Guild Wars 2 Launch Review - Gems are excitement - Nerd Age

Guild Wars 2 has launched and had some major hiccups. We are going to go down some of these for you.

Guild Wars 2 and the non-working cash shop

For large portions of the early release, the cash shop was not working properly. NCsoft did address these problems but many people were without items they paid for. The largest problem was the fact that many people went without gems. We ourselves bought some gems to test it. We did not receive them. We did of course receive an e-mail that they were working on it.

Matchmaking and multiplayer in Guild Wars 2

As with many games, the matchmaking is functional but not phenomenal. Playing with randoms is a roll of the dice. There were some connection errors during the matches. We hope that the process will be much smoother later on. Likewise much of the server vs server warfare is a mess. It’s a huge crash of two blobs throwing fireballs at each other. If you are not a ranged character, there are some points where you will be less than useful. Unless you have exceptional skills it can be quite annoying to play a melee character.

The disaster of basic quests

In one of my very first quests after release, I faced a new bug. I literally got stuck in the introductory quest. It caught me in a perpetual loop of completing the quest and being sent back to it. This was the basic Asura quest. Even logging out did not help, as I would be sent right back into the aforementioned quest. This is absolutely ridiculous for something people call a AAA title. You probably won’t hear about this from other outlets either. AAA titles are beyond criticism, of course.

It’s not all bad in Guild Wars 2

The game itself has a lot to do. There are many mini-games and vistas to explore in the current version. Guilds work well now. The combat still feels very good. Overall we like the game, but it feels so average when bogged down by the many bugs left in. This is less a $60 game and more a $30 indie title until the bugs are ironed out. Our advice is to wait for a price drop before you get into this. This game is sadly yet another symptom of the rush to market that many developers get caught up in. Polish is just simply absent from this title. If you still are interested then check it out on the NCsoft site.