I know that previously, when I wrote a post about GW2, I said it was a wonderful game. A serious threat to WoW. But no, not after going through the whole thing and having little motivation to continue.
The game is really well made. But not for longevity. It's a great game for the first forty or fifty hours. And that's a long game already, but not for an MMO. What's the main problem? The story just sucks or is not told well at all.
- The idea of not having to go to quest givers and instead have the quests just pop up in your screen was a good idea to save time, but after so much time doing that, you get sick of it quickly. You have simply no reason to keep doing them. You don't get a sense of purpose of why you're killing centaurs or sons of svanir or anything because no one really tells you anything. Aside from that, the rewards are all the same, just a little bit of money. So in the beginning, it feels streamlined. After awhile, it becomes vanilla.
- The personal story thing was a good idea to have some kind of single-player RPG style for gamers who like being involved in the lore. However, it also detracts from the rest of the world. It's an odd thing to do your story that no one else in the world can interact with, and so it becomes more like a sideshow than a main questline. Aside from that, it makes the rest of the world disjointed and everything doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything else.
- The big world events, in the beginning, were amazing experiences. But after many times of participating in them, they become jokes. There is no strategy involved in any of these fights, and you can literally just stand at the back hitting your auto-attack forever. After awhile, all you do is just wait in the same spot where the boss spawns and farm the heck out of it. This system was a failed experiment.
- The lack of real team roles makes dungeons awful experiences. It's so rare to find a team that can actually clear trash mobs because everyone is just off doing his own thing, with no teamwork involved. Why? Because every class has basically the same role. So there's no real synergy in any class combination. The combo things aren't really relevant in fights, and they're just there for eye candy.
- The PvP system was amazing at the start. Everything was skill based and nobody could get the upper hand on you gearwise. You had to really coordinate and build your character properly to win. However, this strength, in the long run, becomes its weakness. Because of the lack of actual character progression in PvP, coupled with the lack of any kind of story or lore to back up 'why the hell am i fighting', it gets old after a little while. Actually, I got tired of it after 20 matches or so.
So my new score for GW2: It's still a good game, but it's a bad MMO. 7.9/10
