Something I forgot to mention was the levelling system.
In a game like WoW, you level and get access to new areas that contain mobs and quests aimed at your new level, however, at the same time you lose a reason to play the lower level areas as they won't give the same rewards, and the content ceases to be challenging.
With GW2's system of dynamic delevelling, any content at or below your level remains challenging, and still gives rewards appropriate to your level, both gear drops (I was getting level 12 gear off level 2 mobs) and XP. That means that ultimately, once you've hit endgame there will be a
lot more content that is still rewarding to play, without having to wait for an expansion (and it also means that expansions can include content for all levels).
Also by preventing high level characters from
farming low level areas for items and mats, the game's AH becomes much more accessible to low level characters, as they become the only ones who can get low level gear drops, and are at no disadvantage when gathering mats for their level.
There are a couple of other nice choices that Arenanet made when developing GW2:
- Gathering nodes are instanced, so there's no competition for them and they can't become scarce through excessive numbers of players farming them. You can mine out a node and it'll vanish from your screen, but it'll still be there to the guy who followed you to it. This means that crafting mats, and gear made from them, will have constant availability that matches the server population.
- When you gather crafting mats, you can send them to your bank from anywhere, and they don't technically take up any space there, as each type of material goes into one huge stack. Because of this, you won't need bag space, or to travel to towns to vendor items, anywhere near as much as you do in WoW. You can also access your bank while at any crafting station saving travelling in town.
- While your gathering tools do wear out and will need to be replaced, you don't need to grind your way up through a gathering profession in order to collect high level mats. You just buy high enough level gathering tools (and they don't take up bag slots as they have slots on the character pane).
- Once you've learned a profession, you don't lose the skillpoints gained for it, when you swap to another profession. It just cost to swap, which scales in cost as your character levels.
- All gear drops, or items you no longer need can be salvaged, giving you another source of crafting mats. So long as you have salvaging kits on you, you can do this from anywhere (and again, send the salvaged mats to your bank from anywhere). If you can afford higher level salvaging kits, you even have a chance of getting back the enhancements that may be on gear, as well as rarer crafting mats.
- The fast travel system, like WoW's flight-points pre-cata, opens up waypoints once you've discovered them. However, unlike WoW, you don't need to be at a point to travel to another. You can teleport to any waypoint in your zone (that hasn't been taken over by mobs as part of the dynamic questing system
), from anywhere in that zone. You don't need a mount when you can get from anywhere to a town or city, instantly. Also, cities have portals to other cities (how many WoW players were happy to see those go?).
Little things like these make the game a lot more bearable, and really it all stems from one thing. The game is not subscription, and Arenanet, unlike Blizzard, don't need to make doing anything in the game take as long as possible, so as to waste as much of a subscriber's time as possible.
Fixing little things is something they may well have learned from the developers of EVE, who since they lost a lot of players after a badly thought out expansion, now have a team of people constantly working on 'little things', most of them suggested and voted upon by the players. An expansion consisting almost entirely of small fixes to long outstanding issues is what got EVE's customers to come back. A lot of small issues can add up to the point where the game becomes less bearable, and simply adding major new features and content while ignoring them, is a sign of poor development.
The one overwhelming impression I've got from playing the GW2 beta, is that the game really is incredibly polished, especially in comparison to WoW, but also when compared to most other games I've played (and that's a huge number of games).
I know where the money from my cancelled WoW subscription will be going.
