Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 is a free-to-play open-world MMORPG, the follow-up to ArenaNet’s popular Guild Wars. Building on that first game’s guiding principles, it offers a huge world to explore, populated with dynamic events that can start at any time and provide excellent variety in gameplay. It also features PvP, both open-world and instanced, dungeons, raiding, storytelling, and everything else you’d expect in a full-featured massively multiplayer online RPG.

You’ll choose from among the five races of Tyria – human, norn, charr, sylvari, and asura – and one of several classes. Each class has remarkable versatility, allowing it to fill a number of roles in a party and reducing the need for a full MMO-style “trinity.” Characters have limited skill bars of 10 slots; the first five are determined by your weapon and the second five by skills that you choose: a healing skill, three utility skills, and an elite skill. Different classes have ways to access other skills, and most classes have the ability to swap out weapons, so you’ll still have some variety in exactly what tools you can bring to each fight.

The heart of Guild Wars 2 is its open-world content. While there is some static content, in the form of “hearts” that you can complete once for NPCs, most of the game revolves around dynamic events, which spring up in the world at various times and often require large groups of players to complete. There are no traditional quests that require you to speak to NPCs to accept or complete them; instead, you can simply go from event to event, helping the people of Tyria as you see fit. Some events are parts of larger chains that string together and culminate in a giant event against a great threat to Tyria and require a hundred or more players to complete.