Hey all, as the title implies, new player here. I’ve just played 2 hours or so today, and I’ve been having fun. I wanted to share my experience with others if only for the sake of chatting about it and even getting some clarification in some stuff I’m still not sure about in the game. My only background in MMOs is WoW, so this game obviously impresses me by how different it is, for better or for worse, and I have little else to compare it to.
I chose for my first character a Human Mesmer. I had watched some videos of the skills online, and hey, it looked fun. Illusions, trickery, magic, it all sounded cool (and I found that it IS cool as I played). I chose to be a noble who lost his sister to centaurs; that had me going for a while – an MMO where I choose my background and some sort of personal quest? Unheard of, maybe except in The Old Republic, but let’s stay on topic.
My first impression upon entering the game was, overall, pretty good. An artistic cinematic showed me about humans, their status in the world, and my character. Short and to the point. And then I jumped right into the thick of it: a town is assaulted by centaurs, and I had to do something about it. Here’s a short list of stuff I noticed there:
- The interface: clean and simple. Wait, where’s my mana? Is there no mana? Just cool-downs? Cool.
- My main auto-attack changes with each hit, and the third one creates a copy-me. Awesome! Am I really level 1?
- I have the ability to cause Confusion to my opponents, but I’ve no idea what this does. I tried looking for it in-game in the Help menu, but it’s nowhere to be found. I’ll have to check a wiki or something. It’s the one thing that I saw no tutorial or tool tip about, and what with it being my classes’ specialization, I thought it was weird to be missing.
I killed some centaurs, told some people to hide a the inn (at no apparent reward, but it was nice to have the option) and talked to a Quest NPC. It was very odd to have my character talk back-and-forth with the NPC, both of them being voice acted rather well. I can only think of another MMO that does this – Old Republic, but I may be slightly behind the times.
Moving on I got to my first event, where apparently anyone there can join at any time. Did I really just fight a huge boss that summons adds at level 1? And anyone can jump in to assist without being in my group? This was just a small taste of the “flowing” nature of GW2, allowing and encouraging player collaboration by making it accessible and rewarding.
We beat the boss and reached the “real world” of GW2, where an NPC showed me a map of the area (very detailed!), quest locations, some lore, and more. That was nice. So then I went to find my first quest – and realized that being close enough to the quest giver was sometimes enough to get the quest! Heck, I could just join other players who were already doing a quest – in this case, helping a farm. It sounded silly at first, having fought a “god-like” monster minutes ago, but then I realized that which chores to do was my own decision, and one of them involved fighting giant worms.
I was merrily filling the “quest bar” for the farm quest when all of a sudden an event started, barely meters from me! The mother of all farm worms decided to pay us a visit, and another epic battle was on. I almost died a couple of times, but thankfully my heal ability saved me.
This is a good point to ask: does every class have a self-heal ability? Is there no healer role? I’m used to the standard tank-healer-dps trinity of MMOs, you see. And if there’s no healer, great – nobody likes being back-up too much, right?
I want to conclude this already long post by describing how odd it felt to travel through the starter area and explore, smoothly moving from one quest to another. It’s like the days of going to town, talking to all the NPCs with “!” signs over their heads are gone. I just get close to the area of a quest and it’s on! And then I can jump to other events in the area, or teleport with the waypoints.
It’s all very disorienting, in a good way. Because if it felt like WoW, what’s the point? The same MMO with different art style? Nah. I just found where the armor/weapons vendors are, and how crafting works. So far it’s been a fun experience.
See you all in game
