Published 5/07/2023
Guild Wars 2 (Base Game)
So, probably for the last year and a half, I’ve been looking for a new MMO to truly sink my teeth into. FFXIV is on hold for me, at least until the next expansion, World of Warcraft has… ethical issues that I won’t get into, I think I’m past my Runescape days and many of the classics, like Perfect World have just… kinda fallen apart. And so, not expecting much, as I hear *no one* to talk about it, I tried out Guild Wars 2. Having come out more than a decade ago, I expected to just screw around, get a handle on the game, and likely move on.
Well… spoiler alert. I think I’ve found my new time sink MMO.
Originally, I wasn’t even planning to write this review, as I expected my thoughts to really be a sequence of tweets then anything else. What I expected to be an hour or two of messing around has turned into forty hours of near addiction, wanting to spend more and more time in the world of Tyria with my beloved goblin child, Murky Murkness (hey WoW, if you want me to come back, make Murlocs a playable race!). It’s certainly not the best MMO I’ve played, not nearly - nothing can replace the glory days of Runescape (read: when I was smaller and stupider) and it lacks the stronger narrative of FFXIV or the general vibes of WoW, but Guild Wars 2 just has… something that just keeps drawing me back in. I don’t know what that thing is, or if it truly is just one thing, but for now, this review is just going to be an exploration of why Guild Wars 2 has brought me back to MMOs properly for the first time in ages, and a general look at my thoughts after forty hours in it’s base game.
I’ll admit, I was a little disappointed at first glance with my initial (and arguably, most important) impression; the playable races. You’ve got humans, Norns (who are just Big Humans), and the Char, tiger-esque humanoids who look kinda… kinda wrong for reasons I can’t quite explain. Then there are the Sylvari, who are essentially elves who happen to be tree-people, and then… the Asura. The Asura are best described as minute goblin-esque fish people. They look kind of gross and unlike anything I’ve seen in MMOs. Honestly mildly disgusted by the Asura at first glance, I rolled a Sylvari and proceeded to play the first few hours as a Necromancer. The two hours I spent with my Sylvari (named Jade) were… chaotic. The game's skill system, the Necromancer's unique abilities, the leveling experience… it was all so much, too fast, and I felt myself wavering a bit. Not to give up too quickly, I tried a different character. Not liking the Char and still thinking Asura were gross, I tried a Norn Warrior, and I spent a good ten hours with this character. Warriors just felt… right. Maybe it was just having an inherently simpler class, as compared to Necromancer, but I stuck with this character until I hit forty. Unfortunately, as my life is wont to do, I had a Very Bad Day, and just… couldn’t continue with that character for reasons I’d rather not deal with.
So I decided, maybe this game isn’t for me. One more time. I made a Char, still hated how they looked, backed out. And since I refuse to play a normal human, I did the unthinkable - I made an Asura, named Murky Murkness, and I expected her to be the nail that made me give up the game.
Goddamn, I love Murky Murkness so much. I don’t know why my little fish goblin child thing has stolen my heart - I don’t know if it’s that, her Ranger class, or her stupidly over-the-top animations, but Murky Murkness single-handedly kept me engaged with this game, and I thank her for that - I love my goblin child, and even if I do end up making other characters, she’ll always be my favorite.
Anyway,
At its very heart, Guild Wars 2 has the same kind of MMO gameplay you’d see in WoW or FFXIV - you select an enemy, and you’ve got a row of buttons at the bottom of the screen that make up your character's arsenal. But rather than unlocking dozens of abilities a ‘la the most famous MMos, Guild Wars 2 handles things a little bit differently, locking you into a specific class, whilst giving players enough leeway to play things their own way.
Firstly the first five abilities on your hotbar - using the hotkeys 1 through 5 - aren’t based on your class, but your weapon. Greatswords, Longswords, Bows, you name it, these all have different playstyles and abilities to go with them. You’ll be locked into certain weapon types, depending on your class - Murky Murkness is a Ranger, so she can’t use some weapons like Maces and the like - but there’s such a wide range of weapon types you’ll certainly find some that click. The rest of the main hotbar - 6 through 0 - are more class specific. As you level up and explore the world, you’ll accumulate Hero Points - these can be used to unlock traits that are class specific, many of which are passive traits, but several archetypes will unlock a few dozen abilities that can be mixed and matched in any order onto these five keys, letting you tailor your playstyle. Personally, Murky’s maim weapons do a lot of direct damage, so many of my additional abilities are based on stacking conditions like bleed, or powering up my Ranger pet (whose name is Murkness Murky, by the by).
Beyond abilities and whatnot, Guild Wars 2 does swing towards the norms of the MMO genre, though it generally feels a bit more dynamic then the big players, mostly due to the level of control you get with your buttons, but also for the evasion system. Whilst games like FFXIV would telegraph moves, prompting you to move your ass out of the way, Guild Wars 2 gives you an entire dodging feature. Whilst many boss attacks are telegraphed, the vast majority of attacks from *any* enemy can be dodged if you just time a dodge away as the enemy’s attack animation pops out.
