I recently dusted off my old Guild Wars 2 account after YouTube recommend some videos of it.
I was a huge fan of Guild Wars 1, I especially loved its skill system. You had hundreds of skills available but you could only equip 8 at a time. This forced you to think carefully and craft builds, which was half the fun. There were some skills that were only available once you defeated some hard elite enemies, which was also a fun challenge.
When GW2 released I bought the game on the first week, but the skill system was very underwhelming for me. A huge part of why I loved GW1 was not there in the sequel, so I quickly stopped playing.
Around 10 years later I logged in again and created a new character. I’m aware that there were tons of changes made to the game but the very early game stayed pretty much the same (as far as I remember). However, the way I experienced it was very different.
It no longer bothered me that you only have a fraction of the skills available. I’m 10 years older than I was when I first played it and I have much less time. This means that I appreciate not having to spend days to craft a character, I can just go out and enjoy the game.
The story is also pretty good, I’ve heard that GW2 is one of the few MMOs where the early game is also as much fun as the late game, and it seems to be true. I don’t feel like I have to rush to max level to have fun.
Have you ever had a similar experience?
Yeah absolutely, I’ve been playing Farming Simulator since FS2013, when it came out I was 11. An 11 year old kid with ADHD doesn’t have much patience so naturally I didn’t do anything in the game properly, I just cheated my way through to get the biggest equipment I could. Now that fs22 released at the end of 2021 and I’m kind of burned out on it (just a little) I wanted to go back to how things started off for me and I’m actually enjoying the game again, playing how it was originally intended. Buying all the equipment when actually working hard for it is so much more satisfying than cheating everything in. I’m actually appreciating how simple but still really fun the game used to be, and how much work actually went into this release.
This was me with StarCraft 1. I was also around 11 when I first played it and didn’t even understand English properly at the time. I just cheated and killed every enemy, but it was still a lot of fun.
I recently got the game as part of my Prime subscription and it was so engaging to manage my resources properly, thinking twice when and if I should attack and from where. Victory was much more satisfying.