Guild Wars 2 Beta Impressions: Criticisms and Wrap-Up

      Based on the last few articles, it is clearly evident that I had a blast with the beta. Guild Wars 2 improves on so many things on the original (and even standard MMO fare) that it's easy to appreciate the game. However, it's best to keep things objective and try to see what areas still need some improvement. This not only makes for good journalism, it also helps the developers improve upon the game even further. So without further ado, let's go off to the criticisms!

Guild Wars 2 Beta Impressions: Making more Loot from Looting the Loot

     In the previous article, I discussed more on the loot system and how people gather loot in Guild Wars 2. Now I'll be focusing more on the systems that allow you to gain a profit from things you have gathered. Let's talk about trade.

     Trading systems in MMO's have come a long way from its initial roots. The most primitive form is physical trading where one person comes up to another person and initiates the trade. This is supplemented by a trade chat channel to match the potential buyers and sellers. As the genre grew more popular, people demanded for more sophisticated systems. One system that was quite successful was the auction house. While this system can be called a variety of names, e.g. marketplace, trading post, etc. I'll be using the term auction house as the general term for simplicity sake. The concept of this system is to have an automated in-game system that matches the buyers with the sellers while at the same time, allows the game to manage the trading process without requiring either the buyer or seller to be online at the same time. And like everything else that I talked about so far, Guild Wars 2 takes this concept and implements it in its own unique way.

Guild Wars 2 Beta Impressions: Looting the Loot

     There is always a time in every new MMO player's life where you are just dead broke. If you start out on a new MMO, you start out with zero items, zero gold and zero gear. This is actually a very interesting part in every budding players game life since this is usually the point where you think how you can get the wealth that you were so accustomed to in your other games. Guild Wars 2 is no different. To be an successful in the game overall, you have to have a certain level of game wealth to fund your anything from crafting to collecting mini pets. In this edition of my beta impressions, I'll be talking around this topic. Farming and Trade.

     For those not very familiar with these concepts, there is a basic two-step process to get rich in MMO's. The first part is farming. This is where you go out to explorable areas of the world looking for items of value. This can be obtained in a variety of ways. Either killing monsters and looting their bodies or looking for resource nodes that usually give items useful for crafting. The second part of the processes is trading. While you normally get a small amount of game currency just by killing monsters, selling the items that you get farming to other players will be where most of your income will come from. This can be done either by initiating a trade, or using in-game systems such as auction houses or market places.

     Having said all this, Guild Wars 2 implements both these concepts be it in its own unique way.

Guild Wars 2 Beta Impressions: Questing

     Here's a small history lesson. Back during the early days, MMO's were notorious for the grind. The basic concept back then was, to get to a certain character level, you have to kill a truckload of monsters. Then World of Warcraft came and took the MMO world by storm. They have made a way to progress your level without the "grind". What was their solution? Quests. And ever since then, every other MMO that released had a quest system to guide character progression. Because of this, people started to redefine the meaning of grind. Nowadays, quests are now sometimes classified as a grind. The irony here is quite interesting because as ground breaking ideas are created to address the preferences of people, people's preferences then change to consider these ground breaking ideas to be simply ideas. This was another issue that guys at Arena Net were thinking about when they were designing the questing system for Guild Wars 2. Let's see how it plays out.

Guild Wars 2 Beta Impressions: Transitioning into an Open World

     I was lucky enough to get a beta key for one of the beta weekends. I was able to log enough time into the beta so I have a fair idea of what to expect from the game when it comes out. One thing that immediately caught my attention is how differently this game feels from the original Guild Wars. Yes you have the familiar characters and places, but somehow it does not feel the same. The reason for this is actually very simple. If you followed the development of the game, this has been discussed for quite a bit. The transition from Instanced into Open World.