Gaming Review

Engineers can deploy turrets and numerous gadgets

RELEASE out now

Guild wars 2
S
o, two hundred (in-game) years after its sequel became officially the Only MMO You Had On Your Hard Drive After WoW, Arena.net has released its sequel to Guild Wars. And, boy, has it changed. But not in the expected way. the key thing is, Guild Wars 2 is not as non-traditional an MMo as it makes itself out to be. If you described the most traditional form of MMo, youd say it would be a fantasy world with multiple cutesy races and set classes (including mage, thief, warrior and so on) under peril from evil armies led by dragons. It would have hot-key combat, character customisation, strictly levelled game areas and separate PvP areas, with the story told through instances. thats exactly Guild Wars 2. whats fascinating is that its not Guild Wars, which was a human-only
november 2012

Did Guild Wars need a sequel or is this just guilding the lily?
vItAl StAtIStIcS
Price 35 Developer Arena.net Publisher ncsoft Multiplayer lots DRM Always online Web www. guildwars2.com Recommended specs Pentium III 1GHZ, 512MB RAM, 64MB graphics card

Dont lick plug sockets, kids

tale of the destruction of a civilisation told through a unique instanced story progression, with separate competitive PvP. that means Arena.net has actually taken several steps towards the mainstream with this game, which is great for the larger community, but sad for the diversity of the MMo. the only thing thats held over from the original game is the lack of a subscription this is free-to-play, after youve bought the initial box. Starting the game, you have a wealth of choices to make. Each character you create has its own story, which you pursue through the world. My story as an asura engineer was well, Im not really sure. Something about the importance of friendship? Im aware that theres a larger story that happens along eventually, but I seemed to spend most of my time running around random non-

threatening landscapes and having to listen to Felicia Day (an internet celebrity) babbling on. As my too-cutesy experience showed, the games script is solid but it didnt manage to make me care about the world, unlike the scripts do in Dragon Age and Planescape: Torment. the acting is highly variable too. Perhaps its my British perspective but theres a dreadful sincerity to a lot of it even the irony feels sincere. Also, the games animated cutscene style simply doesnt capture the same wit and believable body language as The Secret Worlds fully mo-capped speech. Finally, none of this communicated to me the supposed plot of the game the return of the dragons, their devastation of the world until I hit level 30, where you have a choice between three factions. thirty levels of playing an MMo without knowing the main

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Getting a group in the same place is almost impossible right now

Engineers also get access to... flamethrowers?

the game is surprisingly scalable on different machines

Siege defence is simple. oil

plot...? that has to be a particularly great game. of course, the races and classes face the classic balancing act of originality versus familiarity. the asura, supposedly, are highly talented engineers who are aggressively expanding after being evicted from their underground kingdom. the elvish sylvari are a newborn race and finding their way in the world. the catlike charr are trying to change their culture away from sexism and war. the ancient humans are almost extinct and trying to survive. And the norn are viking shapechangers who all just want to die heroically. theyre all distinct and the Arena.net team has done a fantastic job of differentiating them from the stereotypes but theyre still built around these stereotypes. Similarly, the classes are all hyperbolic twists on familiar

the charr, unbelievably, are now the goodies

themes. theres eight of them all told and they range from the warrior and guardian (paladin) to necromancer and Mesmer (an illusionist, basically). Each class has a range of ways to specialise as they level up, but their skills are ludicrously overpowered from the go. My sylvari guardian could perform a devastating area-of-effect attack from the beginning and my engineer could deploy several turrets at once. Indeed, its sometimes hard to see whats going on beneath the array of special effects going off. the skills each class has at any one time derive from the range of weapons accessible to it, giving all of them great flexibility. For example, an engineer with

dual pistols has a different skill set from an engineer with a rifle. Yet, pretty soon, youve unlocked all the moves for each weapon and the fun slows you only unlock a new ability once every few levels and you probably will maxi-min your toolset pretty quickly. why swap away from your best set? why swap rare dual pistols for your bog-standard rifle? As every class can solo effectively, most weapon sets are suitable for most occasions and, because you cant change in combat, you only find out theyre not suitable when you die (which causes minor, but irritating debuffs). the greatest joy in Guild Wars 2, though, is in exploring the world, not least because of the design. Arena.nets art team is second-tonone and the game is full of bizarre structures, unique giant enemies and magical touches. Its totally hyperbolic, built out of a hundred
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Gaming Review
Asura warp gates are built for in-game fast travel

