Having played Guild Wars 2 for some years, the game definitely has some mixed bag aspects and a lot to put up with, but it's still fun and engaging in ways my partner and I appreciate and it has so much to see and do that I give it a recommend, with important caveats to balance expectations.

We came to the game on a recommendation, seeking something to fill the Diablo-style ARPG niche but that had decent engaging gameplay, where the player actually played and mattered beyond the build aspect. ARPG gameplay has really failed, with players seeming to want their games to not even take much attention as they grind away hours while doing other things :( Here, you don't have all the diverse builds and interesting build systems to play with that are typical of that genre, but you do have nice play (controller viable, even, with work) where the player both acts and reacts, enough play variety across classes to enjoy, and lots of places to explore and lots of enemies to offer their corpses for you to pile up.

There are a lot of things to do and ways to play. So much so, you may well get confused about what you even want to do. Different kinds of player-vs-player activities between the match-oriented dueling and capture-point PvP options and the larger scale server wars of WvW, various modes of organized-group, instance-based co-op, and all the various things to do you'll find across the open world play, with its flowing small and large map activities, scavenger hunt collections, obtuse jumping puzzles (like a badly designed 3d platformer built by sadists), and genuinely explorable nooks and crannies. We prefer open world play, and there's some surprising nuance to enjoy in the many zones dedicated to it. One unusual aspect is how areas have stories embedded in them via "events": map-visible "thing to do here" activities that pop up on various timers and flow through various chains (sometimes with branches depending on specific events succeeding or failing) to reflect the tale of the locale in a kind of dynamic implied storytelling running on loop. It gives a sense of story and place without dragging things down, and it can be interesting stitching a zone's various stories together over time.

This is not a "trinity" MMO, where you have DPS, tank, and support. I personally have always found the entire trinity concept an idiotic contrivance, so that's fine by me, but be aware roles here are more oriented towards providing specific benefits and pretty much everyone DPSs one way or another.

It's also really not a free or F2P game, and this is a very important point. The base game is a really big demo, but if you put any modest about of time into it, it's totally worth the price of entry to the real game, which is the Path of Fire and Heart of Thorns expansion bundle (priced at the same original cost of just one of those two expansions, even better at 50% off). These both remove the free account restrictions and add just a ton of value, content, and options to the game.

Caveats matter though...

The game is expensive, and I don't mean the sizable upfront cost of expansions and living world, but the extensive and tiresome F2P issues, where the game is deliberately designed with inconveniences, handicaps, and limitations that you can pay to relax. You have to pay extra to even be allowed to make one character of each class. A little extra? No, $40 extra. There are even things bought per character, where you not only have to pay for each character you want to benefit, but you would outright lose your purchases if you delete the character. Inventory pressure is relentless and obnoxious, with a deliberately vast array of objects to deal with that are little more than currency or incredibly pointless reward hoops to jump though. You have lots of key visuals you can't properly color unless you buy a skin, with typical skin costs being fairly outrageous. Expansion prices go on sale and are pretty legitimately rewarding, but nothing in the cash shop is cheap and they never cut prices more than a little. The cash shop even constantly rotates what you are allowed to buy, so you may have to watch for months for a skin or item you want, and check routinely to make sure you don't miss it. There's so much purposely manipulative about their cash shop that it's quite ugly. Veterans often sell the cash shop aspect by saying you can trade in-game currency for premium currency, but the real truth is that requires playing the game like a job--and an absurdly low-paying job. What the currency exchange is really about is allowing whales to funnel cash into in-game currency to buy rewards, resources, and gear from the player trading post without having to invest the time they take to earn.

The main questline story running through every piece of content is awful, deliberately tedious, and gratingly necessary to go through for unlocks and rewards. The core game story has mainly visual novel style dialog scenes which balance their tedium with allowing you to skip them and get back to playing, but the vast majority of the story changes to in-engine "walk and talk" scenes, that cannot be skipped and deliberately waste your time, absolutely ruining replay even though there are many achievement-based rewards made to require replay. Unskippable story scenes are unforgivable and relentless in GW2's already tediously bad story. Also, there is a huge amount of voiced dialog and the English side is generally weak to poor, especially the women (I had to actually delete my Charr character and restart them as a male because of how gratingly lazy the female Charr actress was).

