GW2 Ruined WoW

Guild Wars 2 ruined WoW for me.

I played SWTOR and came back no problem. The animations and terrible expertise mechanic was enough to make WoW look good.

I tried Rift for a bit, and while the graphics were nice the animations and some of the combat felt a little bit off. It was essentially a wow clone with a few new ideas.

I tried Tera's open beta weekend and had a great time for the most part. I'll go into more detail on that later, but realistically it has way too many grindy elements.

I played Guild Wars 2's first public beta weekend. Best gaming experience I'd had in a long time. I've heard enough from the developer blogs to know they are moving in the right direction. They are working on bringing the next generation of MMO's.

My joy with this is primarily from a game designers perspective. But I nearly completely lost that perspective as I played the game. Its only when I would stop between recordings to view and compress that I had a chance to regain that perspective again. This game gave me hope in the industry. So many problems were solved. The PvE was amazing, the PvP was amazing, the entire experience was nearly exactly what I hoped to see.

I realize that its still an uphill battle against established WoW players. Many may not even take a look. But they would be missing out on what could be. GW2 not only solves MMO game mechanics, it solves some gamer interaction mechanics. There is plenty more to say about this, but I'm working on compressing the rest of my videos from the beta to go into more detail.