There’s an emotion I get in a good wargame, it was expressed best in the movie Patton – “God help me, I do love it so.” I’ve only played WoW for 3 years, and I never got into raiding, but I had a lot of fun both as a healer and a tank in random dungeons, as well as leveling in PvE. I had too much fun playing different classes and races to ever get a character to the raiding phase. I leveled a priest from 15-70 doing nothing but random dungeon healing though. It was fun and satisfying on a basic level. But I never had that feeling. I always was standing back from the game, gaming the game. Playing it from my head instead of my heart.

There were hints that things could be different. Pugging as a warrior tank could get joyfully chaotic at times, but never enough to give me that feeling. So I tried different MMOs: Aion, Conan, GW1 (sorry, but yawn…), CoH. None of them could keep my attention and I always drifted back to WoW after a while. Rift’s eponymous spawning group events came close but were too abstract and the rest of the world was too poorly developed to hold my attention (I hadn’t realized how important roads were until I played on maps where they went nowhere sensible. I hadn’t realized I actually sometimes care about the text in quests until I found quests that had none). TSW would have been my new game if GW2 hadn’t been around, but I only have time for one MMO, and as interesting as TSW can be, it can’t give me that feeling.

There are other things that make GW2 special that I’ve come to appreciate as well. One commenter called it a WoW ripoff. This is ludicrous–it is as different from WoW as possible while still being a fantasy MMO. If anything GW2 is the anti-WoW. It took a while for my gut to stop clenching reflexively every time I saw another player running toward a resource node I wanted. But now instead of hating them for getting there first, I feel a camaraderie with my fellow gatherer as we mine, log, or harvest together. The simple pleasure of finding a fellow traveler fallen victim to the various dangers of the world and resurrecting them as we exchange “ty” and “np.” The gratitude when the roles are reversed. All these are feelings I’ve never experienced in an MMO before, and I like them.

But the feeling that told me that this was my new MMO was what I felt on the first open beta weekend of GW2, when I realized in my first 5 minutes that it was different from any MMO I’d played before. Instead of the static world of NPCs with !’s over their heads, it was a world of action–and something was always happening somewhere nearby calling me to rush inexorably into the fray. The awesome directed chaos of the melee is something no other MMO can come close to. Sometimes when I’m playing lower level content where the risk of dying is less, I turn off the UI and immerse myself in it. I love it. God help me, I do love it so!