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The original was posted on /r/guildwars2 by /u/Matt_4n4 on 2025-06-20 08:32:21+00:00.

I can’t believe, that it took me 13 years to find this gem. I’ve decided to share my story, cause it feels like I finally found an MMO that I’ve been looking for. I am confident to say, that I’ve played most of the MMOs that are at the market - some of them for a shorter time, other longer. I’ve always gotten burned out, I believe it was simply due to the fact of what I enjoy the most in games - questing, story, world building & customization and most games has either one or the other. My most played MMOs so far were WoW (starting from BfA), ESO and New World.

All of these I enjoyed a lot, especially New World, but New World is impossible to defend or play when the game has not recieved any new story quests for almost 2 years, it just feels like a life support. WoW was a better in that aspect, but the need to pay each month + boring gameplay (in my opinion) + how the world barely reacts to us, as a player, was what turned me off each time I tried to comeback. ESO was probably the closest to what I’ve been looking for, but I am not the biggest fan of Elder Scrolls Lore, a lot of the stuff feels very simillar in terms of world building.

I tried briefly GW2 in the past, but never finished the base game story - I’ve stopped around lvl 77, even though my overall feelings were positive, something was off. After seeing the ad at Summer Game Fest this year, I decided - why not give it another chance? I had the game bought afterall already so it doesn’t cost me anything. This time I also got my boyfriend to try the game out with me and we went on on our journey. We also found out at the very beginning that Action Camera is a thing, which made the combat feel much better. Especially for me, after playing a lot of New World, it felt like a nice combo of tab target + open combat.

Base game was okay, especially when you can play all of it in coop. I remember struggling with some quests before when I played solo, but as a duo the issue was almost completely gone. Gameplay wise though, it did age poorly at some moments. The final fight was cool, at least at the moment when we were playing it. We would be proven wrong very quickly soon… After 2-3 days we were done with base game and that’s when the magic began to show - starting Living World season 1.

The jump in quality was enormous - finally getting some cutscenes, character talking more lively and overall, being more interesting. Mobs became less of a dmg sponge and instead they did more dmg, but also died faster. Some of the new maps were literally 10 times prettier than anything we’ve seen during base game. To my memory, especially the map during Aether Pirates storyline, where we infiltrate their base at a coastal cave and waves crash over the clifs, with lighthouse light roaming the horizon.

We are currently in the middle of Living World season 2, since we want to play all of the story quests together, and let’s say that I am more of an MMO player than my BF is, so we do just a few quests per day now.

Because of that reason, I decided to get Janthir and in the meantime progress the newest expansion, since it’s so far ahead in lore, I don’t believe it will spoil that much of events from Dragon Saga (other that the good guys win, but the expansion name “End of Dragons” kinda already spoiled it).

Getting into Janthir Wilds was another mindbreaking jump in quality. I know that it’s literally 10 years of game dev ahead compared to what we were playing so far, but damn… everything just feels perfect at the moment. The fact that our main character responds with VO to all of the dialogues in the world said to them, that characters put trust in us cause we actually saved the world multiple times, the voice acting & cutscenes got soooo much better. It’s literally first MMO where I feel like im in a full-made RPG game that has full online support. Even the environmental storytelling through world events & heart quests is voice acted for our main character (the quest where we have to collect mushrooms and we can accidentally eat hallucinogenic one caught me off guard :D)

I can’t wait to see all of the events that happened between Living World 2 & Janthir, but that will come with the time. I can’t wait to unlock all of the mounts, expansion systems and learn about the stories.

Not sure if anyone will get to the end of this post, but maybe there is someone out there who’s considering to try the game and has been meeting the same struggles with MMOs as I mentioned above and will find it useful :P Thanks for joining my Ted Talk - if anyone wants to, feel free to add me to a friendlist at “Wolffie.7425”. There is still a lot for me to discover, especially group content so might be fun