I have never read the descriptions of abilities that I have not earned yet. I like to be surprised by a new ability when I get one. Guild Wars 2′s unlocking of weapon skills is fun in that regard, and as soon as I have unlocked one weapon type I start searching for others I can equip.

If I come across a puzzle I try to solve it myself. Only after a certain number of tries and frustration really builds will I turn to the internet for an answer. I like puzzles to be intuitive, but not punishing.

I spend points in talent trees without really looking ahead at later abilities I can buy. This might make me an inefficient gamer, but there is always time to redo your builds or play with online build calculators at a later date.

The early days of leveling are all about exploration and about learning what your character can do. It is about pushing the limits and going in with little knowledge and expectations of what will happen. Usually on my first run through a new MMO I make a lot of mistakes. I might choose the wrong class for me or the wrong crafting skill. Even though my brain really wants to agonize and optimize by its nature, I try to ignore its screams. At some point all that sparkles will start to dull, but if that happens in a year or only a month’s time depends somewhat on how shallow or deep the game truly is, and somewhat on the player’s approach.

This was a commonly asked question during yesterday’s AMA Reddit with the ArenaNet team, as some are concerned they are removing player choice. I recently purchased the original Guild Wars trilogy so I could work on some of the Hall of Monuments points and I have a new perspective now.

In Guild Wars you need to buy your abilities from a vendor with skill points. Especially after you pick your secondary profession, you are presented with a lot of choices right away. It could certainly be just one of my personal quirks, but I was already feeling pretty overwhelmed. I had a new character in a new game that I was trying to get a handle on, and now I had to figure out which abilities looked like they would be the most useful to not only spend my precious points on but also equip on my hotbar. You have to make the same choices for your NPC "heroes" as well.

I don’t mind my choices being more limited earlier on in the game. Let me just play the class for a while until I feel confident, and let me switch up my build later on for various different purposes. At least with a tiered system I wouldn’t feel like I wasted my points if I found I didn’t really like an ability, because I had to buy it anyway to get to something better. My true hope is that all the abilities will be something useful, but I can’t say that any MMO I’ve played has accomplished that feat. Some abilities will always seem weak in comparison to others.

I was having a great time up until Act III, where you are running through the deserts outside Caldeum and looking for the dungeons to get Kulle’s blood and what have you. The zone is large and the dungeon entrances are likely spread out, and while you are running all over that map looking for them you’ll definitely run into packs of mobs with the blue elites. It seems all classes have to start kiting these around, because you can no longer stand toe to toe with them even if you are a melee class. In fact kiting is just the name of the game after this point. While you are kiting them around trying not to die, you must find some way to stand still for few seconds to get a few shots in. Inevitably in the open zones you will run into another pack of mobs and before you know it you’ve agroed them too. Inside dungeons you quickly run out of space to kite, so getting boxed in somewhere and dying simply because you can’t move is very common.

Gear is also harder to come by at this point because the Rare items don’t drop very often in Hell mode. Apparently this was to stop people from farming the bosses. Therefore I’ve been unable to find much level 50+ gear on the AH that wasn’t an exorbitant price. Instead I’ve been leveling up jewelcrafting and just replacing the gems in my gear when I can.

I also feel part of the issue is that the game doesn’t scale well for group play. It seems adding just one other player makes things exponentially harder than it is soloing, yet it wasn’t a problem at all in normal or nightmare mode. This doesn’t exactly encourage grouping with others.

At this point I’ve become very frustrated from dying over and over. I’ve done the best I can with my gear and I’ve experimented with many different builds on my Wizard. I’ve survived impressively at times, while other times it seems just bad luck with the randomized encounters can really stand in the way of getting to the next Checkpoint. When I start getting stressed and aggravated by a game it becomes time for me to step back. I need to decide if I want to press on and finish Hell mode, but to do so would be a bit masochistic.

