I will say one other thing though: I still remember the ORIGINAL Guild Wars. Back when it first came out. Now THAT was different... there wasnt really anything else like it. Why they couldnt have just stuck to the formula it created initially, I dont know. At least we'd have something INTERESTING on our hands maybe.
Oh man, the original Guild Wars was an amazing game. So ahead of it's time. So ahead of its time in fact, that nothing has even been able to replicate its virtues, not even Guild Wars 2.
The thing that made GW1 so amazing though wasn't the PvE (which I found to be lackluster myself, even though at the very least it was extremely story driven), it was the PvP.
In Guild Wars 1 you could start a max level PvP character from the very beginning, and just skip all the hassle and bull**** of the infamously grindy PvE portion of any given MMO.
And man, was the PvP fun. What made GW2 pvp fun was simply the diversity of options the game afforded you. Whatever you can think of, you could it. It wasn't like the typical MMO where it's tank/healer/DPS. The game had 8 classes, and any class could become a hybrid with any other class, giving you an incredible amount of options. Each class had around 100 skills, and the player could have 8 skills in their skillbar, so you do the math. The amount of class customization (and not in a retarded, superficial way) was near limitless.
The kind of things you would experience in PvP would need to be seen to be believed. You never
KNEW what you were going to encounter next, because the only bottleneck to potential builds was each player's creativity. Sure, there were cookie-cutter builds that you saw often, but there were so many ways to counter them that generally, anything which become too popular was like a curse upon itself.
The battle interactions were definitely the most exciting thing I've ever experienced in an MMO or RPG pvp setting. My god, the game had MAGE battles. Seriously, it was basically Harry Potter. Anything you wanted to do, you could do. Massive direct damage? Check. AoE death over a large area? Check. Damage over time that also heals you? Check. Oh what's that, you don't want your opponent to cast spells at all? You could create an entire build whose only job was to cripple enemy mages, countering every spell they attempted to cast and shutting them down to near uselessness, allowing your team to finish them off.
One of the things that really made it shine were the amount of proactive/reactive choices the player was forced to make at any given time. Imagine as a healer, your teammates are dying, and your only job is to save them. But you have a hex on you which deals massive damage each time you cast a spell. Do you continue to heal your friends, putting your own life in danger, or wait until it wears off, and hope you can save what's left?
Of course allies could then take any kind of negative hex or curse off of you, and sometimes even place it on somebody else.
I mean...you know what I'm done trying to explain it. It was incredible. Play, counterplay, proactive, reactive, outsmart your opponent, outdamage your opponent, punish him for every action, or prevent him from even taking action. It was all there, you could do it.
I was really hoping that they would take this same philosophy and apply it to Guild Wars 2, but they most definitely did not. The classes became much more cookie-cutter, the cross-class hybridization was removed, and apparently since the instanced-based server architecture of the first game had been removed in favor of the typical mass server MMO style, the game can't handle the same kind of quick-reflex mechanics the original one had, so they had to drop that in favor of a more...traditional MMO approach (we'll all do a bunch of damage weeeeeee!)
