Guild Wars 2 Previews
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First, Rock, Paper, Shotgun enjoyed the Engineer profession:
I have to say, just from this play session, the engineer's proved to be one of my favourite quirky MMO classes, up there with LOTRO's burgular and WAR's Squig Herder. Unlike most actual engineers I know, he isn't concerned with minimising measurement errors, but rather with using one of his many gadget sets to alter his role. Basically, most Guild Wars 2 characters have two weapon sets that they can swap between in-combat; the engineer has one, a kind of rifle-shotgun combination, with five attacks, all solid (especially the one that knocks both him and the enemy back a huge distance), but not particularly special.
However, he also has alternate tool kits; a flamethrower, a pack of mines, a pack of medkits, a pack of bombs. all of which also have five special powers. He also has other gadgets that he has to slot in somewhere; a range of three turrets (healing, rifle and a thumper), rocket-boots that fling him far, far away from the enemy, and more gadgets as he climbs the levels. Of course, he can only have three equipped at any time, plus his basic gun, but he can swap between them outside of combat, and that still gives him around 25 hugely distinctive and different moves to try; the playstyle change between the flamethrower and the bombs is just great.
As with all the classes, he also has an additional weapon set for underwater combat (a trident and a basic aqualung) and a weapon set for when he's downed consisting of a nice selection of his powers, including a mine field, a bomb, the ability to throw junk, and the ability to borrow a random downed power from an ally.
Then IncGamers, which thinks the game compares very favorably compared to BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic:
The higher level zone also gave us a hands-on taste of underwater combat, mainly against a giant fish that bears more than a passing resemblance to the piranha's in Alexandre Aja's 2010 Piranha 3D (great film, don't care what you say). Other than the fact that things take place in three dimensions, underwater combat is mechanically very similar to land based combat; there's no breath meter, for example.
What is different is that your movement speed is affected, the enemies are different, weapon aesthetics change (i.e. a sword becomes a spear) and fire balls don't work. Despite my limited exposure to MMOs, I've played enough to know it was horrible in WoW and that it's not so here. Whereas in other games underwater combat means limiting your abilities in Guild Wars 2 it means changing them, making it appealing rather than dreaded.
The jury is still out on whether or not Guild Wars 2 really can break down the walls that other MMOs have spent years building up, walls that non-MMO gamers cannot penetrate and often don't even want to. By shunning a subscription fee Guild Wars 2 has already pulled down the biggest barrier to entry, combine that with action focused combat, optional depth to missions and a less claustrophobic take on the standard class system and ArenaNet might just be onto something. again.
