The name of the game...

Yeah, this is a blog post about gaming.  Look, I'm a nerd, okay?  I like spending my spare time peering wide-eyed at a computer screen watching a virtual, pixellated elf sets fire to gnomes.
This weekend is the first public beta test of Guild Wars 2, a game I've been looking forward to for a very long time.  These are my impressions for the first couple of hours I've spent in game.  
It must be remembered that this is a beta - the purpose of it is to sort out any bugs in the system.  If you go in expecting a perfectly polish game then you're going to be disappointed, and you're also an idiot who should read up what "beta testing" means. 

I'll be honest, I didn't do much beyond wandering around the human capital city of Divinity's Reach going "ooh" and "aah" - this is a very pretty game and that city looks amazing.

It's clearly still a beta and needs some optimisation to make it run smoothly but it wasn't too bad.  At the highest graphics settings, the frames per second (FPS) was very low but just setting Shaders and Shadows to medium made it run much faster.  Well, as long as there weren't too many things happening on screen - when a bunch of players all focussed on a spider-boss thing in an orchard, and there were spell effects firing off everywhere, I think it dropped to single figures FPS.  Still playable and still responded to commands but it was something of a slideshow.

My other main problem is with the combat.  I'm crap at it.  I've got 6 years' worth of World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online muscle memory that are telling me how to play but that doesn't work in this game.  I need to learn how to dodge, and move, and not just stand there spamming abilities like an idiot!  It's not clicked yet and my brain needs to rewire itself - I will get the hang of it though!

Overall, I'm enjoying it immensely and I will be playing more!