The devs really work at wasting your time for some rewards, and there can be ridiculously byzantine procedures to getting things (whales, of course, can often dump a load of cash to not have to deal with that). A legendary-tier weapon, for example, takes literal months of work, and a procedure that's downright comical in both its convoluted multistep collection and crafting requirements, and outlandishly expensive in resources. No game should ask players to go through such a load of crap for anything.

Gearing kind of sucks. There's nothing of any real notable interest to it, a puzzle of number packets to massage into something that suits your ability build, and a painful task list to get it.

Weapon and build options are pretty poor with a lot of consequent choices forced on you. Eg, do you like class X's dagger attacks? Well, then you are a condition build and have to pick from a very few other weapons that also do conditions, gear for conditions, take the condition-oriented build traits, and pick from whatever very few utilities are made to fit those. Even a single seemingly innocuous choice like that can effectively lock down your entire class build, and it goes the other way too. Eg, quickness providing support? Well, here's your weapons, gearing, and entire build. Hope you like it, because otherwise you pick a different ability role.

Advanced PvE play gets very mechanical. Most classes do come down to a correct optimal ability sequence that you execute precisely if you want to make your expected contribution--and other players probably have tools that let them know how you're doing.

WvW sounds cool, but it's kind of garbage the devs never do anything to make shine. Imagine two giant masses of players stacking as best they can on the exact same spots (because the game only lets things hit 5 characters in a position and stacking distributes and dilutes hits across the group) spewing a kaleidoscope of incomprehensible damage effects at each other. It certainly has its devotees, but there's no arguing this accomplishes anything remotely like the cool, tactical war of MMO characters that anyone actually wants from it.

Still, we have enjoyed our time playing, and we expect many more hours of entertainment. I'd suggest buying away from Steam, though.

