The true heart and essence of Guild Wars 2 lies in its map.

It took me three weeks of playing and a chat with my colleague Kirk to realize and articulate how much magic lies in that seemingly simple function. The map of Tyria isn't just utilitarian; it's beautiful. Even mired in the fog of war, the painterly brush strokes hint at all manner of terrain to explore underneath.

But it's more than just the art. Where every other MMORPG I've played directs my attention inward, to a personal quest journal or log, GW2 directs my attention outward, explicitly asking me to take a more global view. Every quest I can complete appears on the map, from the permanent, static heart quests to the mobile, dynamic events. Vista points, seen and unseen, show on the map, as do points of interest and places where I can earn skill points. Perhaps most importantly, downed players—whether or not they are in my guild or group—appear on the map as well.

Guild Wars 2's map isn't just a record of where I have been; it's a living guide to all the places I have yet to go and all the things I have yet to do.

During a full month playing Guild Wars 2, I recorded impressions in a series of logs. The first was where I discovered an insatiable need to explore. In the second, I marveled at how easy it was to get off the beaten path, how unnecessary it seemed to be to form a party, and how generally amiable the community was. Part three was where I discovered crafting, and in log four I hopped into world vs world PvP and fell off rather a lot of cliffs.

The constant thread running through all my experiences was how truly impressed I remain with the very deliberate tactics ArenaNet has taken to try to break players of the habit of a personal, linear ladder that so many previous MMORPGs have instilled in us. Other games have taught me to view other players as competition, or as danger. If another player and I arrived on a dock in EverQuest II at the same time, we'd make a point of steering in opposite directions from each other as we ran into the zone, to avoid getting in each other's way with harvests or kills. A recent foray into World of Warcraft has left me feeling that other players are something I have to wade through to get where I'm going. In these, and in nearly other multiplayer game I've ever tried, the existence of other players only helps me when I am intentionally in a group with them.

Not so in Guild Wars 2. Every event that shows up in or near my path is a moment that inspires a silent but fervent hope from me that there are other players around. Diving into a massive melee is fun; finding myself all alone, with a half-dozen waves of enemies bearing down on me, is not. And yet becoming overwhelmed at an event isn't the end of the world, even it if it is briefly the end a character's life. (Death, fortunately, is but a fleeting and easily remedied condition.) Zones are set up in a state of perpetual warfare: if players cannot defend a location, well then they can help retake it later. After pirates managed to blow up one bridge, a new wave of players came by, helped resurrect me and the other player that had been standing on the bridge when it blew, and then we all worked together to defend the workers repairing it.

That spirit of perpetual cooperation in a living, breathing world is truly what sets Guild Wars 2 apart. The generally joyful, cooperative feeling is enhanced by the way the game measures progression. There are eighty levels, fairly standard, but every action a player takes contributes to a single bar of experience. Crafting, exploration, combat, questing, event participation, even throwing a rez on another player—every action contributes to growth. Nor are skills entirely dependent on a player's level. Hotbar slots do unlock at levels 10, 20, and 30, and players can fill those slots with powerful skills.

Weapon skills, though, are based entirely on the weapons a player has chosen to equip. If I fight with a dagger in each hand, I will learn a certain five skills. If I swap the main hand dagger for a gun, I'll learn three new skills for slots 1-3 in lieu of the dagger skills I had there. If I swap the off-hand dagger for a gun, slots 4 and 5 change. It's a modular system that sounds complex but that becomes intuitive and fluid almost instantly on playing.

Over the past few years, there has been a trend in massively multiplayer online games that has seen them become ever more single-player experiences that take place in a shared world. Guild Wars 2 reverses the trend handily, without ever once prescribing particular "social" actions for its players. No player must participate in a group event, and swooping by to rez a fallen player or lending a hand in any fight you run by are entirely optional acts. And yet, the way the game is arranged, players do tend to stop to help each other out.

