As Guild Wars 2’s final Beta Weekend Event came to a close, there are many closing comments that my friends and I have made about the game. 99% of them are excellent; and here’s why:
We think the game has reached an unprecedented level of polish; literally, it feels way more complete in beta than some games do a year after being released. We love how far it’s come from BWE1, from being able to finally map Ctrl+# key binds to the improved pet management system to the much more streamlined and noob-friendly World vs. World. It’s an incredible feat to have your players’ mouths hanging open when they are just standing still, taking in the beauty.
Speaking of WvW, I cannot tell you the satisfaction I got when I encountered head-on fights with someone who was equally skilled as me. I was a ranger with a longbow and a greatsword, he was an elementalist with daggers and a staff. We battled it out for about 2 minutes, which is a HUGE time for a 1v1 battle in most games.
What I love about GW2 is that it’s not hard to die, but it’s also not easy if the victim knows what he’s doing. I ended up winning all of the 1v1 matches I was faced with as I traversed the battleground, and the amount of satisfaction I got from that made me realize that the beta was that much closer to being over, which of course made me sad. My mood was uplifted when I joined over 100 more teammates and we stormed a castle like something out of LoTR. Man, it was epic.
I’m definitely going to roll a ranger when the game releases, and during the beta I made an Asura ranger. Wow, these little guys are COOL! My friends and I love their little animations; everything they do took the dev team some real creativity to master. They just feel real. Sylvari are equally as cool, especially because of their stunning home world, The Grove. Sylvari are more nature-oriented, while Asura are more technology-oriented. Both are incredibly fun to play and I’m VERY glad we got access to them so that any final glitches in their areas could be found and ironed out before release.
The one bad thing about the game at the moment is one that will be nonexistent on release, and that’s that the game still only uses your computer’s CPU to run. This means my GeForce GTX 460M is just sitting there, doing nothing while my CPU (Core i7 Sandybridge) entirely runs the game. Not a problem performance wise (besides occasional lag), but the game will look and feel ten times better when both powers are used upon release. Not to mention DX11 support!!!
All in all, I very much loved my time with GW2 and the next time we play it will most likely be on release day (August 28th, August 25th for pre-purchasers), or maybe there will be one last stress test, following the pattern of the other betas. Either way, I’m ready, the game is almost ready, and this fall will be absolutely brilliant for gaming.
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