Launch Station: Guild Wars 2

Madden NFL 13 and all those PlayStation game collections were not the only games released Tuesday.  Tuesday saw the release of a highly anticipated MMORPG, Guild Wars 2.  Guild Wars 2 is possibly the only MMO that could give Blizzard's MMO giant World of Warcraft a run for it's money.  With huge improvements and no monthly subscription, Guild Wars 2 looks to be the MMORPG experience not to miss this year.

Guild Wars 2 is set 250 years after the original game.  In that time, the world of Tyria has faced massive changes, devastating cataclysms and other huge global events that have caused big changes to Guild Wars 2's environments and play areas.  Humans are no longer the dominant species as the balance has shifted to towards the many other races inhabiting Tyria.  To make things worse, dragons have awoken from their slumber to wreak habit on the world.  You, the player, are tasked with reuniting the disbanded Destiny's Edge guild in order to combat the dragon threat.  At the outset of Guild Wars 2, players are able to create their own character from a combination of five races (humans, charr, asura, norn and sylvari) and eight professions (engineer, necromancer, thief, elementalist, warrior, ranger, mesmer and guardian).  Each race and profession have different attributes that effect which skills the player has access to.  Guild Wars 2 combat system is very skill-based, so players can only use 10 skills in combat.  Each skill slot has predefined roles in order to make each character balanced and have the combat focus more on strategy than just spamming certain skills.  Guild Wars 2 also includes a higher level cap of 80, a more elaborate crafting system and a World PvP that players can jump into at anytime and play anybody in the world.

Not everybody enjoys playing MMOs, but the original Guild Wars and in turn Guild Wars 2 offers a lower barrier of entry thanks to the game having no monthly subscription.  All you have to do to play Guild Wars 2 is just buy the base game in store or online and you are ready to go.  It is very appealing especially for people like yours truly whose biggest reason for not playing many MMOs was due to the monthly subscriptions.  I personally will not be picking up Guild Wars 2 because there is no way my computer could run it, but possibly someday down the road.  Blizzard and World of Warcraft have some serious competition in NCSoft and ArenaNet's Guild Wars 2.  We will have to see who wins out, but I believe it is time for a changing of the guard.