Notably, whilst most MMOs will have a set level cap at the base game and then incrementally raise it with each expansion, Guild Wars 2 is set apart from this philosophy. At launch, Guild Wars 2’s level cap was 80, and now, more than a decade on, that cap remains the same. At level 80, you’ll unlock the various subclasses each class can spec into, once again using Hero Points spread across the various zones - best of all, you’re not locked into one, as long as you can unlock them, as the game encourages you to set up multiples builds that can be easily swapped between at a whim. That’s right, the leveling experience doesn’t quite end at 80 - there are additional EXP bars to fill, called masteries to help set up the game’s endgame and further expansions, but overall the game doesn’t have the vertical ‘gear score’ design many MMO’s implement. Whilst there are builds and ‘meta’ equipment for those trying to gear to the nth degree, you could genuinely take a break from years and you’ll still be able to engage with the newest releases all the same. I’ve seen, and I can imagine, that this can prove frustrating to some players who want that carrot to chase, but I play a lot of video games, and it’s nice to have an MMO that isn’t a vampiric presence monopolizing all my time.
These days, the game is really set on you hitting level 80 as quickly as possible, giving you a bevy of minor tasks to complete that’ll speed up the pace of your leveling massively. At first, I felt this kind of hurt the game’s pacing, making it feel like there wasn’t a need to dally in various zones to do quests, but with the sheer amount of endgame content to mess around with - entire expansions, tailored for level cap skill sets - not only does it let you get to the true meat of the game far, far quicker, but it encourages you to roll out with new characters and see the world in a whole new light - without a hundred hours of grinding to get there.
As I was getting into Guild Wars 2, the first thing that stuck out to me was the general lack of typical MMO questing. Whilst main story quests are relatively guided and linear, as you wander the various zones of Tyria, you’ll come across Renown Hearts, which will offer you several tasks you can perform in exchange for all the rewards you’d expect from a traditional quest - EXP, money, and the occasional item. As opposed to traditional questing, the Renown Heart system kind of lessens the ‘heroic’ nature of the main character, at least in the earlier levels. These are never high-threat affairs - sometimes you’ll be fighting bandits, liberating prisoners, or even just helping out around a farm. It’s only in the later zones of the base game that your nature as the Chosen OneTM comes out, so until then, it feels like you’re pitching in and just helping out these lands and its peoples as you're traveling through. You’re never on the lookout for the next quest, as you’ll always be stumbling upon them, and with the game’s great open-world level sync feature, you won’t be that level 80 ruining new players experience - whilst still kicking a lot more ass then you did at level 1, since despite being synced down, you keep your entire suite of abilities.
In addition to this open-air questing style, Guild Wars 2 employs a style of event known as ‘meta events’. As you wander the open-world zones, you’ll have the typical ‘random’ events where you’ll be defending an NPC, fighting a group of enemies, or y’know, whatever. But pretty much every zone will have one or two of these ‘meta events’. Basically, they’re chains of these events, slowly pushing forward a zone-wide storyline that frequently culminates in major boss encounters that take a dozen or more players working together to bring down. Easily the best of these take place in the later chapters of the main story, as the world unites to battle the undead nation of Orr. The Straits of Devastation zone has multiple meta events, detailing each wing of the invasion progressing, making players juggle between mini-events, or working together, to advance the invasion and unlock the fantastically rewarding final events. It’s rare that an MMO, outside of its main story, actually makes the player, or players, actually feel like they're making an impact on the game world around them, albeit temporarily. I didn’t need the items, I didn’t need the EXP, but I found myself caught up in a wave of players pushing these events forward, and just hearing people chatting and coordinating… It was something special. In all my times playing MMOs, I’ve never really had what felt like an entire zone worth of players just helping each other, pushing towards a shared goal - once, I stumbled upon a boss meta event taking place, requiring dozens of players to fill three different teams. I didn’t know what I was doing, or why I was doing it, but it was amazing.
The other big hook of this game is its almost collectathon-esque nature. Upon creating my characters, I quickly noticed there was a percentage bar for the entire game world, and then found each *zone* has its own progress bar. Each zone of Guild Wars 2 has a number of nodes and collectables to complete to ‘100%’ it - Renown Hearts, which I’ve already gone over; Vistas, which are beautiful viewpoints that allow you to take in the beauty of the game world; waypoints, which allow you to wrap across the zones; notable locations, which could include towns, shops, general places of interest; and hero points. Completing areas gives you a tidy sum, but that was the least interesting part of it for me - there was always something to explore, leading me to discover new events, quests, and sometimes just a nice view.
