WTF! I Did NOT Expect Guild Wars 2 To Get THIS Good…

i've hit level 80 and now the rest of guild wars 2 is opening up to me three horizontal expansions the whole mount system fractals masteries a lot to do a lot to progress but what's more important today and what surprised me is just how much i have enjoyed the journey so far turns out what guild wars 2 shipped in 2012 in some ways is still beyond what many games even try to do now and when we last left off i was milling around in the 30s a lot has happened since then including this yeah turns out the world bosses are pretty damn big okay there's a lot to get through today as i finish my journey to end game of guild wars 2. let's go big picture the journey continued as you'd expect for guild wars right clearing maps getting a new personal story chapter every 10 levels and then just rinse and repeat till 80. well the thing is as i climb those levels doing that just got more and more interesting where the personal story had been good enough but maybe a bit more minor it was now big the zones themselves started to get more intricate suddenly i was doing multi-stage attacks on citadels just via events i'd bump into in the world and all of this with outstanding music atmosphere and level design the guild wars 2 leans more heavily on its open world than most mmos and it really does show it's really great stuff the quality just keeps rising so let's get into it with the story okay for the mega tldr my character is established in the world i end up joining the order of whispers and we've got the big looming threat of the undead dragon zaitan so within the order i slowly go up the ranks along with my mentor tibult a very likable char now this big zeitan threat is looming but initially it's smaller stuff spy quests helping guagans which are funny-looking fellows but all of that changes with the battle of claw island chapter six of the story but to say chapter six out of eight makes it sound like the battle of claw island is near the end of the story well the thing is by runtime that's not the case a chapter six and seven clock in at four hours between them chapter eight is over four hours alone there is a boatload of content here and the shocking thing is it's pretty damn good it turns out that guild wars 2 really can do spectacle the battle of claw island sees us get our arses kicked it's pretty cool you actually do feel the tension built it finally makes that undead threat just feel real and just when we think we're done lion's arch the capital also gets attacked and from there we go into one of the best quests yet a light in the darkness it's a vision from the pale tree that sees us essentially glimpse the future and learn of ore which is the first human kingdom of tyria that fell kind of atlantis style only for zaitan to raise it back up and use it as fuel for his undead so at this stage the story the plot is ratcheting up but also i'm getting more invested in the lore there is more of a feeling of a rich sense of history something you definitely get a lot more of if you're also aware of the plot of guild wars 1. so it's here that i start to feel arenanet actually flex and we get to see a bit more of treheurne who ends up being one of the more important characters in the story but it's all quite cool i mean treharne's got a really neat voice some some fun stuff there we've got a vision sequency thing going on i mean those are always fun but of course right after that oh my order's base gets attacked and then with it defended it's time to retake claw island in another big attack so to boil down the content there we get a big base defense that's really well themed we get an upping of the stakes a future vision the rescue of our comrades and a big offensive all in one chain of quests and that's what i like here it is the story there is very little filler it's all fully voiced and i think for sure some of their writing can be a little bit simple and clunky at times but overall it does come together to be more than the sum of its parts and then they do a great job with the likes of the sound effects building the tension up it is just a great experience it's not some sort of heart-pounding thriller but it certainly is enough to get you feeling immersed interior and want to know what happens next so mission accomplished and there's even more here there's a death or two but i'll leave those for you to experience yourself at this stage i was grooving chapter six was finished so it was time to go back out into the world and this is where things continue to get better guild wars 2's maps are bloody fantastic and this time around i even bump into a world boss and that's really cool so the scale that they've achieved here is quite remarkable not just in the world boss but also in the breadth and scope and sheer size of the world it feels damn good now there'd be too much for me to just walk you through everything so i'll give you the highlights first variety the undead swamp of spark fly fan is really cool we've got charon char action and fire heart rise giving you more of a war vibe and then the lovely winter getaway of timberline falls the court area which is how we refer to the content that shipped in base guild wars 2 is all about doing the archetypes well the fire heart i found was particularly strong though the atmosphere the sounds the theming of the gameplay it just perfectly captured the tenuous war position that these char are in and here is really where the zone mechanics of this game shine doing a renowned heart in a base only to see an event spawn nearby so i do that event but then that event leads me to finding a contested waypoint which then i recapture from the opposing charge of the friendly char and then that leads me into a multi-stage event to take control of a mine and then shortly after that i come upon a bunch of char attacking