The Time Has Come...

I know I'm not the only one who has been waiting for this, and if I'm honest I thought I would be waiting a lot longer, but today marks the arrival of...

If you preordered it...

Yes, the long awaited "second" game in ArenaNet's Guild Wars series, if you pre-ordered the game you can start playing today if not you have another 3 days to wait... Although it's called Guild Wars 2, it's actually the 5th, but all the others box together into one world, kinda. It all started with Guild Wars: Prophecies, this was the first I played and I didn't like it then as much as I do now. I wasn't much of a PC gamer back then, but I did invest in all the other games, Factions, Nightfall and Eye of the Northm.and got almost to the end of Prophecies before giving up and didn't get really far in the others either...

While I was at university I kind of fell off the MMORPG radar and didn't play Guild Wars much at all... I got stuck and no one else really played either so I had no help and it was pretty much impossible to get the last missions done. However, in my last year, I came back with a vengeance, joined a Guild and actually played it properly. I got really into it and I still kind of am, although I hardly play now as I was waiting for Guild Wars 2 and playing on the Beta weekends and stress tests.

The main extra feature that many MMORPG's had that Guild Wars lacked back when it first came out, was the ability to play as more than one race. In Guild Wars you could only be a human, even though there were a lot of races featured in the game; Dwarves, Centaurs, Asura, Norn and many more... But you couldn't play as them...

Until Guild Wars 2 came along! You can now play as Human, Asura, Norn, Charr and a new race to Guild Wars 2, the Sylvari. From the start I was adamant on playing as a Charr, and in Guild Wars I play my main as a Warrior Primary, Monk Secondary, so when I heard about the Guardian class... Oh My God! I knew I wanted to play that as my main character. I actually missed the first Beta event as the game was £50 to pre-order (CRAZY EXPESIVE DIGITAL DOWNLOAD!!) and I couldn't justify spending that much money on a game... However after the rest of my guildies came back and were completely in awe of how amazing this game we had been waiting 5 years for actually was... I knew I had to make it my life mission to get this game. Luckily soon after I pre-ordered, the second Beta event was announced and I got to play it at last! The graphics and the artistic style of the game still blows me away. It's beautiful, and although I hate people who say all games need "good" graphics to be a good game, Guild Wars 2's art style is impossible to ignore.

I've always loved Guild Wars for it's different style of gameplay. I've played other mainstream MMORPG's (Warcraft and Final Fantasy 11) and many other Free to Play ones and they all seemed around the same. So when I heard that Guild Wars 2 was going to break the moulds of MMORPG standards, I knew I was in for a treat! They have skills similar to those in Guild Wars but they've revamped the skill system. Rather than just buying your skills and being able to equip whatever you want in any slot, you now unlock your skills in branches, and each slot has it's own type. You have skills dependant on your weapons, your class, your race and you unlock them as you go.

Another thing I loved about the way Guild Wars 2 has changed how MMO's work is that they seem to have taken inspiration from RPG's such as Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls series and Bio Ware's Dragon Age series. They've added in the fact that your choices matter, you're not playing a role thrust upon you anymore like in most stories of an MMORPG. You get to decide how your story progresses in your own way rather than just follow the story like a puppet.

ArenaNet have put emphasis on the Role Playing in RPG and they've also done this with the Massively  Multiplayer part of MMO. You get certain events in game where it's impossible or time consuming for one person to do it, say a big dragon suddenly falls out the sky and starts attacking a village, anyone who's around can come join in to slay the dragon. It certainly makes the game a lot more fun and engaging!

The story to Guild Wars is something I am invested in, having played through all 4 of the campaigns from Guild wars 1. I said above that the first 4 kind of slot into one game, however they can all be played as stand alone games, except for Eye of the North which is the only true expansion of the series. Guild Wars 2 is set around 200 years after the end of Eye of the North, where SPOILERS: you find that the Great Destroyer that was commanding all the destroyers was in fact a dormant dragon that has now awoken... Big stuff. The humans have taken refuge in Kyrta, the Asura have been forced onto the surface, the Charr have taken back Ascalon, the Norn have moved south (although I don't know why... Dragons I think...) and the Sylvari are a new race that have been growing in the Maguma jungle and have awoken some time between Eye of the North and Guild Wars 2.

I don't know much about the overall story, I played a little as each class but reached level 20 with my Charr and each storyline is different depending on how you set up your character by answering questions at the start of the creation (similar to how it was done in Dragon Age: Origins) and I had yet to find out the over all storyline about the Dragons and saving the world, but if it's like other Guild Wars storylines, it will be time before everything falls together...

Basically I cannot wait for this game. The way ArenaNet were being all secretive about the game and releasing little bits of info here and there, I thought it was another year away at least. Then when Chinese new year came along and they said "This year will definitely be the year of the dragon... Guild Wars 2 is coming out in 2012" I knew it was close, but I was still guessing somewhere around November/December time. But then out of nowhere (it seemed that way) it was announced August 28th, 25th for pre-order head start... I was just amazed, and I'm so happy that I finally get to play this stunning and beautiful game!