No subscription fees, high production value, incredible depth, polish & great developer support characterize GW2.
The high score I gave this wonderful game is due to many factors, which will be elaborated upon in the sections below, but my main point is this: which company and game would and should you, as gamers, support? GW2 has no subscription fee, is up and running quite smoothly, enjoys a great depth of content (both PvE and competitive PvP), has solid game mechanics that do differ from traditional MMOs and the developers clearly love their game (see: developer blogs from the past few years explaining their systems to us). It's something to consider.
BUSINESS PRACTICES & COMPANY PHILOSOPHY
Weird criteria, right? Well, not quite. Guild Wars 2 is an MMO that is devoid of any subscription fees, and is instead based on microtransactions. Don't let the microtransactions fool you into thinking that ANet has adopted a pay-to-win scheme where players purchasing items will have a massive advantage over those who just bought the retail game. No, items that can be purchased have no effect on the stats of your armor, weapons and consequentially your character(s). Instead most are cosmetic in nature, which is perfectly reasonable.
The incredible depth of content you get is easily much, much more than gamers are accustomed to receiving with their 60$ purchase, and this is something ANet wanted to provide to us as consumers. And not only depth, but polish as well. Unlike many other MMOs who launch before the product is ready, Guild Wars 2 has been under development for at least 5 years – the time the developers felt was needed to release an excellent product. Indeed, most MMOs recently released suffered from catastrophic bugs at launch and a lack of content, which ultimately resulted in a short-lived game life [more on the launch in the next section].
I believe that what GW2 and ArenaNet offer for a retail purchase of their game is what could be termed "generous" by today's standards where the same amount of money will buy you an annual edition of CoD or 4 months of WoW (not including game purchase).
LAUNCH
The GW2 launch was by and large quite successful. In fact, it went much better than for a certain recent game called Diablo III that probably shouldn't have needed the continuous Internet connection and the disastrous auction house (but that's neither here nor there). I have heard of certain log in problems and server disconnects from other players, but I believe in the large scheme of things, most players were able to enjoy a very smooth experience at good framerates. I myself was only disconnected a couple of times in probably 30 hours of gameplay, and reconnection was almost instantaneous. The more complex systems involving transactions such as the guild, Trading post, Black Lion Trading Company and player mail have been intermittently up and down, but that is understandable as there can be no errors with such systems. The important thing to note is that it doesn't stop anyone from playing the game and exploring the world as the world itself is more than large enough to keep players occupied for... well, a very long time.
I will admit that overflow servers are a double-edged sword: I am extremely glad I didn't have to queue in line for hours just to be able to play (though World v. World is experiencing some bottlenecking there). However, I do find myself more often than not playing all the time in the overflow servers. Perhaps in the future, home servers will have a greater capacity.
CONTENT
There are simply too much features to list in terms of content. Consider that both PvE and PvP components are already huge in their own rights. The world of Tyria is beautifully designed and really fleshed out and the developers really made the world seem alive with cities and people (Divinity's Reach in particular is an amazing city). This is in stark contrast to the original Guild Wars where, not being a traditional MMO at all, the world was odd in that the cities didn't really look or feel like cities and were simply hubs for trade and quests. Of course, this improved in Nightfall and Eye of the North with Guild Wars 2 taking things to the next level with a fully persistent world.
Furthermore, the inclusion of the five races (Asura, Norn, Sylvari, Charr and Humans), each with their own massive starting zone and even higher level zones, means that the amount of content occurring in parallel and overlapping each other is staggering: each race has its own combinations of story quests, backgrounds, armor models, weapon models, voice work, etc, etc. There are also 8 professions playable by all races (I have to admit, it's hard to imagine a Sylvari engineer, but whatever...). Ironically, I think this amount of parallelism hurt SW:TOR in that a huge amount of voice work had to be done for each faction and character class, resulting in a huge time sink and lack of end game content. I believe ANet was wise in limiting voice work to story quests only since having five races involves even more parallelism than SW:TOR.
The only complaint I have regarding the story quests is that they all seem to be bite-sized like Renown Hearts or Dynamic Events. I would prefer to have longer missions like in GW1 where everything is more fleshed out. I mean, I can already tell the story will be epic building up to confrontations with the Elder Dragons, but having everything in bite-sized morsels doesn't feel really satisfactory to me.