a flame legion citadel so again i embark on a multi-stage event that ends up with me and a bunch of other players killing the big boss in the citadel cool the best word to describe this is flow guild wars 2's world perfectly guides you from place to place always happy to have you thinking i want to do this poi that poi do this renowned heart but then oh you bump into an event and your journey just happens from there and that's how this game can be a total time vampire and i actually do mean that in a very good way because you just feel immersed in these zones immersed in the gameplay and what i then love is some of the details because while doing all of this one thing that i start doing is keeping up a kill streak because even without a booster kill xp is actually great in this game even at higher levels yeah and a lot of that is because of this game's functionally infinite leveling of course once you hit level 80 if you level again you just get masteries right you just keep on filling that bar and that means that they have no incentive to slow things down absurdly and that just keeps every little bit of your gameplay feeling rewarding and speaking of rewarding well to cuddle is just where the game shines this is a world of warcraft world boss right it's what i'm used to now this is a guild wars 2 world boss it's pretty big isn't it being my first time this gameplay absolutely sucks almost as much as my frame rate perhaps more hopefully they get the engine upgrades that they've been working on as this year rolls out but still from the entrance of this boss right through to its defeat the spectacle is off the charts compared to what i am used to we can talk about tight gameplay mechanics till the cows come home and honestly guild wars 2 is not the tightest but a massive part of a game is in fact the fantasy it's the sights it's the sounds it's the things your character does this is a massive undead dragon and fighting it does feel like me and a whole bunch of other people are fighting a massive undead dragon not just a hitbox with health that happens to have a dragon model so to speak even just the way it's animated the way it moves around the world it feels damn good the mechanics are simple enough there's a burn phase and then a bit where the team just splits off to do multiple different objective defenses and that's all assisted by jump pads of course though if you fail those side objectives you actually can lose and this stuff all happens in a global timer too so for many people chaining world bosses is a very valid way to play this game of course you get big boxes of loot in return not that i really understand what half their contents actually do at this stage soon enough though i was level 70. so it's time for the penultimate story chapter chapter 7 sees the three orders band together forming the pact with traherne as its leader and me as his number two and with a mix of i'd say spec op style missions and then the massive battle for fort trinity this chapter delivers even more fantastic content seriously the for trinity segment does not mess around you do have this looming feeling of a massive undead threat and well whenever hard military decisions have to be made they don't shy away from that and i don't mean this in some sort of oh the game is so edgy and cool i mean it just feels like actual things that have happened in this world and that's good you do actually get a sense that many people die at fort trinity and that makes the zeitan struggle feel like an actual campaign and the thing is they're not doing funny goofs and quips and stuff like that they're actually sticking to their tone when they want to which modern games don't always do a great job of so i was very happy about that essentially it's serious enough that you actually will take the events in this world at face value and you will actually bother paying attention to the world the for trinity battle didn't feel like a quest it felt like an event that happened in the history of this world that they're building strong stuff and it's about to get even better as i dive into my last segment of world content with fort trinity safe i decide to continue leveling but i head south to ore the fallen civilization resurrected by zyton here i find three zones full of exploration and struggle as the packed forces barely maintain a foothold and the thing is gameplay and map design reflects this there are no renown hearts the things that are analogous to a world of warcraft bonus objective a renown heart is generally helping a local with a problem but that doesn't really fit here they've actually designed this so that the packed forces can be significantly beaten back with loads of the waypoints inaccessible so these zones are all exploration pois vistas hero challenges events and those events are often multi-stage ones and those are based off zone-wide objectives so i soon find myself in a massive group of players helping packed forces reach a central control point and that sounds like a very mechanical way of describing it but the thing is this is after i've seen loads of pact members die at trinity right after i've been invested in this campaign i now head out and i see the story actually reflected in how the maps ab and flow with their different events and what really sold me was just the music the sounds the layout or absolutely feels ancient it feels like a fallen kingdom risen from the depths in gameplay and in execution in the sounds in the sights i think that it does achieve so much more than world of warcraft's 2019 take on nazitar i think that's something we need to think about even at this early stage in 2012 guild wars 2 was showing us what a zone in an mmo can be and to this day very few have listened and while this goes on i finally learned how to play the game right elementalist as i covered last time it's