opinion: Twelve reasons to give WoW, Final Fantasy and New World the boot and play the fantastic Guild Wars 2 instead.
World of Warcraft doesn’t make 2022 easy Here we have real-money mounts that are qualitatively superior to anything that can be earned regularly, a confused story that once again makes no sense without the purchase of any novels and level-58 boosters for the Classic servers, after it was promised in all sincerity that this would never happen. A clear message that many long-time fans understand and subsequently migrate to other virtual realms.
Alongside Final Fantasy 14, New World has also benefited from the fact that the market leader in the online role-playing game genre has lost popularity. But what can you do if you don’t fancy either of them? Just take a look at the fabulous Guild Wars 2! In the meantime, I’ll be so kind as to list for you why it’s worth it.
Table of Contents
It doesn’t cost anything to try
Did I mention today that freelance games journalists tend to be short of cash? That’s why I think Guild Wars 2 is great, because the base game is free. You just have to download it, there’s no subscription, you don’t need anything else to try it out and just have a look around for a few days or weeks.
But I don’t want to take the piss out of you: Of course, you’ll have to pay a few euros sooner or later to get the most out of the game. Inventory and bank spaces are very limited by default and are easiest to expand with real money.
If you enjoy Guild Wars 2, even the very extensive story will end at some point, so you’ll want the expansions or additional story chapters later on. None of this costs the earth, the two addons Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire are currently available in a double pack for a modest 25 quid.
Intensive players can theoretically also just farm a bunch of gold and convert it into premium currency to unlock story and luggage expansions without ever spending real money. Realistically, the free basic version is great to try out. If you feel comfortable in Tyria, however, you will probably leave some money there, even if not at AAA level. If you then want some fancy cosmetic skins from the shop, you will logically pay more.
Low demands
Because it fits so nicely with the theme of money: The world is bad and good hardware is unaffordably expensive right now. But that doesn’t matter, because Guild Wars 2 runs playably even on systems that you only find in museums these days. Of course, you won’t get maximum quality and frame rates in the triple-digit range. But on a low detail level, the game runs even on my Gen 1 GPD-Win pocket PC with integrated Intel HD 400 graphics chip.
In the meantime, Guild Wars 2 shows its rather advanced age a bit, but the chic oil painting look still cuts a fine figure today and is still respectable even if you have to cut back on some details on ancient computers.
The story is awesome
The base game and the (from February) three expansions each offer a very extensive story, with further optional story chapters in between. There you bring your character to life and repeatedly make decisions that affect the course of your adventure.
- Is your main character more threatening and crude or does he show compassion and empathy?
- Do you act stealthily and with clever tricks or do you charge right through the front door?
- Which of the different factions do you ask to help you on your adventure, who do you join?
Various choices and approaches not only add replay value and let you do things your way, it’s also a lot more interesting than the quests in other fully-dubbed MMOs, where you’ll be chatted up over and over again by some five defeated soldiers who want you to single-handedly take back their fortress.
On the wings of the dragons: You have no idea how good Guild Wars 2’s story is.
On top of that, there’s a really good story presentation with cutscenes and renders, believably written characters and giant all-destroying dragons, some of which also have really interesting backgrounds and exciting personalities. Even the dungeons have their own stories with conversations and cutscenes.
Cooperative if desired
The main story is designed to be played through solo. However, if you still want help or just some company, you can invite friends and group members into your story. Then you can experience the story together, watch the cutscenes together and see the effects of your leader’s decisions. This is also worthwhile, for example, if you want to know how the adventure of a friend begins who has chosen a different race than you.
If you ignore the story of Guild Wars 2, you’re missing out on perhaps the best part of the game.
While the main story in the base game ends in the same finale for everyone, the paths to get there are quite varied depending on your choices and your main character’s background. It is also fun to accompany and observe friends who are experiencing the game for the first time. In our little guild, we do that every now and then.
No peer pressure
Also important: Just because you’re allowed to tackle pretty much all content with friends, you’re never forced to group apart from dungeons, raids and PvP. Of course, you are always surrounded by many other adventurers in the open game world, after all you are playing an MMO. But team play happens all by itself, even without any agreements or invitations.
Large and small events start regularly all around you, in which hordes of monsters attack villages, defenceless NPCs want to be escorted and world bosses want to be beaten. You then simply join in, knock down creatures, put out fires, nurse fallen fellow players back to health. You can help each other, heal each other and fight the same enemies together, no matter whether you form a group especially for this purpose or not.
There’s no peer pressure in Guild Wars 2, battles against the giant dragons will find countless teammates on their own.
