I've now played about 10 hours of Guild Wars 2, so my perception of it has changed quite a bit than it did based on the first hour or two.
First of all, I've played 3 different races now, and I've discovered that the "personal storyline" (or in other words, the quests based on the character traits you chose at the start) are downright terrible. I'm not sure who wrote the script for these but they're straight out of a cheesy C-Grade movie, with stupidly one-dimensional characters and blatantly obvious "plot twists". I understand the difficulty of making a huge, multimillion-player experience individualized, but if that was their goal, they failed f*cking miserably.
However, I now understand how they've designed the experience and leveling system, and that is absolutely fantastic. Basically, they start you out in an area (based on whatever race you pick), and each area has a bunch of different "stations" that you can attend. Each station has a different scenario or quest that you can complete simply by participating in them. Some stations are explore stations, and they reward you simply for walking up to them and discovering the area. Some stations are called "Vistas", and they are somewhat difficult to get to, but they give you a really pretty view of the landscape, which connects you to the game. The game gives you a lot of experience for visiting each station, even if the point is to just explore the map or to get a beautiful view of the scenery. Once you have discovered and completed ALL the stations in the area, you are handsomely rewarded with experience, "fame", and items.
So for the first few hours, all I was concerned about was leveling up as fast as possible (I tend to find the lower levels of any RPG intensely grinding and boring), but the way I was going about it was completely wrong. You don't level up by doing the same station over and over again; in fact doing that would takes forever. You level up by exploring and discovering the world; and the more I did that, the more I realized how much I was enjoying the game, and I stopped caring so much about gaining levels.
One thing that they do to make exploring any given area a lot more interesting and meaningful is having "waypoints" all over the zone, allowing you to quickly travel closer to the places you haven't discovered or completed yet.
Like if you look at this picture (which is just a small portion of a larger area), the grey diamonds with blue in the middle are waypoints, the yellow hearts are interactive quests, the red double-triangles are vistas, and tiny squares are "explorable areas", etc.
So in other words, if you play the game "on a mission" to level as fast as possible (which is the way most MMOs play from my experience), you're going to be pretty disappointed. Leveling actually takes quite a long time and isn't based on how many things you kill, but how much of the map you explore. You can also level from much more obscure thing like learning and using skills (such as crafting and cooking etc.), and gain a ton of experience that way. The game really discourages you from just rushing through it as fast as possible, which I've discovered I really like. I can forgive the
AWFULNESS of the personal story lines simply because you can completely ignore them and just explore the world instead.
One more thing I really like about the game is that each class seems extremely different and unique, which is (from my experience), somewhat rare for an MMO. Before, most classes could be broken down into 1 of 3 categories: Tank, Healer, or DPS, and they accomplish their role in similar, but maybe slightly different ways. In Guild Wars 2, those 3 roles have been somewhat blurred together, as every class is expected to do damage, and "tank" to some degree. No person can just sit in the front lines and get hit forever. In fact a few good hits to the face will kill you (or at least put you in a downed state). Instead, every player is expected to be very active in the battle, constantly dodging, blocking, and parrying, while assisting their downed allies and always being mindful of their positioning. In this way it really flips a middle finger to the classical MMO formula of everybody having a specific and boring role that you can't really deviate from.
You can learn more about it by reading this article or watching this video:
http://gw2101.gtm.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/combat/healing-death/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3y62pCQs-YI have more to say about each individual class, but I've got to go for now, so I'll finish the post later.
