Guild Wars 2 Impressions

So Guild Wars 2 came out. Shocking to all two of you who read this blog I'm sure. The following are a few impressions of the game.

The Guild Wars 2 launcher, complete with transparent flair.

So the first thing to say about the game is that it's pretty. It's damned pretty. It has a unifying painterly visual style that bleeds into everything, including the above launcher/loader. This is a point that I'll be hammering away at repeatedly, and it's what initially drew me to the game when I saw the Gamescom trailer.

Said trailer.

The second thing to say about the game is that it's a fantasy MMORPG, a sequel to the eponymous Guild Wars. It joins an already saturated market, filled with the veterans like Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14, and newcomers like Rift and Tera. You create a character, run around a massive world, and perform quests for rewards like gold and experience. All very standard stuff.

My Character, inexplicably wearing a kilt. Look, I just want some pants. A decent pair of pants!

There are five available races; Human, Viking, Gnome, Cat-Tauren, and Plant-Elf. I chose a plant-elf and painted him up to look like a charred tree. He even has a lovely orange glow at night, suggesting smoldering embers. Rowr. I also made him a necromancer, because it seemed like a nice dichotomy to have a hippie-dippie tree-elf that was also an evil master of the deathly arts. All very thematic.

An example of the lovely art in the background. Still wearing a dress here.

I started the game in the hippie-dippie plant kingdom, with a cinematic and a few intro story quests explaining some nonsense about a dreamworld that unites us all. I proceeded to wander around a bit, getting the hang of the world and the controls. As I progressed, I kept bumping into further story quests, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that "my" story was based around a few questions posed to me during character creation. I had to, at one point, find and defeat a green-armored knight who had been prophesied in my hippie-dippie dream. It's a neat trick that I'm sure is repeated for all of the other races, but I enjoyed it.

Solomon Grundy want pants, too!

One thing I'm not super fond of is, as a necrowizard, my cadre of minions. Ugly little fuckers. For such a lovely game, I would hope they weren't so damn hideous. I suppose they're supposed to be puppets made of meat or whatever, but still, I'm not fond of having them tag along behind me.

My staff that turns into a wicked shadow-scythe upon activation.

That's why I'm rather fond of one of the game systems used in Guild Wars 2. For each equip-able weapon, including dual-wielding variations, there is an associated set of five skills for each class. This means I'm not limited to skills involving my horde of minions. The above staff/scythe, for example, focuses on putting runes on the ground for enemies to step on. Axes focus on flurries of quick-damaging strikes. And when underwater, there's a different weapon-set.

Charlie tuna there is bigger than he appears. Here I'm wielding a harpoon with abilities based on spinning and pulling enemies/myself closer together. Feel the love.

The forest starting area has proved quite extensive, including vast underwater areas, farms, jungles, and a huge-ass flowery tree. That's why I'm fond of another game system, the ability to instantly teleport to any of plentiful special points scattered across the maps. You could just hoof it, but for a nominal in game fee you can be anywhere you've already visited.

The blue-centered diamonds serve as teleport points.

The in-game map is also quite functional and not-bad to look at. You can zoom in and out from the entire world to just your zone, and it includes the same painterly aspect found throughout the rest of the game.

A few more screenshots. Look at that water. Just lovely. Oddly, there are no combat options for surface-level swimming. You're forced to dive when encountering swimming enemies.

The in-game music and themes are noteworthy. Written by Jeremy Soule, who has composed quite a few of my favorite games, the music is phenomenal and worth paying attention to.

One of the themes from the game.

There's quite a variety of areas. Although I've barely ventured outside the planty-zones, I've seen a lovely snow-city, a very nice and appropriately sciency gnome city, and a war-torn and rusted out cat-tauren city. That brief sojourn to cat-tauren city has convinced me that my next character will be one of them. Perhaps an engineer. Seems appropriate.

Swampy and atmospheric.

There's an odd death mechanic, involving being down on your back fighting for your life. It's somewhat reminiscent of a system some of you may have seen in Left 4 Dead. If you manage to kill a nearby mob, which isn't always guaranteed, you'll be restored to your feet with some life. On the other hand, annoyingly, if you don't survive you'll either have to be resurrected by a nearby friendly player or teleport to a nearby teleport-point for a fee. No corpse-running here.

Hee-hee. Manatee people. I would totes play a manatee character.

It should be mentioned that the game is subscription-free. There's an initial cost ($60) to buy the game, but no monthly-fee. A pleasing development. There is an in-game store which allows players to purchase vanity items and experience boosters with real-world money. Hopefully the game remains profitable enough to keep adding content.

Nice and vibrant.

The game is also very exploration-friendly. There are map-points scattered throughout the zones that give you a short sweeping cinematic view of the surrounding area, such as seen in the above screenshot. These cinematics allow you to appreciate some of the artistry you might normally run past and ignore. The map-points award experience, as does exploring most of the major areas. There are also clumsy platforming areas leading to other vistas. I've enjoyed the not-so-difficult task of hunting all of these down so far.
 

Blarg.

So that's my initial impressions of Guild Wars 2. It's pretty, and fun, and has a lot of neat systems built into it. It tickles my artistic, aural, and exploration nerves in all the right ways. Barring the occasional clunky world model, blurry texture, or awkward clothing-sticking-to-character-models moment, there have been no issues with the game. I like it.

I Hate The Secret World

This is not a review of The Secret World. I haven't played the game in question enough to properly review it as such, and I'm probably -no, certainly- giving the game the short shrift.