essentially avatar meets mage and it leans a lot more towards avatar if you're in a double dagger build now i finally started to use all of my elemental stances all of the time so i rush in with my air closer that turns me into like a moving ball of lightning i then swap into earth stacking loads of bleeds and blowing all my cooldowns i then swap into fire to unleash all that it has at which point i could pop over to water for a quick heal or wait a little bit and return to air and kind of repeat that process all while i've of course got the other abilities that i can customize onto my character as well like being able to just rain lightning rain fire summon an elemental and the thing then is that swapping stances actually casts an ability based on how you've built your character and what stance you're swapping into so when i swap into air it casts a lightning bolt in my target so it ends up being a highly engaging high apm playstyle with a fair bit of positional depth especially when you're weaving things around having to use your own dodges because yeah you see an enemy wind up to do a really big knockback attack you hit the dodge key you'll get iframes and you'll dodge it feels pretty good now a lot of the positional stuff is just simple as an example i have a knockback in my air stance and then i've got churning earth which is a casted aoe that puts a massive bleed on it just feels really cool so it's pretty good to be in air stance use the knockback swap over to earth do the big aoe it just feels great and in that same sort of thing where in vanilla wow you would be just trying to avoid your enemy swing timer to get every ounce out of a limited amount of mechanics at your disposal you actually do get that here with some of the positional gameplay now guild wars 2 has got weaknesses i think when it comes to the clarity of hits some sound effects and some visual effects but still for elementalists it comes together brilliantly and that just means i cannot wait to try advanced classes especially the weaver advanced class of course all those advanced classes are their own things to level up so that's going to be a reason to do a bunch of content which is fine i'm level 80 but i've only cleared 33 percent of corteria so there's a lot to do and now i draw things to a close after immersing myself in the open world of ore it was time to begin the final campaign and i'm not going to spoil the whole thing here but suffice to say it was a mostly great four hours the last mission had an annoying bug and there are a few places where i think a bit more connective tissue could have been warranted and honestly the final fight with zeitan i thought was pretty big let down mechanically even though spectacle-wise it was neat but in spite of all that it is an engaging narrative you are going to the depths of this fallen civilization it's just pretty cool and while the titan fight's a bit disappointing the sheer scale and spectacle is on point and because this narrative has been really well built up in the previous two chapters you feel the weight of everything that's going on they keep up the tone too it's war people die you really feel like things have happened in the world and they even finish it on a musical number now sure it's no flow right it's no dragon song but it is a nice vocal track to cap off the story and i really appreciate the effort there to be honest so all i can say is that where i am now at the end of the personal story i look at the ui and i see that i've got five living world seasons all full of narrative to do and three expansions worth of story that is a massive amount of content in a game that is just cozy to play and all with no pressure and really for a lot of people i think that can just hit the spot that's where i'm at with guild wars 2. i've got to say my initial impressions were strong and i'm just thrilled that i can now sit down and say that it gets better and better as you go on and there's one or two bits maybe in the middle where there's one or two zones that just i began to feel a little bit slow in the pace but seriously once i hit like level 50 60 70 the narrative is you know picking up and pace all that stuff man you just get into the flow with this game and the hours evaporate it's a goddamn time vampire so i cannot wait to get involved in some of the more intricate maps that i've seen from well from looking at ice brewed saga plate i can't wait to unlock more of the mounts i only have a raptor but there's way more and i've got the masteries for my raptor to make it better and then all the breadth of content that this game actually does have to offer so hearing that players have doubled that was pretty damn nice when i got to do that in the previous guild wars 2 video we did it just makes me think maybe in an mmo market where there's multiple successful games i.e people are playing yes world warcraft but also other things and maybe people are a bit more willing to play a few different games maybe that's a market where guild wars 2 can actually do really damn well and where its unique strengths can stand out i think this game is probably probably very enjoyable for far more people than uh i've even given it a shot so there you go pretty damn happy time i hope you found today's video to be interesting let me know if you end up trying based on this and till the next video i'll see you later and don't worry there will be a next one because i'm in [Music]

Channel: Bellular Gaming

Views: 194,087

Keywords: guild wars 2, guild wars 2 2022, guild wars 2 living world, gw2, gw2 bellular, bellular gw2, guild wars 2 gameplay, guild wars 2 personal story, should I play guild wars 2, guild wars 2 end of dragons, end of dragons, path of fire, heart of thorns, EoD, bellular, bellular gaming

Id: 7W4DwmJxvX0

Length: 19min 3sec (1143 seconds)

Published: Tue May 31 2022