{"id":1018,"date":"2024-05-03T23:06:01","date_gmt":"2024-05-04T03:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/?p=1018"},"modified":"2024-05-03T23:06:03","modified_gmt":"2024-05-04T03:06:03","slug":"guild-wars-2-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/2024\/05\/03\/guild-wars-2-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Guild Wars 2, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is part 2 of my Guild Wars 2 review. This will focus more on the in-game store, the UI, and other things not directly related to gameplay. You can read Part 1 here<\/a>, and get Guild Wars 2 from the official site here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Enjoy some music.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I will talk about Masteries first, though. They do affect the game. Since the level for the game doesn’t increase with expansions, they instead give masteries. These are account wide, so once you earn it one one character, you get them on all characters. Still, masteries vary in usefulness. Some are good all through the game. Others are only useful within the expansion you get them in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In order to unlock masteries, first you must gain enough EXP to unlock it. Then you need to find mastery points to officially train them. The main problem I have with that is you won’t automatically change to anther mastery to earn EXP on once the current on is full, and there is no notification that the current EXP is full. If you don’t keep an eye on your EXP bar, you could max out and just waste a lot of EXP. The have notifications for a lot of other stuff that happens in game but nothing for when you fill the EXP bar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note that technically EXP is not wasted. At a full bar, EXP will go to a hidden value that will reward you with Spirit Shards every so often. Though I have no idea what those do yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A long list of story chapters.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Now onto the story. I’m not going to talk about the actual plot that much. The game allows you to jump around from chapter to chapter, so I’ve kind of been playing it out of order and hanging out with characters I haven’t met before. In the early game, cutscenes are done with characters talking to each other in a kind of visual novel style presentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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An old style cutscene.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Later on, though, all talking just happens out in the world with word bubbles above the character and messages in the chat log. The scenes are all voiced, too, which is pretty nice. One downside to having the cutscenes just happen out in the world is that there is no way to skip dialogue. It mainly becomes a problem once you replay story chapters trying to complete the achievements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your character is also voiced. They are not some silent protagonist that you project personality onto. Your character has a pretty defined role within the story and acts a certain way. Overall, the voice acting is fine and makes for some fun characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big story events takes place in an instance, so they can really do a lot of big stuff. Smaller story where you mainly go around talking happens in the main world. Also, the story doesn’t take you to most of the map, so you’ll need to go out there exploring yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Taste my blade.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The story in the game is divided into two parts. Buying the expansion only gets you about the first half of the story. The story in between expansions come in Living Seasons, which must be purchased separately. Now you do get Living Seasons for free if you log in during a certain time period, but those reading this probably did not do that. So for all intents and purposes, you need to buy the Living Season for the story bridging together two expansions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now for the UI of the game. I am not a particular fan of it. The UI is pretty and designed to look like it fits into the world, but to me, it feels muddy and unclear. I like UI crisp and clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Opening a bunch of windows.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The windows have these faded edges and murky backgrounds that annoy me. They are both kind of transparent and not transparent depending on location. I am not against stylish UI, but I would also like it to be simpler.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The world map is also hard to read. It is designed to match the minimap you get, but there are also no easy lines that mark out different zones. You just sort of have to know where one zone ends and another begins. Usually, the name of a zone is centered on it, but it still could be clearer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A map of Tyria.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

There are a lot of fuzzy edges on the map as well, you until you reveal an entire zone, you kind of don’t know if a fuzzy edge is something you can’t get past or just a place you haven’t seen yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I will now talk about the in-game store. The paid for currency are Gems. Unlike some other games, buying more gems is not more “money efficient.” It is $5 USD for 400 gems, and that is the scale they grow at no matter how much money spend. Prices in the in game store range from 180 for really simple stuff to over 800 for a single item. Most items are skins or dyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Some stuff you can buy.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

There are also account and character upgrades that are quite useful. Now, I don’t know exactly what a free account has, but I’ll link to the page on the official Wiki<\/a> about account types. But you can buy more character slots, bank slots, build slots, bag slots and more. Some things affect the entire account, like bank slots and character slots. Bag slots however only increase the amount of bags for one character. If you delete that character, you lose that bag slot. You can also buy convenience items, such as unlimited gathering tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most interesting thing is, you can buy in-game gold with gems and buy gems with in-game gold. So if you decide to go heavy in getting gold, you can trade that for gems if you wanted. I believe the exchange rate is constantly changing based on what is more in-demand at the moment. I haven’t really looked at it since I am still a poor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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To new adventures.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

That is all for this part of my review. Stay tuned for next time! Find Guild Wars 2 from the official site<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is part 2 of my Guild Wars 2 review. This will focus more on the in-game store, the UI, and other things not directly related to gameplay. You can read Part 1 here, and get Guild Wars 2 from the official site here. I will talk about Masteries first, though. They do affect the […]<\/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-1018","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\/1018","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=1018"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1043,"href":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018\/revisions\/1043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.postterminus.com\/xf\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}