Guild Wars 2's land of Tyria is an often stunningly beautiful place. It's the kind of world that inspires intellectual gamers to wax poetic about the potential of the MMORPG. After all, this world that ArenaNet has created may not be real, but it does exist. It's a place where people go to break free—some for longer periods of time than others—of the frustrations and disappointments of terrestrial life. Here, gamers live a more heroic existence exploring distant lands and accomplishing great deeds.

It's a wonder, then, that the MMO genre is predicated on the irritating and frustrating. The bulk of the gameplay is not-so-lovingly referred to as “the grind” by its own fans. Despite living in realms of mysticism and magic, their characters are forced to travel through the world manually on foot or on mounts (at best there's limited fast travel through portals).

Once upon a time in a land called “2004,” things were even worse. Until, that is, Blizzard's World of Warcraft arrived. Reading an original review of WoW is positively surreal—reviewers breathlessly praise innovations which we wouldn't even consider mentioning today. (Some reviewers were pleased as punch to find there were enough monsters available for players to kill).

WoW has dominated the MMORPG landscape so thoroughly and for so long that its design has become the modern standard, even if we often don't really remember why. It was due to a player-friendly design that borrowed heavily from the games that came before it, but it made the experience of an MMO much easier to enjoy for the uninitiated player. In this way, Guild Wars 2 seems poised to repeat history.

Here, at last, is an MMO that respects your time.

Respect

Guild Wars 2 is still very much the offspring of the last decade of MMO design, but it rethinks the experience in such a way that will make it vastly more palatable for the uninitiated and those who can't devote a fourth of their life to the game for five straight months. Guild Wars 2 fixes many of the genre's long-standing flaws, and it innovates in ways that remove unnecessary hiccups in the gameplay. Quests, for instance, are no longer gifted out one at a time by NPCs. They begin the moment you enter an area where the quest takes place, and you're automatically sent the reward once it's finished. Traveling has also been hugely simplified, as players are allowed to warp at any time to virtually any zone in the world.

These are nice features, but they don't radically overhaul the experience. GW2 still falls into the trap of forcing players to do “quests” that amount to little more than errands. The real step forward is that GW2 isn't focused on grinding through the majority of the game to reach end-game raids and bosses.

In most previous MMOs, the very best, most engaging content was often hidden behind 80 levels of grind and hardship, ensuring only the most dedicated players would ever earn the right to see it. Guild Wars 2 sprinkles this content liberally throughout the leveling experience, rather than stacking it all in a heaping pile at the very end.



Rather than hide its most amazing encounters behind a velvet VIP rope, Guild Wars 2 introduces “World Bosses.” Or, put more simply, titanic monsters which arrive in the game world at random intervals, some of which are the size of small towns. Players flock from all around to participate in these fights which can get fairly complicated, as the boss may spawn hordes of enemies to defeat as well. Where normally these fights would be reserved for the end of an arduous dungeon, reachable only by players who had invested thousands of hours (and hundreds of dollars) into the game, we fought our first world monster after only five hours. ArenaNet seems intent on tearing down the artificial barriers of the modern MMO that only serve to add unnecessary length to the experience.

This philosophy permeates the whole of Guild Wars 2. Unlike most MMOs, Guild Wars 2 is neither free-to-play, nor does it charge a monthly subscription. You pay a one-time price for the game and play forever. Since you're not being charged a monthly fee, the developer has no reason to goad you into playing for months and years. This is a game you could conceivably “beat” in two or three months rather than years. It's a new idea for a new marketplace. No more can an MMO seek to dominate players' time. The competition is too fierce, and it iterates too quickly.

World vs. World

The same ethos can be found in the game's player-versus-player modes. Rather than hiding the best games and competition at the level cap, Guild Wars 2 gives you access to everything almost immediately via its up-leveling system. Enter any of the PvP zones and you'll be automatically given Level 80 stats and pre-set gear so you can compete at once. This also means that you can play whatever class you please. In games like WoW, you'd have to spend hundreds of hours leveling up a new character if you wanted to play PvP at the highest level with a new class.

This is especially necessary because PvP is a large focus of the game, with two different styles offered. There's an arena-style PvP mode which features only one game mode (but multiple maps) at launch: conquest, a standard capture-the-location style game similar to WoW's Arathi Basin (or Call of Duty's Capture and Hold,) which is by far the simpler and more enjoyable of the two.

There's also “World vs. World” PvP in which servers compete in weeks-long wars over huge zones dotted with castles, keeps, forts, and supply lines. These are highly complex games that feature siege engines and catapults, however they're also the most restrictive. I found this type of game the most difficult part of Guild Wars 2 to enjoy. The zones are massive in scale, and are the only places in the world that don't feature instant-travel locations. Meaning if you die, you're set for a very long walk back to the front lines (which may move before you arrive). That's not accidental though. This is intended to be a long-term campaign with planned attacks, not frantic mayhem. My suspicion is that this game will take time to develop as strategies evolve and guilds begin to orchestrate calculated assaults.

The stakes are high in this mode. It's often very tough to enjoy, but that may be the spark of difficulty that hardcore fans will need to stay interested, as this is one of the main long-term activities in the game after reaching the level cap.

Truly Massive

As of this writing, I haven't seen even remotely close to everything Guild Wars 2 has to offer, and I don't anticipate reaching that point anytime soon. Like all MMOs, it's an enormous game that contains more features and content than I could ever hope to describe here. Reviewing an MMO is always a somewhat precarious business. The only way to offer a truly authoritative opinion is to play for weeks or months, and by that time the usefulness you could provide to your readers has long since passed.

However, I don't feel like I'm recommending Guild Wars 2 based on the strength of its content anyway. In fact, it can be pretty ho-hum (most quests still generally revolve around MMO tropes like stomping spider's eggs and killing X of Y creature). Certainly the world bosses and PvP are great fun, but it's the game's philosophy that is so alluring to me. Guild Wars 2 seeks to land a killing blow to the notion that MMOs must torture and annoy the player before offering them what they paid for.

ArenaNet is allowing players to—for perhaps the first time—experience an MMO on their own terms, playing pretty much however they like to play. Most activities will earn you experience in this game, not just questing and killing. World vs. World PvP offers experience points, crafting/gathering offer points, even the long-held tradition of MMO players trying to see which buildings they can jump onto will give you experience points with the games “vistas” (hard to reach ledges which, when triggered, zoom the camera out to give you a cinematic view).

I was even pleased to find that simple exploration nets players appreciable experience, allowing me to backpack through the world, exploring the game's gorgeous locales rather than spending time constantly battling through quests that don't interest me. And make no mistake, the game's quests are by far its weakest point. So it's fortunate that players are allowed to supplement questing through so many other activities.

GW2 still features some of the same pitfalls of the modern MMO, and the lame quests are a perfect example. But by giving the player more choice at the outset of the game, ArenaNet has de-emphasized these quests, and as a result they hold back the experience less.

GW2 is not a radical reinvention of the genre. ArenaNet simply rearranged the dominant paradigm in such a way that makes the adventure more manageable, while borrowing the best ideas from the best predecessors. It's a combination of pitch-perfect iteration combined with calculated innovation. The result is a game that will feel instantly familiar and easy to play for anyone familiar with MMOs, but is also designed for those who may not have had the time or inclination to pick up an MMO in the past.

Too many supposed Warcraft-killers have come and gone in recent years to bother worrying about whether Guild Wars 2 will be able to “dethrone the king.” What we know for sure is Guild Wars 2 is a step forward for the genre and will make adventuring more appealing for those who wish to escape the confines of terra firma and wander off into terra incognita.

Verdict: Buy It