are far above your level.

You just need to make sure that you are playing a bit strategically  and keep yourself in motion cause unlike other mmos, in GW2 dodge indeed matter.

- if you need more infos about the situation around you check through the npcs, there are tutorial quests that leads you through the game for a bit.

- the games leveling pace might look as if it's slower at start than other mmos in which you hit level leve 10 after a few quests already because of it's flat xp curve compared to the

- When it comes to Visuals, you should upgrade your graphics drivers and check the infos in which its stated which cards they are currently having issues with to see if yours is included.

Have fun! :)

Thanks for the review, very interesting perspective. The game needs more people outside of the GW2-fan-sphere to give feedback, to resolve the issues with accessibility and tutorial gameplay.

Originally posted by Creslin321

Good review, and you bring up a good point that many of us GW2 fans may not see.

Specifically, when I played the game I had zero problems with the controls or figuring out what I needed to do.  But this is becase I religiously followed this game for like a year prior to release and I knew its systems in and out.

Most players...will not have that kind of knowledge, and I think that GW2 is a bit lacking in the "tutorial" department.  They really could have something for new players to help ease them into the game better.

That's probably my only real concern with the game.  Most of us here knew exactly what we needed to do once in the game, well before we even downloaded the client.  Most new people won't have our familiarity with the systems in the game to rely on when trying to figure things out.  A newb's perspective in this is a lot more valuable (I think), than anyone else's.  It will be them who actually decide how much a success GW2 turns out to be.  For my part, I'll just try to be as helpful as possible in-game when someone asks a question that I've already heard a thousand times, instead of just referring them to a Wiki page.

As for the review, I'm pretty much in agreement.  I think some of those negatives will turn out to be positives, given a bit more time.  Three days of a BWE should help a lot, rather than just seven hours of stress testing.  It should provide more of an opportunity to see how the systems work together, especially the economy and crafting.  By the way, you can also buy salvage kits with Karma if your gold is too tight.

One thing that struck a chord with me was the mention of respawn rates.  I found them a bit fast as well and I'm not sure yet whether or not I prefer it that way.  I remember trying to move out of Queensdale through a gauntlet of ogres along a long, narrow path.  They were close to same level but it took quite a long time to get through it because the respawn rate was so quick.  I really had to refine my tactics to be able to get them down fast enough to make through to the next group before the ones behind me respawned.  It was a bit frustrating, but when I made it, it was also gratifying.  Still on the fence here.

As for Rangers, it's been mentioned, but I'll reiterate.  Pets aren't tanks and they will go down quickly if you just use them as fire-and-forget DPS.  Start thinking of them as an extension of your skill bar instead of something apart from it.  They have their own unique skills that you can use yourself, which can help a lot.  Also, you can pull them out of combat when you need to and send them back in when you're ready.  And beyond that, you can swap them in combat so if one goes down, you can bring another out.  The cooldown on swapping is funky because the lower the health of the pet you're swapping out, the longer the timer will be.  Swapping a dead pet results in a full 60s cooldown (I think).  Note that traits can be assiged that will reduce that period, if you choose to build that way. 

Some folks find that pets are just a nuisance and would rather not have them at all on their Ranger characters, but they do offer another level of tactics for the profession, that will reward those who take the time to learn to make the most of it.  And hey, some of us just get a kick out of collecting new and exotic beasts that we can whip out and show off at cocktail parties.

All in all, decent review.  I'd like to hear a bit more after a full BWE to see if some of those issues were less troublesome with a bit more time to throw at them.

Originally posted by Creslin321

Good review, and you bring up a good point that many of us GW2 fans may not see.

Specifically, when I played the game I had zero problems with the controls or figuring out what I needed to do.  But this is becase I religiously followed this game for like a year prior to release and I knew its systems in and out.

Most players...will not have that kind of knowledge, and I think that GW2 is a bit lacking in the "tutorial" department.  They really could have something for new players to help ease them into the game better.

All that we, who follow GW2 can do, is educate those who aren't aware of the many unfamiliar aspects of the game and to have patience. Like during the last Stress Test, whilst I was re-speccing my character for PvP, I also spent some time answering several player's queries in the Local chat and I was glad to see that I wasn't the only one. It really is nice to see that the game has such a good community in beta. Hope it pesist after launch.

