1st Impression of GW2

I never played in the beta so this playing Friday night when the servers came up was my first look at GW2....

The character creation is not to bad, I was a bit disappointed that we can only choose from several preset body options, that really limits your creativity..  (Aion and Champions Online have far better character creation tools)

After making my toon I noticed that within 10 mins of the servers coming up every popular name was already taken, I most of tried 50 different names and everyone taken, did beta testers get to reserve their names or something?   Anyways I had to be creative with the spelling to get a name I liked...

As I entered the game I watched a cut scene which I guess is suppose to give me a back story, didn't really tell me much and I thought the hand drawn art was a bit dated for a new MMO, maybe some cool CGI or in game cinematics would of been cool ...

So I start out and the first thing I notice is people running around killing endless spawning mobs, I eventually find the npc's I'm suppose to talk to and was very disappointed with the voice overs, sounds like they hired the janitor to read cue cards... Really low quality, also the cut scenes felt very 1990's Legend of Zelda, where you get your toon on one side of the screen and the npc on the other and they talk, not much of a cut scene, then again I might be spoiled by SWTOR cinematic style cut scenes..

Once I figured out the map I headed over to the Heart Shape Icons to get some local quests to try and level up, I have to say the combat is pretty fun in this game, way more fluid then other MMO's i've played lately.

The graphics are a bit cartoony and Humanoid characters skin has a very plastic look to it....  Although the environmental graphics are really nice... 

I noticed the events happen pretty quickly with the random boss spawning for everyone to take down, the Public Quest system definitely had a Rift feel to it and if you hang around the area long enough it seems to start over again rather quickly...   Given all the action that was going on the game felt rather chaotic....

I'm hoping there are some sandbox elements to the game and not just a bunch of Public Quests strung together to lead you from one end of the map to the other with not much else to do but endless combat.....

Time will tell.....  Overall not a bad MMO but it definitely does not live up to the hype that some people were tyring to make into..