I might still get some enjoyment out of the game by leveling up some other classes, but 3 weeks of solid play is still worth the price of the game to me.

I think about the games to be released this year and the mounting pressure building up on them to succeed. The Secret World is releasing first assuming it doesn’t get further delayed, but I still believe TSW will attract a smaller audience from the beginning. It doesn’t get the same level of buzz and excitement that Guild Wars 2 is getting right now. Already there are strong communities, fansites, blogs and podcasts forming around GW2.

I have something to be positive about today and that was the announcement of the next GW2 weekend beta. The community will get to test Arenanet’s mettle, and find out if they truly did fix the issues identified in the first round. If we log in to find stable servers, less lag in highly populated areas, and parties that stay together when zoning it will be a success. I am perfectly OK with them fixing those types of issues before opening up Asura and Sylvari races to us.

These beta weekends give us just a small taste, revealing a bit more each time before turning off the light. I have not played an MMO regularly since March. I’m like a moth flying in the dark, getting ever closer to the lamp in the distance and hoping to find a warm spot on the glass.

Taking into consideration what I do know about the game via reading and playing one beta weekend, Guild Wars 2 seems to be a game with both horizontal and vertical elements.

The more traditional and vertical progression is still alive and well in GW2 in the form of character levels, unlockable "traits" that you need to earn skill points to purchase, gear with stats and level ranges, and level ranges on the PvE zone content and dungeons.

The horizontal progression comes in with the automatic downscaling of player level so you can play in lower level zones. This essentially widens the areas you can PvE in rather than having to make a choice along the way. Technically, you could quest in a particular zone over and over and still progress in the game, but how long would a person conceivably do so? At some point, players will tire of the content and a game expansion would have to be released to bring the PvE’er back. Even with dynamic events in the PvE zones, the events are not infinite and will eventually be experienced by all.

As Taugrim points out, there is more opportunity for horizontal scaling in the PvP portions of the game. All players in WvW are bolstered to level 80, but there are still some vertical elements here as you still need to unlock your traits. You can earn those traits in the Mists and gain experience just like you would through PvE, but there is still a disadvantage for those who aren’t "true" level 80s. Aside from that, you could play in this area indefinitely and have different player-made experiences, and with multiple profession types.

Structured PvP (or what would be the equivalent of battlegrounds or arenas) takes away the disadvantages by giving everyone access to the same gear and traits upon joining. As far as I can tell, the only real progression in structured PvP is to gain Glory. You use Glory to purchase different gear skins, but not more powerful gear, therefore making it purely a bragging right.

This horizontal scaling seems to go hand-in-hand with player generated content like PvP. It leaves me with the question of what will happen to players who really don’t PvP at all? With no raiding to fall back on, they may leave in droves once they’ve experienced the PvE content with as many professions as they care to create. That would not bode well for life out in the lands of Tyria. Our hope rests with Arenanet seeing the trend and counteracting it, if indeed it becomes a problem at all.

I didn’t buy Diablo 3 for its story, and I’m sure most people knew exactly what to expect from this game. It is about gearing up your character and slicing through mobs. It was great fun playing my Monk and trying to break my record for monsters killed with a single blow. I even enjoyed grouping with my husband and friends when serendipity struck and we happened to be at the same story point.

I still think the Lore audio bits that play are awesome. They are a nice way to deliver additional backstory without stopping the action. Many MMOs have some sort of Codex (Warhammer, Rift, & SWTOR come to mind) in which you can read to learn more about NPCs or the world. I always tell myself I will read these entries during downtime, but in truth that downtime never comes. I find it a bit sad that someone wrote all that content and yet it is very likely that only a few people read it. These audio files solve that problem, with one caveat.

Many times I would find a lore book on the ground and start playing it, only they would appear at very inconvenient times. The book would drop right before the conclusion of my current quest, in which an NPC would pop in and rudely interrupt the audio clip. You can go into your journal and start playing the clip again, but I found that too cumbersome during times that I was grouped and we kept plowing on. It made me wonder why the developers didn’t time the finding of these books (or the clips that play when you fight a certain monster type) better.