The end result is a game that feels a bit like Cheers. Everyone may not exactly know your name, or be glad that you personally came, but it's still a world that welcomes your presence. Tyria can be difficult to navigate at times, but in a way that feels playful and mischievous rather than hostile. Above all, Guild Wars 2 feels encouraging and fair. Death and failure are not particularly difficult to overcome, and become challenges rather than punishments.

If I get lost by stepping off the beaten path, there will always be another path to find. If I die falling off a high vantage point, it will have been my own fault for climbing up there to begin with. If I am severely under-leveled for an area, it's because I chose to ignore the level guidance prominently displayed on my map. When I get in over my head with a bunch of adds, I will almost always have had adequate warning that the area was dangerous. With waypoints scattered fairly liberally around most areas, reviving at one and making my way back to where I was usually doesn't set me back all that far.

Guild Wars 2 is likewise forgiving in its dungeon environments, for which I found myself very grateful on my first foray into the Ascalonian Catacombs. It's the first group zone in the game, and yet it doesn't appear until a player is roughly level 30. Events in the player's character story lead to it, and allow the player to enter in story mode. After, players can return to explore the dungeon in a more traditional exploration mode.

While the dungeon itself is a fairly straightforward and predictable mix of trash mobs and bosses, laid out in an easy shape, learning how to approach one for the first time with GW2's particular mix of class skills can be an adventure of the repeatedly fatal kind. Additionally, the more players are casting in a particular area, the harder it is to spot the warning signs of AOE effects or traps about to splash fire, spikes, or another variety of pain on your location. Though the problem of visual spectacle overwhelming useful information is hardly limited to dungeons alone.

What I feel as I play Guild Wars 2 is something I have not felt in this kind of game in a very long time. In it, I am not just a player who happens to be moving through a game that other players also enjoy. Instead, I am part of a community and part of a world that constantly reacts to my presence in it—even if some of those reactions are clearly on a loop. My urge to explore just for the sake of finding things is not only tolerated, but encouraged and for once, I am relishing the part of "massively multiplayer" that brings other players to my side.

Guild Wars 2 is not structured as a deeply competitive game, and players who strive only for the best gear, the fastest leveling, and the sharpest end-game technique will likely miss most of what it has to offer. Rather than seeing the absence of an end-game focused quest and gear ladder as a lack, though, I see it as a blessing. It is a journey that gives me great pleasure to explore.

As for the destination? I really have no idea where it all will end. But I will enjoy taking my time—and discovering every single point on every map—on the way there.

Hell, it has famously been said, is other people. Play enough games online and you'll come to understand where Sartre was coming from. Many online games can feel a lot like No Exit—a world populated only by the meddling, the griefing, and the incompetent, where even death isn't an escape.

That being the case, it's all the more remarkable that Guild Wars 2 actually makes me glad to see other people. Aside from Thatgamecompany's Journey, I've never played a game in which that's true. Other than the momentary adrenaline rush I get when I see a player in Call of Duty or Gears of War before he sees me, I rarely feel happy to see anyone online. But in Guild Wars 2, my emotions upon seeing others run from happy to excited, even to relieved, if I'm overmatched in a fight. (The only anger I'll feel is when I see a similar-looking elementalist who's ganking my style.)

That's not an accident, not by a long shot. A couple of weeks ago at ArenaNet's offices outside of Seattle, I sat down with Guild Wars 2 lead designer Isaiah Cartwright to talk about how ArenaNet designed player-love into their game.

"We really wanted every player, when they see another player, to be happy to see that other player," Cartwright said. "We found that when we were playing other MMOs that that wasn't true. One player comes over and attacks your monster, and you're like, 'Woah, dude! Back off, he's mine!' Or, you were on a quest of some sort and you were trying to kill some boss, and you get there and another player is fighting it and killing it. You started to resent players in other games. You started to seek out little corners of the world where there weren't players, so you could do your stuff. And so we tried to solve that—[the problem of] hey, we're in a big MMO, but we're playing alongside people and not with people."

