Guild Wars 2 Preview - PAX Prime 2010

For me, the original Guild Wars (Guild Wars: Prophecies) was a solid and relatively action-packed RPG that was a blast to play through with friends but never gave me enough of the long-lasting MMO feel to keep me around once I hit level 20. I loved that Arenanet was looking to bring the MMO experience to gamers who didn’t feel comfortable with the standard $15 monthly fee, and for that alone, I always supported the game. Despite my previous experience with the game, nothing had prepared me at what I saw NCSoft’s Guild Wars 2 booth at PAX earlier this month.

Leading up to PAX, I had seen very little about Guild Wars 2. The Necromancer announcement trailer looked amazing and dragged me onto the site for a bit to check out the other previously announced classes. Everything looked great, but I still felt as if this game was one that wasn’t on many people’s radars, and I wasn’t quite sure how successful I could expect it to be upon launch.

Upon my arrival at the Guild Wars 2 booth at PAX, I felt fairly confident that I was a bit of an odd man out. The booth comprised of approximately 16 different stations playing the game and every single one was packed, as well as all the entirety of the ground floor in and around the booth, with tons of rabid gamers looking for a brief chance to play the game or even just watch it being played. Gamers stood and waited in line for hours in order to play the game. The rather epic line rivaled some of the expo’s other big titles like Halo Reach. It seems Guild Wars 2 is much more highly anticipated than I gave it credit for.

Let it be known now, if you didn’t already know, that Guild Wars 2 looks amazing, not only in terms of pure graphical prowess but also in terms of animation and art style. Glancing from screen to screen inside the booth, I was treated to a wide array of interesting and awesome bits of action. Guild Wars 2 as graphically powerful and impressive now as Guild Wars 1 was at the time of its launch in 2005. On one screen, a Charr Elementalist cast a spell that brought a huge swirling tornado into existence that was then directly controlled by the player. Being presented in an extremely exciting and cinematic manner, this was just one example of the new aspects in Guild Wars 2 that felt way outside of standard MMO combat.

The game’s visuals are wonderfully similar to the concept art that can be commonly seen on the game’s website. In certain aspects of the UI and menu system, it is almost exactly the same, but in the general gameplay visuals, they pull heavily from the concept art in a great way. It really works to give the game a grittier and much more mature feeling than the original, a game with an already beautiful and somber atmosphere.

One of the things I was able to take away in my brief time with Guild Wars 2 is that Arenanet is obviously trying to do something different than just make another cookie-cutter MMO. Obviously some elements are the same, there are still text boxes for quests, inventories, leveling, and skills as these are, for the most part, the standards of the genre. Where other upcoming MMOs like The Old Republic are removing text boxes in favor of fully-voice cutscenes for every quest, Guild Wars 2 is looking to build an eerie and beautiful world with unique and interesting combat where players will be doing things they have never been able to do before in other MMOs. This is an exciting prospect. Based on my experience, the combat seems to keep close enough to common MMO mechanics as to not be entirely off-putting and confusing like Age of Conan’s real-time combat while also being more than a simple tab-target and auto-attack system.

One of the most interesting aspects of Guild Wars 2 is that it is a fully-fledged sequel to another currently active MMO, something that we rarely get a chance to see in the gaming world. I was sure to ask one of the available Arenanet devs what players of Guild Wars 1 can expect to carry over between the two games. Although they weren’t spilling all the beans on cross-game connectivity, they did divulge a few interesting facts. Because the game is set 250 years after Guild Wars 1 and many of the game’s mechanics have seen significant alteration, players will not be able to bring their Guild Wars 1 character over into Guild Wars 2. What they will be able to do though is tie their account to both games, reaping the benefits of both game’s characters in their Hall of Monuments and achievement lists, and at the launch of Guild Wars 2, character names from Guild Wars 1 will all be reserved (I’m assuming for a somewhat limited time) for use in Guild Wars 2. Even though these are all interesting little features and the devs promised more details would be announced in the coming months, I can’t help but hope that Arenanet is preparing some more significant bits of connectivity between the two games in the future. A true MMO sequel is an interesting thing and adding more benefits to players of both games could not only lead to a better player experience overall but help Arenanet and NCSoft net more players and cash as well.

In the end, my experience with Guild Wars 2 was one of the most interesting moments I had at PAX. I had no idea how popular the Guild Wars franchise remains to this day and how anticipated Guild Wars 2 has become since its announcement all the way back in 2007. The game looks and feels absolutely wonderful, even in this somewhat early form. Both its visuals and its interesting bits of gameplay really make it feel like a fully-fledged, next-generation entry into the Guild Wars series. This game went from being entirely off my radar to one of the best looking MMOs on the horizon. I’ll be extremely interested to see how it does when it launches in 2011.