We interrupt your Saturday broadcast for a piece about Guild Wars 2. The early beta weekends are a long distant past, so much so that I can’t honestly remember anything that I did in them.

1. Saving Features For Next Time…

I can’t get to everything in this hands-on. As no doubt a few hundred thousand players all attempt to force their way through the teeny tiny door that is the login server, not all of the features are presently working. Foremost, I was unable to get into any of the World Vs World or player vs player instances. Secondly, I was also unable to access the gold transfer service and auction house due to connection outages.

Despite these setbacks, the actual servers themselves held up rather well. My server is the second most populated in the North America region, and rubber banding was almost nonexistent. I can also count the number of times I was disconnected from the server on one finger, although I don’t presume that my experience is universal.

2. World Quests Beat Warhammer Out Of The Water

I catch a lot of flak whenever I refer to Warhammer Online, but the quests in Guild Wars 2 do bear a strong resemblance to the public quest system. Unlike Warhammer Online however, where public quests didn’t serve much purpose other than a repetitive distraction from the normal quest grind, Guild Wars 2 revolves around public quests.

And to separate the two even more, the great majority of quests have numerous ways to complete them. For instance, a farmer may ask you to help him, which you can accomplish by feeding his livestock, killing pests, putting out fires, or watering seeds. While you are doing this, you may find yourself in the middle of a live event where bandits raid the farm. So you put down your tools and finish the spur of the moment quest, and then go back to what you were doing.

Live events are spontaneous and not marked on the map. Unlike Warhammer Online, if you fail at one of these events, the timer doesn’t just reset. Instead the event moves down a completely different path. Say, for instance, that you fail to push back zombies rising in a swamp. They populate and the next event has you defending a town that they attack. Fail that and the town is destroyed.

In theory, anyway. Failing events is rather difficult this weekend when people outnumber the event mobs by an easy 10:1 margin.

3. Overflow Is Obnoxious

I understand the need for Overflow in a game with as massive of a community as Guild Wars, and I would prefer to have overflow servers instead of having to sit in a queue line. But as usual, the concept in practice is not the same as in theory. Overflow is based on zone, not server, so in the time since the Guild Wars servers went live, I have experienced the following:

Enter game, immediately put in overflow.
Finally travel to home server.
Enter city, instance, or new zone. Immediately put back in overflow.
Enter regular server.
Return to city, leave instance, or new zone. Immediately put back in overflow.

You don’t spend a lot of time in areas like the city, so to have the game constantly put you back in overflow just because you changed zones becomes incredibly annoying after a while. Again: Better than the alternative, but in need of improvement.