Every player who actively participates in an event receives a reward at the end. No one can claim monsters for themselves, no one takes away your quest items, and raw materials such as wood, ores and herbs can also be collected by any number of players. Everything is designed to make encounters with other players enjoyable and never annoying. In Tyria, no one would even think of spitting on you for owning a premium mount
It’s a huge thing
Guild Wars 2 is worth a visit if you just want to “play through” it, i.e. experience and complete the entire story. At the same time, it’s also worth a look if you’re looking for the next title to invest thousands of hours in.
The game world of Tyria is huge and constantly growing. There are hidden Easter Eggs everywhere, very challenging jumping puzzles with jump-&-run interludes, huge PvE events with stories, treasures, escorts and boss monsters on all maps.
There are rewards for every map you explore 100%, structured battleground PvP for small groups of players, and huge WvW (world versus world) battles where adventurers from three servers battle it out for supremacy.
Story missions have fully dubbed dialogue. The most recent content features some elaborate animated cutscenes.
In addition, there’s gear specifically for underwater combat and exploration, as well as a convenient selection of dungeons, each with several different explorable wings and bosses, plus raids, tons of gear and gear for the perfect look, and elite specialisations to unlock for your class, giving you access to new fighting styles, weapon classes and abilities.
You can learn to craft legendary gear, sacrificing countless hours and mountains of materials to create it. Rack up tens of thousands of WvW levels. Earn your own dragon over a period of weeks. If you don’t want to stop, you’ll always find something to do in Guild Wars 2, new challenges, collections and discoveries. Or you can just have a few very good stories and stop when you’ve had enough. And come back to it later. There’s no subscription you have to keep deactivating and reactivating.
No Item Treadmill
Games like WoW live on it, but not everyone finds it great: You painstakingly acquire really good equipment, are ideally equipped, finally have your character ready in terms of its equipment. Then a content update comes along, devalues all that stuff again and some green quest junk is immeasurably more powerful than your raid gear.
This is not the case in Guild Wars 2. Once you have the best equipment for your play style, it remains powerful even years later and does not need to be renewed or replaced. Most of the gear is also only tied to your account and not to a specific hero. If you play several characters who can wear your best equipment, your warriors can swap it with each other at any time.
Of course, you still have reasons to keep collecting equipment, whether it’s for different attributes, cosmetic reasons or because your first character is wearing heavy armour and you’re now raising a lighter-clad elementalist.
It is also very easy to get good equipment in Guild Wars 2: weapons and armour in the third-best quality level “exotic”, for example, can easily be forged yourself, captured in all PvP and PvE activities or purchased for a few gold pieces in the player trade. Many paths lead to the goal, every type of player can get it without much effort.
Equipment of the next highest rarity level “ascended” requires a little more time and patience, but ascended armour is only just under two percent stronger than exotic armour, for weapons it is just under six percent. “Legendary” is the highest rarity level and by far the most difficult to obtain, looks extremely cool, but offers no statistical advantages over upgraded equipment. It’s all about the visuals here. For many players, Legendaries are a long-term goal, but you can also ignore them completely.
For world bosses, anyone can join, you don’t need any guilds, special equipment or raid access. No classic “Trinity “
Many MMOs use the holy trinity of tank, healer and DPS. Players specialise their characters in one of these three areas, and dungeons usually don’t work without someone to bind enemies and soak up damage, someone to heal that damage, and three honks with names like Tódèsdèäth who hate any form of responsibility, stand in non-stop fire, and just bang away.
In Guild Wars 2 things are a little different. It’s true that it’s now also possible to specialise certain classes to strengthen the group and keep it alive, and many players distribute all attributes exclusively for maximum damage effect. Here, however, you have the opportunity to balance things like healing, survivability and damage and to create balanced heroes who can dish it out but also don’t drop dead from the first counterattack.
Character development is more complex and nuanced, giving you more options to fine-tune and adapt to your needs and play style. You can tackle dungeons with every conceivable class combination, and experienced players can even master many of them solo.
Of course, this also has its limits. For raids, for example, there is of course an ideal combination of buffs for certain classes and perfect rotations for the greatest possible damage. But you don’t necessarily have to stick to that, if only because most of the raids in Guild Wars 2 are a lot easier than some of the tougher raid encounters in WoW or the complex raid choreography in Final Fantasy 14.
Great combat system
Guild Wars 2 uses an action-heavy real-time combat system with short cooldowns, active dodge rolls, lots of movement and many different fighting styles and weapon types. You can actively switch between two weapon sets at a time, for example to switch between melee and ranged combat or between area and single target damage.
Each weapon type has different attacks and special manoeuvres depending on the class. A greatsword, for example, grants you completely different attacks than a heavy warhammer, and a warrior, for example, fights much differently with a greatsword than a guard or ranger with the same weapon. Timing, good positioning and playful skill are also always more important than equipment.
In the main story of the game, you free the world from the threat of giant dragons.
All classes are very different from each other and play uniquely. Elementalists switch fluidly between elements, completely changing their abilities from area to single-target damage, to control effects and support and healing spells as needed.
