If I go and assume that it'll be like the personal story from SW:TOR (so yeah, help me out here guys that played) then I'll assume that it'll be the primary leveling line from 1 to 80, except, unlike in TOR, this is **optional**, and you can go and level in a different way if you choose.
In WoW, you're more of a "person in the world" rather than "the hero of the story". While you are the one saving the day, you're still not the ONE saving the day. The thing I have to commend about SW:TOR, was that it made you feel like you were the one saving the galaxy, instead of you (who's useless without your 9-24 friends there to stop you from being slaughtered) facelessly and namelessly defeat repeatable content. The personal story is there to give you the feeling that you're actually doing something to save the world or make the future better. Also, with small quests in WoW like, "go kill this guy and bring me his head", the guy just respawns later for someone else to kill. However, in your personal story, that place will be instanced off, so for you, if you kill that guy, he's gone for good. I feel that this works better to show that you're actually doing something in the world, instead of fighting in a stalemate, where nothing get's better or worse.
To sum up, I'd say that the personal story is like the single player RPG type thing, but with the option of grabbing your friends and playing with them. Which I'd prefer. I'm playing through FFXIII-2 atm, and it'd be cool if I could have a friend take control of one of the other characters for me.
I think I might have said this before, but as I look more into what this game is going to be like, I realise that it's more and more difficult to compare it to WoW. WoW has its own style, while Guild Wars has its. GW1 had the same kind of "personal story", but you had no choices at all. You had to play through the set story to reach the bad guy at the end, then kill him. Usually after you completed the story, "Elite Areas" opened up, and these were basically the raids. While you reached max level looong before you completed the story, you still had to carry on to be able to get to the harder stuff. There was a lot of content, and the storyline was much like doing a string of instances with 1-2 quests in between. All of which could be done solo or with friends. GW2 is trying to carry that on, but to still give you the option of doing something else if you want to.
Basically, GW2 is a new and improved GW1, and GW1 really isn't that much like WoW.
Also, the beta should be here very soon. We're looking at about March/April. I'll be coming here with information about how to get in and when exactly it starts when I find it.
if the personal story in gw2 is linear, boring, has no impact on the game what-so ever and is the only gimmick keeping the game alive then yes its exactly like tor .
fortunately it isn't. everyone will have a chunk of the capital city that is your "home". that area will change depending on how you play out your story. during character creation you will choose the background to your character which will determine the starting point of your personal story from that point on it will be heavily influenced by your decisions.
its a nice way to give you something new to see if you role a new char, gives a lil depth to you chars and ofc is nice for the role-players.
and GRR where's the freaking beta!! XD, running out of mmo's to keep me busy ;P tor was a complete let down, gone back to rift atm which seems to be the best mmo on the market atm.
"Tanking is skill, Dps is science, Healing is art"
I know someone that's currently in the closed beta, but he can't spill any info at all... I'm extremely jealous and want to wring his neck to find out things, but... I can't. (I'm not even supposed to know he's in there, lol) Like I said though, the open beta should be really soon.
I dont get the point of the 3 questions. Ppl will click random buttons in answer to meaningless questions, all it seems to be doing is slowing them down on character creation. It might slightly change the gameplay experience at some point through the game, but I dont see how selecting stuff at random in login has any point whatsoever, why not just give ppl a randomized character path throughout the game, would make far more sense?
And bubb, as for the world vs word pvp, I thought 'looks pretty cool' till i got as far as 'you can jump in on your pvp toon you dont need to level or gear' and I just stopped reading Mmo for me will always contain an element of grinding, its a part of the genre.
i have to admit, i might go and have a look at this game. SWOR is a huge disappointment, and wow disappointed aswell here in the last few patches.
so hell, keep on posting Joe, im reading/swallowing it all, and in my eyes, it all looks awesome...
The questions part at the start doesn't take long, and if you don't care about it then it's easy to just click randomly. Anet just wanna give people some kind of character uniqueness besides the way you look.
But, the point in it is for character personality. It lets you have the options of walking into a town and having the NPCs react to you in such a way. If you wanna be a bad ass, you can make yourself a bad ass, and walk into town with everyone crapping themselves around you. If you wanna be really charismatic, and have all the women swoon as you walk past, then that's maybe possible too. I reckon it'll be a good idea, and I'll probably have some fun with it.
I don't really know much about the PvP side of the game. Mostly because I don't really care about PvP a whole lot... but I've seen and heard a few things.
GW1 has the option of creating a max level character to PvP with, but you're so limited to PvP that it gets boring quick, at least for me. I think the reason they put it in was for players that wanted to only PvP could just skip having to level a character up, and dive straight in. Everyone has this option, so it doesn't become unbalanced or unfair. If you want to create a PvP character and PvE with it, then you're outta luck. You don't have infinite character slots, so if you're gonna PvE and want to PvP, then it's probably best to make a PvE character, play PvE, and gear up for PvP later.
In GW2, low level characters are scaled up to max level so that they have a chance at doing something, instead of having low level BGs that might not have people joining them. They don't get max level attributes, which is why they still need to level up, but they'll have max level hp, etc., so they're not just getting slaughtered by the higher levels.
@Drayke - thanks. I think most of my enthusiasm for GW2 comes from being a GW1 player, since I know what Anet are like I can predict the general feel GW2 is gonna have, based on GW1. Problem is, it's really hard to describe that to anyone that hasn't played. If there was gonna be a WoW2, you could kinda guess how it was gonna go based on WoW1.
I played Classic until I was nearly level 60. It needs The Burning Crusade really for me though. I am lurking around Daggerspine again for a while, trying to get used to the changes lol
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Mmo for me will always contain an element of grinding, its a part of the genre.
