Guild Wars 2 Head Start Weekend

The hype is finally over and Guild Wars 2 is out (if you pre-purchased it, that is). After being down Saturday morning, GW2 worked flawlessly for the rest of the weekend. Usually the hype far overshadows the actual game. But in this one rare case, it’s possible that the hype was justified.

Let’s talk about Guild Wars 1 for a second. I never got into it. Certain things just bugged me. Mainly the lack of a jump. I’m not one of those people that bunny hops everywhere, but I never realized how often I jumped until it was missing. The other thing I couldn’t get past was left-clicking everything instead of right-clicking.

So when I first logged into GW2, I was dreading having to live without jumping and right-clicking. Imagine my delight when I was configuring my controls (for ESDF, as I have to do for every single PC game huge sigh) and found a jump key! And I was even more delighted when I got to the first NPC and was able to right-click to activate him!

I won’t go into the actual gameplay, because you can find ten thousand writeups and videos on that elsewhere. I’ll just go straight into my commentary.

GW2 is awesome. Really. You should get it. That’s it, nothing else to say about it. Run, don’t walk, to your browser; buy it and download it.

I say that having only reached level 15 or so (out of 80). I have no idea what the “endgame” is like, or if there even is an endgame. (In a game that has no subscription fee, one has to wonder why they would bother with endgame content.) All I know is that between the story quests and the public quests and the dynamic events, it is hella fun for the first 15 levels, and each race has a different first 15 levels, so there is a lot to do for an altoholic like me.

I have not really decided on my “main” yet. I started with a Necromancer but it doesn’t seem to have a lot of impact in a group situation. I really like the versatility of the Elementalist, though, so maybe I’ll stick with that one. Then again, the Engineer has a bunch of cool turrets and stuff. (I still don’t understand why people keep putting high-tech engineer classes in these allegedly medieval MMOs.) And the Hunter has nifty pets. And … and … and …