Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Head Start - First Impression
zmortis
Member Posts: 152
My first impression - the first 15 minutes of play as a Norn Hunter were interesting. The hours of down servers after that, not so interesting. Not a good way to make a good first impression as many other head start game launches in recent years haven't encountered this issue.
Comments
I do plan to update my impression when I actually get an opportunity to play longer than 15 minutes. Right now, this is the best I can do given the circumstances. It should also serve as a notice that first impressions will impact review scores. It is certainly quite possible to recover from a bad first impression, but it takes a pretty good effort to make up ground when a game is obviously not ready for the early start rush of new players.
It hasn't been since 2003 that I've seen a head start go this poorly. That game was WoW and they obviously recovered from their initial misstep. Many of the games which followed them also learned to do a better job at pre-launch stress testing. It seems Arena Net has somehow unlearned that lesson, and needs to learn it again. Certainly their have been launch jitters in other games, but outright hours long global outages on day one are not a good sign that the game and the infrastructure are ready for release.
Update: After a few hours and monitoring the Guild Wars 2 twitter feed I got their notice that things were up and running. A short update from the launcher, and everthing seemed to be working on that end once again. Login went in a timely fashion, and the game world started up fine. I called up my brother, and he got his character on as well. We played Silvari (elementalist and necromancer) for several hours together in the starting zone and liked the different mechanics and innovative use of the hot bar with different approaches for each class, and the ability to automatically customise the hot bar by weapon choice. On a down side trying to meet up with another player when we were both constantly in the overflow was a bit painful as we frequently ended up in separate overflows even when in the same group. Only zones without enough players to span an overflow didn't have this problem.
I went back to my solo play when my brother had things to do, and back to my Norn Hunter. Several hours of looking around, grabing vistas and points of interest later (another fun mechanic for us explorer types) my brother rejoined with his Norn character. In the interveining time we had also both created a character of each race and five different classes to sample a variety of classes out of the intro portions. Of all the introductions the silvari had a certain esoteric coolness factor due to the very unique nature of the race. Stylistically I am liking the Norn environments (and relative ease of main city navigation) the best so far. Not because they are so startlingly original, but because they seem comfortably familiar in many ways. I just like the overall vibe of the Norn.
Race wise I don't really care much for the Charr. Maybe because they are made to appeal more to teenage boys and it shows in both their design and the constant gruff voicing of so many of the NPCs. Class wise my favorite so far has been the Hunter. The mechanic is pretty straight forward and what you would likely expect from a combo of ranged DPS and Melee capabilities with a pet.
So far my least favorite class has been the Mesmer with its tiered up hot button approach. As you press a hot button for an ability, it fequently "flips" to second or subsequent stages of that ability with slightly different effects. It is a cool seeming mechanic, but it leaves you needing to remember each effect in the chain in its order to grasp what is going to happen. My brother likes the complexity, and has a Norn mesmer he has been playing. So take my dislike of the mesmer with a grain of personal preference salt.
I am also liking the elementalist pretty well. A lot of potential complexity there as well as you have four classic elemental modes which do different things with each weapon equipped. A lot of learning of which modes are good for defense/support vs. offense, but it really is nice having the flexibility to switch between modes as needed by the group.
As is typical with modern MMO designs there is no "healer/medic" class in the game. Each class has minimal self heal abilities available, and they have instead implemented the "fight to survive" mechanic where your character goes prone, but can still launch basic attacks. If their primary foe drops before their energy bar wears out, then they rejoin the fight. They can also be resurrected by any player in an area, but that does leave the resurrecting player vulnerable to hits by nearby foes.
So overall first impression: the Guild Wars 2 game is fun. It has some innovative mechanics, some interesting settings, and several things which are obvious refinements on the MMOs which have come before. It also makes it hard when lots of players are on to coordinate with your fellow party members spread across several different "overflow" zones. The advantage of the "overflow" zones is that their hasn't been any noticible game engine lag due to the limited player presence in the areas. It also makes it possible to actually see your character except in the largest fights.