One of the approaches ArenaNet took was to ditch the quest model embraced by other MMOs like World of Warcraft. The quest model superimposes the quest structure of single-player games into an MMO format—you go to a quest-giver to get your orders, carry them out, and return to complete the quest. Cartwright said that makes the world feel very static.

Guild Wars 2 does have quests of a sort—the "heart quests" where players go to a quest giver and take care of some baddies or clear out some traps. But those events can be simultaneously attacked by a number of people, and are much faster if done with other players. And the biggest move away from the quest structure are the dynamic "events" in the world that pop up wherever you happen to be (sometimes in the middle of heart quests, even). Everyone playing the game knows them well—that familiar chime plays, and a big orange circle appears on your map. I don't know about you, but my first instinct when I hear that sound is "Yes! I wanna go join the fracas!" At which point I make a beeline towards the spot where the explosions are happening. This does not happen to me very often in video games.

Cartwright talked more about the ArenaNet approach. "The entire time we were doing it we were like, 'This seems so common sense! Why isn't it common?' But we realized that's because it's harder. There's a lot of problems to solve. I think some of the way we approach it is we just played the game, and we think of it ourselves. We ask, 'Is there any reason why I dislike another player?' And if we ever have that feeling, we get in a room and we talk about it."

The team had to test the game to remove some elements that put players at odds with one another. "Originally when we had events," Cartwright said, "we had events that had fail states and success states. We still have that, but there would be this event going on where there's a [character] that's gonna summon a big bad monster. And they're on the way, leading up to it. And if you fail that event, a big monster spawns. And if you stop her, it doesn't spawn. What we found is, some players want to see the big bad monster, and so they're like, 'Don't do the event!' But some players do want to finish and [stop] the monster, and so you have conflict. Now, some players are disliking each other. We started getting in the game and some people were like, 'Hey, don't do that.' And so we said, okay, what did we do wrong? When you see another player, you should be like, 'Awesome! I have another person here!'"

I think it's safe to say that ArenaNet has achieved their goal. Every time I join a high-level event, I'm happy to be surrounded by so many other players, to have support if I go down and to add my powers to our mutual benefit. Every time I'm wandering the wilds, I'm thrilled to see another player and to spend a few moments by his or her side, helping one another out. And whenever I see a downed player on my map, I rush over to help out. In most games, hell may be other people, but in Guild Wars 2, other people are a blessing.

Well, except that one floozy who was wearing my exact armor with an identical color scheme. She can just go jump off a cliff.

Do you like Guild Wars 2 but wish it could feel a little bit more action-packed? pvpPROJECT has got you covered with this "Combat Mode" mod that adds free mouse-look to the game, more or less turning it into a third-person shooter depending on the ability you're using.

Of course, the mod isn't official, and outside modifications are strictly verboten by ArenaNet's terms of service. When asked about the mod's permissibility on the Guild Wars 2 forums, an ArenaNet community manager said:

Hi everyone.
As Diva points out, the use of third-party software is not allowed in Guild Wars 2. Thypari, if you feel this is something that would improve the game, then we invite you to post your ideas on the subforum Suggestions, where they will be looked into.
I will proceed now to lock the thread.
Thanks.

So, we may never get an option to play Guild Wars 2 with combat mode turned on, but at least it'll live on in this wub-wubby video.

(Via Gameranx)

If you're a Guild Wars 2 player and have ever complained about a sore wrist, or tired eyes, here's something that might put your issues in perspective.

Keith "Aieron" Knight was born with Amyoplasia Arthrogryposis, which basically means he can barely move his body. At all. Yet he still takes on other GW2 players, and wins, controlling a mouse with his cheek and hitting keys with a pen in his mouth.

You can see him in action below. It's incredible.

