HeyDaniko // Orignal: February 21st, 2023 // Update: November 25th, 2024
I know it feels a little weird that Part III only contains two entries, but these are by far the absolute beefiest chunks of the entire article. I did try to edit them down quite a bit, noticing that any and all semblance of formal register had completely buggered off, but I don’t know… I feel like the rambling is almost essential to the experience. It is just part of the flavour at this point.
In case you have missed them, you can find Part I here, along with Part II here.
9) Guild Wars 2 (& Guild Wars 1 in no small measure):
[ArenaNet – August, 2012 Global release]
I played an incredible amount of the first Guild Wars from early 2006 until, pretty much, the time that Guild Wars 2 was due to release in 2012. But, despite it being one of my most anticipated games to date, I wasn’t actually able to play the sequel at launch. Sadly, the PC I had at the time was 7 years old and without a single upgrade. Near the end of its tenure, it was even struggling to run the original game so was, for lack of a better description, a complete spud. It was clearly long overdue for an update, and I think it would be quite dishonest to not attribute my ultimate tackling of that to Guild Wars 2. And, to a slightly lesser degree, Diablo III, which I had only been able to play at my friend’s house for around a year. Up until this point I had pretty much always been a console player first, and a PC gamer second if ever there was a title unavailable elsewhere. And this sudden change to PC-centric gaming was later reinforced by the terrible E3 we had to suffer through in 2013. I have yet to buy a console since the seventh generation and that E3 is largely, if not entirely, to blame.
Funnily enough through, on the topic of slow burners from my previous posts, I didn’t even really enjoy GW2 at first. Compared to the original game, the controls were extremely difficult for me to adjust to, as I wasn’t yet well versed enough in the use of keyboard and mouse for action orientated combat. The first game utilised a rather leisurely, slow-placed, tab target combat system. I almost never had to touch my mouse because pressing the space bar would allow my character to endlessly chase down his target and immediately begin his attack, never letting the foe escape. And all of my character abilities were bound to the number keys across the top, so never very far from where my fingers were resting. Additionally, once my initial target was down, pressing the C key would immediately target the next closest enemy, who I could then charge with another click of the space bar. So, after 6 years of such low effort play, I simply wasn’t ready for what ArenaNet decided to throw at us next. The second game changed everything, but most glaring was the combat system. Gone were the days of tab targeted, keyboard exclusive, relaxed gameplay, now replaced with a fast-paced, action combat design that suddenly required me to consider things like dodging and staying in or out of melee range. Without ever trying to imply that tab target combat requires less skill to play, action systems definitely feel considerably more demanding in terms of reaction time, spatial awareness, and the sheer number of buttons needing to be pressed at very specific times. But don’t come at me WoW players. I’ve seen how many buttons you have to press. That’s really not my point.
Guild Wars 2 has almost nothing in common with its predecessor. Whilst the first game is often loosely considered an MMORPG, simply because there isn’t really a more fitting, widely accepted category for it to fall into, the sequel is, without doubt, a genuine MMO experience. And honestly, in the beginning, I kind of hated that. There were people absolutely everywhere that I went. I was no longer able to play on my own or with my small, chosen group. There were no NPC companions either, something that I loved about the first game. I didn’t feel like the hero of the story anymore because I was now surrounded by hundreds of other heroes-of-the-story, all doing the exact same things in the exact same places. Of course, I have since come to discover that that is just kind of how MMOs are but, up until this point, I had been completely convinced that GW1 was representative of all MMOs, and I had no reason to believe that the sequel would be any different.
All this, compounded with a somewhat underwhelming base-game narrative, left Guild Wars 2 feeling like a real disappointment. And it was incredibly defeating to have waited years for a game that ended up being nothing like what I ever wanted, or needed, it to be. So, after a few brief adventures running around a now-unrecognisable Tyria, I simply stopped playing, with little-to-no intention of ever going back.
But all that changed a few months later in mid-2013, when my then-girlfriend decided to start playing, having been convinced to give it a go by a mutual friend. I wasn’t so upset with the game that I wasn’t willing to try it out again and play with them. And so, of course, in true slow-burner fashion, going back into the game with more understanding of both what it was and wasn’t, I found myself learning to love Guild Wars 2 for its own strengths at last. It was undoubtedly a completely different experience, and arguably designed for a very different audience given the scope of its changes, but once I was able to let go of ever wanting, or needing, a true continuation of the first game’s tone and atmosphere, I was able to appreciate the game for what it truly is.
