Guild Wars 2 has  done away with traditional questing in favor of dynamic events. Even though the personal story lets players still experience a more familiar quest structure, when exploring the world outside of these tailored instances they will be hard pressed to find to now so well known exclamation marks. In stead hearing of a village being under attack  in a long winded text or dialog from ‘NPC village Joe’ you will actually experience the attack yourself and if you don’t hurry and get involved ‘village Joe’ might end up dead and you singing his long winded eulogy instead. Warhammer started it, Rift continued it – how is Guild Wars 2 faring with their radical implementation of dynamic events? Read some of my impressions from the beta weekends below.

The Cynical Part First

Dynamic events were supposed to make the world feel more alive in contrast to the static mobs standing around in other MMO’s but do they really? As much fun as I had in the BWE (both of them) I couldn’t shake the feeling I was playing themepark 2.0 with an invisible puppet master dev pushing the button every 20 minutes, releasing the centaurs to entertain gamers. The events didn’t flow from world occurrences but rather from underlying mechanics alien to the world itself. (Unless of course the centaurs set their invasions by the clock: “its been half an hour guys , lets stretch our legs and swing our swords – again”)