Games

I was a fan of the orig­i­nal Guild­Wars online MMORPG from the first moment I dis­cov­ered it includ­ed the Mes­mer pro­fes­sion for play­er char­ac­ters. I played it for sev­er­al years and still do on occa­sion, but I long since did every­thing I could and even cre­at­ing a new char­ac­ter with a dif­fer­ent pro­fes­sion was­n’t all that inter­est­ing any longer. Now I’ve found a sim­i­lar inter­est in the sequel game, Guild­Wars 2.

Three years ago, Are­naNet released Guild­Wars 2. One of the great mys­ter­ies sur­round­ing the release was the final char­ac­ter pro­fes­sion, which was (as many play­ers were hop­ing) again the Mes­mer pro­fes­sion, much changed from the first game, alas. Guild­Wars 2 was, like its pre­de­ces­sor, a non-sub­scrip­tion game, with only the ini­tial pay­ment for the client soft­ware the only main out­lay to play the game. At the time, and since, I could­n’t real­ly afford the (admit­ted­ly min­i­mal) cost, plus, at the time, I did­n’t have a fast enough Inter­net con­nec­tion that could han­dle the mas­sive size of the client down­load. There­fore, I parked my inter­est in the game and car­ried on with oth­er things.

Just recent­ly, how­ev­er, Are­naNet “unlocked” the game, so peo­ple could play it for free. Grant­ed, access is lim­it­ed to only two char­ac­ters, and oth­er aspects are lim­it­ed or locked, but the core ele­ments are still avail­able. I decid­ed to give it a try and I’ve been hooked ever since.