Guild Wars 2

I’m not new to Guild Wars 2. I played at launch, reached max level, and only came back recently because a friend insisted, especially after my time with Turtle WoW came to an end. It felt like a good moment to revisit older MMOs and see how they’ve evolved. When I logged back in, my old character was gone. Honestly, I didn’t mind restarting, but it still felt like something that should have been better communicated. The biggest issue is onboarding. The game throws a massive amount of systems, menus, and currencies at you almost immediately while only explaining the basics. Everything beyond that feels like you’re expected to figure it out alone. Progression is the game’s biggest structural flaw. I reached level 80 after completing only a handful of starting and mid-level maps. That pacing is absurd. You massively outlevel content before truly understanding your class, the world, or the game’s systems. This completely undermines combat learning. The combat mechanics are genuinely excellent, but the game never forces you to learn them properly during leveling. You unlock skills faster than you can process them, so early combat becomes little more than spamming cooldowns, swapping weapons randomly, and steamrolling everything anyway. It works, but it feels shallow for far too long. Crafting progression is handled terribly. By the time I reached level cap, my professions were still far behind because the game provides no natural or satisfying way to level them alongside normal gameplay. Instead of being a meaningful parallel progression system, crafting becomes a separate grind after the fact. At that point, most of what you craft is already obsolete or irrelevant, which makes the whole process feel pointless and demotivating. Inventory management remains one of the worst friction points, especially for free players. Bag space is extremely restrictive, forcing constant trips to the bank and turning basic item management into a chore. Combined with waypoint costs and travel time, the game often feels like it wastes more of your time on logistics than on actual gameplay. Dungeon design may be fine mechanically, but the player culture around them ruined the experience for me. My first dungeon run was completely rushed by veterans sprinting through everything as fast as possible. Nobody waited, nobody explained anything, and if you fell behind, missed dialogue, loot, or map details, that was your problem. There was no opportunity to appreciate the dungeon itself, its atmosphere, or its story. It felt less like group content and more like being dragged behind people doing mandatory chores. The post-80 gameplay loop did not improve my opinion. The game immediately pushes you toward dailies and weeklies centered around event grinding, but as someone without mounts, traversing the world for these objectives is tedious and slow. Worse, many event participants barely engage with the content. Players swoop in, contribute the bare minimum for credit, and leave instantly. The cooperative open-world design that sounds great on paper ends up feeling hollow and transactional in practice. At no point did the game motivate me to push further into raids or deeper endgame systems. And that matters. If an MMO fails to convince a player to continue after they have reached level cap, tried dungeons, experienced open-world endgame loops, and sampled its progression systems, then “the real game starts later” is not a defense, it is an indictment. To be clear: Guild Wars 2 has excellent combat fundamentals, an immersive world, and one of the most alive-feeling open worlds in the MMO genre. The foundation is strong. But the actual player progression experience, from leveling to early endgame, feels fundamentally poorly structured. The game constantly gets in its own way through bad pacing, poor onboarding, disconnected progression systems, and community-driven optimization that strips the soul out of group content. I wanted to like it more than I did. But after giving it a fair chance, I simply do not think Guild Wars 2 respects a new or returning player’s time well enough to recommend it.