Guild Wars 2: The 1st MMO to Get Avatar Individuality Right

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of gaming and virtual world fashion

I'm incredibly excited about Guild Wars 2, which has its first beta event for players who've pre-ordered the game this weekend. This is also the first beta event being run that doesn't have a non-disclosure agreement hovering over it, so I can finally gush about why I'm so madly in love with this MMO. It boils down to one thing that Guild Wars 2 does better than any other MMORPG: It makes you and your avatar feel like an individual, even in a crowd, right from your very first level.

That's thanks to these three innovative features:

Character Customization Extends Beyond your Appearance

The days of choosing between five avatar presets seem to be almost behind us, so it's unsurprising that GW2 allows for a fair amount of customization of your avatar's face and body. What did take me by surprise is how character customization extends to your character's background and personality. Each race has a set of questions that come immediately after the more familiar part of character customization.

These questions affect you in some obvious ways (for example, this is how rangers select their companions and how other classes select class specific masks and accessories), but they also help define your character's attitude and past. The area quests may be the same for everyone nearby, but your answers to these questions can make your story quest differ wildly from your friends', even if they're the same class and race.

Custom Colour Palettes Make Even Newbie Gear Distinct

The original Guild Wars had a bit of this as well, but Guild Wars 2 seems to have expanded on it somewhat. Each peice of equipment has one to four colour slots which you can fill with the colours of your choice to make even the most basic and common outfit look distinct. 

Something that makes this feature stand out even more is comparing it to one of the latest additions to another recent MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic. They recently added a feature that they'd been bragging about since before the game's December launch, the ability to match all your pieces of armour with your chest piece. As cool as this sounds, most of the armour in SWTOR is black, brown, or beige, which means that colour matching is not exactly life-changing. The colour palette in SWTOR is so drab it drives me crazy, so I'll take GW2's customizable palettes any day.

Weapon Skills Let you Play your Way, no Matter What Class you Are

This may get a bit technical, so bear with me. In Guild Wars 2, most of your fighting skills aren't restricted by level. Every class has access to a half dozen weapons and offhands, each which come with their own skills that are unique to that class. If you don't quite follow what I mean, take a minute to watch this overview of the Thief weapon skills: 

 

The skills are unlocked by killing enemies with your weapon instead of just levelling (unlike almost every other MMORPG), so right from the beginning a thief using a bow will play quite differently than a thief using daggers... and there's nothing to stop you from switching between them, either!

Many classes offer weapons skills that are so diverse that you can decide to play the same class as a tank, a damage-dealer or even a support character. There is far less of a need to pick a class based on your skills or play style because the classes are so flexible in terms of all these classic, pre-defined roles. Why is this so important to making a unique character? Ultimately, what makes your character the most unique isn't how you look or what you wear, it's how you play (though looking great still helps!)

If I've piqued your curiosity, be sure to check out the Guild Wars 2 site. The game has no subscription, so it will definitely be my guilt-free pleasure this summer!

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Iris Ophelia (Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.

Comments

[Kitty Revolver]

I hate everyone that can play this amazing game! I am on a mac and I really want to play, but buying windows is too expensive for bootcamp and I am unsure how Wine is going to effect my computer if I run it, making me nervous about getting my computer damaged. Help or anything about Wine or where I can find a cheap copy of windows (I would prefer not to do ebay) would be life saving!

[Iris Ophelia]

I'm running it on my iMac in Bootcamp, though I'm not sure where a good place to get a cheap copy of windows is. Keep your eyes peeled and fingers crossed for sales, or ask a friend to use theirs?

[Rin Tae]

I am excited about this game as well. I played the first one and have waited for this one to appear finally.

[Ezra]

Boo. It's digitally sold out somehow. I'll check it out whenever purchases are open again. I very much enjoyed the first Guild Wars and played through all expansions except the very last I believe.

[Aleida]

Enjoying the Guild Wars BWE this weekend :D really impressed by the character customization, a big improved compared to the original game. I also like you can add personality to your character during the creation process (attitude, past).

Already played a couple of personal story quests and they are quite entertaining. Really glad professions can use various weapons. Running around as a mesmer with a sword and pistol instead of a wand is quite a nice change!

I must say I felt a little overwhelmed during the first minutes of gameplay (with all my fellow BWE-ers running around), but I'm definitely looking forward to the release of the full game.

[Menno Ophelia]

This is definitely not your average mmo and it took me a little while to get the hang of it. With that said, from what i have seen so far, it is pretty mind blowing.

1: I love it that your skills are tied to your weapons. So try as many weapons as you can early on, and unlock those skills attached to it. (You unlock them by just playing with it)

2: Even if it is in Beta, the character creation is pretty awesome. Tweak you shall!

