In the world of MMORPGs, there seems to be only one household name that comes to everybody’s mind, and it’s no wonder. Blizzard really set the standard for MMORPGs with World of Warcraft, creating a beautiful fantasy world filled with fantasy characters, fantasy powers, fighting fantasy foes, with fant… real family, friends, fantasy friends, your next door neighbor the marine, and his grandmother. In fact, they had such control over the MMORPG industry to the point where 12 million users were gladly paying a monthly premium to continue playing the game, and purchasing expansion packs that they had to buy unless they wanted to be the losers stuck at a lower level cap.
Enter Guild Wars 2
At first glance, Guild Wars 2 looks like another knock off of the King of all MMORPGs, but after playing the game for a couple of hours you begin to realize that it is so much more with its own unique design, features that add to its convenience, versatility, variety, and enjoyment of the game and guess what… NO MONTHLY FEES.
Creating Your Character
Unfortunately, this game is not very good with first impressions. With GW2’s all too familiar “professions” (don’t you mean classes?), and “crafts” (don’t you mean professions), and “races” (don’t you mean races?… wait), you can’t help wonder if this game really is just some knockoff of WoW. The only place where it seems to differ in terms of characters creation is that you get to choose the color of your armor, and strange useless facts that set the back story for your character. Seems like a trivial ability (well the character’s back story is), but changing the color of your gear is actually a pretty neat feature. It turns out you can also change your gear color at any time during the game, and even create or purchase dyes to give you more color selection. OK… so painting your armor isn’t that cool. Don’t worry, it gets better.
One of the biggest differences and source of controversy you discover is that the GW2 creators got rid of the holy trinity of MMORPGs: healer, tank, and DPS (Damage Per Second). Instead, everyone is self-sufficient and everyone can help each other. Sounds strange and alarming, but it turns out to be a great decision on the part of the creators (more on this later in the co-op section). Also, it doesn’t seem as though races have any inherent traits. Therefore, in terms of creating characters, this means you can choose your character’s race solely on their looks, and its profession based on the game mechanic that you prefer.
