I will just start with this picture. This is my Norn Guardian that I found myself getting attached to playing. She’s a rather tall lady even though I adjusted the size down while creating her. I stood beside of Norai just so I could feel small and feminine 
In the quest cut scenes I also found her voice to be on the uhmmm… masculine side, and said as much on the random surveys that popped up while rating certain quests
Okay, so Guild Wars 2. What were my impressions? Overall I liked it. At first I was overwhelmed not knowing what to do. In this game, you definitely choose your own gameplay path. I think that this is a game that you definitely want to read up on so that you have an idea of what to do. I didn’t do my storyline because I am wanting to save that for launch. What Charity, Ulrai and myself did do, was the skill challenges, the random events that were popping up as well as getting a taste of the pvp atmosphere. Since we chose to do pvp towards the end, we found out why some areas were less populated with players. Obviously everyone was doing pvp. Sidenote: for some reason I kept targeting people. lol I think it’s because my vent hot key is the control button, and to target someone it’s ctrl left click so yeah… I kept doing that.
Okay, so it looks like I am going all over the place with this, so perhaps I need to do it in sections…….. [fade to black]
Okay! Still with me? let’s break this down.
The game itself – The UI is very much like any game that has that WoW-like set up. I am referencing WoW because I’ve not that much experience with games prior to 2 yrs ago, and games after seem to set up like WoW. The mini-map is down at the bottom right, and I didn’t rely on it all that much. It was more like a general reference point of where to head. Your party members show up as blue dots, so that was a help. I used my world map quite a bit and let me tell you, that thing is HUGE. There are no mounts, nor flying, but once waypoints are discovered, you can teleport to different area that way (for a small fee of course), instead of using a predetermined NPC flight path. Bags operate very much the same. Looting was a little less than what I would have liked. So if there is something that is lootable, (which does sparkle so that you know) you walk up to it and a popup will tell you to press F to pick up. I think you can right click as well. The window with the loot pops up to the right, which I found a bit of a pain, because I would forget to look. It would be better if it popped up closer to what you are looting. There are mini icons for your character, bags, pvp, the market, a few more things that I don’t remember, and it is important to note that your mail is built into your UI. Basically the only time you need to go to your capital city is to purchase gear and to train. There’s no trading between players, at least not in the traditional way. You simply mail the item you want to give to a player and it pops up immediately for them as mail received. I thought that was pretty nice. The map shows undiscovered items of interest, your available way points as well as where to go next to do your storyline. How you get there is for you to figure out, and there are events all along the way that you can get involved with so, no… not linear in any way (at least to me).
Races/Professions – I tried the Human (Ranger, Necromancer), Char (Guardian) and Norn (Guardian). Regarding the starting areas, each one was different enough that I didn’t feel that I was duplicating anything. while I did start 2 guardians, it was a completely different experience for each because the areas are that different. There aren’t a ton of abilities to learn, and the ones that you do learn can be enhanced with training up and assigning skill points. While there aren’t tanks and healers per se, you can definitely take paths that will lend yourself more to those play styles.
The PVE play seemed less immersive, but I believe that is because I didn’t do the storyline. The events were great though. Lots of escort quests. I know, I know, who likes those, right? Here’s the thing, they are fun when you have a group of people escorting with you and to give you one example…. we were escorting someone to somewhere and were being attacked from hilltops, so a couple of us broke from the group, took out the attackers on the hilltop, and then rejoined the group. To me that was a really nice twist to an otherwise, ‘here they come at you, get ready’ type of thing. PVP… like I said before, it was obvious where everyone was (they were pvp’ing). The objectives were to protect the different ‘castles because I can’t remember the name of them, fight back the other teams, rebuild and supply the fortresses. Lots of variation there, and it really made it fun. Picture Wintergrasp (for those from WoW) only more aggressive, no buffs, and full out war. I did like that a lot. Yes, there will be 2 sets of gear, pve and pvp, and I can say that if you intend on pvp’ing there, you WILL need the appropriate gear. I died like a million times It was fun though and definitely something that I can get into. I melee’d in pvp and really didn’t like that. There was so much aoe that it was difficult at best to not die from that alone. I am thinking melee for pve and ranged for pvp.
There is so much information and I know that I am leaving a bunch out. I don’t know how those who do these write ups consistently, keep track of everything The bottom line is that I will be playing at launch, and perhaps do a more in-depth write up regarding certain aspects as I do more weekends. I did have fun, and that’s what matters. So much so that my poor ears are sore from my headset and my voice sounds even more horrible than it did before. lol I do have video footage that I will be uploading and of course I will be editing out the hacking cough that people suffered while I was streaming.
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