- A warrior specialised as a spellbreaker can fizzle out and counter any enemy attack, no matter how powerful, with the right timing.
- A Mesmer creates clones and mirages to fight alongside him, confusing and misleading enemies.
- Rangers are not only masters with longbows and shortbows, but also handle axes and swords well and combine their powers with the abilities of their animal companions by specialising as a soulshifter.
The list of possibilities is long, varied and above all fun. The battles in Guild Wars 2 are thus a welcome change for anyone who wants more than to stand around and click through hotbars. However, those who are not so keen on fighting need not fear that they will be mercilessly defeated in PvE if they do not master evasive manoeuvres and perfect rotations that are precise to the second. The difficulty level in the open world is very humane; if in doubt, enlist the support of your friends.
But talented players who master their heroes perfectly can, with the right practice, complete content on their own that less experienced groups fail at. This is especially great for competitive adventurers who prefer to show off their skills in PvP.
The many different mounts in the game don’t just look cool – each one has unique abilities that help you explore the game world. Good PvP balancing
For those who want to, there are classic PvP arenas in the game where you can fight in small teams for control points, for example, or even kill an enemy boss NPC while trying to prevent the opposing team from killing your boss. There are even tournaments, leaderboards and the chance to get all the armour sets, weapons and rewards from the PvE part of the game.
Don’t feel like slogging through dungeons with randoms for your dream armour? Then just punch the randoms in the mouth in PvP and earn the armour that way! You won’t have to worry about running into enemies who spend 20 hours a day farming for the best PvP gear. In this area of the game, you will have access to the same weapons, armour, runes and upgrades as any other player from the start. You create your ideal setup from the start without any grind and go into battle with it.
Hundreds and more players can take part in large world events at the same time. The game world always feels alive.
Things are a little less civilised in World vs World, where mostly giant-sized Zergs (i.e. large groups of players) clash and make each other’s lives a little more interesting with ballistae, catapults and other heavy warfare equipment. But here, too, the stats of all players are raised to a fixed level, no one has an unfair statistical advantage.
Unlike in certain other MMOs with giant battlefields for three factions, here the servers do not regularly crash or create endless loading screens and battles in which many attacks and spells are only registered after a long delay or not at all. And yes, of course there are also classes in Guild Wars 2 that are stronger than others from one balancing update to the next. But at least there aren’t any players running around here who, in case of doubt, wear out entire raids single-handedly. I know which game I prefer.
Fun to move
In Guild Wars 2, there are special jumping puzzles over cliffs, floating platforms and obstacles, and completing them will earn you all sorts of rewards from treasure chests to achievements to special titles. As you progress through the Heart of Thorn expansion, you’ll unlock a glider that lets you soar through the air, avoid falling damage and reach places in the game world that would otherwise remain hidden from you.
With Path of Fire, you earn a colourful selection of mounts, all of which have unique abilities. You can jump over ditches with the raptor, catapult yourself to dizzying heights with the jumper, glide safely over quicksand with the hover ray and teleport through magical portals with the jackal.
There are countless optional jump passages in the game. The Super Adventure Box is specifically dedicated to this 8-bit style activity.
Specially for player battles in WvW you can earn a war claw. The heavily armoured big cat can spot hidden enemies for you and even tear down enemy fortress gates when properly trained. Eager collectors can, with a little effort, earn the blazingly fast roller beetles or sail through the air with griffins and sky scales.
For the upcoming expansion End of Dragons, siege turtles have also been announced, on which you can transport a fellow player to operate the on-board cannons for you. Instead of simply taking you from A to B, each mount serves a purpose, feels unique and is much more fun than the mounts in other MMOs. If you’ve ever won a gryphon race, you know that Guild Wars 2’s gryphons are the best MMO mounts ever.
No Dead Zones
A big problem with many MMOs that have been around for a few years is the often empty and dead game world in low level areas. Do players who only got into WoW with Legion actually know that Westfall exists? Have they ever been there? Why? You level out of any zone very quickly, quick ascents via dungeon finder are easier and more effective. Away from the actual end-game areas and capitals, you hardly ever meet other players.
It’s not like that in Guild Wars 2, because every form of content is relevant. There are great events in every area, there’s something going on everywhere, everything is alive with players. Because whether your favourite thing is beating up world bosses, finding all the jump puzzles, or just randomly wandering around and letting the world surprise you, you’ll always be rewarded for putting your time into the game.
Gold, equipment, resources, it’s all there, whether you’re into the most challenging group activities, working your way through your personal story, just exploring or fighting in PvP. Everything will take you further.
You just pick out the content that you like and that you want to do and play away. Sooner or later, everything leads to the maximum level and good equipment. And it can be really nice to finally be “done” with upgrading your heroes and just play. Guild Wars 2 is better suited for this than any other online role-playing game.