After finishing Act IV, you can hop back into the game after the credits roll which you will most likely do to identify your loot. You get plopped back into Tristram to start all over. I need some way to process the dissonance, so I will pretend my character had their memory wiped and was just sent back in time.

Last night shortly after I created my first character, one of my co-workers whom I had swapped IDs with just appeared in my game. He was four levels lower than me but that didn’t seem to matter. The dungeon challenge level adjusts and you fight more monsters at once. He was able to catch up pretty quickly to me in level so it would appear you also get more experience when grouped.

The problem with having someone else in your game, especially someone that you don’t know super well on a personal level, is that one person winds up deciding which way to go and the other follows. There are numerous ways to go in a dungeon, and part of the fun for me is to explore every corner. I did not know if my friend felt the same way about exploration, or if he just wanted to get to the objective in the most direct way possible.

The years of playing MMOs have clearly shaped me. When I group with other people I feel this need to be efficient, and to be really good at playing the game so I don’t cause wipes or failures. Suddenly I’m not stopping to take in scenery, or paying much attention to the lore audio clips that play in the background. I don’t want to stop moving for too long while staring at my skills or the stuff in my inventory. I get into the “go go go” mentality.

However I’m also a polite person, so I don’t want to tell my friend to shove off because I want to play alone. It is difficult to convey to someone without it hurting their feelings. There will most certainly be times that I want to group so I’m not looking to burn bridges either.

If Diablo 3 implemented a way to make yourself appear offline even when you were not, it could solve the issue in a non-confrontational way. At the character selection screen you can set yourself as “busy” or “away”, but not “appear offline”. A quick search of the battle.net forums shows many other people want the feature.

If I can’t hide from the world I’ll either have to change my mindset, or become more assertive.

It is a shame that this occurs, because being in a group that actually succeeds at tackling the tougher content can be a rewarding experience. However, due to my own introverted nature and just not wanting to deal with people, I am not the one you will find putting the call out "looking for more" in a global channel. I tend to wait for someone else to do it first and join them. Somehow their act of putting the call out means they are responsible for filliing up the rest of the group and giving out instructions. Funny how that works.

This is one of the things I’m most looking forward to with Guild Wars 2. In my limited time with the game, it has been loads of fun for me to roll up into an area and see a cluster of players. I join up with them to fight, throw out some supportive buffs and I make a bee-line to anyone who is laying on the ground and needs reviving. I feel like I’m still helping other people and accomplishing my own goal at the same time. I do have concerns about what will happen as the population moves on, but hopefully Arenanet will come up with an answer just as Blizzard is planning to do with cross-realm zones.

So where does the game fall short?

Quest Limits:
This is quite a confusing bit of the game when you first encounter it. Our typical MMO pattern is to go around collecting all the quests in an area and set out, but in this game you sometimes get a strange warning that if you accept a new quest, your current quest will be canceled.  Everyone that sees this is going to be like “huh?”, because it is not clear at first that you can only have 1 quest of a certain type.

Mission types explained

Yes, those quest icons that appear on the screen actually have a meaning.  The red one with the running man is an action quest that involves killing.  The yellow icon with the bomb is a “sabotage” quest. Green icon with a computer is Investigation.  If you have any one of these types active, you cannot take another.

There is another type of green icon that is an “item” quest that you obtain from items in the world instead of an NPC, and you can have up to 3 of these at a time.

The argument is that this limitation forces the player to focus on one task at a time, thereby becoming more immersed in the story instead of just blowing through quests.  I don’t feel that the game should take away the player’s choice here.  Not to mention, if you can’t even pick up a quest at a given time, it is too easy to forget to go back to that NPC to get it later.

This also seemed to draw out how long you stayed in one particular zone.

