Guild wars 2 has tons of pve (in fact I think most of it is pve) with dungeons and raids, so while it gives a lot of attention to pvp its certainly not shutting out the pve market. I agree tons of people are burnt out on WoW but I dont think GW2 is built that was just because of the burn out. They just set out to innovate because honestly every game that tried to beat or mimic WoW with WoW like gameplay has just been swallowed up and spat out by WoW.

Guild wars 2 has me excited for a few things, the questing looks standard-interesting, the controls look smooth and it has an established world with several interesting factions. A lot of the posts on this thread just seem to be flat out dismissal of it. For starters there are no elves in the game, sylvari are a race of sentient plants which are the closest thing as far as I know that come to elves. Healing is regulated to a few support skills and everyone has at least one heal. I like this because honestly, no one ever seems to want to heal and healing generally means you spend all of your time looking at UI playing wack a mole with health bars. Its not fun for most people to do and waiting around or worse spamming chat for hours looking for a healer is obnoxious. As far as I can tell in GW2 there is formal arena based pvp with equalized gear and level and etc and informal world realm versus realm pvp where servers fight each other. There are no factions, no more of that terrible alliance vs horde, imperial vs republic debating. Personalized stories, if done right this will be like SWTOR. You can jump. This was kind of a deal break for me in GW1. Also NCsoft is just the publisher isnt it? its being developed in house by Arenanet. NCsoft has no part in the development. I think we all know NCsoft has a reputation for making Asian grindfests.

Pretty much, you can't really grade morality, at least most of it, and if you can, it is usually because you have encountered "stupid evil" or being an evil obnoxious jerk just for the sake of it. Even when it hinders you.

So far I liked the sith inq story but I stopped playing him at level 13 when warzones started having 5+ sith sorcerers.

Try questing with him. Every time you have less the 100% health he spams "I was just wondering how I could better serve you. I was just wondering how I could better serve you. I was just wondering how I could better serve you..."

It really shows what MMOs are these days though, competitiion. Its not adventure, like Yathzee said when he interviewed WoW raiders, people riad because they want better gear, they want better gear so they can have more numbers, they want more numbers so they can get the next better gear and have more numbers until they have more numbers until they have the most numbers and can kill everyone elses numbers. Its not like EQ1 where only a few people make it to max level or adventureing a world. People feel they need to be on top to compete.

If I had time for an alt I was going to roll a female just to see what males are romancible. As far as I can tell same sex relationships were left out to keep the ratings low and the homophobic demographic content. Even the flirt options are pretty tame even for a bioware game and generally it culminates in people going to kiss and it fading black then them walking back fully clothed saying "lets do that again sometime!"

At this point I am unsure. On my commando there was a corrupt officer who sent honest soldiers off to die on the frontlines when they threatened to reveal his corruption. I reported him, in a cutscene he told me the frontlines were dangerous implying that I would have an accident out there. Then I got a mail that read he tried to get people to ambush me but instead got reported and arrested. Its been kind of like that ever since where I make choices and unless the result is shown during the handing in of the quest the only "consequences" I get are either a happy mail with credits or an angry mail. Sadly the choices I make don't seem to make much difference even in the main story lines, if I say, disobey an order to kill someone, the worst that has ever happened to me is the general going "I AM DISAPPOINTED, I EXPECT BETTER RESULTS! Here is your next mission."

I know operatives/scrapper and sage/sorc have a 1 minute long CC, that prob would have helped quite a bit. WoW has gotten people into the habit of one unkillable tank spamming high aggro AOE abilties while healer shoots a fountain of health at them and DPS runs around spamming rotations. If the group was telling you you are pulling too much, you are prob pulling too much.

This exactly. It was an easy model to produce and filled the race selection screen. THere are plenty of races in the game I would love to play as but only the human looking races got put in because it is easier to model armor around that one body scheme then design helmets for the three eyes long snouted dogman or the cyclops with the horn.

Haha true, but I always thought he was a pretty good example of how us gays break the stereotype in so many ways both on screen and off screen and should be a roll model to be considered when exploring sexuality in games and writing. And you are right there are enough biggoted people out there to make a scene out of this which is why I think it was dropped. It could easily jump the rating of a game too, social conservatives love threatening developers with that. But these tend to be the same people that think video games promote witchcraft and feminism and should be banned on that account as well. So you can't really win with em. I think open minded/people who don't care/everyone else is a bigger market if you just take the risk. I can live with or without it but it is a minor let down to see a whole game come out with flirt options and somehow every gay in the universe disapering/the game pretending we don't exist.

This is prob the worst place in the world to say this but star wars markets itself by selling the same story/archtypes/themes over and over again to people. Its why every smuggler ship has looked exactly like the millennium falcon and why we keep seeing the same planets over and over again. Hoth is an even better example, in the movie it was a barren wasteland of snow, and yet its vital here too? Or the fact that storm troopers keep appearing disappearing and re-appearing throughout the timeline. Its all done to milk a franchise.

I just ignore most of the medical droids. They are placed for player convience, and often in far out of reach or haphazard locations. There is one on Taris in the middle of no where surrounded by pirates, imperials, Nexu, and rakghouls. In reality it would prob be torn to shreds or looted for parts or something but this is a game.

Hutta is far from imperial control. Nemro the hutt is one hutt of one town. At the end of IA you only convince nemro to seek imperial intervention. Fathra is still alive and well as far as I can tell and there is a whole cartel of Hutts across hutta, nar shaddar, and other planets. All the imperials have on Hutta is a shaky foothold.

straight male romance always overshadows otehr genders/orintations. Bioware was starting to change this but kind of reverted here I think in large because it is an MMO that they want to appeal to the biggest demographic. At least straight women have options. I do hope in the future to see some gay male leads akin to Captain Jack Harkens of Torchwood.