The State of the Art: Guild Wars 2

“If you can’t commit to a game you simply can’t be competitive.”

Almost six months after the release of Guild Wars 2 the game has changed. And did we change?

Indeed, Guild Wars 2 was the game that brought the end to the holy trinity in MMOs. Some people may even say that it lost the ‘role’ in the Role Playing Game. However, the truth is that they are still there and every profession has its established role within the battlefield, be it in PvP or PvE. The kinetic energy behind every profession discourages the class warfare and even though the need for the existence of a healer or tank is gone, teams became more dynamic. The deconstruction of what we knew was fundamental in an MMO change.

The monthly free (see what I did there) makes Guild Wars 2  more casual by removing the obligations to play it every day because you are paying and that is making gaming a healthier place. On the other hand, the amount of monthly updates we receive almost leads us to believe that this is indeed a game with periodic fee involved. So what happened to about 80% of the players I saw and met at the beginning of the game and why are they no longer playing Guild Wars 2?

Maybe because the game that would just “come out when it was ready” wasn’t in fact ready when it came out. The version that came to be at launch differed little from that which was the version of the beta weekends overrun by bugs and crashes. Also, many of the promises made before the release did not occur.

As far as I am concerned as a player, the original Guild Wars meant PvP to me. That game had the most balanced combat I’d ever seen and probably ever will. Heroes Ascent and Guild versus Guild were two awesome modes that worked excellent alongside observe mode and the guild ladder. So why hasn’t Anet added any of such to the new game?

Dear reader, I sure don’t know the answer on this one. Still, Structured PvP was and is quite involving. But, at the end of the day, something seems to be missing: PvP Ladders. You can’t plan an e-sports game and not let a team match their PvP status with the rest of the teams on a competitive table.

The non-inclusion of the Guild Hall in the second installment of the series also led me to disappointment. The social side of a Guild Hall was part of what made you identify yourself with your guild, your guildies and so forth.

“When you start to hear that guilds like Team SuperSquad or Team Legacy are dropping out maybe it is time for ArenaNet to do something about it.”

The system as it is implemented almost obliges the teams to dissolve or drop their activity written in their DNA. And when you start to hear that guilds like Team SuperSquad or Team Legacy are dropping out maybe it is time for ArenaNet to do something about it. A PvP system with no ladder is the same as assuming that people just have no goals to achieve at the end of the day. You log in Guild Wars 2 just to chill out from other games. Period. You can make no PvP squad based on this kind of statement. If you can’t commit to a game you simply can’t be competitive. And even though the new matchmaking system is an improvement and the new PvP maps are pretty interesting more needs to be done.

Guild Wars 2 was indeed one of the most hyped games of the last months. Did ArenaNet make use of it? I don’t think so and maybe now it might be too late to recover a game that promised so much. Did gaming and gamers change with Guild Wars 2? Our standards did.