I've given this game 1,000 hours of so of my life. I wishlisted it because I loved Guild Wars 1 so much; its world is so bleak, the way the game played rewarded theorycrafting, there were so many opportunities to make custom challenges.
Guild Wars 2 simply isn't that game. It's another kind of game; the single-player experience is not unlike Breath of the Wild, where you make your own fun exploring the world, seeing organic quests pop up, seeing vistas, doing puzzles, it's all very dense.
The story itself also has little of the bleakness the original had, even when the game itself is going for bleak like in Heart of Thorns — the scale of the conflict has just gotten too high. I never wanted to interact with mythological figures directly, take down gods, or even think about dragons. I was happy doing espionage on a human scale and interacting with the avatars of the gods now gone.
In its place the story just feels like it was done by entirely different writers, different artists, different people altogether. ArenaNet as a studio changed a lot between games, and that's fine. Guild Wars 2 does what it's trying to do well.
Most of my time was spent in World vs. World — logging in day after day and seeing the same people in a crew of a couple dozen or a couple hundred felt very intimate, very cool. I liked getting a reputation from my actual achievements as a warrior or as a defender with these same people. After a while even that started to feel a bit nihilistic — it's just not a mode that players or developers as a whole care too much about.
It's weird because WvW was intended initially as the thing to do after completing the game, I think, but it never took off that way and it ended up being more or less shelved. I think GW2 focuses mostly on PvE these days.
Now I just sort of log in and do my dailies once every few months and wonder what it is that rubs me the wrong way now. I guess it's like being forced to look at how the thing I once loved isn't here...?
Guild Wars 2 simply isn't that game. It's another kind of game; the single-player experience is not unlike Breath of the Wild, where you make your own fun exploring the world, seeing organic quests pop up, seeing vistas, doing puzzles, it's all very dense.
The story itself also has little of the bleakness the original had, even when the game itself is going for bleak like in Heart of Thorns — the scale of the conflict has just gotten too high. I never wanted to interact with mythological figures directly, take down gods, or even think about dragons. I was happy doing espionage on a human scale and interacting with the avatars of the gods now gone.
In its place the story just feels like it was done by entirely different writers, different artists, different people altogether. ArenaNet as a studio changed a lot between games, and that's fine. Guild Wars 2 does what it's trying to do well.
Most of my time was spent in World vs. World — logging in day after day and seeing the same people in a crew of a couple dozen or a couple hundred felt very intimate, very cool. I liked getting a reputation from my actual achievements as a warrior or as a defender with these same people. After a while even that started to feel a bit nihilistic — it's just not a mode that players or developers as a whole care too much about.
It's weird because WvW was intended initially as the thing to do after completing the game, I think, but it never took off that way and it ended up being more or less shelved. I think GW2 focuses mostly on PvE these days.
Now I just sort of log in and do my dailies once every few months and wonder what it is that rubs me the wrong way now. I guess it's like being forced to look at how the thing I once loved isn't here...?