Knight livestreams his play every friday night, and also collects donations for a charity that helps out people like himself.

Aieron - Disabled Gaming: Look Mom, no hands! [TwitchTV, via PC Gamer]

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Watch live video from aieron on TwitchTV

In my weekly summaries of Guild Wars 2, I've looked at exploration, combat, and crafting. I've been chasing vistas, leveling slowly, and getting sucked into events as they pop up around me. I've even been cautiously exploring the big, boisterous, overwhelming experience that is world vs world PvP.

In total, I've learned a lot of things about Guild Wars 2. The full, formal review will be coming next week, so for this, my last log, I leave you with a list of all the miscellaneous things I've learned, experienced, and decided in Guild Wars 2 this week.

1.) There are several very kind players in the game who will wander by and resurrect you after you have fallen off a cliff.

1a.) Don't log out standing on the edge of a cliff. You'll pay for it when you log back in.

1b.) Also, if you happen to have a number of combat arts that involve "shadowstep" or other wide, leaping changes in position, don't use them next to a cliff either.

2.) There are jerks in the game who will train a half-dozen over-leveled mobs onto your sorry under-leveled self, and then will not only not help you fight them off, but will in fact stand right next to your corpse and not even toss a revive your way afterward. When this happens almost immediately after encountering kind souls at the bottom of a cliff you have unexpectedly and fatally traversed, the difference is rather jarring.

3.) There's just no good way to do underwater levels. Every game has them. And in every game, they're flawed. I do like that Guild Wars 2 allows players two switchable sets of underwater weapons in addition to two switchable sets of land-based weapons, but neither the spear nor the harpoon gun I have is as elegant and useful as the daggers and pistols I am accustomed to use. The harpoon gun also makes it easy to get in a lot of trouble with adds without meaning to.

Maybe it's just me. In theory I like the freedom of the Z axis but in practice I tend to find it cumbersome and awkward to navigate. And my thief swims so very, very slowly.

4.) I know it's called Lion's Arch, but I will forever call it Tortuga, at least in my head. Also it's my new favorite city. Like, ever. Anywhere. The whole thing is made of ships! Gorgeous ships! I want to live there. No, I don't care how structurally unsound it is.

4a.) There are PIRATES in Tortuga. Actual pirates. I would like all of their clothes now, please and thank you. Can I run away with them later (the pirates, not their clothes)? Oh, I hope so.

5.) It took a while for my character's personal story to get meaty. Now, I'm digging it, but that has a lot to do with the introduction of various world factions. And when given the chance to pick among scholars (the Durmand Priory), soldiers (the Vigil), and spies (the Order of Whispers), it turns out I will pick spies pretty much every time. Although should I ever get my Engineer alt high enough, I can see her as the Priory type.

6.) I only rarely get kicked to overflow now. Tortuga Lion's Arch is always busy, and whenever I hit the plaza with the Asura gates I can count on an overflow message. But aside from just once or twice at peak play times, I haven't gotten dropped in overflow while popping around the world. The combination of early-launch-rush on the player side and ArenaNet working out population loads on their side seems to have hit its balance point.

7.) The queues for World vs World, on the other hand, can be nuts. The first time I decided to go into the Mists, I had a five-minute wait. Tuesday night, I wanted to go in and the queue was so long that when I got the pop-up a half-hour later asking me if I was ready to travel, I had completely forgotten I ever signed up for the queue.

8.) The server-wide World vs World bonuses are really very nice. I am not particularly great at playing through the Borderlands zones; I find them overwhelming, if intriguing. But apparently folks on my server, in general, are. The bonuses applied to the characters I level have just been increasing for the last week, and now sit at the point where I am accustomed to getting four pulls from every harvesting node, and significant XP bonuses for every kill. Should our red and blue rivals (my server is green) sort themselves out anytime soon, I think I will notice the loss of the benefits rather sharply.

