{"id":1011,"date":"2024-04-26T23:11:09","date_gmt":"2024-04-27T03:11:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/?p=1011"},"modified":"2024-04-26T23:11:11","modified_gmt":"2024-04-27T03:11:11","slug":"guild-wars-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/2024\/04\/26\/guild-wars-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Guild Wars 2"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Guild Wars 2 is a Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Game (MMORPG) with combat that is sort of a cross between tab targeting and action. The world is expansive and full of different things to do. There are 8 base classes with 1 class available with the purchase of any expansion. The game is also free to play, though free accounts have a lot of restrictions. This will definitely be a long and multi-part review.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Get it from the official website here<\/a>. The game also has an official Wiki<\/a> with lots of information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Savor the view.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I played Guild Wars 2 when it first came out but stopped after reaching the max level of 80. I will say that coming back to the game, I spent my first 2 hours just cleaning out my inventory and figuring out all these random currencies and items. Sure, I could have just destroyed everything to start fresh, but some of those items are hard to come by and would cost real money to easily obtain. If you start new, you’ll likely not have this problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For my class, I chose the Necromancer, a light armor wearing caster class. Usually, I don’t like casters in MMORPGs because of the cast time and casting interruptions. In Guild Wars 2, though, the combat is much more fast paced. In fact, targeting something is optional as all of your attacks can be used without a target. They’ll usually just automatically go out in front of you. Also, you can cast on the move, so no spells getting interrupted or not going off because the target died. Most cast times are also usually only around half a second long, so not too bad. The necromancer is a pretty fun class to play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Witness my minions!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

You only have ten skills you can select at a time. The first five are based on what weapons you have equipped, and you can easily swap between two sets. Out of the last five, one is a healing skill, one is a long cooldown special skill, and the other three can be selected from a pool of skills. The low number of buttons keeps things focused on the action. There is also a specializations you can do to change up your play style a bit. Expansions to the game add the ability to wield different weapon and unlocks elite specializations as well, which change up a class’s gameplay even more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With all these options, I sort of just glaze over what to do and look up guides made by other people, though. For some reason, the tooltips in this game just feel so long and awkward to read. They are clear and concise, but some skills do a lot and they are overloaded with numbers and information such as number of targets affects, radius of the skill and more. I’m too old to be reading all that. I just push everything as they come off cooldown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I sometimes find combat a bit too fast paced and chaotic, especially compared to Final Fantasy XIV. That game works more like a dance. This game, while I haven’t played at a high level yet, feels more like I’m just throwing out everything I can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is my shark. He is a good boy.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So moving away from builds and skills, what is there to do in this game? The over world is where you’ll spend most of your time. Each zone scales you down, so you won’t just steamroll through everything. Within the world map, pretty much everything gives experience from gathering stuff to exploring around. There are events that pop up, sometimes doable by one person, sometimes a group is suggested. Participating is easy. Just go up and start hitting stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Let’s get involved over there!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Later areas will have meta events. These are map-wide events with many stages and take a lot of players to complete. They mostly come on a known timer which you can look up in the official Wiki. Even in the older zones, there are still a lot of players, and people do come just for big meta events. I don’t foresee many problems experiencing the major events in the game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what if you want to just explore? There game encourages that. With lots of vertical parts to the zones, climbing by jumping around is a useful skill. There are also underground parts hidden. The map actually isn’t that useful. It’ll only show you a top-down view of the area, but with things stacked on top of one another, it can only show so much. Sometimes, you’ll have to go looking around yourself to find entrances to tunnels or ways up mountains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Wells of corruption.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Within the world, there are also vistas, which are just places that show you a scenic cutscene of the area. They are usually high up and hard to reach, so it’ll be a challenge to reach them. Some of them are even part of jumping courses where you must navigate a bunch of tiny platforms. I really enjoy these jumping courses, but falling can be frustrating. You do have some control in midair to help. Some of the harder courses even have vanishing or moving platforms, though those are more rare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Time to go on an adventure.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The last main thing to do in a map is heart events. These are similar to quests from other games where you do simple tasks for people. They are helpful guides showing you where to go and what levels your expected to be. The tasks vary from attacking enemies, clearing the fields, picking up water buckets to dump on drunks, using hunks of meat to whack drunks, beating up drunks. There are quite a lot of drunk people around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Help people out and make friends.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The max level in this game is 80. That’s the way it’s started, and even after many expansions, it is still 80. Gear also hasn’t gotten more powerful. So expansions do give you other ways to improve your character, but it isn’t strictly getting more powerful or getting bigger numbers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are a lot of different systems in the game, though. Trying to figure it all out yourself can be time-consuming and challenging. I used a lot of guides and research. If you don’t you may find things tough to understand as the game throws different kinds of currency at you and directs you to various strange locations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being a free to play game, they do want to encourage you to spend money. I’ll talk more about the Gem shop, which is the currency you buy with real money, next time along with some other stuff I wanted to point out, mainly about the UI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A calm little district.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The game does have instanced content, but seeing as I haven’t done any of it I can’t say anything about them at this time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even not doing any instanced content or diving into the many different system around, Guild Wars 2 feels like a fun world to explore. You can try to jump most reasonable-looking slopes and it just feels good to do that. The world is yours to roam. Later on, expansions give you even more movement options, though I’ll take about that later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Find it on the official website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Guild Wars 2 is a Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Game (MMORPG) with combat that is sort of a cross between tab targeting and action. The world is expansive and full of different things to do. There are 8 base classes with 1 class available with the purchase of any expansion. The game is also free […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,5],"tags":[57],"class_list":["post-1011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vgreviews","category-videogames","tag-mmorpg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1011"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1041,"href":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1011\/revisions\/1041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}