But that’s not to say that I learned to love everything. Narratively, I still very much consider Guild Wars 2 to be a real disappointment. The first game certainly has its points of contention and understandable criticisms, but its sculped sense of scope and adventure, facilitated by small-scale, instanced gameplay, managed to carve out a notably emotive, epic, and memorable journey. The campaign of the base game alone, now referred to as Guild Wars: Prophecies, was absolutely massive. So massive in fact that my first playthrough of Prophecies easily touched on 200 or more hours of playtime before I reached its conclusion. This campaign alone saw us trek perilously across a post-war wasteland; frozen mountains and icy tundra; swamps and marshes laden with deadly, Australian wildlife; and hostile, blistering volcanic chains. And every step of the way something dramatic seemed to happen; maybe someone new would join you, or someone you had been traveling with would die. Maybe someone would betray you having lured you into their fold, or maybe someone else would extend the hand of friendships after several, previous conflicts. And keep in mind that the bulk of this experience was instanced. The only times you would ever see other players, outside of your adventuring party, were in the towns and outposts serving as social hubs. This format nurtured an ostensibly single-player-friendly yet cooperatively focussed experience, where the world felt rife with opposition whilst your party felt limited, overwhelmed, and outnumbered. Your personal involvement genuinely mattered. It was your job to lead this band of heroes and refugees across the world, saving whoever you possibly could and toppling whatever single foe or sinister organisation you encountered. And I fucking loved it! It was an emotional, extensive narrative, packed with great characters and wonderful, diverse places to explore. To this day, as of the November 2024 update to this article, Guild Wars 1 is still one of my absolute favourite video game adventures.
But that was just Prophecies, the first of three campaigns and a following expansion. So, if you add this initial, colossal odyssey to the later Factions, Nightfall, and Eye of the North adventures, all of which are admittedly smaller but still extensive in their own right, you have an absolutely, gargantuan narrative of sublime craftsmanship, that honestly hasn’t aged anywhere near badly enough for me to steer away from recommending it to you now. (The trilogy doesn’t include Eye of the North.)
But this article was supposed to be about Guild Wars 2. And it was, originally. You can thank my recent 2024 update for this seemingly unending deep dive into the games’ comparisons. And you can probably see where this is going.
Sadly, Guild Wars 2 didn’t just choose to fill all of its maps with the populace of the player base, but also downsized its visions of that scope and adventure many of us loved and yearned for. Traversing the world felt incredibly brief, contained, and formulaic by design, especially when compared to its goliath predecessor. And, mostly glaringly, all of the maps had been designed as quadrilaterals of varying descriptions, leaning away from the much more natural and free form layout of the original game. I’m sure there could well be programming and backend reasons for this, as I’m not a software developer, but just looking at the map from a its top-down perspective, there is something almost Minecraft-esq and voxel-like about the way each region is arranged and stacked like tetrominoes. We now have perfectly square mountain ranges used to draw various map borders that just feel off, especially when placed over a world map that many of us spent hundreds, even thousands, of hours exploring in a previous incarnation.
And that was just my initial, aesthetic complaint. Things didn’t get any better once I began delving into the narrative for the base game. Whilst I’ve come to love Guild Wars 2 for its visuals, combat, dungeons, raids, and PvP experiences, to this day the quality of its writing, especially when compared to the first game, still upsets me. There was no grand adventure, very few likeable characters, and no real growing sense of threat other than what we were first introduced to. It has certainly had some high points in subsequent content updates over the years, but the overall delivery of that initial story, the one that most players should be using to decide whether or not they’ll be sticking with the game, was genuinely pretty damn poor. Not least of which was how GW2 decided to replace actual cutscenes with two characters superimposed over a still background, spewing rigid lore and exposition at each other in the last engaging way possible. The original game’s take on cutscenes was far more immersive, seeing your party taken over by the engine’s AI, and shepherded around various locations amidst dialogue with assorted allies and NPCs. So, it took some real brute-forcing for me to see beyond these glaring devolutions and learn to find those aspects that I would later come to appreciate.
But back to 2013 when my ex and I and our mutual friend were, somehow, really quite hooked on this bloody game. Not quite a Bethesda open world calibre of hooking, but definitely not far off. We gradually managed to convince a small group of friends to pick it up too and, in very little time, we had our own decent crew going. Or ‘guild’ if you will. And as our hours in the game piled up we found ourselves joining the TeamSpeak server for our world, Vabbi, where we met, to put it politely, quite a colourful bunch. But I had originally been, really quite, adverse to ever joining another large voice server after having had something of a ropey and unpleasant experience on Ventrillo a few years earlier with my GW1 alliance. I was, however, eventually talked around, and I cannot overstate just how pivotal this one decision would go on to be in my later life.
And this is where the “importance” of Guild Wars 2 finally kicks in starts.
It’s funny to trace so many central moments in your life back to one, singular, profound instance, but that’s exactly what happened here. That decision, or maybe coercion, into joining Vabbi’s voice server would lead me to making some of the closest and most enduring friendships that I have ever had. A group that I still regularly play Guild Wars 2, D&D, and various other games with, to this day. Over 10 whole years later! Many of whom I have even had the pleasure of meeting in person over the years, either locally, or during a few brief jaunts around the world. I even attribute the very fact that I was able to relocate to Asia to having such a strong group of online friends. Knowing that wherever I went I would always have access to same group of people and the same hobbies that had been keeping me going for several years made the whole process significantly easier than I think it ever would have been without them.
And that’s enough of the mushy shit.
