Waiting for Pandaria, WoW-Killers and Other Stuff

So I am sitting here waiting for Mists of Pandaria to drop. I am not wildly excited by the thought of Kung Fu pandas but I expect Blizzard to do a decent job and I am curious. I strongly suspect I will end up playing more Guild Wars 2 than WoW in the near future. A lot of people are saying the same. That got me thinking about how many games have been called a WoW killer and how silly this tendency is in our media and not just in how it applies to games. Way back when I worked Read more…

Guild Wars Third Impressions

I am a couple of weeks into Guild Wars 2 and have had time to poke around a bit, get over the initial glitz of the launch and see a bit more of the world. What do I think now? I am still impressed. If anything I am more impressed now than when I started. An incredible amount of work has gone into this game, giving it a level of polish in the world-building that I don’t think I have seen in an MMO before. It’s not just that the game is beautiful; it is clearly a labour of love. Read more…

Guild Wars 2: Second Impressions

On Friday, I upgraded my computer just so I could play Guild Wars 2 and I am glad I did. As the owner of one of Asus’s Republic of Gamers laptops I am now in a position to really appreciate all the work that has gone into this game. The world now looks like all the screenshots on blog posts and magazines. It’s jaw-dropping. The special effects when you use a spell or skill are lavish. When you get a group of people fighting together it’s like an explosion in a fireworks factory, and I mean that in a good Read more…

Guild Wars 2: First Impressions

I’ve been looking forward to Guild Wars 2 for a couple of years now, ever since I read the earliest press releases from the developers. I was a big fan of the original game and the folks at ArenaNet were talking about a lot of exciting new stuff for the next iteration. As you can see here, I was so psyched by the release of the latest version I did something I have never done before, I bought the Collector’s Edition (pictures courtesy of my lovely wife, Radka). The Collectors edition comes with a very fine statuette of the Char Read more…