The game, Guild Wars 2, has been out for sometime and I believe that a decent and honest review should do some justice to the Guild Wars 2 team at Arena-Net (Anet). Though it had a shaky launch, after about 9 months the game has improved impressively thanks to the Anet team's commitment to the players.
1) Good framework. The game itself is good in the fact that the framework and gameplay of the game are pushing the limits of the current MMO generation by integration of a more selective and careful set of skills rather than a normal button spam of pressing numbers on the keyboard. The system of the game's online experience works well for the kind of game it is trying to deliver. Being ambitious as they are, the Anet team has also improved some of the UI and online experience through bug fixes and major rebalancing issues throughout its life span, so far. If we were to compare the initial game to the game Guild Wars 2 is today, the major fact that will stand out is how much the game has improved. Being built on a solid framework in terms of general online play, PVP, PVE, and WvW, Guild Wars 2 delivers a solid gaming experience that will draw you in once you get to know the game. Unfortunately, many gamers make the sorry mistake of playing it like WoW. 2) Graphic. The graphics for an MMO of the current generation are considered good. By far they are amazing compared to WoW or other MMO's out on the market currently. Since this is a CURRENT generation game, it is not fair to judge it by the next generation's standards. The graphics are based around a very artistic and stylistic feel of a painterly mood with the brush strokes and everything including concept art and whatnot. The game's graphics can be tuned low enough for low end computers and fine tuned for higher end computers. Unfortunately, the coding for the way the graphics are processed is not fully optimized to use the multiple cores of a multi-core processor, which if implemented should greatly improve game-playability. One down side is that if your computer is not good enough, you will have trouble in WvW or massive Boss Fights (World Events). Anet is currently working on the issue. 3) Decent story. Though many may complain about this, the story is not the main point of an MMO. It may be important, but is certainly not the main issue. However, to do justice in review the entire game after playing it for 9 months, the story in certain areas does need work. certain missions in the personal story are sort of 'half-baked' and not quite good. Other missions are fantastic, so the personal story is a bit of a mixed bag and hard to review. Certain races of a more appealing and fresh story than others (like human vs charr story). However, the Anet team did a decent job that is certainly commendable in various areas and half-baked in others. The beginning of the personal story, however, is the most intriguing of the entire story. Also, the personal story does effect the open world in various ways, though they may not always be big (like a group event starting up because you stole away the top Minister's daughter, and a champion ministry guard from divinity's reach attacks you in open world). So it's small things like that which are a great detail to the game. Other times npc's are actually missing from certain areas if in your personal story they are off in another location (like Rytlock). In all, mixed bag of goods and bads. 4)Good Dungeons. The dungeons pretty much speak for themselves in story mode, in which many are quite decent, though some are kind "meh" (like Arah story). The fun really begins when you are able to go into explorable mode, which also nets you unique tokens that can be traded in for exotic armor and weapons. It's a nice reward system besides the fun factor involved, though some dungeons are genuinely hard (like Arah and Aether-Retreat). The Fractals of the Mists dungeons are a great addition Anet made to the game. The Fractals genuinely shows that Anet is looking to improve the game content as time goes on. 5)Added content. The addition of content by the GW2 team in Anet is a great thing that has been constantly improving. The first time Anet tried to change the game by adding an entirely new area as part of their goal of expanding the content, called SouthSun Cove, was a little tentative in its success when it first launched. However, since then they have been steadily improving, adding the Fractals dungeons, new sPvP stuff, Guild Missions, temporary yearly holiday events, and the recent Labyrinthine Cliffs for the Bazaar of the 4 Winds. Lots of balancing issues fixed, and still being tweaked to this day, and lots of bug fixes and maintenance fixes like frame-rate.
Conclusions: Great fresh look to MMO gaming compared to WoW and other games. STill has issues that definitely need fixing, but hopefully those will be fixed in time if NCsoft starts funding Anet more.
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