After attending the developer session of Guild Wars 2 at the Eurogamer Expo, our blogging street cred managed to score two of us a 40 minute play session of the game. I watched, listened and took a furious amount of mental notes. For a rundown on what Arena Net were showcasing check out the ‘Watching Guild Wars 2’ article here.

Kicking off in character creation we chose an Asuran and a Human. The character creation was very compitent where the customisation options available stayed consistent to the extreamly strong art style for the different races. When creating our cute/demonic/freakish/anime Asura character we were impressed at how much we could mould it to be as freaky or cutsey as we liked. Ours had a purple afro…

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The personal story you mould for your character is initially simple but effective at both giving your character an identifiable back story as well as filling you in on some of the lore of the race. I’m very eager to see how your characters story evolves and becomes increasingly unique as you level up and complete quests, I hope you can read the journal for other players to see their history and chosen path through the game, it’d be a good way of gauging how they are playing their character.

There’s seven character classes to choose from which are; Elementalist, Warrior, Ranger, Necromancer, Guardian, Thief and Engineer – we went with thief as we were keen to see how ranged, traps and stealth worked.

Combat is a little different in GW2 than in other MMO’s like WoW, while intially familiar with abilities fitted with cooldown timers, GW2 differenciates itself by offering a real-time positioning and dodging mechanic. If an NPC swings to attack you, it’s not pre-determined by a dice roll if the swing will connect, dodging out of the way at the right time will make the NPC miss, just in the same way as in action games like God of War. Our little Asuran dude had a preferance to large leaps and summersaults as his dodge move, he looked a little like Yoda from those Star Wars films but I’m not going to hold that against him.

Animation in general is fantastic, much personality is expressed as characters run, leap, punch, emote and use magic. It’s a major part as to why the game looks as good as it does. I noticed that many of the animations can be broken and interrupted which should help avoid some of the ‘stuck in animation’ annoyances found in games like Witcher 2. The pace of combat is very fast and flamboyant, exageratted effects and gestures really help to pronounce what is happening. After a while of play it becomes easy to recognise what everyone is doing just by looking at them and as loud as the visuals become, it’s never confusing, you never loose sight of what is happening which is essential because this is a very tactical game.

Playing as the Theif class we found that staying in motion was essential, constantly running to gain a better position, diving in for a quick flurry attack and bouncing out again and diving back in again for another. It’s exciting to play and feels very immediate and weighty. The sound design here really helps, everything is larger than life and heavy but never muffled or distorted. It’s clear that the people working on this game really know what they’re doing within every aspect of art, design and audio.

Quests are given to you in an very seamless way, it’s somewhat similar to the ‘extra’ missions in Red Dead Redemption where you’d be adventuring along and will find yourself in the middle of something, in Red Dead it could be seing a train robbery in the distance you could get involved with where in GW2 it’ll be a whole quest. Outside of NPC’s explaining to you what’s happening, you’ll just get a new map marker to follow and as in our case, wind up in a village of Frog People under attack.

Arena Net wanted to show off their large group dynamic events where it seems like shit will just happen and you can either jump in and help or not. What’s interesting here is that if you don’t want to help or you and whoever else is playing fails to ‘save the village’ this can have real consequences that affects the persistent world for everyone, not just you and your party. It’s brilliant, I really hope they can pull it off because this sort of thing will make the world feel alive and active, it also actively encourages cooperative play as the more people who take part in these events the greater the rewards are. Also the more people means tougher enemies or combination of enemies and special attacks if it’s a boss.

All of us who played it here just loved it, I am flat out impressed by everything I’ve seen, most of all I love how the game looks and feels – it feels like a highly polished single player game but it’s an MMO, Arena Net have made no compromises. It feels like they’ve taken the next step, they have matured the genre by injecting what we expect from a modern videogame. GW2 is bold, beautiful, innovative and surprising, if the game is anything like what we’ve played here then I will definitely be buying it – and I hate MMORPG games.

About the author

Michael Manning

Michael is a sound designer and composer working in the games industry. His portfolio can be found at www.manningaudio.com