Guild Wars 2 isn't a theme park. It's more of a funfair.
One of the most common terms used to describe MMOs is 'theme park', and as often as not it's used in a derogatory sense. In a theme park MMO each zone can be little more than background for a strictly linear progression through a series of set piece spectacles. The player is ushered from one ride to the next and is discouraged from going astray, either by the fact that there's not actually much else to do if they slip their leash and go wandering, or because progression requires that certain specific checkpoints are reached in the order which the devs intended. Often it's both.
Most MMOs have some degree of theme park design to them, and that's not in itself a bad thing. The pros and cons of theme park vs sandbox MMO design is a topic for another time, but it's undeniable that the popularity of theme parks in MMOs is, at least in part, due to the fact that it works. How well it works is much more open to debate, and a lot of the time it's a question of how far it's taken.
Silverpine Forest (post-Cataclysm) in World of Warcraft is my go-to example for bad theme park design. It's a zone that's so linear and so heavily scripted that I could draw my exact route through it on the map, not only from hub to hub but from quest to quest. Virtually from mob to mob. There's no sense of Silverpine as a location that exists in the world outwith the specific timeframe in which the zone storyline takes place, and returning to it afterward is akin to walking through a series of discarded theatrical backdrops after the play is over.
Guild Wars 2 isn't so much a theme park as it is a funfair. The main attraction here isn't the big rides but the sideshows - not the rollercoasters but the shooting galleries and the Test Your Strength machines.
In Queensdale - the human starting zone - there's no overarching story to speak of, just a series of vignettes that come together to form a picture of the zone as a place. There's no aspiration to a bigger narrative, and no prerequisites. There's nothing you have to have done before you do what comes next in the story, because there is no story.
(I'll talk about the Personal Story another time. Suffice to say it's as optional as everything else.)
Of course funfairs are crowded, noisy and chaotic, and there's always someone yelling in your ear trying to gab your attention. This is also true of GW2. Early on in particular Queensdale is so full of Things To Do it can come across as rather manic, and while it does settle down after a while it's still true that if you go sixty seconds in this game without being presented with a new event or activity you've probably lost connection to the server.
This is a game that wants to hold the player's attention at all times, and it appears to believe that the average attention span of that player is about a minute. This isn't Lord of the Rings Online or Fallen Earth or any other MMO that offers up long stretches of world in between the action. In Guild Wars 2 there's always something around the next corner or over the next hill, and that can lead to the game feeling overstuffed. Sometimes less is more, but not in GW2.
Still, it's fun. If it's not the deepest experience in MMOing it's still easy to just go with it and bounce around from one sideshow attraction to the next, accumulating balloons and stuffed animals - or at least crafting ingredients and loot chests - as you go. Guild Wars 2 invites the player to live in the moment and not think too far ahead. That can come later, perhaps.
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