Two thumbs up for GW2!

[Balandar]

After 3 days of beta “testing” I will definitely be playing the release. I’ll be canceling my SWTOR account as well when this comes out. I keep jumping from game to game ever since UO died down. I've been playing MMOs since 1997. This is the one I'll be staying with until something else stirs up the MMO world.

I only noticed one ‘bug’ where an npc was female but the voice-over was male. Otherwise, it didn't feel like beta. It was very polished.

Screenshots

What I liked:

1. The graphics are stunning; it’s like playing in a painting, very artistic.
   
2. Crafting and the harvesting of ore, gems, wood, mushrooms, etc. You get nodes to harvest and they appear for every person, so if someone grabs it you can too rather than it being gone for good. I'm not sure how WoW does this, but it reminded me of my UO days.
   
3. Skills are simple and straightforward, you do not have 4 quick bars of 12 slots each full of skills. And what's cool is that they are based on the weapon you hold. So a scepter may give you a different set of skills than a hatchet.
   
4. Snow! I always liked snow in games, and in Hoelbrak, when graphics are maxed, you can see your foot prints! The graphics of snow remind of DAoC a lot, which I really enjoyed. The reflections off of frozen lakes is really cool.
   
5. The character customization at the beginning. Everything from eye slant, to how big you want the upper lip, to how long you want their chin. You can spend a good 20 minutes creating your character.
   
6. MASSIVE world, but it’s quick to get to other places via waypoints and gates. I only scratched the surface. The world is just huge.
   
7. Every race has a unique starting area and main fight/boss. They drop you right into something that feels epic and you’re not starting out killing womp rats.
   
8. Underwater combat and swimming! Water isn't something to just swim across, you can enter any body of water and find something in the depths.
   
9. Leveling speed is the same for each level after 11ish. So you do not have to grind that last level or feel like it takes forever to get the last few completed.
   
10. Events/Quests just “happen”. No need to click on NPC’s unless it’s your story line. You could be walking along and see a group of people battling centaurs around a large pack animal. As you get closer you’re automatically included in the quest and can join in to defend it on it's journey to a remote outpost.
    
11. No need to group other than to find people on a map. Everyone gets the full share of XP as long as you hit the mob once. So if someone comes up to you, you don't think "they are going to steal my kill". It's a different approach to wanting people to come up and help you kill it faster. You both get full XP from it then.
    
12. Smooth gameplay. No lag at all with graphics, even with groups of 30+ players and spell effects going off everywhere. That is on my new system. (on the old alienware from 2003 it stutters just walking around in the main human city and that computer can’t even run SWTOR, so at least it can run gw2 as my backup from my main).
    
13. Just have to say the graphics again. My favorite city is Divinity’s Reach, the human city. I spent around a 1/3rd of my time just looking at places and taking screenshots!
    
14. WvWvW (World vs World vs World). They took DAoC realm vs realm and SWTOR's leveling people to max level and almost perfected it. There are castles to take (which you can take in the name of your guild), outposts, towers. You can build catapults, arrow carts, rams, etc to take towers/castles. There are also the small instanced zones of capture the flag kinda thing that you can play. But WvWvW is where the action is at!
    
15. NPC's randomly saying things. I saw a group of NPC children gather and play out a pretend battle as kids do, then split up and run off to do other things.
    
16. Interactive combat. You can't just sit there and hash keys. You have to move, dodge, and be a participant.
    
17. The sounds in the cities and in general. It immerses you in the game.
    

What I didn’t like

1. More of a learning curve then other games I felt (probably me getting old). Once you get the hang of things it's easy to play.
   
2. Only 5 character slots (but you can buy more they say).
   
3. The max zoom out is not very far (about the standard default in SWTOR) but during Epic battles the zoom distance doubles. There is so much to see and you want to zoom out to take it all in.
   
4. Chat bubbles only appear above NPC’s. I wanted the old UO style of text/chat bubbles appearing above people for a more RP feel.
   
5. Overflow server. When there are too many people in an instance you get dumped into a new instance that is on an overflow server. Due to the hundreds of thousands of players that were online this happened often. That server lagged a lot. It was usually just the starting area outside of Divinity's Reach. I hope they have more overflow servers on release, or more servers in general. But the good news is that you didn’t have to wait a queue for 10 mins to even log in.. you could still play even with the lag.
   

There's probably more that I didn't think of at the moment. I'm sure Martok and Borg will jump in with their likes and dislikes.

Summary

Buy it!

[Martok]

I am still compiling my list. My hand hurts. I got chicken claw foot of the hands from trying to stance dance as an elementalist, and run like a biotch when someone targeted me.

[Borg]

or you just walked into an arrow cart zone.

[Martok]

Ok. Here is my official review of the game broken down to likes and dislikes. Overall opinion is at the bottom:

LIKES

-Graphics are amazing. No, really amazing. Very very nice stuff here.

-Character customization is very in depth. Characters will look very different from one another

-There is enough "story" to your character to keep you interested, but its not overboard like SWTOR.

-No NPC's with ! over their heads to identify a quest. You simply wander from "heart" area to the next engaging in stuff that happens around you! Feels a little more natural than clicking on every npc that has a quest for you.

-Grouping is gone. You don't group for pretty much anything. Everyone around you is your "group" and you all get credit for whatever is going on near you. No more mob tagging. This does change for dungeon instances from what I have been told.

-Armor and weapon artwork is very nice. Bioware should have hired their art department.

-Combat takes skill. Sure, you can button mash in PvE and most likely win....but not in PvP. Its all about skill. This isn't stun wars!