Investigation Quests:
Investigation quests have no waypoints on the map at all.  Sometimes the clues given to you were just too vague to figure out on your own.  I’m certain all the answers will eventually be on a wiki, and players will just look them up.

Crafting:
This wasn’t intuitive to me at all.  The information under the Help feature was very vague, and I couldn’t find any kind of crafting tutorial.  I understand you are supposed to make a pattern with the components, but what would be the pattern for a glyph for example?
The game didn’t give you any help to let you know if you were at least on the right track.

Decks:
The decks or builds as they are more commonly known were not balanced.  In the testing that my husband and I both did, we found certain combinations such as Fist/Chaos or Fist/Blood Magic to be much more powerful and survivable than others.  Certain quests were much easier to do with these builds.  It seems having some way to heal yourself is required.

I fear this will lead to a game where everyone picks the popular options instead of a truly free-form skill system, unless they can do some major balancing.

Combat:
It becomes very spammy.  You spam your resource builders and then consume them, and then start the process over again.  When I want spammy combat, I’ll just play Diablo 3.

Challenge Levels:
Certain mobs were easy to take down, and others would completely rock you.  It was difficult to know when a fight was going to be a challenge.  The same was true of quests, some of them read “demanding” in the quest window, while others read “challenging.”  How is a person to know which one is tougher of the two?

Verdict:
As it stands now the game has a high frustration factor.  It may improve over the next few months but I do not believe it is quite ready for an audience.  I expect it will eventually go free to play, so I haven’t ruled it out as a future game.  I predict that it will launch with a fairly low subscriber base, and that most people will opt for Guild Wars 2 instead.

Character creation:
The very first thing you are asked is to choose your faction and you can play a short video right there within the game to get a preview.  After making your faction choice you are taken to character creation, which surprisingly is a very simplified experience.

You choose from standard “head” templates, and you can slightly customize the eye size, eye color, nose and mouth size, and skin tone. There are no complex sliders at all and not many color choices. There are only a few hairstyle choices and it seemed most of them for females were of the short variety. Then you had your basic hair colors to choose from. There were no unusual hair colors like pink or purple so if you had your heart set on the punk rock look you would be out of luck. Naturally this is beta, so I’m really hoping we are only seeing a limited selection and that more choices will be available at launch.

Next you choose your initial clothing, and once again I was disappointed in the selection given. You choose between 3 shirts, 3 pant styles, 3 shoes, and 3 coats. One pair of eyeglasses or none. I could live with that, but the clothing didn’t even match well. I definitely looked like a fashion reject. Apparently you could get more clothing from The Secret War Facebook event, and I suspect they will be available in the cash shop.

Choosing a name was also a little strange because you have first and last name plus a nickname.  It seems the nickname is the one that has to be unique and it is the only one that gets displayed in the game.

The NPC in this first cutscene happened to look just like my character.

Cutscenes:
There are many cutscenes throughout the game, as some of them are part of your story line and will start up automatically when you enter a designated area. Many times I found myself caught up in the moment, using hints given to me to follow someone or something, or find a way out of a bad situation, only to cross some invisible threshold and be whisked instantly into a cutscene. It can be a little jarring.

However, you will come across NPCs in the game and you will see icons floating in the air beside them (a neat trick). If you click these you get a short description of the quest and once you click the “accept” command the associated cutscene will begin. The cutscene serves to deliver the quest to you straight from the mouth of the NPC and give you a little more background then you would just reading a short sentence or two.

Your own character is unfortunately mute throughout this process and only stands there listening. The cutscenes are not terribly long, but you can hit the escape button to end it prematurely and the quest will still appear in your log. The voice acting I’ve seen so far has been very good, only the animations don’t match up. Sometimes the character’s mouth will not move at all while they talk, making it seem like you are watching a ventriloquist without a doll. Hopefully this is another beta quirk that gets ironed out. I also had a few issues with cutscenes locking up the game during the transitions, and the only remedy was to force quit the game and restart it.