9.) The best way to get good screenshots in the Mists is to be dead. It's a surprisingly good vantage point.

I didn't spend very much time dead, honestly; I got fairly good at dodging attacks, and my teammates were lovely about quick revives. (I tried my best to provide the same service in kind.) Hitting F to finish off your opponent, meanwhile, is more satisfying than it probably should be. Sorry, red guys. I really did take joy in your demise. That wasn't very nice of me but, you know, war.

10.) Even the PvP zones need exploring. There are vistas in the Borderlands WvW zones. This means I need to explore them all. Thoroughly. I managed to branch off and grab a few already, but the ones in the heart of enemy territory are going to be... challenging.

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Overall, I am not particularly driven to level quickly, even as more and more of my guild-mates get characters to 80. Guild Wars 2 is encouraging me to take a careful, thorough approach to my playing. I tend to want to bring a map to 100% before I move on to the next, though sometimes I do overlap. (I started exploring Gendarran Fields at level 21, because I like getting in trouble.)

In short, the world is too much fun for me to want to race through it. Sometimes you just need to stop and smell the roses. Or, better yet, go swimming.

Having been in development for so long, the artists behind Guild Wars 2 had literally years to put together an immense volume of images detailing the game's world and inhabitants.

It's all impressive stuff - so impressive it's been featured here on Fine Art multiple times - but tonight we're going to put it all in the one place.

This is The Art of Guild Wars 2, a book that has just a ton of publicly-available pieces of art for the game. It's an impressive collection; where most game art books are full of giant white spaces and pages being dominated by shiny promotional art, from front to back The Art of Guild Wars 2 has nothing but paintings, sketches and everything else you expect (and want) to see when you're interested in the creation of a game, not in how it's sold.

I got a copy last week and absolutely loved it. There's just so much art from one of the most talented teams in the business that it makes my head spin. Topping it all off are brief but informative notes from the artists themselves, a rarity when books like these are often written by a single PR-smoothed representative or editor.

About the only downside is the quality of the book itself; it ships as a paperback, which given its size means it feels more like a thick magazine or Ikea catalogue than a coffee table book.

That should only worry those who give a shit about what's on the outside, though. On the inside, there's enough beautiful imagery and insightful commentary that I really think this is the best video game art book since Half-Life 2's Raising the Bar. Which for fans of the field is certainly something.

You can grab the book here.

UPDATE - No you can't! Clicking through reveals the book has been sold out for, well, a long time. Something I wasn't aware of when thumbing through my review copy, which was shipped last week. Sorry for getting your hopes up!

To see the larger pics in all their glory (or so you can save them as wallpaper), right-click on them below and select "open in new tab".

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Massively multiplayer online games have this way of becoming a rush to the top. If a game has 50 levels, 49 of them will end up being considered inconsequential as players float up to the level cap and then stay there. As more and more players reach the limit, more and more of the game ends up focusing around them. Even a game like Diablo III, technically not an MMORPG at all, ends up with endgame woes.

Guild Wars 2 has been out for less than three weeks, but already power-minded players are driving their characters to level 80 in droves. And yet, ArenaNet representatives say on their blog, that's not really where all of the "good" content is, and players may as well slow down and enjoy the process.

"We didn't want the endgame to be something you could only experience after a hundred hours of gameplay or after you reached some arbitrary number," ArenaNet's Mike Zadorojny wrote, "so we've introduced game elements that you'd normally associate with "endgame" at every level and every possible opportunity." The hope is that players will find value in more activities than the traditional top-level gear hunt and raid circuit. Dedication to crafting and exploring each have their own extrinsic rewards, as well as dedication to the fine art of going places and killing stuff.

But will the focus on spreading boss monsters, drama, dungeons, and explorable locations across the entire 1-80 game actually placate players who sped to the top? Sure, "the dynamic events become larger, the battles more spectacular, the circumstances more dire" as players level, but they still remain the same sort of content that players have been poking their noses into from their first tutorial boss.

