I've been meaning to put some thoughts down about Guild Wars 2 for some time, and I wasn't too sure how to frame it to begin with. I liked GW2 when I bought it, even though I had my misgivings. I never played the first Guild Wars, and when previews/press started coming out for the second one, I wasn't really engrossed. This isn't to say I thought the game was crap or anything, I just didn't find myself interested with what I was seeing. I had previously played WoW, SW:TOR, City of Heroes, and even the old SW: Galaxies as well as other MMOs for short stints. Seeing GW2 just made me think it was another fantasy MMO with not much going on that was new or intriguing. But as someone who played WoW for so many years, I was in absolutely no position to judge folks for playing the same ol' thing over and over.
After it was released, some local friends picked it up. Watching some of them play and talk about it, I decided to go for it. Not because their tremendous salesmanship had turned my head, but because I frankly missed playing some sort of multiplayer game with them. My friends in Austin, for the most part, all have a shared interest in vidja games, so the fact we weren't doing this as a community just kinda... bugged me. Can't really explain it. So anyway, the game looked interesting enough and would let me do something online with the folks, so I picked it up.
From the get go, something about the game bothered me. The combat was interesting and a bit of a change from typical MMOs (but not so radically different that it required learning from Step 1), and the class system was interesting. I picked up a Mesmer with the idea of playing an Engineer and probably a Guardian in turn. I didn't do a whole lot of actual group play to begin with, but the game more than compensated for that - most people who are vaguely familiar with MMOs and GW2 have probably heard the comments about the geniusly simple "world group" system. There's no "tagging" mobs, and players can all sort've complete the same quests together even if they're not grouped. Add in that quests are handed to you when you move into the area the quests should be done in (and require no "turn in") plus the world events that people would flock to, and it came out pretty well. Taking out the competition of tagging mobs or fighting over quest kills or racing to resource nodes turned what is typically an adversarial experience on an open server into something else. Everyone had this feeling that the players were all in it together, and there was nothing to fight over. MMO socialism, really, if socialism involved a total lack of mundane concerns.
After awhile, though, the cracks began to appear. The great strength of this system began to bother me and I was more able to figure out what it was. Unlike other MMOs, which relied on what people call "the holy trinity" or the tank/healer/dps roles, GW2 had these features as noted above plus a specific effort to avoid splitting players into these roles. Additionally, so that players didn't feel like they HAD to bring certain classes or builds, most buffs and debuffs were widely available to any given class and were low-impact. Instead of a buff that made a HUGE difference in your damage output, there was one that was just noticeable but not critical. Players could combo their abilities together for neat effects, but these effects were either similarly low-power or relatively infrequent to pull off (or both).
The reality came to the fore, for me - in a great effort not to force people to group together or punish people for not grouping, Guild Wars 2 barely rewarded people who did. Groups were only slightly greater than the sum of their parts. In PvP, of course, group tactics and planning were king, but that had little to do with the actual mechanics and more to do with the players themselves choosing what/where/how to do things. In PvE, dungeons and group challenges always seemed to hinge on fights that were slow and repetitive and presented challenges that were just full of large numbers rather than real challenge so that players had to group up for them so they could overcome the large numbers through their own large numbers.
This is not to say that there were no such challenges or interplay to be had. Group events, raids, group PvP and all of that stuff is definitely there. It's just that the difference between playing in actual coordination with people and playing solo nearby them is not vast.
I couldn't really figure out these things and define how they bothered me until I was talking about Magic: The Gathering with a friend and I remembered my high school Chemistry teacher once remarking that she thought the whole game just looked like "parallel play" to her, not actual interplay. She didn't understand the game that well, of course, and as someone who valued logic lessons in all their forms she revised her opinion once she understood it better. But the point she made stuck with me - from the outset, MTG looked like two people on opposite sides of the table just fiddling with their own stuff. And that's how GW2 really boiled down to me - lots of players just playing their own game together, but not with each other. Just around each other.
It's a good game, don't get me wrong. And I'm not one to say that people shouldn't or can't enjoy something. But I think a definite lesson GW2 teaches is that it's entirely possible to go too far in the other direction.
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