Guild Wars 2 in 2021: My Full Thoughts on the MMORPG

I never thought I’d ever finish the entire base game of Guild Wars 2 but as of January 2021, both Mrs Stix and I managed to clear the base game, beginning our journey into Heart of Thorns, followed by Path of Fire.

This will be a collection of my thoughts on the way to max level.

Let me start off by stating that Guild Wars 2 is one of the few high quality MMORPGs left available to players. This is an MMO that is so contrastingly different to any other MMO on the market that if you haven’t played it, you’re doing yourself a disservice. You need to take a moment right now, navigate on over to the Guild Wars 2 website, and set the game to download. Trust me, you won’t regret it.

Guild Wars 2 is an expansive open-world MMORPG with a story that captivates you, combat that is engaging and intuitive, a world that is thrilling to explore, and features not only a unique questing system, but progression system allowing you so much creative freedom over your character and how you ultimately build them. This ranges from the default character customization options when creating your character for the first time (with each race having individual customization options,) but also to your build, your abilities, your selection of weapons to equip.. Guild Wars 2 provides more depth than I’ve ever encountered in an MMO, so much so that I often found myself completely overwhelmed. But that’s also where some of the fun comes into play, as you’re given the freedom to (as an example) play a tanky Guardian like myself, and hurl around thunderbolts with a staff. Yeah. However that’s also a double-edged sword, considering if you’re not running the optimal weapon-skill-gear build that everyone else runs then people won’t want you in their group, citing suboptimal parses.

Thankfully, however, Guild Wars 2 has an incredibly friendly community – more friendly than any other community I’ve come across in an MMO, much to my surprise. They’re always around and willing to help you out if you need assistance, and that sense of camaraderie is sorely missing from the genre.

But the game isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. While yes, the game is definitely one of the better titles out there, it’s worth noting that there are some aspects of the game – such as dungeons, that are so empty – so void of participation that it’s almost impossible to find people to play with outside of story instances. And this is highly disappointing, considering Mrs Stix and my favorite thing to do when playing MMOs is to experience dungeons and raids for the first time.

I have yet to participate in PvP, but that is mainly due to the fact that we were busy exploring the world, fully completing maps, playing with our viewers and guild members and just.. enjoying our time spent in-game. That’s the goal of the game after all, and while, yes, admittedly I didn’t have all that much fun initially, it definitely grew on me over time. As an MMO should. No game is perfect, especially when playing the first few hours of it. Thankfully it was gripping enough that we stuck with it and began to appreciate the unique gem this title is.