Guild Wars 2 Angry Review
Release Date: August 28th, 2012
Platform: Windows PC
Developer: ArenaNet
Publisher: NCsoft
Genre: MMORPG
Players: Massively Multiplayer
Angry Joe and MMO’s don’t get along. Despite my best efforts to find an MMO that I can really get into i’m still searching. Well the much hyped Guild Wars 2 is finally out daring to Innovate MMOs! Does it succeed? Find out!
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392 thoughts on “Guild Wars 2 Angry Review”
See Joe, this is where you’re wrong.
While gameplay is important (don’t blame WoW, the game is 9 years old), but for a MMO”"RPG”" story is VERY important as well.
Which is one of the reasons why, for myself included, WoW is still popular (I mean as well as the reason that people have invested so much time in their characters), despite being already 9 years old. Once the game hits lvl 100 cap and last expansion comes out, it’s likely gonna be the end of WoW and people wanna see where the road will take the universe franchise that’s over 20 yeasr old.
I mean Everquest is older and doesn’t hold over 8 million subscribers, despite still having subscription fee.
Now while, GW2 does have a PERSONAL story, the MAIN/CORE plotline can ONLY be experianced through dungeons… which are absolute balls.
WHich brings me to next point.
While the lack of “Holy trinity” seems a nice concept on paper, when you have 5 silver elites beating down 1 player to death, without an aggro table, all the system goes to shambles, not to mention how unrewarding they are.
Angry Joe isn’t intelligent enough to think things that far. In fact, most all of GUild Wars 2′s target audience are people who are too stupid to think things through. As someone who has played a significant number of hours of GW2, as well as been with WoW since vanilla, I can irrefutably say that the game is entirely made with people who are going to drop the game in a few weeks in mind.
The lack of a subscription fee makes this all the more obvious considering they know casuals and mainstream gamers have this stupid notion that subscriptions are useless and don’t actually mean anything, and thus resulting in a pay-once scenario where the developers already KNOW that the players aren’t going to care for too long and will likely not even be playing by the time that ocasions when all of the “dynamic” systems fall apart are going to be more common.
A quick stroll around… well, anywhere, really, and chat with general players ingame will show that most people this game are terribly misinformed about how games are meant to work. They’re easily hyped with flashy graphics and the word “dynamic” thrown at their face. It’s like voters. They react to buzzwords like moths to a flame and neglect to do their damn research on the subject before making a purchase. After they do, they discover that the “dynamic events” are nothing more than a simple quest in WoW with the only different being you don’t click on an NPC, and you get no storyline elements thus, no motivation to actually perform the quest. The ones that are relatively smarter than the rest eventually come to the realisation that the game, its PR discourse and its conceit on paper is leagues better than reality, and refusing to accept the fact that their purchase was horrible, they just quit altogether, happy with the fact that they don’t need to pay anything else.
Guild Wars 2 is one of the most overhyped MMORPGs I have ever seen, and I could forgive all of its shortcomings, if the story was any interesting. But, no. It isn’t.
It certainly isn’t a bad game, and it’s better than every other free-to-play MMORPG I’ve ever played, and that’s for sure. But is it better than World of Warcraft? By no stretch of any conceivable level of imagination.
In my personnal opinion The old republic online simply isnt an enjoyable MMO ’cause it rips off the world exploration for a linear quest system forcing you to go trough the same places over and over, and the experience leveling process forces a shitload of XP grinding trough the same bonuses and space missions daylies and all those stuff to keep on with the current class progression. (not to mention most artwork for armors sucks but that might just be me) And most class quest are unimaginative (deja vu feeling all the way) and the sith pureblood race was not even original either, they are a copy/paste of the red *imperial* race in planet hulk movie. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_wTYjAsrzg)
Evening,
Joe I have been playing World of Warcraft for the last 4 years and I love the game but lately it’s gotten dry and old. I am a casual gamer. I have a full time job and I go to school at night, My schedule only allows me to play any game on Friday nights only. I never had the best gear when I played wow because I could never devote the time to get the good loot and the wow community is gear driven. Few people were ever willing to help me since my Guild was very small and most of them came on after I went to bed.
Since Playing Guild Wars 2 I have run across a few people who have helped me with my toon. The world, The Story the gameplay is very fresh and exciting. I saw your review of GW 2 on YouTube and Loved what I saw. I am not sure if you will be doing in update to your GW2 review but if you do I look forward to seeing it.
