Guild Wars 2

It’s through levelling that you get to explore the game world. It may be tedious for someone on the 10th character, but for a new player it’s fun as you gradually learn what Tyria holds. If the designers try to accelerate the levelling process too much (as has happened in WoW) it is almost like an admission that most of the game world is uninteresting and to be skipped as fast as possible.

Speaking as a new player but with a lot of experience of WoW, it seems to me that one of the strengths of GW2 is that shows up what an essentially artificial game mechanic “the party” is. In GW2, if I see someone fighting some enemy, I go over and help. We both benefit. In WoW, in the same circumstance, I get nothing because the enemy is “tagged”, unless the two of us are formally joined in “a party”. What’s the logic in that? It’s totally artificial and meaningless, and, as GW2 shows, the game works better without it.