Okay, so I've been playing GW2 today and yesterday. This is the third or fourth (idr) beta weekend. The first weekend I decided to play a Human Thief, but this weekend all previous characters were wiped, so I rolled a Charr Warrior. The game is great; it's pretty, the combat rules, and its take on questing is an interesting idea. The thing is, though, it's not nearly as amazingly incredible as people have been making it out to be.

Everywhere I look online I see people praising Guild Wars 2 for breaking the norm. They didn't break it at all, they just smudged it a bit so it's harder to recognize. People complain about how standard MMO's have certain kinds of quests; kill x things, escort x to x, collect x x'es. I've seen a lot of articles where it's claimed that Guild Wars 2 is different in that regard. It isn't. The quests are neat because you can just be walking along and bump into one or more quests and you get swept away into doing them, but they are almost always "KILL THIS THING." With variations of "KILL THIS THING BEFORE THIS TIMER RUNS OUT" and "KILL THESE THINGS UNTIL THIS BAR GOES ALL THE WAY DOWN." Now, people talk about the archetypes of quests in MMOs as if there's something different you can really do under those circumstances. They talk about them as if they are so boring and dreadful. Why? If I'm playing a game where I'm making a character stronger so he can kill stronger shit, I want to kill shit, that's the way these games work. I guess anything gets monotonous if you do it hours and hours every day for years and years.

Despite how fun the game is, there's a few problems I see with it. The story is really, really difficult to get immersed in. It seems so fake and detached. This may be due in part to the little cutscenes where your character is talking to another character. The characters are standing at a 3/4ths angle, as if they are on stage in a play, in front of a painted background. I don't know why they decided to do it this way, it seems silly. The dialogue has little to no emphasis, the story itself is so boring in the beginning I just can't help but think, "Why would I ever care about this?" As I said before, it just feels fake.

And my last gripe with it is how the whole game just seems like a bucket for the devs to jerk off into. It's a game that is obsessed with itself, and its developers are obsessed with themselves. They recently added "Vistas" which are little areas (demanding some shitty 3D platforming to reach) that show a long cutscene of the camera looking around at the surrounding area. It exists for no reason other than to show off the environments, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but in my opinion, atmosphere ceases to be atmosphere when you start calling attention to it and putting it in the spotlight. Good atmosphere is important, but it shouldn't be shoved in your face. In the time before the beta events started, I read/watched some dev diaries, and there is no modesty to be found anywhere. They talk about how they developed the Sylvari (dryad people made of lettuce) and how incredibly original and creative they are and how you'll never find anything else even remotely comparable to Sylvari in any anything, never ever. You can see hints of the devs' self-love in almost every aspect of the game.

I do like this game.

All I'm saying is I'd probably enjoy it more if it wasn't so far up its own ass.

Plus, with the fact that there will be no subscription fee. I can't really complain too much. I don't think a game exists that is worth $15 a month.