First-timer

Ok, so a week ago my new PC arrived, having decided my slightly-aged laptop wouldn’t cope with Guild Wars 2. Just after the last stress test. Imagine, then, my delight at finding out about last night’s test.

I was at a choir practice, so didn’t get logged on for the first 90 minutes, but when I did, I got straight into the game. My first challenge was figuring out that to select the race of your character you had to click on the picture. Who knew! Once that was sorted, I opted for a Charr, only so that I could team up with a friend. I hadn’t planned to play a Charr to start with, but I did enjoy messing around with my pussy-cat warrior last night.

Considering I wasn’t too sure how the UI worked, I was surprised to find it fairly intuitive and the starter areas give you a great chance to get used to everything.

Coming from Guild Wars, the thing I like best about it is teaming up with guildies on missions. I wonder if I will miss that in GW2. I believe you can travel to where they are and party up, but in the limited time I had last night I didn’t get to experience that. Having said that, it was fun just coming across an event and teaming up with others. I’m not sure how much co-operation there was. Sure, we all contributed to the kills, but I suspect we were too new to things to take advantage of any proper team-work. I like the old-style approach of knowing you’re out with a skilled Fire Ele, or balancing a team. But I’m sure I’ll get used to the changes. I did find people happy to res, and I did a fair bit of that myself. As a monk of long-standing, it’s instinctive behaviour.
I still reckon the Charr Warrior will be one of my last chars, but it was an easy introduction. I’m aiming to create all professions in time, but most likely Guardian, Ele and either Nec or Mes will be my preferred choices. Of course, I could be completely wrong!

As far as the stress test itself went, I had no issues, other than thinking it seemed rather graphics-hungry. It was a warm evening, but my fans were working overtime. Still, as it’s a new PC I’m getting used to it, though Skyrim doesn’t seem to stress it as much, and that had a reputation for being much hungrier, I thought.

Tonight’s test is in the middle of the night, so I suspect RL (i.e. sleep) might intervene. But then again…..