GAME MECHANICS
Again, there is too much to write about the game mechanics in a single review, but a few aspects can be addressed. I really like what ArenaNet has done with Dynamic Events and their very fluid nature with players who just happen to be near the area joining in. It is a much better way to structure "quests" in the world without the aid of NPCs in towns with stars over their heads. Interestingly enough, the quests themselves are not very different from traditional MMOs involving killing a certain creature species and gathering certain items, protecting caravans from waves of enemies, etc. Still, events are a very nice change of structure and don't make everything seem like the traditional go from point A (quest giver) to B and back again. The main strength of this change of quest structure is the chain of events that occur (contesting outposts, mounting counteroffensives, etc.). I believe that future events could span across larger areas and involve simultaneous interacting events: there are multiple fronts in a way after all. Dynamic Events also involves group work without having to be in a party. That being said, it would be nice to have an easy way to form parties with other players as everyone seems to always be doing their own thing though I suppose guilds should play a large role in that regard. Still, it's always fun to party with random players and having an easy way to organize parties would be great.
I also like the fact that you no longer necessarily have DPS, tank and healer characters that need to spec as such throughout their entire 80 levels in order to be "useful" in the game. GW1 avoided such problems by having a pool of 800 skills or so divided up among the 10 professions, having an 8 skill bar and implementing a level cap of 20 – it was therefore easy to re-spec and experiment with builds. I understand that having a persistent world with a level cap of 80 would not work with the old system. I really like that GW2 kept the skill bar limited to 10 skills instead of seeing those insane 30 slot bars in other games, which I think is ridiculous. Actually, the decision to eliminate potions like in GW1 is a blessing as the emphasis is not on items, but on proper skill usage and positioning to survive. I must say that I prefer the original 8 skillbar system with hundreds of skills to choose from. That's in part because I haven't really figured out how to optimize the utility skills, which generally have very long recharge times. I still think that having to use the same set of 20 or so weapon skills up until level 80 will become tedious and really hope that ArenaNet will add more in the future – some customizability and growth really helps the sense of progression that is a huge part of playing a character.
I realize that the limitations in the number of skills were to preserve some balance between professions, simplify this balance and to emphasize the importance of positioning. I haven't played PvP yet, but in PvE there still appears to be some balancing under the current system, namely, that ranged attacks are so much more powerful and AOE attacks even more so. It seems to me that ranged AOE attacks do nearly as much damage as melee single target attacks with the obvious advantage of striking whole groups of enemies and maintaining a distance from foes. Professions like the elementalist, ranger and engineer come to mind. The effect of having light or heavy armor seems to be negligible in terms of the amount of damage taken, and all professions have the same general basic capacity to dodge (of course, some have skills allowing for faster endurance recovery) again leading to huge advantages to staying at a distance and using AOE attacks (that are usually supplemented by powerful individual attacks anyways). I know that eliminating the "holy trinity" was a goal, but melee-based classes like the warrior should have some advantage in close like tougher armor or more powerful attacks to compensate for lack of range with a sword (I know that warriors can use rifles and the longbow). They should also be physically stronger than casters and have higher Endurance, meaning more dodges.
The combat system functions right now, but melee-based fighting in PvE doesn't work all that well simply because ranged attacks are just as powerful except that you can often keep the target away from you and therefore take no damage. The only exception is the greatsword in my experience. I think that the greatest thing the GW2 combat system could become with future updates is one similar to that of League of Legends, but in an MMO. That would be incredible. As I see it, there are certainly DPS characters (glass cannons), support and tankier heroes, but ranged and melee-based characters co-exist quite well and are typically balanced pretty well. Keep in mind that most of my previous remarks apply to PvE where PvP is a very different story where I believe everything is much more balanced.
ART, GRAPHICS and SOUND
I have written a large amount of text already. I think it suffices to say that I personally really like the style of the game – not too cartoony like WoW or TOR, a vivid beautifully-designed world, detailed textures for an MMO and optimized for performance on a wide variety of systems. Guild Wars 2 has one of the best concept artist teams behind the look of the world and it is apparent in how everything is designed. The vistas in GW1 were impressive, but in GW2, they were able to bring their design aesthetic to the cities themselves instead of being limited in large part to landscapes.
The sound design is equally good though sometimes the sound lags onscreen animations and a low rumbling can be heard in areas where I never saw any reason why it would be present. Having Jeremy Soule as the composer certainly helps in that regard. ANet has certainly attracted a talented team of programmers, server specialists and artists in the production of this game.