Eventually, there comes a time where players have simply exhausted their options, and going back to explore low-level content missed along the way up loses its allure. There are promises of "new types of events, new dungeons, new bosses, new rewards, and new places for players to explore" in the works, and based on the first Guild Wars ArenaNet will no doubt deliver regular content additions. Hopefully, players will learn to enjoy the journey and not just the destination.

The Endgame Reimagined [Official Blog]

Oh, dear. I have begun crafting.

I put it off until I reached level 20 with my main, and truth be told it's just as well. I've never yet sold or traded away any of the crafting materials I've come across (though I should really put the ones I can't use into the guild bank), and I still ran out remarkably quickly. Ah, well. One basic set of armor that I didn't need, and a couple of eight-slot bags that I did, and it was back into the field with me to acquire more leather and jute.

Why couldn't I have picked a crafting discipline that relies on easily-mined metals or readily-chopped trees? Silly me. Still, half a decade as an Assassin-Tailor in EverQuest II seems to have prepared me remarkably well for putting in time as a Thief-Leatherworker in Guild Wars 2. In fact, a lot of what I see in GW2 reminds me, pleasantly, of a more streamlined version of EQII.

"Streamlined," though, is the operative word. The "Discoveries" tab is a great addition to crafting, but I'm a particular fan of the "craft all" button that lets a player refine a huge stack of stuff into a smaller stack of more usable stuff almost instantly. That, right there, is a fantastic feature that makes crafting feel almost fun, rather than punishing like I'm used to it being from other games.

I really needed a crafting break for a while too, because group events on the overland maps had been wearing me down. It's one thing to zone from a safe spot in the overflow to the middle of a melee on the "real" server when there are plenty of players at hand. Suddenly to find yourself alone, surrounded by an event appropriate for 5-15 players? I'd like to say that at least I made my deaths count, but I really didn't. Two dozen level 24+ monsters, to one level 19 me? It feels profoundly unfair, and while the penalties for death are at least minimal, I began deeply to resent the incessant, repeated events that made up the war between the Seraph and the centaurs in the Kessex Hills.

Indeed, the repetitive nature of the large overland zones began to get to me this past week. I enjoy collecting vista views and points of interest, and heart quests and skill challenges are worth completing for their rewards. The pattern, though, grows stale fairly quickly, especially given how many of the heart quests I've completed are utterly interchangeable with one another. (Surprise! Whenever a trap needs checking or a rock needs turning over, it'll have an angry creature in it!)

I do now wish that the first available dungeon zone were at level 20 or 25, instead of level 30. While I've settled into a groove that gains me about two levels per day, it's a groove that's in danger of becoming a rut. Exploring the world still motivates me—particularly now that I've been able to walk from my starting area, through a higher-level area, to other races' starting areas—but when a map's uncovered, it's uncovered.

At least the maps I'm uncovering remain beautiful, though, and fun to explore. And once a character hits 20 and has amassed some weapons expertise, skill points, and skill slots, playing a class really starts to come into its own. The ability to swap out my preferred pistol/dagger weapon set for a bow at pretty much any time is enormously useful, particularly when I find myself standing in the midst of a massive event, with attackers drawing in from all sides.

Simon Goinard has been doing freelance work for the past decade, with his art featuring for clients as diverse as Disney, Exxon, Camel and Aston Martin.

He's also done quite a bit of video game work, with an equally-impressive list of employers like Sony Computer Entertainment Japan and Guild Wars developers ArenaNet.

You can see more of Simon's incredible work at his personal site (thanks CAW!)

To see the larger pics in all their glory (or so you can save them as wallpaper), right-click on them below and select "open in new tab".

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Guild Wars 2 has some of the medium's finest concept art. And while the actual game engine often struggles to do it justice, the game's environments can still look absolutely beautiful, proving once again that powerful "graphics" are often no match for strong art design.