Well this is all just my opinion and probably mostly driven by nostalgia, but gw1 to me feels like the story is more about you/your character, and your friends(as opposed to the world). Sure gw2 has instanced content, but it feels more like a traditional MMO than gw1 does. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, but literally all of the mission and quest content in og guild wars was instanced, so it feels more like a single player RPG that you could play with friends and less like an mmo unless you are in a town where you can party up and trade with other players. It really captured a feeling of being out in the wild by yourself and didn’t have the same feeling that I get playing every other MMO where you just feel like your going down a beaten path, even if you technically were going something that literally everyone else was doing. Some games like PoE do have a similar system but they do not do their storytelling or combat in quite the same way. There’s a bit more to it than that though, the art style, the combat mechanics, and the tone of the story all changed quite dramatically between the games. Gw1 has a less exaggerated, more grimy and down to earth artstyle compared to the more “paintbrush” artstyle of gw2 and gw2 also feels like the overall tone is more lighthearted and gw1 wasn’t afraid to just strait up off npcs that you grew to know well in order to advance the story and up the stakes.
Playing gw2 for the first time as a long time gw1 player was a strange experience, because it felt like Anet had abandoned many of the things that made guild wars unique and different compared to standard mmos, and it honestly felt like they took the stock mmo formula, applied a vaguely guild wars artstyle to it and removed healer classes.
To be clear I’m not saying gw2 is a bad game, just that it’s very different from og guild wars. I would not be surprised if gw3 is significantly different than gw2 and 1.
TowardsTheFuture@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
It’s kinda funny, what stuck out to me in gw2 was that it was an MMO where (at launch) the story wasn’t just about you. There was an entire army (I mean duh it’s an MMO) and while you were the commander and thus still important, there were still things happening that you didn’t see. People dying in the war, even if you try and help, and overall just felt refreshing. Well I guess most people hated that so it ended up going a different direction after that but, I really enjoyed it.
I get liking the 4 player instanced content stuff, I loved PSO and others with a similar setup I just wouldn’t really call that an MMO, but they’re good games too. GW2 is much more social, and stuck out to me as an MMO where you don’t hate to run into people for once. No fighting over mob kill credit, no waiting in queue to kill a unique for a quest, no rushing to get a resource node before someone, etc. so even if it wasn’t all instanced, it was good to see other players, and they were more often than not extremely helpful.
It’s for sure a very different game than gw1, and I’m sure it will be different than gw3 as they plan to keep supporting and releasing content for all 3.
Also, if you didn’t see, they recently did a pretty big update to gw1 to make it more modern, and releasing on mobile later this month (you can sign in to same old gw1 account to play on mobile) and they did just say in their video post yesterday that they are adding a new type of content to it soon.