The quest “menu” was pretty neat looking.

Questing:
I will cut to the chase now and say that “questing” in this game is more investigative than in any other MMO I’ve played. The game points you in a general direction using arrows and colored areas on both your map and mini-map. The objective might be to find a person or object, or to follow something. When you get to the area you will either find that thing or be given another clue, or you may be asked to solve a puzzle. These aren’t overly complicated puzzles like in the Myst series of games, yet you still have to use your brain a bit. The objectives often do not tell you exactly what to do.

Here is an example of one such quest I did in Kingsmouth. I was led to a building from a different task. I noticed there was an NPC inside because they are marked on your mini-map, so I went in. I went down a staircase and this new-age type of music began to play. The room was dimly lit with a reddish light and there were bookshelves all around. There was a woman sitting at a round table in the corner with her head down and on the table was a crystal ball. She appeared to be a fortune teller. I clicked on her and she told me a story about having recurring dreams of ravens. She felt these ravens were connected to the events happening in Kingsmouth.

My objective was to find a raven. I went outside to the spot indicated on the map and a raven was on the ground, and when I approached my quest updated telling me to follow it. It flies up in the air and though I can’t see exactly where it took off to, I start following in that general direction. I find more of them a short distance away, they keep flying off and I follow. At times a monster pops out of the ground and I need to kill it, collect a feather that drops, then follow the ravens again. They lead me to a fountain in a park. I’m asked to find a way to summon the Revenant. I would have had no idea how, but if you look closely there is a piece of paper on the ground you can interact with. When you read it, it shows you a picture of a pentagram and instructs you to place the feathers in certain corners to begin a ritual. The paper pretty much tells you what to do, so I placed the feathers in the corners indicated. A pentagram lit up in the center of the fountain and the Revenant boss appeared, whom I killed without too much difficulty. I was then able to receive my reward for that quest. There was a follow up quest given by the fortune teller, but I was going to have to go see her again to get the next part.

What I’ve just described is a typical quest in this game. A trend seems to be finding small things to interact with that are easy to miss. I found myself oftentimes led to a colored circle on the map and roaming around it searching desperately for whatever I was supposed to click on. Those don’t glow and sparkle in an obvious way, in this game objects are outlined in red when you can interact with it. Oh there’s that dead guy over there, behind the bush in the one direction I didn’t look. Ah, a tiny piece of paper on the ground. Or a little switch on the wall that disables the camera that will kill me with flame if it detects me. Quests have all been multi-step and they advance themselves as you go along. When you complete them, you send your report to your faction (not by magic, but cell phone) and they credit your account with your rewards.

Another interesting thing I noticed is that all the quests are repeatable, after they’ve gone though a “cooldown” period. Since the game has no classes and there are 500+ skills to unlock, could this mean there is not enough content in the game to unlock all these skills without repeating quests?

There is a limit on how many quests you can have active at once of a certain type.  If you try to go over the limit, you get a dialogue box warning you that your current quest will be cancelled. You can put the cancelled quest into a paused mode, so you can go back to the NPC and reactivate it again and it will save any progress you made on it.

You can only track one quest at a time, so which ever quest is “active” is the one that will be represented by the colored circles and waypoints on the map. You can easily change the active quest by hovering over it in the UI and a pop-up menu of your other quest “icons” appears. It seems they wanted us to focus on one task at a time, but this means you can’t knock out two or more objectives that happen to be in the same area.

There is an impressive help menu, along with videos.

The Environment:
What I’ve seen of the game so far is impressive. There is a good day/night cycle and the in-game time is always represented by a clock on the top right corner of the screen. You can actually see the minutes ticking by.

Kingsmouth has a creepy and foggy atmosphere so it is always a little dark even during the daytime hours. You will also find out pretty quickly that Kingsmouth is overrun by zombies, and the way the zombies hang out in groups munching on a corpse is a nice touch. It feels just like walking around in an episode of the Walking Dead.

