Review; http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-09-18-guild-wars-2-review
Snippit;
“Funny thing about expectations: they can blind you both ways. After claims that Guild Wars 2 would shake up the stagnant genre of massively multiplayer online games, many were surprised, and a little disappointed, to find that it looked and played just like an MMO. But deflated expectations can be just as deceptive as the hype that led to them.
It’s true that you can hardly call Guild Wars 2 an iconoclast. From its high-fantasy head to its role-playing toes, it’s an unashamed genre piece, an MMO through and through, a giant engine designed to grind out experience points and loot beneath the tattoo of a hundred thousand hotkeys. But don’t let its familiarity blind you to the fact that this engine has been re-engineered from first principles, and purrs sweeter than any has before.
In fact, Guild Wars 2 is by far the most important – and plain enjoyable – massively multiplayer game since 2004’s World of Warcraft. At long last, it’s the changing of the guard.”
I find that the review rings true, on both the negative and positives.
I don’t care scores. I never have. You can’t make a reviewer, who is just a person. I don’t believe in being a professional gamer. It’s all just entertainment, and no human on earth is more entitled to decide what is more fun on others behalf.
However, I do have a soft spot for well written, and well documented reviews, that are backed out by sound logic and a non-boring writing style. Eurogamer has some good and critical articles, and they are usually more strict that a lot of other outlets. That doesn’t mean anything in itself (make your own opinions, don’t rely on others) but it’s still interesting to discuss reasonings and thoughts, instead of a silly score, which again, doesn’t mean anything.
Here’s how Guild Wars 2 handles tagging: you so much as land a single blow on a monster, you get full credit for killing it. Experience, loot, quest progression, the works. It doesn’t make any difference if you’re in a group or not. It doesn’t matter if the monster was killed by two players or 20. It doesn’t matter if you just hit auto-attack and took a sip of tea while someone you’ve never met did all the hard work. Everyone wins.
Is that fair? Did you earn it? Who cares? It’s more fun – and just as importantly, it’s more social. You’re rewarded for helping others, because many hands make light work. And the result is that in Guild Wars 2’s world of Tyria, those wary queues of self-interested souls don’t exist. In their place are happy, noisy scrums of players, digital flash mobs coalescing and dispersing around dynamic events: an army of adventurers fighting together for the common good. Isn’t this what massively multiplayer gaming is supposed to be like?
One small change; one giant, wonderful result. Next to the libertarian work ethic espoused by most of these games, Guild Wars 2 is practically a socialist utopia. The needs of the one and the many are aligned, and the awful tension between solo and group play that plagues most MMOs disappears in a puff of goodwill.