It's been years, but "For the Tamini!" still rings in my ears.
Since I started this blog I've added new games into each rotation. New to the blog, but not new to me. Guild Wars 2 is the last of that list - the MMOs that I'd played before for more than a couple of hours.
It's the last for a reason. My recollection of my previous experience in this game was mostly of running around generic green hills fighting centaurs, and then fighting some more centaurs. Later on I'd fight yet more centaurs, and then, just to change things up a bit, I'd fight some centaurs. That was the impression it left, and years later just the sight of abandoned seige equipment on green hills at the start of Helm's Hold in Neverwinter was enough to put me off that zone.
I burned out on GW2 around level 40, and I've never returned to the game since. Until now.
It didn't help that it's published by NCSoft, and for a long time that left me even more disinclined to give it a second chance. The memory of the shutdown of City of Heroes was very fresh when I first played this game. Now that CoH is more or less back my attitude to NCSoft and all their works has shifted from resentfully hostile to guardedly neutral, so with that in mind, and with the lingering sense that I might have been unfair to the game the first time around, I'm giving it another chance.
(I've often revised my opinions of MMOs upon revisiting them. My first impressions - long ago - of both Lord of the Rings Online and Star Trek Online were not good, and I rate both of those games quite highly now.)
For the record, I've never played the original Guild Wars, and know very little about it except that the box art caught my eye on the shelves a few times back in the day when I actually bought physical copies of PC games.
Perhaps I'm setting myself up for a fall here, but when I blew the dust off my old acocunt to start this new character I went for the same combo I'd went with the last time - a human warrior. I did consider a Sylvari, but I really dislike their armor designs. Perhaps I just couldn't pass up on the opportunity to fight centaurs again.
I'll say this for GW2 - it doesn't waste any time getting you into the action. I thought the opening of Neverwinter was fast paced, but it's a leisurely mood piece compared to this game. After a very short tutorial sequence I got a pep talk from a priestess who told me to go and help people* and that was it. Time to go adventuring. It's not so much a Call To Adventure as it is being told to get off the couch and go outside.
*Help people AND kill centaurs. That second part is left unsaid, but it's clearly the subtext.
The ensuing first couple of hours of the game could be considered an advanced tutorial, but it's the best kind of tutorial in that it walks the player through the core mechanics of the game without ever feeling like that's what it's doing. Arenanet have made the new player experience as smooth and user friendly as possible, and of all the MMOs I've played this one is probably the quickest to get the player into the regular gameplay loop of exploration and adventuring.
The action is fast, the visuals hold up well - it helps that I'm able to up my graphic settings from those I used six years ago - and it's very well animated. So far I'm having fun with this game.
Even when I'm fighting centaurs.
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