Guild Wars 2 World vs World First Impressions

The first beta weekend kicked off for Guild Wars 2 yesterday, which gave me the chance to try out the game for the first time. If you’re a dedicated reader of Lorehound, you’ll know I’ve been looking forward to World vs World for a long time, so I spent the majority of my time there.

During this first beta weekend, only three races were available, Human, Charr and Norn. I decided to go with Norn and selected a class I normally don’t, a Thief.

I started off in a small town and immediately began trying to figure out how to get to World vs World, since it’s been said you can start there at level one. After a few mins of searching, I gave up and figured a NPC would tell me, so I began doing some quests. After a few quests and no help, I just started spamming the local chat until someone told me how to get to the Mist. Some nice people whispered me how and I was off. (Hero PvP menu)

You begin in a very small outpost that acts as an intro tutorial with three lessons. Once you complete that you are teleported to a slightly larger area with more tutorials and once done with that, you’re teleported to Lion’s Arch, a large city back in PvE. This was confusing for me because it took me a little while to realize this wasn’t World vs World. Why was I being sent back to PvE when all I wanted was PvP?

Around the area were four more portals, Blue, Red, Green and Eternal Battlegrounds. Having read up on the system, I knew those were the portals I was looking for, but I had no clue what color I was. The NPC at Lion’ Arch tells you to check you Mist Score Board, but doesn’t tell me how. I couldn’t find any game menus that showed it and had to look at key binding to find the hotkey for it (N). Once I opened the score board, I finally saw what color my server was and then entered the corresponding portal.

ArenaNet really needs to work on their tutorials for World vs World. Most of them were pretty bad, not just this one. If I was a player who didn’t know anything, I would have been completely lost.

Now that I was finally in the right place, I checked the map and score to find my server was in second place and our lands were under attack. I immediately went towards where the action was, as it’s marked on the map, and met up with two dozen or so other players. Together we attacked some towers and keeps and reclaimed all of our structures within our server zone.  Now that our lands were safe, we entered the Eternal Battlegrounds, which is the open zone that all three factions fight for.

The other two factions were battling it out within their own zones, so we did’t find much resistance and were able to take over more structures before I logged off.

My initial impressions were that this is going to get addictive. I found myself not wanting to log off or abandon my party, I needed to stay and help win the war, but of course you can’t play forever. Combat is what you would expect from really any MMORPG you played before and there’s lots of gate bashing, so make sure people bring siege weapons.

Since it was the first beta weekend and first day, none of the keeps really had any upgrades, so there weren’t many NPC guards defending them. The biggest obstacle to taking over a keep is how long it takes to get through the gates, which in my opinion doesn’t take nearly long enough. We were able to take over keeps, undefended, within 15 mins, and no one even had any siege weapons for some of those attacks. I’m sure it’ll take longer with upgrades, but I’m one of those players that gets disillusioned when hold points begin to flip too quickly. There’s nothing worse when taking over a structure only to find out a few mins later it was lost.

I’d like to see tougher defenses for towers and keeps, taking one over shouldn’t take 15 mins, even if undefended.

Getting around in World vs World is also a bit nuts, as there were no portals setup yet and no mounts, so you need to run everywhere. Certain structures can be eventually upgraded to contain teleports, which is great, but I’m not sure if mounts are allowed, I hope they are.

Aside from those small grips, World vs World was a blast, they just need to get the kinks out and if they do, I have no doubt that GW2 will become the PvP game for a long time.