Thanks for all the good info you provide.
Patrick
Hey Joe,
Awesome Review! I am planning to buy GW2 very because of your review
Hope you will let me join your ANGRY ARMY i would really like that since none of my friends play this game. Great review i am a big fan stay awesome.
Hey there Joe I hope you are alright mate. Can I join your Guild and World please? I am new on this game and maybe you could help me out and I could join you guys bossing and questing together. If you don’t mind, can you tell me your world and Guild? Thanks bro.
PS: I’m a big fan of your reviews you saved me a lot of money when I was going to buy games and found out they were crap from your reviews xD
Sorry man but this is what they stated in the angry army forums.
“If you were hoping to get guild wars 2 to play with angry Joe, do not. We are a multi-gaming community that moves game to game and if your plans were to get the chance to play with Joe it wont be on guild wars 2″.
THE GAME IS LEGENDARY
I got it Friday and I love it. xD I’ve had to force myself to stop playing so my class work. Yesterday I got so wowed out that I got dizzy and light headed. That as never happened to me with a game. I found the portals and just kept jumping in to them. I don’t care if I get killed. I love it, its really beautiful and just awesome
I played a bit in the free weekend from 19th until the 21st of April (2013).
I wasn’t impressed as Angry Joe says.
The “main” quests rise in level a lot. I was at level 7 or so and the next phase of the main quest was already at level 11.
The little ‘heart’ quests seem few and don’t give much reward. I finished all quests at level 8-9-10 and had only level 11 or higher available, all this while I still was level 8.
The combat system is kinda dull. There is a slight inclination to move your character so you can evade attacks, but it’s difficult to figure out when to move and what attacks can be dodged. I played as some kind of sorcerer and he had all types of attack. Fire, water/ice, thunder and earth. Each looked under-powered. Ice is group-oriented. But you just have to press ’2′ every time and have to place it so after the timer reaches ’0′, the enemies are still in the ring.
I switched from some sort of wand to a staff, but I had to relearn all skills. Albeit they were a tad different. But felt under-powered as well. I was fighting enemies level 10 or 11 when I was level 7 or 8.
There’s no idea where to get better gear. The Auction House works a little bit different. With a second character I got from level 2 a great and powerful bow with which I pretty much cleared every ‘heart’ level 2 or 3. So all I had left were level 4 or higher, and my character was still at level 2.
Great bow or not, this looked as something inconsistent.
(The) Travel system is pretty simple. You uncover travel points and you can teleport from wherever you are to the clicked point, paying some money. But that takes away from the whole immersion and in the end you just play a game of clicking and loading screens.
You don’t have a sense of what you have to do. ‘Heart’ quests are given without even talking to an NPC. You just get a message saying what you have to do when you reach a designated zone. And then you finish it without much visual feedback so often you don’t know what you got (experience, money).
Resource gathering is… Well, you do it all. You can mine, gather plans and cut down trees. There isn’t skinning, although there are a bunch of crafts for leather-working. And I love building bags to have more space for loot. But you can’t skin, you have to get leather either by simple killing (what? Animals I assume.), or by destroying armors using some kind of a kit.
You don’t have just one pick for mining. You must buy them in sets of 50. And there are different levels. So you can buy 50 picks for mining copper ore. But for something more advanced, you need the money for the next picks set of 50. It’s kind of strange.
Weirdly enough, arrows are infinite.
Skills were weird. You had to buy a book at level 10 or 11 from your profession trainer. I didn’t have the interest anymore to pair up with some other player just so I can manage other quests and get some more experience.
As for the fact that you could help or be helped by other players without loosing your loot, I was expecting more of a Diablo-like system were if a player joins the ‘area’, enemies get tougher and the loot gets better. But most of the loot was pretty useless. The game reported as 90% of it being some kind of resource that I should keep, but I wouldn’t know for what. And selling it looked like a waste. And finding out what everything was good for, seemed again too much to ask for a new player.
Even when helping some rather large groups fight what it looked like a big enemy, the rewards were just some ‘goo’ and maybe a weapon or armour I’d never use or get any money for it.
At some point a caravan I was escorting stopped just to wait a good deal of minutes before a tower needed to be built. The game never took the time to explain that and I was waiting for it thinking something broke.
