Guild Wars 2 is a completionist's dream, or nightmare.
I mentioned in my last post that since there's no overarching story to Queensdale there's no obligation to do everything that the game throws at you, but you'll probably want to anyway. In GW2 everything is an objective, or an activity, or otherwise Something To Do. Even just the act of looking at things is gamified. Press F to admire the view.
All the while the player is doing this the game is keeping score, and that score is shown on every loading screen, and every time the map is brought up.
(The zone/world map in Guild Wars 2 is fantastically well made - informative, intuitive and easy to use, it can zoom in to show the detail of the immediate area or out to show the entire world, and the artful blurring of unexplored regions leaves no doubt as to what's been explored and what has not. It both looks good and works well, and is easily the best map I've seen in an MMO.)
The lure of 100% completion is at least as effective at leading the player through the zones of GW2 as the more conventional questline path would be - perhaps moreso, since it leaves the player free to choose their own route and make their own pace. Since arriving in the next zone - Kessex Hills - I've explored at will, picking off the low hanging fruit of quicker, easier Hearts and Places of Interest, but with no sense of being locked into a particular area and needing to finish that before moving on. It's a system that can be approached as methodically or as haphazardly as the player wishes, and it works very well - especially if, like me, it's hard to resist that 100% score.*
*And the rewards that come with it, which are pretty nice.
It's not a perfect system - I won't deny that toward the end of Queensdale my completion of the last few objectives was decidely mechanical. By that point I was ticking off items on a checklist rather than really engaging with the world of the game, but that's something that comes up in every MMO from time to time, and the profusion of teleport points scattered throughout the zones does a lot to reduce the sense of slogging through the last few things to do.
The sheer number of fast travel points in this game does feel like overkill at times, but I appreciate that it's part of the design, rather like the Hearts questing system - something to cut out the 'boring bits' of questing in favour of ensuring that the player spends more time doing the things they want to do, rather than things they have to do.
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