For months, I have been very skeptical of Guild Wars 2.  Why?  First, I’ve been burned by the hype machine behind title before.  Second, I still remember what the original Guild Wars was like.  It’s been five years and lasted about a month, but that experience is still burned into memory.  It was a tediously instanced, grindy experience I did not want to repeat.  Gaming-wise, I think of that  brief time as wearing MMO-diapers before “graduating” to World of Warcraft.  The more I heard about Guild Wars 2, however, I realized my bad experience had created predetermined expectations of what to expect with this game.  This is not an expansion to the original, even calling it a sequel feels dirty, but a complete revamp of the game.

Once I ignored that voice in the back of my head bitching about the past game and started doing some digging about features already divulged by ArenaNet, I felt that inner geek in me turn into Sloth from “Goonies.”  Mutated ears perking up with a smile and a cheerful yet quizzical, “Baby Ruth?“  I found a good list of MMO innovations that had me thinking, “Why hasn’t anyone come up with this before?”  There are a couple cases that said features actually are in other games but not very well known, like the option to put a listing to buy whatever is out of stock from the auction house in Eve.  Something called an “overflow server” was being used in this last weekend’s beta as well as at launch specifically meant for high-pop servers.  Just when I thought I had the came figured out, the combat and trait system gave me a severe twitch when the theory-crafter in me considered the possibilities. Read more…