So, although I took quite an extended break from GW2, it’s still a game that means an incredible amount to me and one that I will drop into whenever I can. And at the time of writing, it still remains one of my most played game of all time, clocking in at just about under six thousand hours I believe. Fucking hell. But, because I apparently have nothing better to do with my life, it is very steadily being gained upon by the following entry…
10) The Elder Scrolls Online:
[Zenimax Online Studios – April, 2014 Global release]
Now, I never wanted a second MMO. Honestly, one is enough of a chore. It’s ridiculous that we accept that these games require hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of play to get anything done whilst the majority of other releases last a fraction of that time. I worked out recently that had I never played either Guild Wars 2 or the Elder Scrolls Online, then their combined playtime would have allowed me to complete nearly 1,400 other games of average length. And that’s fucking horrible! I wish I’d never worked that out. Even if we ignore the soppy mention of friends made along the way and such, which, yeah, is probably a positive, I can at least be confident that playing these games so much has been some pretty great value for money. Whilst subscriptions and in-game cash shops exist for a reason, there is absolutely no way that they have cost me quite as much as 1,400 brand new AAA releases, as they’re 70 to 80 quid a pop these days.
But that’s still a lot of time invested regardless of how little it’s cost me overall. Those are hours I could have spent learning languages, or doing something creative, like woodworking, writing, or painting. All fulfilling activities in their own right, but all also considerably more likely to earn money than playing two bloody MMOs! (www.twitch.com/heydaniko. Ad revenue please! You can even F5 this page a few times too. That might help.)
All this to say that playing a second MMO for the MMO experience, silly as it sounds, was never the actual plan. I just wanted to play through ESO’s story because I’d heard it was quite good. And I liked Skyrim a lot. I even wrote about liking it a lot, several times.
But this was early 2020 which we all fondly remember as the year the world ended. I had some time off work due to being a teacher and the sudden start of the pandemic forcing parents to keep their kids at home. I wasn’t at all against having some time off, of course, especially back in the early days when we all, hilariously, assumed that Covid-19 would last around two months at worst. So, I found myself going back to Skyrim in order to kill some time, having so recently completed a full trilogy playthrough of Dragon Age. But I was, sadly, a little fatigued with the game at this point. As much as I loved Skyrim and no matter how many new mods I installed, it was something that I think I was going back to a little too often, and never really giving myself time to miss. So, I got talking to a friend who had previously played through ESO just for the story – something I had wanted to do for a little while. I had briefly dabbled in the game a few years earlier, but Steam would attest that I had only made it 14 hours in. I’m sure people remember the rocky state that the game launched in. But my friend, the most recently of a few, confirmed that she found the story really quite good and that, if I was tired of Skyrim, it was well worth a go. Around the same time, I was also a Patreon subscriber of the Skyrim mod author Joseph Russell, most well-known for creating Lucien the follower. I had dropped in and out of Joseph’s streams a few times to catch him playing a little bit of ESO and I was definitely feeling like maybe it was time to have a tackle of the story myself.
And, again, you can see where this is going, because I am nothing if not predictable.
What began as a simple attempt to experience the narrative and the world of the Elder Scrolls Online did, indeed, end up turning into a second, full blown MMO addiction.
But it didn’t happen overnight.
I actually managed to play the game solo for a good few months, just enjoying the quests and the scenery, some of which I covered in my previous ESO article here. But after some time, I decided to ask around in the various ESO social media circles about guilds with active members on my time zone. I ended up joining a guild that I am still with to this day, with members all over the world covering all active time zones. And whilst folks have come and gone over the last 4 years, there have been an incredible number of static faces who have, somehow, managed to train me up from casual quester into veteran raid healer. Though I am not entirely sure how or when I let that happened.
Now, the majority of my ESO playtime was clocked over the years of 2021 & 2022, which most of my nearest and dearest will know to have been a rather difficult time in my life. This is where the game gets slightly elevated from “just another title that I really enjoyed” to something that has made a real impact on me. Having something to sink my time and energy into whilst being otherwise unable to do very much else was an incredible distraction for someone living with chronic illness. I had, of course, dropped back in and out of Guild Wars 2, and even Guild Wars 1, during this time but, after years of exhaustive play, there just wasn’t enough content to keep me busy. And that is where ESO shines. The amount of content it has these days is absolutely staggering. Especially if you’re a newer player or someone just interested in questing and exploring. But it’s definitely no slouch in the group content department either.
And much like my experiences with GW2, I have made plenty of great friends through ESO. Whilst I haven’t yet known most of these people very long by comparison, the times I have spent with them both in and out of the game have been just as memorable and rewarding.
So, please imagine some gruff, manly noises here to compensate for having emotions.
And that’s it! That’s the article done. How do I get all that time back? No more mammoth essays for me, I think. Smaller, more manageable opinion pieces going forward.
But if you made it to the end, over all 6.5 thousand words (2013 numbers, as I haven’t calculated the 2024 update), then I have nothing but appreciation for your time. Please feel free to let me know which games left the biggest impact on your life. It’s a topic I never tire of talking about.
Thank you again, very, very much,
Daniko
Thunder's Remnant 