Guild Wars 2 beta, FINALLY

As soon as the Guild Wars 2 pre-purchase became available, I bought a game to secure a place in the beta events. I've been looking forward to this game for so long that it seems absolutely incredible that it's finally here - even if only partially so far, since it'll be a while before the full game is released. In celebration of that, I decided to dust off this blog and once again resume posting about my wild adventures in MMORPG-land.

After some connection issues on Friday (tried connecting about 1.5 hours after the beta began and just couldn't get in at all), I was finally able to begin gaming this morning. I decided to try out races and professions that I wouldn't pick as my first choice, so with sylvari and asura out of the question since they weren't included in the beta, my first character ended up being a female charr engineer.   

Seen here, eyeing her male necromancer companion suspiciously.

I played with my bf as much as possible, since I'd dragged my PC over to his place for the weekend just for this purpose. In the  Charr areas things were fine (possibly because we played the Charr early in the morning, with not many players around), but later on with different characters, we kept running into a nasty partying issue. It kept forcing us to separate areas almost every time we exited an instance or gated to a different area (you'd have the main area, and different versions of queues). I really, REALLY hope they fix this before the final game, it was exasperating to constantly try to force the game to put us in the same area. Partying will be a huge problem if the group can't even stay together while doing quests and instances

 The guns are awesome though.

Aaaand that's pretty much my only big grievance with the game at the moment... there are still other small bugs, but those are just bugs and will most likely get fixed before the full game comes out. In every other respect the game is just so shiny! Beautiful graphics, stunning environments, fun events and lots of great, rewarding co-operation between the players. I love how they've done the event system, so that everyone who takes part gets something and people won't have to compete like hyenas for each scrap of loot.

After playing a few levels on the Charr, we decided to switch races. We made human characters next (I rolled a male mesmer and bf rolled a female guardian), but only played a few minutes before deciding to switch to Norn because the human areas were absolutely filled with other players and the aforementioned partying issues kept happening over and over again. Norn are my favourite race out of all of them, so I couldn't help trying out a female norn ranger which is my first choice for a possible main character. My bf rolled a male thief, since we were both curious about how the thief profession worked.

Oh, the lovely blood ---- I mean, tattoos. Yes.

The Norn area turned out to be my favourite scenery and mood-wise (just as I'd expected). There's just something so breathtaking about steep mountain ranges, forests of lush pine trees and roaming wild animals. Also, swimming! As soon as I found a place deep enough, I happily splashed around with my pet, enjoying the exoticness of underwater guns. 

 So, which one's your daddy?

This kitty takes to water like a fish!

Tomorrow, we're planning on trying out the PvP, and I'll try to get a bit more use out of my human male mesmer. The guardian profession is looking more and more interesting too, so I might have to give that a whirl as well. 

As a final question to anyone reading this blog post and who played the beta... what area (human, norn, charr) did you like the most? Which had the best scenery in your opinion?