So just wrapped up GW2 play for the weekend. I am a long time gamer (im old) and will spare you the list, but I have some experience, but get bored quickly.

This was my first GW2 experience (played quite a bit of gw). It was nice to see it went better than I thought it would, I liked classes I typically do not (tried several). Ran very smoothly on my laptop (albeit a very fast one) but still ran much better than TSW. and was pretty. I stopped many times to just look around, and frankly tried other races just to see the different landscapes so that was nice.

I noted a few bugs and reported them, but nothing to crazy, and overall very close to being ready. (good thing since they are most certainly frozen at this point and just bug squishing). The one thing I liked was it was very clear you were playing guild wars, but not so much that it felt like version 1.5. Blizzard does a fantastic job of creating their environment and giving you the same feeling that you are playing one of their games, but so much so that it almost does not feel as fresh as it could. (ie. the nostalgia of the sounds of SC and DIII were cool, but the game play was very similar in many ways). GW2 was not afraid to change things up quite a bit, but still retain the GW feeling. (hard to put a finger on it). 

All the little shiny details like even when XP went to your bar was nice. Lots of attention to details. Some things to me were a little unclear as someone who just dropped in an played, but I felt the urge to horde things I picked up for fear that I would sell them only to find out later that I wanted them to craft cool things...so I did not get to dig into that enough over the weekend. 

Heard some people gripe about simplified combat, but I think the ability to change weapon sets, and the chaining of some abilities and weapons carried make for a lot of variety, and I think is a non-issue. I found myself spending a lot of time contemplating more about what type of combat/gameplay style do I like for weapons/traits -vs- the lack of the ability to have 6 actions bars and the ability to show my leet macro skills...ha

Overall, a nice game and something I will certainly buy and play likely through the holidays as I level up and build out my characters. I travel a ton, and the occasional escape in the hotel room is nice when trapped in nowhere USA. I think this fits the bill, and I dont feel like I have to be committed to a 3 days a week raid schedule and other things to enjoy the game. I have no idea about endgame, so that might change over time, but right now makes for a nice themepark with the occasional PVP drop in when I want to get owned by some hardcore players :)

-biff