Having played Guild Wars 2 for some years, the game definitely has some mixed bag aspects and a lot to put up with, but it's still fun and engaging in ways my partner and I appreciate and it has so much to see and do that I give it a recommend, with important caveats to balance expectations. We came to the game on a recommendation, seeking something to fill the Diablo-style ARPG niche but that had decent engaging gameplay, where the player actually played and mattered beyond the build aspect. ARPG gameplay has really failed, with players seeming to want their games to not even take much attention as they grind away hours while doing other things :( Here, you don't have all the diverse builds and interesting build systems to play with that are typical of that genre, but you do have nice play (controller viable, even, with work) where the player both acts and reacts, enough play variety across classes to enjoy, and lots of places to explore and lots of enemies to offer their corpses for you to pile up. There are a [i]lot[/i] of things to do and ways to play. So much so, you may well get confused about what you even want to do. Different kinds of player-vs-player activities between the match-oriented dueling and capture-point PvP options and the larger scale server wars of WvW, various modes of organized-group, instance-based co-op, and all the various things to do you'll find across the open world play, with its flowing small and large map activities, scavenger hunt collections, obtuse jumping puzzles (like a badly designed 3d platformer built by sadists), and genuinely explorable nooks and crannies. We prefer open world play, and there's some surprising nuance to enjoy in the many zones dedicated to it. One unusual aspect is how areas have stories embedded in them via "events": map-visible "thing to do here" activities that pop up on various timers and flow through various chains (sometimes with branches depending on specific events succeeding or failing) to reflect the tale of the locale in a kind of dynamic implied storytelling running on loop. It gives a sense of story and place without dragging things down, and it can be interesting stitching a zone's various stories together over time. This is not a "trinity" MMO, where you have DPS, tank, and support. I personally have always found the entire trinity concept an idiotic contrivance, so that's fine by me, but be aware roles here are more oriented towards providing specific benefits and pretty much everyone DPSs one way or another. It's also really not a free or F2P game, and this is a very important point. [b]The base game is a really big demo, but if you put any modest about of time into it, it's totally worth the price of entry to the real game[/b], which is the Path of Fire and Heart of Thorns expansion bundle (priced at the same original cost of just one of those two expansions, even better at 50% off). These both remove the free account restrictions and add just a ton of value, content, and options to the game. Caveats matter though... The game is expensive, and I don't mean the sizable upfront cost of expansions and living world, but the extensive and tiresome F2P issues, where the game is deliberately designed with inconveniences, handicaps, and limitations that you can pay to relax. You have to pay extra to even be allowed to make one character of each class. A little extra? No, [i]$40[/i] extra. There are even things bought [i]per character[/i], where you not only have to pay for each character you want to benefit, but you would outright lose your purchases if you delete the character. Inventory pressure is relentless and obnoxious, with a deliberately vast array of objects to deal with that are little more than currency or incredibly pointless reward hoops to jump though. You have lots of key visuals you can't properly color unless you buy a skin, with typical skin costs being fairly outrageous. Expansion prices go on sale and are pretty legitimately rewarding, but nothing in the cash shop is cheap and they never cut prices more than a little. The cash shop even constantly rotates what you are allowed to buy, so you may have to watch for months for a skin or item you want, and check routinely to make sure you don't miss it. There's so much purposely manipulative about their cash shop that it's quite ugly. Veterans often sell the cash shop aspect by saying you can trade in-game currency for premium currency, but the real truth is that requires playing the game like a job--and an absurdly low-paying job. What the currency exchange is really about is allowing whales to funnel cash into in-game currency to buy rewards, resources, and gear from the player trading post without having to invest the time they take to earn. The main questline story running through every piece of content is awful, deliberately tedious, and gratingly necessary to go through for unlocks and rewards. The core game story has mainly visual novel style dialog scenes which balance their tedium with allowing you to skip them and get back to playing, but the vast majority of the story changes to in-engine "walk and talk" scenes, that cannot be skipped and deliberately waste your time, absolutely ruining replay even though there are many achievement-based rewards made to require replay. Unskippable story scenes are unforgivable and relentless in GW2's already tediously bad story. Also, there is a huge amount of voiced dialog and the English side is generally weak to poor, especially the women (I had to actually delete my Charr character and restart them as a male because of how gratingly lazy the female Charr actress was). The devs really work at wasting your time for some rewards, and there can be ridiculously byzantine procedures to getting things (whales, of course, can often dump a load of cash to not have to deal with that). A legendary-tier weapon, for example, takes literal months of work, and a procedure that's downright comical in both its convoluted multistep collection and crafting requirements, and outlandishly expensive in resources. No game should ask players to go through such a load of crap for anything. Gearing kind of sucks. There's nothing of any real notable interest to it, a puzzle of number packets to massage into something that suits your ability build, and a painful task list to get it. Weapon and build options are pretty poor with a lot of consequent choices forced on you. Eg, do you like class X's dagger attacks? Well, then you are a condition build and have to pick from a very few other weapons that also do conditions, gear for conditions, take the condition-oriented build traits, and pick from whatever very few utilities are made to fit those. Even a single seemingly innocuous choice like that can effectively lock down your entire class build, and it goes the other way too. Eg, quickness providing support? Well, here's your weapons, gearing, and entire build. Hope you like it, because otherwise you pick a different ability role. Advanced PvE play gets very mechanical. Most classes do come down to a correct optimal ability sequence that you execute precisely if you want to make your expected contribution--and other players probably have tools that let them know how you're doing. WvW sounds cool, but it's kind of garbage the devs never do anything to make shine. Imagine two giant masses of players stacking as best they can on the exact same spots (because the game only lets things hit 5 characters in a position and stacking distributes and dilutes hits across the group) spewing a kaleidoscope of incomprehensible damage effects at each other. It certainly has its devotees, but there's no arguing this accomplishes anything remotely like the cool, tactical war of MMO characters that anyone actually wants from it. Still, we have enjoyed our time playing, and we expect many more hours of entertainment. I'd suggest buying away from Steam, though.