Was literally going to make the same thread.
I played WoW since Euro-Release and literally only stopped playing it to a semi-hardcore level this December. This and TERA literally have me so excited for the genre again, I genuinely cannot wait for both releases.
There is an incredibly detailed thread on my old guilds website, where a lot of the people plan on migrating to GW2 when it hits, I'll copy and paste all the info as the level of detail in this game is stunning, even things such as combat underwater have had an insane level of time put into them.
Certain weapons cannot be used underwater for example, and the logical majority of spells that would be effected by being submerged in water change completely. Fireball for example, turns into a lump of rock that is shot at the enemy.
What really sells me is their promise of no flying mounts ever, which quite frankly destroy the feeling of immersion and the sensation built up by having such an incredibly designed game world. That and WvWvW looks too badass for words (more info below).
Anyway, I'll copy some of the information into here and add some more recent stuff:
On W v W v W[/u]
A good week for Guild Wars 2 news!
You know how a lot of vanilla players often reminisce about the good old days of Alterac Valley and its games that lasted for a day or more. No mindless rushing past each other to get to the end NPC, but actually pushing each other away from objectives and completing PVE quests to strengthen the NPCs or launch special assaults like the gryphons or giant Treant/Ice Elemental.
Well Arenanet miss it as well. Which is why theyve designed WvWvW this way. Heres a blog and then some key points:
http://www.arena.net/blog/mike-ferguson ... d-vs-world
-Battles have no final objective to obtain, they simply run on a time limit. Each battle lasts for TWO WEEKS.
-When a battle ends, scores are tallied up and new matches are formed. Losing realms will be pitted against losing realms and thetop realms will compete against each other. The downtime between matches is just a few minutes.
-You can level up in PVP. Enemies you kill will drop loot, cash and award experience. Loot dropped is randomly awarded as with monsters and isnt taken from the other players inventory.
-You dont just have to control objectives, but also complete dynamic events that could recruit help from some of the maps residents.
-Siege Weapons to knock through the doors of enemy keeps. Or the walls.
-Potential maximum amount of players = 1200 per realm. Thats 3600 players.
-You can join as a level 1 and get artificially bumped up to max level so you dont feel like youre useless.
This is what constitutes the Badlands, as you can see there are 3 main islands, each world starts out with a keep on each. Players then have to conquer the rest of the continent that they start with, the middle island, and eventually progress in to each others lands.
Bear in mind this is not a small endeavour, as previously stated, each battle lasts for 2 WEEKS.
The Arena-Net blog probably surmises it the best, as is previously linked.
On PvE[/u]
This is probably one of the bigger selling points of GW2 for me.
So far, there are 8 unique dungeons in the game, the first of which can be accessed at lvl 35. Disregard the WoW model for dungeons and instances completely, this rewrites the format.
Similar to WoW, dungeons are instanced zones. However, there are FOUR possible ways to do each dungeon, each uniquely and wholly different to each other so much so that in effect there are 32 different dungeons upon release. I'm not going to list the key features, most of it can be seen here:
http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/dungeons/The concept of a story mode is absolutely perfect. The problem with the WoW model for dungeons (which undoubtedly is very successful), means that the inclusion of heavy story in a dungeon ultimately hinders the enjoyment in the long run.
Looking at the 4.3 examples where each of the 3 new 5 mans were laden with lore and story, it was fine the first run through of each, but as people did them more and more times the story and various mini-cinematics simply became a hindrance to fast-running the dungeons and ultimately made them more of a chore than an enjoyable portion of the game. (Just to note, the WoW model required running said dungeons x-times a week to gain a form of currency that was exhanged for gear, it's a very repetitive and boring system).
Coupled with the fact that the trinity of Healer, DPS, and Tank classes are non-existent, groups can be formed of absoloutely any combination of players you like, making the process faster and less restrictive.
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Those are basically the two main dynamics of any MMO so that's all I can be bothered to cover.
There is ample material out there for people to trawl through if you're still interested after this wall of text. If you can't be bothered trawling through the internet, MMO-Champion has one giant mega-thread that summarises absoloutely everything we currently know about the game in the first post which can be found here:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/892106-Guild-Wars-2-The-One-Thread?highlight=guild+warsTL;DR - This shit is the BAAAAWS where you kill giant mother-fuckers on a scale like this:
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