Players can have cosmetic and practical armour sets

Siege battles are fun and great for fast levelling

concept art pieces that dont always gel well together, but what the hell, its just great to look at. As youre exploring, theres just enough extra content in each area that you can run through the game levelling up at just the right speed, so youre never stymied by having to grind (and you can always craft or do player-versus-player if you want to). the fast travel system is cheap and easy to use, so you can always hop back to elements youve missed and the map shows you all the interesting content in an area, so youre never without something to do. Your personal story draws you along to new areas and the game throws XP at you for everything combat, rambling, getting to difficult areas, crafting, resource gathering, and so on. In the same vein, the game endlessly pops up quests that are happening nearby, which are looping. If you dont go and clean the reactor up now, there will be a catastrophic meltdown. then you
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can help out with the clean-up, then guide a golem to the reactor core, then defeat a boss, then the situation loops. like Warhammer Online, just being in the area is enough to take part and get XP. All of this makes the game feel very light its an amusement park, not a story. You run through it and fun things happen. You can tell theyre fun, because theyre surrounded by flashy lights. tied into that, for an MMo, the second M is very much optional. theres no pressure to group until you hit the dungeons (at level 30, probably 40 hours into the game). Before that point, as you all get experience for every joint kill (and often just for being in an area where a boss is being killed) and as all your loot is just yours, theres very little incentive to group, unless you want to get through the levels quicker. As it is, the grouping system is broken at the time of writing though you can party up with friends, you cant see them on the map or in-game

All characters can dodge enemy attacks, making combat very fluid

much of the time, as theyre actually on a different server. the PvE dungeons are perfectly moulded after World of Warcraft. As I said in my Secret World review, its hard to avoid this, because its the norm for high-end MMo content. the dungeons Ive played had much less trash enemies than WoW but still more than The Secret World. the tens of millions of ex-WoW players expect tightly co-ordinated boss battles where everyone comes with particular equipment sets. Its about finding out a linear path through the battles on a wiki and then getting the equipment, buffs and team to do it. then redoing it on a harder difficulty, which Guild Wars 2 caters for. For me, if funs so organised that its about box-ticking and conformity, its not fun anymore. But if you like that kind of thing, this does it well. the larger scale world v world PvP takes place in four great areas, which players can conquer to unlock

Q&A
We chat to Jeff Grubb, creator of SpellJammer D&D, novelist and embedded writer on Guild Wars 2
How do you go about taking an existing world and destroying everything? Jeff Grubb: Haha! we didnt destroy everything. we have great artists who we want to find room for. And this is a very elastic, plastic world. whether its the Foefire, wiping out Ascalon and its enemies, or the sinking and rising of the continent of orr, brought to the surface by the dragons, it changes. Your book, Ghosts of Ascalon, has a certain Grisham-style relentlessness. Jeff Grubb: It has action-oriented combat, like the game! we wanted to introduce the new races, we wanted to save the iconic characters for the second book, and we didnt want to give the idea that theres just one epic in the books but rather there are many stories, including Dougal Keanes. the second book deals with the iconics and the third book with lions Arch (the games main hub), where the races finally came together, which was founded by pirates. It was a great story. You seemed quite happy to kill off every last character. Jeff Grubb: the Joss whedon approach. we will threaten the puppy, we will do horrible things to it, but we want the characters to grow.

The usual array of fantasy enemies awaits you

underwater combat is a larger portion of the game

thieves can steal the abilities of enemies

bonuses for their faction/server (and get easy XP). Players are levelled up automatically to the maximum level of 80 and can build siege weapons to lug around with them. Despite this, its very familiar its just a much more polished version of the PvP combat from Shadowbane, Aion, Lord of the Rings and even The Secret World, right down to the PvE elements inside the wvw arenas. unlike the main game, theres a lot more trekking around between waypoints and the combat doesnt feel co-ordinated compared to the more rigorous, less floaty multiplayer of Planetside 2. Its still fun, but its easy to miss I only found it by accidentally hitting the B button. So if its not the multiplayer thats getting me playing and its not the story, what is it? the combat is certainly solid but, as I

say, its throwaway and repetitive. the PvP is compelling, but floaty and samey. the design is beautiful but I can just go and look at the concept art online, which is still more beautiful. what Guild Wars 2 has going for it is that its subscription-free. Although its a theme park and although its light, because its subscription-free, those floating players wont leave. theyll get bored (as they always do) and disappear for a month, but then theyll come back in. At which point theyll be hit by the in-game shop, taken from the free-to-play model. Arena.net is still working on this, but its a simple microtransactionbased shop, which allows you to buy cosmetic upgrades, buffs to your levelling speed and does nothing that could

unbalance the games economy. You can buy stuff at the shop with in-game currency, but its much easier to use real-world money instead. Guild Wars 2 is definitely the most polished MMo Ive played in years. Its largely bug-free, obstacle-free and compelling to play. Its also beautiful to look at. But its very much a traditional MMoRPG and there are hundreds of similar ones to play already. Please, MMo developers, stop being obsessed with beating World of Warcraft. Go, do your own thing. this is very polished, very welldesigned, but its just too damn familiar. n Dan Grilliopoulos

Falls for too many of the MMO stereotypes to stand out but theres no subscription fee at least, which means it should last a while.

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