This is ultimately a marriage of traits from numerous games - including the original Guild Wars. One thing which I notably miss is the apparent lack of the quirky titles like Drunkard here - I mean, I've had every rum bottle that isn't nailed down and I still don't see drunk visual effects or points accumulating for it. I do feel that Guild Wars 2 has given up a part of the Guild Wars identity in game play while staying true to the lore.
The Good
I love Points of Interest - the design team had fun and we can see it, enjoy it, and be rewarded!
I love the massive persistent world and the minimal zone lines/breaks and World Events and Personal Story as opposed to Quests and Missions. They didn't just rename things, they changed how they felt. It really does seem more natural and I feel that the bar has been raised. GW1 was a story-driven game and GW2 appears to be one as well - although, I'm sure, you could just sit in a level-capped area and kill easy monsters all day with huge, overpowered weapons and skills from karma-merchants. You'd probably get laughed at though because this is a persistent world.
I do feel that there are items imported which add flavor or utility to the game - experience for exploration (previously seen in WoW - although GW gave a title for exploration, unless we're having a definite GW3, this might be a better approach), Waypoints which need to be tagged prior to use (the Final Fantasy series used these in both MMOs), and massive character creation variety (PWO had the opportunity for you to make yourself look pretty ridiculous with customization and Aion, I understand, did the same).
It has also taken some items from other games and made them how they should be, making the prior game to hold the feature look like the work of monkeys by comparison. It took the open world, high graphical quality, standard that we're heading toward and made it subscription free (which is an Arenanet thing, really). It made it clear that subscription-based games or games which require micro-transactions to play fully aren't doing it to sustain or develop but to get filthy rich.
They took swimming and changed the rules of combat to conform to the environment and the weapons which should be in use.
They gave everyone a healing skill - in GW1 I always took self healing anyway and most classes had it but the damage output of mobs was too high for it to really work without a devoted healer.
They made Elementalist Attunements a one-touch thing which switches your whole skillbar instead of "recast every minute" buffs which you pretty much needed to carry or be laughed at for running out of energy after two spells. As someone who did everything in the game as an Elementalist at least once in the first game, I appreciate the upgrade although I'll miss the infinite energy builds which I made in the first game and the ability to really pick my skills.
The Bad
While overflows are a great idea because people don't wind up stuck outside of the game, you can't bring guests or friends from the server itself into the overflow and they can't redeem you from it. I think the developers are working on this so expect better in the final release.
The armor and equipment feel more generic now - yes, there was a total random nature to it all in GW1 and I liked the requirements and scaling and needing to hunt for modifications! It was more confusing back then but I liked how much I could modify and customize things! The gems now just feel too much like WoW minus any real need for jewel crafting - that's a bad thing.
There is very little customization of skills and builds since half your skill bar is decided for you in advance based on your attunement or weapons. I had power over my skill sets in GW1 and, even though I could only take 8 at a time, there were elite skills (are the high skill point cost ones meant to replace this?)! Where have the elites gone?! Generic, cookie-cutter builds belong in other games which shall remain nameless (but we all know it wasn't any of the FF since builds didn't exist there). It's all weapon based...which feels like the gimmick which FFXIV was going for.
Some skills seem more useful in the description (which doesn't give solid stats on damage or healing like in GW1) than they really are and you wind up feeling like you just wasted your points.
I miss sub-jobs. WoW is the only game with classes which I
played for very long without sub-jobs (and really, I hated the inflexibility of class in that game and the gear dependency) and, frankly, it was
the least engaging MMORPG I ever played. Sub-jobs added depth and experimentation which made FFXI and GW1 feel vital and encouraged people to experiment and try new things until the seemingly impossible was possible.
The Ugly
I know that we need to pay for death but, seriously, financial penalty?! Yes. If you die, and no one is around to revive you, you will probably wind up paying to go back to a Waypoint to repair broken gear (you have to pay to go to them most of the time anyway) unless you have no money (then you're pretty much stuck with the nearest Waypoint...good luck running from whatever killed you earlier!).
In the Beta Weekend Event Server/Overflow Stress Test, I ran a very low level character without money into an area without an armor repair NPC and got killed by the buffed woodland creatures that came out to play for the event (necromantic deer pretty much camped my corpse). If it weren't a stress test, I'd get annoyed really quickly if normal mobs had me permanently in a cycle of Waypoint revival and death while completely naked and totally broke. It's not a likely scenario but I'm going to assume that someone is going to manage to bungle into it at least once.
I'm sure that the intent wasn't to penalize but to keep people from doing what they do in FFXI - which is, intentionally kill themselves to go to their Homepoint (essentially the last crystal they tagged - which could be anywhere because you don't need to tag them in that game). Yes, we don't want people traveling across the world by committing suicide but why make them pay to go back to the nearest town with an armor repair guy? That's just cruel.
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