-PvP is second to none. I absolutely love the World vs World vs World. Very engaging and I spent most of my time there. The structured pvp matches were fun as well and did not last too long.

-Traveling around the world is as simple as opening your map and clicking on a waypoint that you have already unlocked.

-Load screens take SECONDS.

-Almost zero lag in heavy world pvp. What? this ain't Ilum!

Dislikes

-Chat feature is not good and needs reworked. Too difficult to chat with other players and as a result, most people don't chat.

-Some character/class skills are not correctly working or do not work at all. This needs fixed

-Some of the dynamic events are over-tuned. The fire shaman in char lands at level 6 wiped a group of about 50 of us at least 10 times before we could kill him. It was easier to take down the lich king than the level 6 fire shaman.

-Max camera distance is not far enough. I need to be able to zoom out. How else can I know who I'm running from in pvp?

-Arrow carts in world pvp need nerfed. ZOMG. Two of those up on the walls of the keep you are assaulting will destroy every player in the area.

Concerns

-No dungeons until level 30ish? What does this say for end game? Did they focus more on end game rather than beginning area? Not sure here! Only a few large guilds leveled up to 30 to test the dungeon over the beta weekend.

Overall I really enjoyed the game, most specific the pvp portion. If the end game PvE is just as good, this will be a very successful game!

[Calendar]

1 word: *Sploosh*

[Balandar]

1 word: *Sploosh*

I think Martok mentioned he did that on his monitor when he first saw the graphics.

[Martok]

1 word: *Sploosh*

I think Martok mentioned he did that on his monitor when he first saw the graphics.

Ya. I had to get a smoke and wipe my screen off.

[Borg]

I will take the listed agreements and add in some BOLDED thoughts and additions.

LIKES

-Graphics are amazing.....EPIC

-Character customization is very in depth. Characters will look very different from one another

-There is enough "story" to your character to keep you interested and it seems to be tied to your CREATION phase on how you answer your character questions...so within the professions will be even deeper options

-No NPC's with ! over their heads to identify a quest. You simply wander from "heart" area to the next engaging in stuff that happens around you! Feels a little more natural than clicking on every npc that has a quest for you.

-Grouping is gone. You don't group for pretty much anything. Everyone around you is your "group" and you all get credit for whatever is going on near you. No more mob tagging. This does change for dungeon instances from what I have been told....you can create a group and it exists in corner of screen and maintains THROUGHOUT LOGOUTS and relogins with new characters...it is tied to your Account....good for chatting I suppose but we used Teamspeak without any problems after lowering the default settings of the game levels.

-Crafting looks very deep and word is that it will be emersive enough to be a game within a game for those who enjoy the less combative life.

-Combat Keys are simple and force you to make a plan on your strategy for PVP or PVE.....what weapon and what abilities to I wish to have at my disposal for this interation....you must leave combat area to change....this I did like and with my naga mouse I had an abundance of keys to utilize once I got leveled up to enjoy the extra options.

-Leveling is smooth and up to 20 was not laborious.....actually shocked me a couple times to notice.....HELL I leveled 2 times since I even looked down at the bars.....WHOOT.

-Armor and weapon artwork is very nice. Bioware should have hired their art department.

-Combat takes skill. Sure, you can button mash in PvE and most likely win....but not in PvP. Its all about skill. This isn't stun wars! (NO STUNLOCK>>>>>HIP HIP HOOORAY!!!!!)

-PvP is second to none.....World vs World vs World......it is EPIC...plain and simple.....throw in the map for this area is HUMOUNGOUS....not succeeding in one area.....literally infinite options of where to go and attack.

-Traveling around the world is as simple as opening your map and clicking on a waypoint that you have already unlocked.....NO MORE 15 minute travel times and or multiple layers of loading areas to get to a location.

-Load screens take SECONDS......I Could not make my LOADING SCKREEEN joke at all (SKYRIM)

-Almost zero lag in heavy world pvp....or in any area of game engine.....for a beta it was amazing and smooth like butter.

-Guild Emblems are able to be placed on Armors, Weapons, Banners and ingame NPCs can do your guild business to help spread the glory of your victories and agendas.

Dislikes

-Chat feature is not good and needs reworked. Too difficult to chat with other players and as a result, most people don't chat.....only good for AREA question/answers.

-Max camera distance is not far enough. I need to be able to zoom out. How else can I know who I'm running from in pvp?.....odd that even running from peeps was fun....trying to lose them and/or split up and turn the tables on them.

-Overflow server at times would have me on it while Martock and/or Balandar were on the main server for that specific area PVE....which was a bummer when we were planning on doing some adventuring into the UNKOWN areas of map.

-Was not able to mess with any of the guild emblem fun in the beta at this time.

-No Time or clock in game.....lord that can be dangerous....especially with the graphics which PULL you to look around the next corner for what is there or what will this street look like...who/what vendors or stuff will I find around this block...etc.

[Balandar]

A few things I saw from DEV posts.

• Arrow Carts (crazy killing machines right now) have had their timers changed from 1 second to 3 seconds, but it didn't make the BWE1.
  
• They have said they will look into the overflow and party groups being split. So hopefully they'll change that to either everyone staying in the world or everyone being dumped in the overflow so we can continue with our questing.
  

I've been replying to the suggestion forums on topics I'd like to see in game.

• Clock topics (I want to know the time IN GAME). For example, logging into Divinity's Reach and it's dark out but no idea if it's close to sunrise or what.
  
• Chat bubble topics. I REALLY REALLY want a chat bubble topic for the /local channel. It'd be so helpful for RP purposes and also for "HELP! OVER HERE!" chats, as in the chat window you have no idea where "HERE" is!