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I don't have my copy yet, but Meowthsan let me diddle on his. I went in hoping for the best but expecting mediocre. I played primarily as an Engineer and Thief for a little while.
What I liked:
- The movement, it handles almost exactly like WoW. The only exception being I couldn't jumping spin attack to kite. Intentional or not, it's something I'm OK with. With the exception of the the steepest hills, you can walk anywhere. I even ended up platforming my way down a cliff - something I can't do in some games because lolinvisible walls here for no reason. I didn't have any rubber banding or character jittering while moving on steep surfaces either, like I've had in other games. All fences and other things I like to jump over were low enough to jump over, I never had a point where I had to walk around something that wasn't a tall wall, cliff, etc. The dodging mechanic works nicely too, many of the mobs have not-so-obvious yet avoidable attacks. Again, didn't PvP, can't say with players.
- The abilities. The skills are few enough that you don't need to keybind half your keyboard, but multi-faceted in their use so I didn't feel like I lacked certain abilities (I usually had a skill to do everything - kite, burst, interrupt, aoe, etc), and if I didn't, weapon switching is easy peasy. Skillsets are more concise in using them, but still broad in their use.
- The events, I enjoyed these. They feel spontaneous, and were effective in promoting teamwork with other players. They were also widely ranging in the types of events, and weren't simply "kill these guys".
- Waypoints, the way these are used is perfect. Talk to a scout and they show you where they are, and once you reach them by foot, you can teleport to them from then on. It's like flightmasters, except there's more of them and you don't have to wait while you watch yourself flying over an area for the umpteenth time.
- Earning skill points by doing deeds. As opposed to simply leveling. It looks like a far better, refined version of GW1's way of acquiring elite skills.
- I had surprising few bugs and the load times were just fine.
- The aesthetics were pleasing, and voice overs do a hell of a lot in creating an epic feeling.
- Choices in how you do the journey. I had a choice at one point to decide if I wanted to dip a weapon I helped a smith make into a gryphons blood to finish it and use it against a boss, or to ask for help from the spirit of the wolf to aid me against said boss.
What I disliked:
- The illusions of choice. This is something I don't like, and it happens in a ton of games. You can do this, or you can do that, but in the end, the result ends up being the same. Even though I was given the choice of the wolf or the weapon in aforementioned quest, the result would have been the same - the guy would have died. Although I dunno how the wolf does it, but the weapon route was fucking awesome, and I enjoyed being a BAMF.
- Turrets, these things are limited in use, long in CD and immobile. I found out that if you pick up your turret as opposed to just blowing it up, you get a shorter CD. Unfortunately it's a flat 5 second reduction, with my Rifle Turret being 20s (full CD) and my flame turret being a 35s CD. I know later on there are ways to repair them, and there is about 3-4 turrets I haven't seen, but I don't expect anything spectacular.
- Not enough XP, I had to do many events multiple times. I hit a stonewall around lvl 7, where all the quests I could do where done, I did probably every event atleast once, and my Journey recommended that I be level 10 before doing the next part of it.
- The starting dye palettes. You'd think it would start with your basic red, green, blue, black, white. There was no normal anything. And most of the colors were pukish.
- Many of the (favor) quests lack anything extraordinary. Most involved killing guys, retrieving items or interacting with things. I didn't find any epic favor quests.
- The lack of info. I couldn't tell who was being targeted by what, what people where targeting, what profession they were, or inspect what they were wearing. I did like being able to see what every mob does in combat though.
- The targeting annoyed me at times because it didn't seem to stay put. Sometimes if I turned away, or I turned more towards another target, it would switch on it's own.
- Lack of World PvP. The constant and pervasive threat of potentially being killed by opposing players was a thrill in Warcraft and other games that I took for granted before playing GW2.
- Lack of ugly characters. I was able to find 1 ugly male norn face, and no ugly or even older than 25 faces for norn females. I didn't look at the other races because cmon, norn master race.
"Ok we aren't such things and birds are pretty advanced. They fly and shit from anywhere they want. While we sit on our automatic toilets, they're shitting on people and my car while a cool breeze tickles their anus. That's the life."
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