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The original was posted on /r/guildwars2 by /u/The_Meowsmith on 2024-11-07 04:28:01+00:00.
I've played MMOs all my life starting with the humble original Runescape and spending insane amounts of hours on games like FFXIV. Any time I eyed Guild Wars 2, I always had an excuse to not look into it: I was either maintaining a sub to another MMO or enjoying other multiplayer games that didn't require subscription fees. With my interest in FFXIV waning, my time in WoW spent having fun but ultimately not enjoying the raiding community as a major reason for quitting instead of investing into the content treadmill, and Runescape's increasingly weirder and bizarre business practices, I finally set aside time to play Guild Wars 2.
I think getting into the game was overwhelming as a first time player in 2024, and I don't mean that in a way that implicates the complexity of the game, but I mean that from the perspective of a MMO player who realizes that the longer a game lasts, the more content is added, the more systems start to encroach on each other and stack up to make for a puzzling introduction for newer players. Endless tokens used for XYZ merchants, how most rewards can be focused down in ways you find particularly engaging/fun, and the way the entire game is handled differently than other mmos beyond the personal story experience- it gave me the impression that I had to re-wire my typical gear-improving MMO brain to play this game.
Because of my F2P account I was not able to use certain features that a paid-for account would have. Daily login bonuses, full access to the trading posts, among many other features like access to expansions of which two are heralded by the community as really opening the game's more entertaining gameplay experiences. Since my perspective will be different than someone who's invested large amounts of hours into the game with access to expansions, I must admit that plainly here before settling into my thoughts about the gameplay.
Milling over my options, I flipped a coin to either start as a warrior or mesmer. Coin ends on warrior, and I decided to follow the advice of people around me who played the game for years. While the levelling experience as a warrior was a bit milquetoast as many recommended using passive signet effects, what was left over- the faster weapon swapping, high-impact weapon skills, and the class gimmick, burst- it kept me interested.
I think the personal story from 1-40ish was amazing as a charr, but I think I'll save you how I felt about the latter bits and the death of the dragon. My thoughts were probably the same as yours 12 years ago.
Regardless of the leveling experience and souring on the story at the very end, it makes me excited to see what people saw glory in the starter expansions. It has so much potential in its combat, something that the leveling experience didn't show its hand to you. You see glimpses of this as you approach level 80 core content where enemies ask you to zip or position around, where you're actively watching the enemy for its tells instead of sitting there wailing on a test dummy.
What I appreciate about GW2 is the wide breadth of experiences available that I can do at my own pace. If I don't feel like completing more of the world or engaging in world bosses/meta events, I can get my ass beat in wvw or pvp (I know not having access to elite specializations can certainly be a cause for why that happens :p) but I enjoy wvw greatly as being part of a zerg rush really brings back memories of old casual WoW to me.
I also want to send appreciations to the people I met along the way who helped me along when I was lost in-game and the players in wvw who took time to elaborate on how to play or let me use things that helped secure objectives. To the commander who let me use a mortar to knock an enemy trebuchet out of play so it would stop destroying our castle walls: That was a definingly cool moment for me as a new player. The community is, naturally, cooperative and friendly- I IMAGINE that changes in extremely high-end content but if that turns out to be the case I can simply choose not to do it, since there's more than enough variety here to be interested with the game's lack of focus on content treadmilling.
Closing off these thoughts, I just wanted to say that despite the problems the community might be having with the game at the moment, the game is more than capable of fostering interest in newer players such as myself, despite the usual problems MMOs have garnering new players as time goes on- i.e. the base game being less interesting than the expansion content, relying on the community to say it gets better ala FFXIV as my friends have said many times before.
When a sale hits I will be grabbing the starter expansions and upgrading to a full account. Thanks for reading all of this and if you have your own thoughts/advice on what fun I could have as a f2p account until that point, please let me know/talk my damn ear off about it.
