Lens on GW2 BWE3 Liveblog

Here we go again!

12:27 am--Off to bed!

9:02--Coffee is a-percolatin'!

9:03--I think it'll be a sylvari warrior to start.  I hope the name "Elmer" isn't taken.  Botanical puns for the...win?

9:20--I have coffee.  Is it noon yet?

9:40--According to my most recent estimates, it's still not noon.  I'll double-check and get back to you.

9:58--A small patch, no event ongoing to log into  :-(   Also, I miss the password chroma hash.  Dear ArenaNet, please bring back the chroma hash.  Thank you.

10:14--I have consumed my coffee.  It is still not noon.  I have dashed off a quick letter of complaint to my congressperson in an attempt to have this remedied ASAP.

10:24--Guildie just said "One hour and twenty-six minutes to go!"  Tease.

10:41--We're up!  And I'm stuck waiting for it to process my TOS acceptance :-(

10:52--And the sylvari warrior "Elmer" has awoken!  And for starting the beta early, ArenaNet I love you more than anything!  (Note:  I do not actually love ArenaNet more than bacon or vodka.  Other than that, we're good.)

11:06--I'm out of the dream.  The real world is scary!

11:47--I'm level 4!  I must now level up my sandwich making and consuming skills!

12:01--My last "quest" I was tranformed into a plantdog.  Insert your "dogwood" or "dogweed" joke here.

12:10--My first "vista", a sort of panoramic swooping view of the area.  A nice addition to the "point of interest" type of map accomplishments.  A little bit of a platformer, but not too bad.

12:17--The sylvari home city is beatiful and a classic example of "fantasty town syndrome".  It's pretty, it looks and feels cool, and it's ridiculously difficult to navigate because of the time and effort spent to make it look and feel cool.  So...a mixed bag.

12:23--Lots of botanical pun-names.  "Asparaguy" and "Joan of Bark"...I'd complain, but I went with "Elmer".

12:31--OK, very, very well done ArenaNet.  One of the initial sylvari stories has you help a guy whose lover is in danger.  And the lover is also a guy.  They don't make a big deal of it, it's not paraded around with a flashing neon sign...it's just there.  The Big Deal is that it's not a big deal.

12:55--Still trying to get to all the discoverable points in the sylvari home city.  Really a pain.  City discovery can be annoying, but this is above and beyond.

1:27--I'm up to level 6, doing some events and such and skilling up aaaaallllll my weapons.  That's one good/bad thing for the warrior, all the different weapon skills.

1:35--It's all feeling smooth and polished so far.  Only bit that felt a bit unresponsive was an escort event with about 30 of us running around in an area the size of a phone booth.

1:51--If I had any doubt, ArenaNet are evil geniuses.  I was working on my storyline quest and I had to help a woman defend her lover's grave from an attack by the undead.  She had seeds I could drop down into fertile ground, and they would grow into flowers that would slow or damage the rampaging undead.  Yes...Plants vs. Zombies.  I was slackjawed with amazement.  Well-played, sirs.  Well-played.

2:19--The first bug!  One skill point quest not activating.

2:42--So many skills to train.  Almost L8.

3:03--Because the sylvari starting area is so...green, so high-saturation green...it can be hard to pick out details and make out the landscape for the trees (and bushes, and etc.), so to speak.

3:13--Yeah, finding the appropriate path to certain landmarks is mostly impossible in the wall of greenosityness.

3:50--Wooo, lots of events, lots of loots (some of it even useful), level 9, and all of my basic weapon skills (except the underwater ones) learned!

4:43--And I've hit L10!  Skilled up one of the underwater weapons a bit on an event boss and got like 6 or 8 items out of the loot chest.  Wooo for loot chests!  And chests in general.

4:50--Back in the sylvari main city...and it's really a pain in the ass.  The map options to "show level" in the four level city are as useless as tits on a bowling ball because basically everything in the city shows up, just some are transparent, so you can only kind of tell what is on which level.  Basically, it stinks.  Perhaps the most frustrating thing in 3 weekends and 2 stress tests.

5:16--I finally found all of the points of interest and vistas and such in The Grove (hate it!) and they have a new build requiring a server reboot...so time for dinner!

5:51--I have dined and now resume my botanical existance.

6:12--I've been in this chair so long I feel like I'm putting down roots.  Harhar...plant-based humor!  Har?

6:53--Got to 11, spent half my silver for my book to open up my traits, did a little bit of crafting...  Progress!  So...since I totally hate the syvari main city, I'd better take a look at the asura and see what I think of those little turds...

7:00--Yay, the color hash is back on the password!

7:14--And a new asura engineer is born!  I give you...Loos Wingnut!

7:29--The sylvari tutorial boss was excellent, but the asura one is a-MAY-zing!

7:48--The asura area is a lot more whimsical and funny than the others.  Sort of halfway between WoW goblins and gnomes.

8:27--Really nice animations on the asura.  Comical without being over the top.  It's making the sylvari look totally vanilla by comparison.  And, you see, vanilla is a plant pod, so it's like funny!

9:00--It's a lot easier getting around and finding things in the first asura area.  Still haven't checked out the town yet though!

9:16--Some of the dialog is just asphyxiatingly funny in the asura zone.

9:55--And into Rata Sum, the asura home city, for the first time.  And it looks very nice.  I hope it's arranged in a more user-friendly fashion than The Grove.

10:06--Rata Sum is pretty much another "Fantasy Town Syndrome", looks extremely cool, hard as hell to get around in.  It's certainly better than The Grove, but still not good.  We really need the map levels to be separate, not overlayed.

10:10--I am reminded by Rata Sum of WoW's Undercity.  But way cooler looking.  Really, GW2 is sometimes strikingly beautiful.

10:13--That first step is a doozy...7024 falling damage.  It probably would have been more, but I started off so close to the ground!

10:43--OK...enough!  I've been at the game for about 12 hours...perhaps I should stand up and let feeling return to my legs.

SUMMARY:  After two previous beta weekends and a couple of short stress tests, I'm still enjoying the game a great deal.  But I think I'm also glad that this will be the last beta (purportedly), as all the time I spent in TOR didn't work out so great at launch and beyond.  On the other hand, I do expect GW2 to have better legs than TOR did, as I saw problems looming for TOR almost immediately after getting into the beta.  I expressed the opinion that they'd need to keep the content pipe full for TOR to succeed long term (something they certainly didn't do).  There's just a lot more to do in GW2 even just while levelling up.  It's a deeper game experience where TOR was very linear.

So I'll get some sleep...y'know, 2 or 3 hours...then back at it tomorrow!