Guild Wars 2: My pictures. Let me show you them.

It’s tough to capture a vacation with a handful of anecdotes. Which is why you roll out the pictures and hope your friends are polite enough to sit through them.

After the jump, are you polite enough?

The Mesmer creates up to three illusionary copies of herself with different powers and different finishing moves. It’s the perfect class for a narcissist who wants to admire multiple copies of his character. I call this picture Fox Force Three.

I call this one Fox Force Four.

This one doesn’t have a title, but it belongs in a comic book. A full-color comic book that captures the glory of my purple beams.

But Guild Wars 2 isn’t all about my character. It’s also about the world. Here are some places I want to go.

I have no idea how to get out there, or even what’s out there. But I want to go. I wanted to go into this steampunky cave lair, but the dudes in there were too high level for me.

I’ll be back, high level dudes! Maybe not until the game comes out, but I will be back! Here’s a place where the dudes weren’t too high level for me.

That bandit camp in the trees was the site for a dynamic mission where me and several other players ran around recovering stolen goods. Basically, we were re-stealing. Here are the Earthworks Bluffs.

It’s a huge ramshackle fortress/city place that’s constantly under attack by centaurs. There are several dynamic missions that involve defending it from centaurs or sometimes even taking it back from the centaurs, who can completely occupy it.

Other dynamic missions involve escorting caravans. You’ll find clusters of players traveling with pack beasts.

Sometimes the local patrols can use your help.

When you come to a town called Beetletun, one of the options to fill up the local “heart quest” is erasing graffiti. Which is kind of a shame. As far as graffiti goes, that’s not half bad. There’s also a carnival going on in Beetletun. Here is a puppet show I want to see.

When is the next showing?

The main human city is massive and its massiveness is not merely cosmetic, which was often the case in the original Guild Wars. For instance, I can go down there.

If fact, I did and here’s what I found.

There’s not a lot of gameplay in the city, but the quests and crafting will pull you around to different areas. You’ll mostly jump around using waypoints, but the scenery is still nice. I hope ArenaNet will give us some excuse to really explore the city. Like, say, achievements. Oh, look!

I see an exploration category!

You’re probably tired of seeing my mesmer’s pretty face. She starts wearing a mask that makes her look like a kabuki performer.

Here’s an ugly old charr character.

The charr are like half orc and half dog. They look good decked out in heavy armor and carrying big weapons.

I’m pretty sure you can find some charr in this screenshot where a bunch of us are taking a tower from an enemy faction.

Before we got up to this capture point, we can to knock down the gate using siege engines like this.

Here’s me waiting for someone to let me drive a siege engine, since I didn’t bring the plans and supply to build my own.

One of the little touches I love is how party chat doesn’t just appear in a window. It also shows up in little chat bubbles next to the speaker’s picture on the party interface.

The cutscenes look like cutscenes from JRPGs. Here are two NPCs detailing some backstory during a dungeon run.

Guild Wars 1 hit you with a death penalty each time you died. That’s in Guild Wars 2, along with equipment durability. As you get killed over and over again, your equipment basically breaks and your character model is rendered accordingly. By the time we finished this dungeon, we were basically all naked and rendered accordingly in the cutscene.

Click here for the previous Guild Wars 2 entry