Guild Wars 2

Today we're going to divert yet again from the regular discussion of World of Warcraft, just like I have over the years with this blog.  

Guild Wars 2 is the MMO I respect more than almost any other, and the one I keep at arm's length even though I've quietly poured a serious number of hours into it. That's the contradiction I want to be honest about. "Keep at arms length" makes it sound like I've barely touched the thing. I haven't. I've got a max-level character of every class in that game, because the altoholic in me doesn't switch off just because I've wandered out of Azeroth. The distance was never about playtime. It's about where home is.

Start with why I respect it, because that part is easy. GW2 took a hard look at everything that grinds you down in a traditional MMO and designed those things out. No subscription, you buy the box and you're in, play a session a year if you want and nobody's charging you for the privilege. No gear treadmill, once you hit max stats they mostly stay there, so a friend who quit for two years can come back and not be three tiers of armor behind you. The quest hubs with the yellow exclamation points are gone, replaced with dynamic events that just happen in the world whether you're there or not. Even the holy trinity got tossed. Everybody brings some support, everybody brings some damage, and the "we can't run tonight, we don't have a healer" problem largely evaporates.

And here's the part that undercuts my own statement about being someone who only admires GW2 from afar. I've actually done the content. My main is completely caught up on the story, all the way through the expansions, the whole through-line. One of my alts is nearly there too. Add in a max-level character of every class and you are not describing a tourist. You're describing someone who has put real, sustained time into a game he keeps claiming he only respects from the sidelines. So let me drop the pretense. I like GW2. I play GW2. I've finished things in GW2 that most people never get to.

So why the distance, then, if I'm clearly in there swinging?

Because it never became home, and after seventeen years I've learned that home is a real thing in this hobby, not just a figure of speech. WoW is where the muscle memory lives, where the friends are, where the version of me that's been logging in since Burning Crusade actually resides. GW2 is the extraordinary place I keep a second residence and genuinely enjoy, but I've never moved in. When I've got one MMO night in a week, it goes to Azeroth almost every time. Not because GW2 is the lesser game, but because the pull of the place you've lived for nineteen years is not a rational thing.

There's a smaller piece to it, and it's the treadmill. GW2 gently removes the carrot on the stick, and it turns out my lizard brain misses the carrot. I like logging in and knowing there's a number a little higher than yesterday, a piece of gear I'm chasing, a reason the session counted. GW2 hands you freedom instead, and freedom is a harder thing to build a nightly habit around than a grind is. I completed the content because finishing things is what I do. But the loop that pulls me back night after night is a WoW-shaped loop, and GW2 was built, on purpose, without one.

So I respect it from a distance, and I mean respect, not the backhanded version. GW2 is what happens when a studio has the nerve to question the parts of the genre everyone else treats as load-bearing. I've spent enough hours in it to say that from experience rather than from the sidelines. It's just never going to be home, because I already have one of those, and nineteen years in, it isn't going anywhere.

Try it. It might be the game you didn't know you wanted. It turned out to be more of one for me than I usually let on.

That's it for now! 

Cheers! 

Joar