Guild Wars 2 – World v World Preview

This beta weekend has been too long coming for my liking. Having completed a lot of the human starting area last time around I was gagging for a bit of play time on the Charr race to try out a) a different part of the world and b) a few more of the classes.

Alongside my general PvE mooching I had a rather inconclusive look at one of the PvP options that Guild Wars 2 is offering. This takes the form of World versus World (WvW) and looks to be massive and slightly intimidating.

The premise is that your world (i.e. server) will be pitted against two others in a fight to control four geographical areas. In my case this was: Anvil Rocks’ Borderlands, Port Sledge’s Borderlands, Vasburg’s Borderlands and the final area, being simply called “Eternal Battlegrounds”. There’s an NPC when you portal in to your home base who patiently explains how it all works but I was lost within seconds and decided that getting involved, however poorly I performed, would be a far more expedient way of learning.

Scoring is tallied across a two week period and points are earned “Arathi Basin” style for capturing points of interest. Once a region is owned a few NPC guards will spawn and help to defend against opposing teams trying to attack. Again, we’ve seen it before in WoW’s Alterac Valley but it’s a formula that works well in these large map PvP contests. These are somewhat tough to take on single handed even with a level thirty boosted to the WvW level eighty – excellent news though, as they force people to work as a team.

You can participate in WvW at any level due to the level boosting component built in to the game but gear will remain at your PvE level and loot dropped from players will be level-appropriate. Sadly, this was as far as my experience went – Anvil Rock had already taken the entire map and in a couple of hours wandering around the various areas I didn’t see a single player from an opposing world.

Points do mean prizes and in GW2 these take the form of buffs, buffs and buffs – dependent on your world’s score you can pick up a selection of these (unconfirmed) effects which assist in your everyday PvE routine. Loot will be dropped when you kill an enemy player but as yet I’ve not seen anything about a reputation points vs PvP Vendor kind of system most commonly used. Maybe this will come in a later patch or perhaps the Guild system of Influence will be used to greater effect.

What will be interesting to see is how all the smaller challenges will work alongside the ultimate challenge of owning all the keeps, towers, resource points etc. There are supplies to worry about, siege weapons to use for various nefarious purposes (blowing things up) and fixing of defences to manage. Cut off a keep’s supplying caravan and goodbye nice, solid front door. PvP on this scale and with this level of complexity is either going to be fascinating, engaging and edge-of-your-seat or just the usual cluster fudge we all know and *cough* love.