End. Game.

Seeing as there was a gap of two years between my last run of Guild Wars 2 and this one, it might sound like I'm stating the obvious when I say it could be a long time before I return to this game.

Throughout my time in GW2 I've had mixed feelings about the game. I started off pleasantly surprised at how much better it was than I remembered from the first time I played back in 2012 or thereabouts, and I remain wholeheartedly impressed by the design of the open world experience. The early levelling in this game is first rate and really showcases the ways in which MMOs can be different from single player games. It's great.

Up to a point, and that point is where the main story really takes over, and if I had to do GW2 all over again, knowing what I do now, I wouldn't even have done the later stages. From level 60 onward the main story is over long, over scripted and departs entirely from the freeform dynamism that is GW2's greatest strength. If this is how the expansion storylines play out...

"The story of Heart of Thorns takes place in the Heart of Maguuma, the deep jungle where Pact forces crashed on their way to confront the Elder Dragon Mordremoth."

...I've little interest in going there. 

One last comment on the main story - the finale, 'Victory or Death' is painfully bad. It's very clear that it was designed for a group, and this makes several of the encounters deeply annoying to play through as there's been little attempt to make them solo friendly. Also, Destiny's Edge show up, and I still don't care about them. They're almost completely useless anyway.

Oh, and the final 'battle' against Zhaitan is one of the worst boss fights I've ever seen in any MMO, and quite possibly the worst if you take into account that this was at the time of release the culmination of the entire story of GW2.

Aside from all of that, another thing I've noticed is that after a certain point there's a weird lack of character progression in this game. By level 50 or so I had the skills that I wanted, and after that I was simply chucking hero points into the various builds to fill them up. I wasn't actually working toward anything that would impact the way I played.

I've often seen the comment that the levelling experience in GW2 isn't supposed to be the core of the game - that it is essentially an extended tutorial. If that's the case then I'm left wondering what then is the core experience? PVP? WvWvW? Dungeons?

Perhaps it's me. For all that I like many aspects of the design of GW2, I have from the start been uninvested in the world. With a very few exceptions I simply haven't found the characters or lore in this game engaging, and that's another reason why the story fell flat with me, and why I've little enthusiasm for seeing where it goes next.