I just want to clarify a few things here, while I mentioned the various aspects of GW2 that may be interpreted as "this game is not user friendly / this game is difficult", I personally do not perceive those things as a drawback. I like complex games that take a while to figure stuff out or where gold build up and the like is very slow. I've picked up games like Gothic 1 with very unintuitive controls and enjoyed them (people who played that know what I mean), or games like NWN where I had no idea what DnD even was prior.

But I wanted to keep the review as objective as possible and not call positive what others may consider negative. As someone here mentioned, the "negatives" can turn into positives, as well. Nevertheless, people looking at this game may be concerned with such things for various reasons, and I also have a friend who's looking into the game and this review was somewhat written for him. This is a review for newbs, you'd notice I state a LOT of things in there that people who have been following GW2 even a little bit would be aware of long time ago.

If I get to play in the next BWE, I may write a more extended review that's not as rushed, and hopefully on a different computer, as well.

Originally posted by sassoonss

btw the last build was based on CPU and not GPU .

It ran flawlessly on my computer I have i5 2500K and ATI 5850 HD on crossfire

CPU is the stronger point of my laptop so that doesn't make me any happier... I have an i5 M 450 2.53 GHz.

Originally posted by Drafell

This is a good and fairly honest review, although I have to disagree with the pacing issues.

I don't see why they should do all of the work necessary to adjust this for one 7 hour event if that side of the game is not what they are testing.

Not implying they should, just reflecting my experience.

Originally posted by odinsrath

lol2 this last part "if your tired of wow clones ...and want a THEMEPARK mmo to play..plz get this"

umm..i dont get it..every mmo that comes out people seem to bash the hell out of if for being wow like / themeparkish but this title..ya this themepark is what you should get and play..lol btw wow is a themepark ..so if you like themeparks like wow youll love gw2..this is what you should had said..but i understand you prolly didnt want to piss off the gw2 community seeing most think this is the best thing evar

this is just another run of the mill themepark..it just goes round and round like a merry-go-round ..its just the music playing over the speakers is rock'n'roll instead of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbUFSMV5wG8

I'm aware WoW is a themepark.

I DO like WoW, and I'm not hiding that part. But I no longer play WoW, and I do not want to play a game that attempts to copy WoW. WoW is very good at what it does and when I want that, I subscribe to WoW. That does not mean I dislike themeparks.

I do not feel that GW2 is attempting to copy WoW. Nevertheless, it is also a themepark. It may not be drastically different and share a lot of the same elements, but everything from UI design and art direction to the combat mechanics, removal of the Trinity, and downscaling indicates to me that the developers do intend to make their own game. Quite a few people out there are waiting for specifically this kind of game.

"this is just another run of the mill themepark" is an opinion, and the point of my review is that, if such an opinion exists, I disagree with it. People who want a themepark that's more drastically different, or people that prefer PvP sandboxes, will obviously think otherwise. People who like themeparks and are tired of WoW clones should consider this game.

This has nothing to do with "not wanting to piss of the GW2 community".

Originally posted by Classicsta

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All this from a few hours of play lol.

Rush rush why?

And yes no instant satisfaction or uberness sorry GW2 is not like other mmo's.

Combat you have to learn ive played warrior and learn to back off when needed and dodge alot also get a gun/pistols so you have melee and range switch between them.

Im gald its not easy getting money no EZMODE in GW2 sorry:)

Ranger pet you can call him back pay attention to his health backoff in time to regen and revive him if you manage him well is not that offen then most think here i had a bear as pet.

I only got to play in the stress test, and it was very short. Hence the rushing. Otherwise, I'm the slowest player in the universe. Nor did anywhere in my review did I request, or even imply requesting, "easy mode". "I die a lot" wasn't worded as a criticism at all, merely a statement of fact.

The idea of demanding "easy mode" seems limited to a very specific subset of gamers who are actually quite often min-maxers, from my experience. For instance, everyone complaining on battle.net forums right now about Inferno difficulty in Diablo III is a min-maxer, since most casual players a) haven't reached Inferno yet; b) don't need to reach Inferno / beat the highest difficulty / have the best gear to be happy; c) are rarely bothered by imbalances or challenges; d) rarely post on forums. So who are you speaking to?

I also find your post condescending and rude and I feel MMORPG's are much better with more friendly players rather those who look down on anyone who is maybe having problems with some game mechanics, and instantly assume if a person expresses having trouble with something they must be asking for easy mode and handouts. Or that your understanding of challenge and difficulty is the only correct one and anyone playing worse than you is inferior.