3: Being a little spoiled with the swotr dialogue option, GW2 has great cut scenes and all the npc's are voiced so there is not a lot of old school quest reading.

4: Instead of gathering a billion quests to do, GW2 flows more naturally so it feels like you are being led into events instead of collecting them. It makes you want to discover more and not being stopped by picking up quests. Whenever there is an event, in the area you are questing in, you can simply join.

5: When you are wounded and about to die, you have the change to fight back until your enemy is killed that wounded you (Can be done by you or by people who are in that event). If you succeed, you are back on your feet again.

6: There is no specific healing class, everyone can heal and resurrect. (big yay)

7: If there is anything you can pick up, you sure as hell can fight with it (Fish, bottle, rock, Metal bar etc etc)

8: The art work is pretty great (Even the little icons in the ui), score is great and the voice acting is good (Which ncsoft can fuck up)

9: I have tried a Engineer (Norn). Awesome race and a great starting area. And the Engineer is one awesome class.
I have tried a Hunter (Charr) I love their whole bad ass charr attitude. As a hunter you can pick 3 pretty awesome pets (each race has different options)
I have just tried a Necromancer (human). I never really like to play human but the Necromancer is awesome. (Love the Spectral form ability to fight). Only downside with the Necromancer in general is that you get this face painting which i hope you can turn off.

10: No monhtly cost.. I am in.

11: With most mmo's it feels that around the end game that you will be taken part in big raids. GW2 let's you have that from the start and it is awesome.

[Pussycat Catnap]

This -might- motivate me to buy windows 7 and bootcamp it. That's at least $100 or so... but GW1 was pretty amazing in its day - there's a lot of trust built up that these are the people who know how to deliver good content.

I just hope that they don't do to this what they did to GW1.

You think no monthly fee is amazing... think what that means to their revenue model a year from now when you've run out of content to play with.

With GW1, they put out two amazing expansions. The third one was better than the entire rest of the game combined - then they put out a fourth thingy, that was kind of a strange half expansion... and then they just let it linger.

With that went the closest I came to being a 'gamer'.

With no monthly fees - to keep the game up they need a constant stream of new players, they need to discourage old players so they servers can handle the new ones, they need low-dev-cost xpacs so the xpacs can pay for server upkeep rather than just xpac development, and then when all that runs dry, they need gimmicks.

Right now, in GW1 - you can buy more character slots, buy skin tones, and buy this or that. A bit like SL.

But SL was set up that way from the beginning, and has its main stream come out of land.

A free to play MMO means a heavily micro-transactioned MMO where the goal of the devs is to get you to not log in while at the same time buying stuff...

Which is where GW1 is today. Or at least time I checked. Its still installed on my old PC laptop.

Personally, I'd rather pay a subscription fee upfront and have the micro-transactions stay out. Give me a game where they are motivated to keep me logging in - because that will keep them getting my subsciption, and it'll be a game that they need to keep improving game play in order to retain me.

I love the guild wars look, but after enjoying it so much in the past - I'm more convinced now than I was back in the day that it needs to be pay to play.

[Iris Ophelia]

Pussycat, I'd rather have free to play game with microtransactions than a subscription because I don't HAVE to buy anything. Microtransactions are hot right now because they lower the barrier to entry but still allow the company to turn a good profit. In most cases like GW2, where there is some sense of respect between the game publishers and the player community, cash content isn't something that has been removed because there's no subscription-- you're not LOSING anything from the game in exchange for this system, so there's no reason to begrudge them for choosing it. I've seen the cash shop, it's nothing you can't be perfectly happy playing without, and many of the items even appear as drops or infrequent quest rewards anyway. It's a reasonable system. The people to frown at are publishers who want the best of both worlds-- subscriptions AND cash shops.

Furthermore, saying that they want to discourage old players is a little silly given the transaction model. I remember my first month or so in SL I refused to buy any L$, but as I started playing more and more I finally cracked and did. Then I started buying L$ more and more often. It's the same with microtransactions. The more someone plays, and the more devoted they are to playing, the more they spend.

It's true that some games abuse microtransactions and that does bother me, but I've been in 3 GW2 betas now, with cash shop access granted free for testing, and the system is entirely inoffensive. Think of it as nothing more than a voluntary subscription fee with some fun, superficial perks of your choosing.

[Faster]

Quite the bold statement. Clearly you've never played Mabinogi.

[Eleri Ethaniel]

*nodnod* GW2 has really emphasized that while they will have micro-transactions, nothing you can buy will have an impact on actual gameplay- it'll be cosmetic or aesthetic only. So no pay-to-play bleh like other games.