Intro
Thank God for No NDA's, as I can actually talk about the Guild Wars 2 Beta that I was involved with this past weekend - hell, they encourage even on the splash screen! I can see why they feel this way. This game feels like it's ready to ship. It feels like it's primed and ready to go.
My Thief Character & Personal Quests
My character was a Human Male Thief - which basically set traps, are fast, and can use deadly weapons. Character Creation involved picking your character's look, clothes, etc - you know, the usual RPG decisions on the cosmetic factor. Then, it goes a few steps further. The game asks you a few "character background" questions - and whatever you answer, some of these will cause what some of your "Personal Story Quests", which are basically the instances in the game. To go w/ the Thief theme, I decided to be a Street Rat character, who grew-up in the streets. And that I also decided that I never knew my parents - so I picked that for one of my character's goals. Charm was my special skill. There are other options [i.e. Intimidation and there are others] - and whatever you decide here, these can be important for your personal instanced-quests, which often multiple outcomes to them. Usually, that special skill will be an option you can use in dialogue, when making a decision. That's right - some personal quests involve you making some sort of decision and the outcome of that quest will be different. I did my Personal Quests basically alone without any other online players.
Exploring The Game-World
You will want to explore the game-world. First off, the game-world's huge. Second off, there's rewards for exploring it. There are areas in the game-world and in the cities, which you get experience just by reaching those points on the map. Third off, the game is just down-right beautiful to look at - so it's worth exploring for that reason, as well.
Events, Quests & Whatnot All On A Worldly Scale
The game is nothing short of just about everything happening on a grand and huge epic scale. This is NOT the same GW1 you played before. Most things are happening on a world stage. In GW1, you had towns that were the hubs w/ Lord knows how many players running around in those areas, trying to get a small group together to go off. And then, when you all went off to the game-world, those were the instances. Not here in GW2. The game-world is basically comprised of players, doing whatever quests they are doing. These normally aren't instanced. Basically, you can look at your BIG world-map or your small mini-map - and from there, if you've explored the area, you can see where the quests are at. You don't even have to talk to quest-giver NPC's or anything, when doing these World Quests. On the upper-right hand corner, a World Quest will just pop up and tell you what you and whomever is in the area what they can do in that area. It'll tell you what level your character should be to do the quest, as well. Often, multiple objectives are there and you have to do so much of it that it fills up the meter bar to finish the quest. They often involve numerous things you can do to help out, such as "take care of the land", "kill monsters", "trap monsters", "return specific item to specific NPC", "destroy a specific item the monsters are using as a unit", etc.
Major World Events
Sometimes, you'll be in an area, and you'll get a Major World Event. You'll know when this occurs. You'll see people in the chat for the Map talk about it, tell everybody to go rally there, you'll see the event marked-off on the map, and basically you'll see TONS of players show-up to attack this brutal boss-like character to try to take it down. These often involve a HUGE monster appearing in the area, usually like the smaller ones that are in that region - and you and the players on the map are to take it down. And yes, you'll be fighting ALSO the smaller versions of the monsters, right along w/ the HUGE monster. Don't be surprised if it's hard to keep up w/ what's going on w/ so much action on-screen. I had to turn my setting from Ultra down to High, to alleviate the framerate issues that only were happening when these Major World Events occurred.
Gameplay
Basically, you'll be mostly doing World Events and Major World Events, most of the time.
It pretty much goes like this:
1. Do World Events and Major World Events within your level to do so you can level-up;
2. Actually level-up and spend your points there;
3. Repeat this until you level-up enough to do a Personal Story Quest;
4. Do the Personal Story Quest;
5. Go back to Step 1.
Combat
Combat is similar to Guild Wars 1. You had your option to physically move them or click where you want to go in GW1. Though, you don't anymore have the option to just click where you want to go in GW2. You physically have to move your character directly. Though, there is also an Auto-Run Toggle, so if you hit this key, the character will keep running ahead until you tell him or her to stop by hitting that same key. You may Target Enemies, if you click - by left-clicking on them or using your Target hot-key. Once near an enemy, Right-click will basically auto-attack until you move or fire a skill off from your toolbar. You have a limited amount of skills you can toss onto your toolbar at the bottom of the screen. On the left, are your skills that are tied to whatever you have equipped. Depending on what weapons you equip, certain skills are filtered to that area. Equip a sword, expect certain sword-based skills in Slots 1-5. Equip a sword in one hand and a gun in your-off hand, expect some sword skills on 1-3 and 2 off-hand skills for your gun. For slots 6-10, expect your Utility skills to sit here. These Utility skills, above the skill, is an arrow. Click the arrow, and you can actually switch and swap those Utility skills out while on-the-fly, if you feel the need to do so. There's A LOT of combat in this game, to say the least. Combat looks, feels, and sounds great. You can roll-dodge out of the way, as well - there's a key for rolling and/or in the Options you can enable/disable Double-Tap of a direction to roll that way.
Always Online
This is a MMO, so expect to be forced to be online to play at all times. Friday Night, when they upped the player count per map, it basically brought the game to lag-city for about a half hour or so for EVERYBODY. But, it was nothing a hard-reboot of the game and their servers on their end couldn't solve. That was the only issue I had all weekend w/ connecting to their servers. I had no other issues for the rest of the weekend. And I spent a good 13 hours or so in total w/ the game, from Friday to Sunday. If a server's getting packed w/ players, the game has no problem w/ queuing players off to another server to play on and then deciding to ship them off to another server, once a quest is completed or whatever the case might be. I really hope they don't run into any issues online, once the game actually launches to the public officially - b/c I've quite enjoyed what I've played and I don't think we want to see a repeat of what happened w/ Diablo 3. I'm curious how it'll all turn out and what gamers will think of the game once the game is actually released b/c I quite enjoyed my time with this Guild Wars 2 Beta. If my time with the GW2 Beta is an indication of anything, this is going to be a very good and epic action-packed MMO.
