10 Thoughts and Cool Things About Guild Wars 2

ArenaNet’s promising sequel to Guild Wars is the subject of a new article from Rock, Paper, Shotgun which lists ten points worth mentioning about the game, both in a positive and negative sense. Here’s a couple of them:

3. It’s So Big! (Can I Touch It?)

Guild Wars 2 looks beautiful. Its art direction is amazing. Its locations while very stock fantasy in origin are great. What really impresses though is its scale. The human city of Divinity’s Reach may not take up a vast amount of space in pure square-foot terms, but it does an amazing job of faking it. The districts feel big and (by MMO standards) bustling, especially your instanced Home part of it. The walls and homes and decorations tower above you, making it easy to imagine thousands of people living and breathing behind the scenes.

The most impressive bit though is when you climb high above it to the palace in the middle a lush, beautifully designed area in itself and glance up. Hovering above the whole city is a gigantic orrery with massive celestial bodies in constant motion. Nobody would have noticed if it wasn’t there, but it is, and like so much here, it looks absolutely stunning.

The scale is just as impressive wherever you go in the opening areas and capital cities, yet without ever seeming stretched out and padded. There are cliffs, and huge lakes, and sweeping panoramic views everywhere. This is a world you’ll want to explore in great detail, especially knowing that there are secret areas and hidden skill points and all manner of other stuff tucked away off the beaten track specifically to be discovered instead of pointed to.

For the five minutes it takes to get everything onto a wiki, anyway.

…

10. I Hope Events Get Less Messy

The one downside of Guild Wars 2’²s (Everybody Pile In) approach to questing is that with all the pyrotechnics and people just running around, it’s impossible to see what the hell is going on most of the time, never mind play with tactics. That’s great for starting things off with a bang, but I do hope there are some more strategic battles and encounters later on that we can simply walk into, but that will challenge more than just our ability to mash attack buttons. That said, a beta weekend where everyone starts at the same level is obviously going to be much more chaotic than the actual launch game, so it’s very likely that things will be a lot calmer post-release.