That being said, I hate The Secret World, the newest MMO from Funcom. I've played a few of their other games, including the free version of their Conan the Barbarian MMO, which I also didn't like for other reasons. I was a bit surprised to find that I already had a Funcom account. I'd even played their ancient Anarchy Online MMO ages ago, and hadn't liked it either. So I'm not sure what exactly possessed me to purchase The Secret World on the first day of release to the tune of fifty hard earned dollars. I made a special trip out to Target to pick it up.

I like to imagine myself an informed, discriminating consumer these days. In the past I've wasted probably thousands of dollars on games that I ended up not caring for, and then never finishing. My steam account bears permanent witness to these crimes. Let alone the childhood indiscretions, long since banished via yard sale. Pitfall 3D, Blasto, Lock's Quest, Grand Theft Auto DS, Rhythm Heaven, and Sphinx, I'm looking at you. These are all games I was hyped for, based on previews and trailers and any other nonsense I had consumed. So these days, I try to avoid such trappings. Unless I'm really very certain I will buy the game, I avoid all trailers, previews, and screenshots. That is to say, I wait until the reviews roll in. But something about The Secret World grabbed me, whether it be the setting, a contemporary sort of X-Files/conspiracy/modern mythology type of thing, or the delightful graphics, or the promises of a unified story based MMO that I seem to have developed in my head, based on skimmed RSS feed headlines.

In any event, I bought the game, installed in lengthily, and played it briefly. I should mention that the game has been auto-patching in the background for the past forty minutes while I've been typing and musing and preparing food and eating dinner. I wanted to take some screenshots to accompany this post. It seems to patch itself quite a lot.

Look, there it is, patching away. Go baby go! Note the In Game Store prominently displayed on the launcher. Way to predict your eventual Free to Play turn, The Secret World.

The first step was to watch a lovely rendered set of intro videos, then to create a character. I made a character named William "Billee" Tha-Mime, using the interesting, and mandatory, nickname based naming system.

There he is! Billee (sic) The Mime!

I chose one of the three factions (Templar, Illuminati, or Chinese) and spawned in a starter zone, New York.

It's always dull and dark in New York. I can tell it's New York cuz of that bridge and the text what tells you so.

I created Billee as an elementalist, because I thought it would be fun to burn and electrocute things. Granted I'm a low-level character, but I only have a couple of attacks. Combat is somewhat boring, although there is a dodge mechanic, based on on-screen cues, that is somewhat fun. Generally though, in my short time in the game, I've been fighting groups of zombies who queue up around me to slowly beat me to death and queue up for burning. I don't enjoy the combat. Which is to say, I don't enjoy the actual gameplay of this game. My reward for fighting is moving onto new areas and earning new skill points, or AP or SP or whatever they are in game. There is a confoundingly confusing skill point appropriation wheel in the game.

What the fuck does all this mean?

One of the first new areas I moved onto was Agartha, a lovely zone that serves as the portal hub for the game.

Agartha. It's quite nice to look at.

There isn't much to do in Agartha though, beyond falling off the platforms into endless space, ogling the big mechanical sentries, and using the weird teleport function to teleport around the portal zone. You don't actually run along those twisty walkways in the above screenshot, but instead sort of sidle up to the foyer of them and then get zip-cut to the next set of portals. Go figure.

My first few quests introduced me to the game mechanics, and then shuffled me towards Kingsmouth, a perpetually dark and foggy and awful-to-look at zone set in a small New England town overrun with more zombies. I should mention that the game consists of zones spread all across a present-day Earth, but filled with the undead and quests and other players running around. This isn't a big "world" with zones that can be walked between, from snowy tundra to poisonous forest ala World of Warcraft.

While the graphics are lovely and feature nice lighting, I am not a fan of the settings chosen. Granted, a modern world limits your options somewhat, but I don't want to trudge around dark, grey New York or dark grey New England for hours on end.

But my major complaint with the game is the UI, or the game systems in general. I appreciate that this is a well thought out MMO, with a lot of the modern trappings that players expect. Moddable UIs, and guilds, and other such. But when I'm playing this game, I often don't know what's going on, or how to do seemingly basic stuff. As an example, the character sheet is teeny and non-descriptive.

Observe said character sheet, hovering around my character. I guess that's my inventory to the right?

Then there's the quest system, which is permanently docked to the right side of the screen. There are different classes of quests, which mostly come in chains. I think the one active in the above screenshot is a story quest? Which is different from a main quest? All of the quests consist of either killing X number of mobs, going to Y location and talking to an NPS, or collecting Z number of cruft around the zone. I should mention that if you select a quest giver to read the quest description, I couldn't figure out how to close the hovering text box except to either accept the mission or walk far away out of range of the NPC.

I just don't like the aesthetic of the menus and the UI. There's a very modern sensibility to it, where visually things are well designed, but the actual experience of trying to use it is frustrating. I couldn't figure out how to do basic things, and it frustrated me to the point that I cut my game sessions short. Or important elements of it would be tiny and indecipherable.

Each time I've come back to the game, days or now weeks later, I don't care to continue. Perhaps I'm just a big dummie. I enjoy whacking things in Skyrim, or building things in Minecraft, or constructing complicated parks in RollerCoaster Tycoon. But I do not care for The Secret World. In fact, I hate it. I hate it to the tune of perhaps six hours of lost time and now (checks bank account receipts) sixty-five dollars of lost money, as it's now been more than my alloted thirty days of purchase-approved game-time. That's an extra fifteen bucks for my trouble.

So in the end, I'm now uninstalling The Secret World. Perhaps I'll return to it one-day, once it goes free-to-play and I've read headlines declaring it new and improved.

Probably not. Fuck you The Secret World.

So here we are...

I've started this site so that myself and the friends I game with can have a place to comment on their gaming experiences. That's all I've got for now. Hope to make the site a bit prettier in the long run, and add more co-authors.