After months of waiting, this weekend marked my first moments of playtime with the hugely anticipatedGuild Wars 2. After waiting so long, the only word that accurately sums up how I felt over the past few days is…underwhelmed. Not overly so, but enough to make me take stock of why I feel this way. After a post-mortem with some guild mates, we came up with a radical conclusion: I’ve been playing too muchTERA. While I fully intend to play both games, the past weekend has got me thinking about how the two compare, and now I plan to share my conclusions with you, gentle readers.
Class Progression
The way your class develops in Guild Wars 2 through having different weapons offer different skills offers brilliant customisation. The first character I made was a Charr engineer, and I found much of my first hour consumed with trying to track down as many different weapons as I could. From very early in my playtime I was able to refine my playstyle to what worked best for me, and that’s really quite special.
TERA has nowhere near the same level of class customisation on offer. Your class is pretty much shackled in terms of how it operates, all the way down to the weapons it uses which could quickly become repetitive. What makes up for this is the vast difference in play experiences between classes. In a game with an emphasis on action combat, the speed and range of attacks take on a much more important meaning, which in turn makes picking the right class for your style a big task. Sure, it can’t be refined to the degree present in Guild Wars 2, but that’s not to say there aren’t options there.