In all honesty, I think this collectathon-esque aspect to the game’s open world, coupled with the genuinely fantastic meta events and reasons for players to unite under a shared objective… I think this is the most fun I’ve had just *being* in an MMO, especially divorced from my nostalgic feelings of games like Runescape and Adventure Quest Worlds. It’s just fun in a way games like FFXIV or WoW aren’t - no knocking those games, but it’s just a matter of preference and game feel. Sometimes when I just log in, not sure what I want to do, I can just charge into a random zone, knock out some achievements or map progress and feel perfectly satisfied with my progress. As someone who was addicted to collectathon games like Super Mario 64 or the Banjo series, this is kind of a dream come true for me.
As with many other MMOs, though, Guild Wars 2’s biggest struggles are in its main story. It’s not awful in the way that the base game of FFXIV is infamous for - it isn’t that bad, neither of them are, but as opposed to FFXIV, there is very little filler within Guild Wars 2, and it actually respects you a good sum. The issue is the events, as world-shattering as they can be, aren’t particularly engaging. From the rather generic fantasy storytelling, lack of difficulty in the majority of its content, and genuinely stilted ‘cutscenes’, the game has its moments, but for the most part I wanted to be done with these quests as quickly as possible. I’ve played a lot, lot worse then this (I almost quit FFXIV during the fucking ‘corrupted crystal quests) but it’s just sort of middling with very little to say. The later moments of the story, especially once you begin to interact with the island nation of Orr does pick up notably quite a bit, but again, that’s less to do with the actual story quests you’ll be tackling, and more the much stronger union between the open-world experience and what you’re doing in the main story - the meta events in Orr are easily the best in the base game, bar none.
But whilst the main storyline of the game struggles on the aforementioned multiple fronts, two key mechanics of how the game handles the main story do a lot to dispel these issues. First, for those who love to make alternate characters, there is nothing forcing you to actually engage with the main story - and even if you do, you can start from any of the major starting points, i.e, the apparently much better expansion storylines. Sure, there’ll be a few buffs and rare equipment you’ll be missing out on, but the fact you don’t *need* to slog through these relatively linear instanced content is a massive boon.
Secondly, for those who actually *do* enjoy traipsing through this game’s storyline, the structure of what quests you’ll be tackling aren’t strictly linear. For example, each of the five starting races have unique starting quests. But, depending on the choices you made during character creation, you’ll follow two *different* questlines for *each* the level 10 and 20 quests. But wait, there’s more! Soon after, you’ll be able to pick one of three factions to align yourself with, and each of *these* will feature multiple choices for questlines as you progress through the game. I’ll be honest, the quality of these quests can vary heavily - the Norn quests, for example, were pretty damn weak, whilst the Asura ones far more engaging and just had a better sense of personality throughout. The sheer scale of these branching paths, even if they only really apply to the game’s base game is kind of staggering, as even the first full set of quests I play through on my Asura felt like a fully fledged game in it’s own right, but the fact that there are probably at least *six* a decently unique playthrough to run through is nothing short of insane. It might be a case of quantity over quality, but I can’t really say - the sheer variance in experiences one can have playing the base version of Guild Wars 2 is impressive, no matter how you tweak it, and I’m genuinely excited to play through another run and see how, say, the Char quests might play out.
Overall though, I think what’s kept me with Guild Wars 2 all this time now is just how… relaxing it is. This goes beyond the fact that the game has no active subs, or major Pay-2-Win elements. Everything - from it’s collectathon nature, the fact I can just jump onto any character I want and do *anything* I want, and even how there is always, always something to do - but very little to miss. Guild Wars 2 respects my time, respects me, more so than any other modern MMO, and perhaps more than any other MMO i’ve played, period. It’s premium currency shop is unintrusive, it’s power scaling experience doesn’t force you to constantly log in, day after day, and it truly lets you play your way for 90% of its content; meta builds and whatnot only seemed like a requirement once you’re digging into the real endgame endgame of the game.
My forty hours with Guild Wars 2’s base game haven’t been perfect - but I’d argue that no MMO of the modern era reaches that bar. For what it is, Guild Wars 2 has been a delight. With some many quests, achievements, and map-centric objectives to tackle. Its community is chill, its vibes immaculate. Sure, the storytelling can crap out from time to time, and it does have some weird swings in regards to difficulty and whatnot, but it’s been a long, long time since a MMO has hooked me in the way that games like WoW or FFXIV failed. From everything I’ve read, Guild Wars 2 only gets better from here, especially once I started diving into its pretty well received expansions. Forty hours in, I think I could see Guild Wars 2 being my ‘main game’ for a long, long time to come; and considering, mere days before writing this, a fourth expansion was announced, I’d say Guild Wars 2 will be a part of my life for a long, long time to come. Now if you excuse me, I must go look at Murky Murkness for a while.