So a confession. I’ve owned Guild Wars 2 since September 2012 (basically just a couple months after it was released). I would love to tell you that it was initially one of those games that just hooked me and I’ve been playing it like mad ever since. Truth is, for some reason I never got into it. It’s possible that the main reason is because the classes I have historically liked in the MMO genre just had anime styled armor which I didn’t like. Maybe I just hadn’t reached the level of burnout with various other games, I just don’t know why it had never clicked.
With the above in mind let me now lay out the further scenario. I had more or less burned out on most games, and because of family responsibilities I had lost my “gaming” PC to boot, all I had then was my beloved Macbook Pro that I had upgraded to last year. That in and of itself limited what games I could consider playing, plus since I also use my Macbook Pro for work, well I only have so much room I’m willing to use. So since, as I mentioned before, I owned a copy of Guild Wars 2, I decided to give it one last shot.
The game has changed, a lot, since I last played. Oh the graphics are the same (gorgeous even toned down for my laptop) , and the professions are the same, and frankly the basic mechanics are the same. However what they have changed is the leveling experience, and class mechanics. And I think the leveling changes are what finally got me moving forward.
In previous iterations of Guild Wars 2 you could have access to all you professions weapons by level 2 and you unlocked their abilities not by leveling up, but by use. While that may sound great and grand in theory what it does is great a low level “grind fest” so that by the time you leave the very early zones you have every weapon fully unlocked. Now the reason why this “grind fest” burned me out back in the day, is that it meant you got a lot of skills but it became very easy to miss key parts of the game which you might otherwise have not. For me the pieces that I tended to skip were dodging, and understanding things like retaliation and effective weapon swapping. With the current leveling mechanic the weapons unlock skill areas as you level. You cannot even use an offhand weapon (or get those nice 4th and 5th actions for your 2 handers) until Level 7. This rather simple change means even the low level mobs require a little finesse now and then, which means you learn to dodge/evade. Am I great at it? Heavens no, but at least now I spent time practicing it.
Another aspect of the leveling that was lacking in previous version was the disjointed personal stories aspects. So much of the personal story is treated as time sensitive, for instance one Human story is about finding a child that went missing at a circus, but in the earlier version of the game their were level requirements to progress each part of a “story’s chapter”. Since each chapter has multiple missions it ultimately destroyed the weight that the the story might contain. Take the aformentioned Circus story, it started at level 10 an concluded at level 20. Being forced to move away from the story to get to the level requirements robbed the story of what I think the developers had in mind (namely something compelling that went beyond the old mom tropes). In the newer edition of this game, they just open up the chapters when you hit the max level needed for the events you play all parts of the chapter. I really love this aspect because it means if you lose the immersion from the personal story it is because you chose to, not because you were forced to. And maybe this was the ultimate payoff for me, because the personal story has been an absolute blast, it has kept me very involved in the game, to the point that for the first time in may 3-5 years I was at my keyboard last night saying “Ok, let me finish this last part to this chapter and then I will go to bed”
So Long story short, From September 2012 – December 2014 , 0 Characters to even Level 24. January7th to January 26th , 2 characters > Level 60, and enjoying every second of it. Finished the Lion’s Arch Chapter of the person story as Part of the Order of Whispers, hoping to finish that same chapter tonight with the Vigil.