The sound effects are quite nice too, with music being localized to certain areas and good environmental effects. I often heard the zombies near me before I necessarily saw them. I noticed while fighting if your health gets low, the combat music gets louder adding to the excitement of the moment. While the cutscenes give the NPCs some character, unfortunately they just stand rooted to the same spots in the game. They don’t move around or fidget much, but some of them will acknowledge you when you walk near them.

It performed well on my mid-range machine and I was able to get consistent 60 FPS on high settings. Use CTRL-ALT-F to show FPS.

Combat:
If you weren’t aware, you can technically use any weapon you find in The Secret World, but if you don’t have any points invested in that weapon type you won’t have any of its associated abilities. The game has an area in the tutorial where you can equip and try out all of the weapon types, but they only give you 2 abilities to play with of each type. You must choose one weapon type before you leave this area, so you at least have a starting point for your character. Similar to Guild Wars 2, you only have 7 active abilities equipped at any given time on your hotbar so you certainly aren’t overwhelmed with buttons to push.

All attacks build up a resource, either on you or your target. You can have a main-hand and  an off-hand item, like a fist weapon plus a focus that allows for Chaos powers for example.

The combat and spell casting effects themselves are pretty underwhelming at this point. It is the complete opposite of Guild Wars 2 which are at times overwhelmingly colorful. I’m not sure if this was intended because the game is a modern setting and they wanted to make it more realistic, but they fall flat when compared with what we are used to as MMO gamers.

The combat is not billed as “action” combat, but you don’t want to just stand in one place. I found myself constantly circle strafing mobs while using my rifle, because I seemed to take less damage that way. Some mobs have special attacks which will be obvious and you need to move out of the way of them. There is no auto-attack.

Seeing as this game has no levels, it was never easy to tell if a mob was going to be a challenge or not. Some of the zombies would always come as a group, and I noticed when I targeted them there was a 3-circle symbol by the name. Other mobs which came as singles only had a one-circle symbol, but they had a larger hit pool. I found the single mobs to always be a little bit tougher.

The ability wheel, plus a view of the “decks.”

Character Progression:
There is a pretty complicated Ability Wheel in the game. You can either try to plan out your own progression or use one of the game’s recommended builds. This is similar to Fallen Earth’s skill based progression, except in this game once you buy abilities you can switch them out anytime you want and you can earn all 500+ abilities. There would be no reason to re-spec and lose all your progression if you wanted to switch paths, you would simply start spending your points in a different area. I didn’t want to use up a lot of time looking at all the different skills, so I based my build off one of the recommended builds or “decks” as they are called in game. The decks are given creative but vague names like Executioner or Witch Hunter.

There are anima points (AP) and skill points (SP) that you earn by filling up your experience bar. Experience is gained through killing mobs and doing quests, PvP and crafting. AP are spent in the Ability Wheel on both active and passive abilities. SP are spent in a different window, and from what I can tell are just more points that you spend on a certain weapon or magic category. You can spend SP to boost either the damage, healing, or support effectiveness of the weapon.  I also had to spend some points in Major Talismans, so I could equip a higher ranked talisman that I got as a quest reward.

So while gear doesn’t have a level requirement because there are no levels, there is a SP requirement associated with them (presumably so one couldn’t become super powerful at an early stage via gear given to them). You don’t equip armor in the traditional sense, but you do equip things that are more like jewelry and accessories that increase your stats. The clothing itself appears to be purely cosmetic.

Crafting:
I can’t comment much on crafting because I honestly couldn’t figure it out. There is a grid that you place a toolkit into, but then you are to place components into the grid in a certain pattern.  I tried various toolkits and placing components in randomly but got no where. I was looting crafting components off mobs as I killed them but I didn’t know what the components were for.  I would need lots more time to figure this out, and I imagine the recipes will wind up online eventually.