Does Wooden Potatoes have a video summarizes the events of Season 1? I hear that's not playable for new players because the story seemed pretty fun. Can't look right now, at work unfortunately.
Yeah, what happened was that they had no infrastructure. When people talk about how much the game has evolved, they aren't kidding!
Season 1 starts out with them not taking a lot of things into consideration. The updates are every 14th days. Two weeks. That is no time to be able to do proper content, so what we got was mini story.
Some NPCs would be run away home at various parts in the world, and enemys would appear. You had to find a help rescue villagers and slowly uncovered a plot.
The way they build Season 1 was as temporary content. It was open world event based content that once introduced, the world was changed and they could never change it again. It was in Season 2 that they realeased they had to make something more replayable.
The quality of the narrative also changes, and the core characters are also mostly replaced by a new band of much more likeable ones. It's quite shocking how good it becomes.
In a way this is good for new players, because they are not going to miss out of anything narrative-wise that was essential in Season 1. Season 1 did have some incredible moments but some of them were tied to gameplay,
and you had to have been there.
That is an unsatisfying thing to say, and it's something that pisses people because they rightly feel they missed out.
Noteable, the core GW2 faction city in the game, got totally destroyed and weeks of story and event was about defending, escaping and retaking the city. It was pretty incredible stuff.
As was a open world raid that was added to the game. 200 random players had to separate and organize in 5 groups on a random map to try and work together, which is really difficult. This is not 40 people organized on raid with voice IP, but 200 people all talking at once.
I wouldn't worry about Season 1.
There is a youtube who has a 3 hour video that showed how the releases were sort of introduced. These released came mixed with everything else, and there where many patches and updates that came out which brought other quality of life improvements. They also added a
ingame recap video which is pretty good.
Those look absolutely stunning. Wish I could see them in a higher resolution. So small
I've always loved the aesthetic of the game. As proven, the zones ooze style, hoping they have substance though as others have said they are dull but, visually are amazing.
You've convinced me. I'm going to pick the expansion up and start playing again soon, hopefully will coincide with the new expansion launch too. This time mostly avoiding the hearts if possible and try to experience more of the dynamic events which I personally enjoy. I will also take time out to explore and discover things naturally.
The best way I can describe a better approach to playing it is looking at the Lazy Peon.
This was his first time with the game - He absolutely hates it, doesn't know how it works. Tries to play it like WoW. It's painful to look at, but unfortunately it's how a lot of people approach it
This was his second time playing - By request and lots of messages he got about how he should approach it differently, he ended up having a lot more fun with it the second time.
It's the best way I can illustrate my anecdotes, but of course I don't know if this is related to your experience!
You don't need to purchase the expansion before you're lvl 80. The expansion will become F2P once the second expansion comes out. We expect more about it to be revealed once the last living world update of season 3 gets released, in september I believe.
So what you could do, is to just remain a F2P player, get to lvl 80, buy Season 2 and really absorb that. And then if you're still really thirsty and engaged, you could buy the expansion Heart of Thorns (it's on sale fairly often) or simply wait until expansion 2 gets released, with expansion 1 becoming absorbed into the F2P aspect.
The expansion has some nifty things, but the only thing you can really do before lvl 80 is playing as the Reverent class, which is really cool. Every other class gets a new sub class, and many of them are wonderful, but they cannot be unlocked before lvl 80.
There is a goal that most people aim for in Guild Wars 2, which in my mind is one of the most rewarding solo player endevours I've ever untaken in a MMO,
and that is getting 100% world completion.
This requires you do to 100% exploration of every area, every zone. Every hidden jumping puzzles (and some of them are crazy), every Point of Interest, every vista. You're being awarded with a symbol next to your name, and it's a sort of "Mark of a veteran". This is a really really awesome challenge, and I recommend you aim for it as you explore the world.
At the end you also get some materials you need to create a legendary weapon, if that is your fancy.
This game is huge, and it's almost creepy how you'd find content hidden in places where it feels like you're not supposed to go.
Second thing I'll tell you that makes a big difference is that, the community organize via a LFG tool( when you press Y). Using this, people make squads where you, just right click and join, and then you're transported to where the player are.
This tool is invaluable because there are many places in the world where things are going on that requires 100s of players in the world at once, and so what happens is that you can sometimes end up in a map with "not a lot of people". You dont feel engaged and you're just running around aimlessly.
Well, thats why you can use the LFG tool to join people and be part of it.
This tool makes all the difference. But once again, it's one of those things you won't necessarily know about unless someone has told you to.
The thing is, a fuckton of things of going on at all times. GW2timer.com is an invalueable tool to really see what is going on and where. Then you can use the LFG tool to join a squad, and jump in.
GW2 added a megaserver which connects all servers into one. When 200 players are in one area, the game opens up another copy of the area, and 200 player fills up in that, and so on. And so if you have an area with a boss, you might have 800 player who quickly transport to that area, separated over 4 map instances. So you can see that the LFG tool is good for finding your friends and people you want to play with to swap to the correct map.