I was pretty hyped by the review and wanted to get this game, but the price was way to expensive for me. Then I played it that weekend and found GW2 to be way to dull for me.
I don’t know why it is so difficult to make a MMO where you have your standard gun and you shoot things and dodge them like you’d normally do in an FPS. With all the good stuff as quests and pointers, and loot and items and groups and guilds and auction houses and seamless travel by air, ground or water, without costing an arm and a leg.
Like Joe said, the game is not very good at guiding new player, you need guild member to help you. And everytime you finish a heart, you will unlock a karma vendor for gears and gathering tools. The combat is fine and fun, dodging is just hard, not impossible. That ”skill” you are buying is trait, and their cost is not that much.You can get ”good” gear by doing event boss, not just killing veteran ( they are everywhere ==’ ), that’s why they are called rare.
minecraft review
Got sick of Swtor and WOW is crap… THIS IS WHAT I NEEDED!!! THIS GAME IS A GIFT FROM HEAVEN!!!! WHOVER SAYS THIS GAME IS NOT A 10/10 SHOULD BURN IN HELL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
From the depths of Abyss I stab at thee. =p
I just bought the game today after seeing this review and thinking about it for a little bit (realized I still had leftover cash from christmas, so that was the clincher), got to say its pretty nice, my new mesmer is going pretty good, thanks for helping me get an awesome game Joe, and its a lot better model than *sniffle* swtor (f2p is horrible there, even if you are preferred status)
Joe this review impressed me. I too believe this F2P model is the future of MMO’s, and as a whole is a very complete experience. WvW is engaging, the single player is full of content, and replay value is enormous. Great game and I’m glad to see the genre heading in this direction. Sorry to see your guild implode, but thats the nature of the beast.
Jeremy Soule makes the best music, he also did Skyrim and I think Oblivion.
Just asking, do people still want and play this game? I’ve been asking this around to make sure i won’t get it and it’ll be dead…
It’s not dead at all, i still play it and will keep playing it for a long time.
people that say it’s dead are just WoW players who are used to see 10 million people in every part of the world.
yes, it’s less played as at the release, but that’s with every game, people that don’t like it don’t play it.
but it’s worth buying it, today, tomorow, and an year later still.
I hope my sister brought this for my birthday T~T I WANT IT!!
libary… haha good review
A lot of people seem to think that we NEED mounts in all MMORPGs, but we don’t. Yes, we’ll get to destinations much faster, but that would also take the scale out of the game. Maps would feel much smaller and more restricted, and people would just skip fights by riding past mobs. Arena Net is constantly working on fixing bugs and adding new areas, but I don’t blame them for not adding mounts. Star wars the old republic included mounts and all that did was make the maps feel even smaller.
The review was pretty accurate, and the game is great for sure. But you’ll need an amazing computer to be able to play it at its best. Other than that it truly is an awesome game
I loved the review & have since bought & played GW2. You were accurate on many assessments. As you stated at the time you played things were in the works & have been implemented. In comparison to other P2P it is much better overall. Compared to F2P it shares the typical cookie cutter feel of fantasy mmo’s & is not as unique as far as features, quest approach, graphics, content etc, but still has earned it’s place among the top & has improved upon the choices it mirrored from others. I like it & will continue to play it.
Whimper… I so want to play this but I’m on step seven in MMORPG Anonymous.
I have to thank you Joe. I had only heard moderate things, nothing ever really substantial to make me want to play Guild Wars 2 aside that it was a one-time-pay.
I had stopped playing World of Warcraft for a while so I could save up my money for a new vehicle, and have been tossing around the idea of doing it again and getting Mist of Pandaria for my girl-friend who wants to raid and stuff with me again on it. But after watching this review and hearing your opinions of which I’ve come to know and trust, I’ll be definitely taking a look.
I can’t say we shouldn’t stop playing games like WoW, as I still love that and will still get that when I can, because they do have great things about them that make them great games, but this is definitely an in-pocket deal for the person who does hate paying month to month for shit, which I do hate myself, but I’m tolerant of it, for now.
i brought this game just because of your review! thanks joe!
Can I join the angry army
never picked a mmo up before think you sold this one 2 me
I like exploring and as long as I play smartly I can explore mostly anywhere I want on the entire map. As a level 10 Mesmer Charr I made a voyage across the entire map with a friend, it was ton of fun evading monsters and having to use my teleport and invisibility in smart ways.