Now I for one wasn't convinced Guild Wars 2 would be anything special at all when I first heard it announced, to me it was just another generic MMO trying to beat down World of Warcraft (ie - Rift, Aion, pretty much every single other MMO) but after playing the first Guild Wars recently and being fairly impressed (though it might not be the best MMO it is certainly good) I decided to do some research on Guild Wars 2 and I couldn't believe what I saw. Of course, I'll back up what I'm going to say with various sources and I can't say for sure that it's going to be the best MMO ever I can't see why I wont be. Let's get started.

Personalized Story

You know games like Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect, Fallout, Oblivion etc have in depth story lines in which your choices effect the game? Imagine that in an MMO. Not only from the get go do you fill in a biography (similar to what Mount and Blade Single Player has you do) but choices in the various quests in the game will change the story and your world. For example, if you run into a choice of either helping a friend or letting them die then whatever you choose will be shown. If you saved him he will be in your home instance and if not... not. Of course this expands into greater things but that is only a small example. Rescue a town? They will acknowledge you. Having a faceless character in an MMO is pretty crappy so Guild Wars 2 is going to change that.

Dynamic Quests.

Let us sum up a normal MMO quest, talk to an NPC, he gives you a wall of text, you get a message telling you to kill 5 bears, attempt to kill the 5 bears only to realize that another player keeps coming and killing the bears stopping you from doing it, finally kill the bears, travel back to the NPC, get a reward. Rinse and repeat about 5,000,000 times and you have your bread and butter MMO, but not so in Guild Wars 2. Instead of doing all this normal, boring routine Guild wars 2 offers dynamic and original questing. You never have to right click on an NPCs head to get a boring generic quest. How the system works is that while you are randomly exploring in the world you will bump into various events that happen. Let's say a town is being attack, a villager will run up to you yelling at you for help and pointing in the way of the event. However, you don't just go there and see 15 mobs just sitting there you will see them actually fighting and progressing in battle. Also, the outcome of the quests heavily directs the quest chain. If you fail to save the village then they have taken over. They will try and reinforce the town to help their forces against you and that town will be held by them. Every quest in the game aren't just quests, they are events in which you interact with and effect the world in different ways. Oh, and did I mention the scaling difficulty? well, the more people actively (I want to express this because people think that people can grief just be attacking once to increase the difficulty, they can't) the harder the quest gets. More enemy reinforcements will come to attack the village. Also, there is a rating system that determines how much exp and gold you get. Say is you only participated a bit, you would get a bronze rank, a good amount you will get a silver and doing a lot in the event will give you gold! But Neku, how do I turn in my quests? You don't. Come in and slay a few monsters and the game will rank you and give you the reward, it's is a bit hard to explain fully buy you can see more below in the video section. Not only that buy you can't steal other peoples kills because if two people hit it you will both get gold. You can find more about the questing system below. (see: Videos)

Combat.

Combat is the main part of any MMO and up to this day (even with the release of Star Wars The old republic) all you do is stand still while maybe running in circles pressing 1, 1, 1, 2, 5, 6, 9, etc and the games challenge is trying to remember which skills are bound to which keys. In guild wars 2 the game has no auto attack, you can dodge projectiles and the game becomes a lot more interactive. This is a right step in combat as the ''press button, see what happens'' combat is getting tiresome and guild wars 2 throws it out the window. Oh, did I mention that weapons have skills? yeah, that's right, 5 slots are in the hotbar are weapon bound and the other are depended on what you choose them to be. Also, there is no traditional Tank, heal and dps system in place here meaning that you can play the class the way you want. If all your friends want to play warrior, why not? They can heal, tank and dps with the right gear etc. The videos go much more into detail.

There is much more I could go on about to from the various mini games to keep you busy, how nice the game looks or how there is NO MONTHLY FEE but why not let the devs show you? Here are a bunch of videos to help you get ready for the best MMO... of all time.

Videos.

Well, enjoy the content and there is plenty more on Youtube to find!

I hope I have made some of you guys hyped for Guild Wars 2, and I hope to see you in game!

I hope so. I really enjoyed Guild Wars 1.

Also, I really think you guys should watch the videos, they tell you a lot.

Too bad much of the game was surpassed, at least in concept, 8 years ago.

The game isn't out yet.

I swear there has been a thread with this title already? Also - FUCK YEAH GW2!  
 
I'm pretty fucking psyched, haven't been staying in the loop much about it but will buy day 1. Now to actually read your post :P

While I'm excited to play it, at the same time (like Diablo3) I can only be excited to a certain point until the damn thing comes out. Until then it might seem awesome in the footage but the actual part of playing it might still be junk for whatever reason (controls/camera/grinding/etc.).

I still prefer WoW- I honestly don't give a shit if a town becomes occupied or not, or if they build a statue to me.

It sounds like Rift except for the no auto attacks and dodging attacks part

The combat does look incredible, I saw a Warrior dual wielding and it was very fast paced with fluid animations. It's definitely the MMO to look out for.

Yeah, sure...why not.  Is it among my most looking-forward-to games?  Yeah, but so is SWTOR and Tera.  It looks cool, but I am always very cautious when it comes to getting on the hype train these days.  The higher the expectation, the stronger the disappointment.  It took me over a year to get past my disfavor for Uncharted 2.  I built it up to be the best game...ever and was crushed to discover it was only a very, very good game.  So, while I have hopes for Guild Wars 2, I am just tentatively optimistic for its arrival.

Still no beta yet, but people who have played it say is different, a good thing these days.  
 
Check this guys out http://guildcast.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/episode-48/

@example1013 said:

Too bad much of the game was surpassed, at least in concept, 8 years ago.

By which game? What was surpassed?

I don't understand why anyone would play The Old Republic when you could be playing this.

As much as I love what was shown from this game so far, I will not make a judgement on it until it is out for all of us to try out.  It can't be a contender yet for best MMO if it isn't even out now.

@SeriouslyNow said:

@example1013 said:

Too bad much of the game was surpassed, at least in concept, 8 years ago.

By which game? What was surpassed?

Player-driven world. Shadowbane. No quests. Player-owned cities. No hard-coded factions. Player-driven politics. Sieges and fights for control of towns and territories (which was the most interesting part). The players were, literally, the story. Any tales from that game will be tales of epic wars between rival nations. Sneaking in and assassinating a king during a wedding ceremony. Burning entire nations (made up of multiple guilds) right off the game world. Months-long campaigns against sworn enemies.

Technically the game was a nightmare. 6 years later and the memory leaks and fairly common CTDs were still unfixed, along with lag issues that made anything above 100 people on-screen at the same time turn into essentially a slide-show. But if you could get past the crippling bugs (which most people who tried it couldn't) and the more hardcore nature of unrestricted, open-world PVP (you can kill anyone at any time, even in your own guild), you had a game that was completely unique. Nothing like it has ever happened since.

The game has potential spilling out of itself. I can't wait to play this game since I never played the first one very much.

It's pretty interesting in concept but there are so many areas it really needs to get right. 
 
1. Content that is actually worth doing.  

2. Balance - they're attempting to blur the lines between the 3 role structure, but who is PvE balanced for? A group of strangers doing their own thing / a team with a synergistic composition?
 
3. Visually it's better than I thought it would be, all except for the human characters and this is mostly down to the animations looking floaty. 

4. The combat isn't revolutionary, casting while moving has been done before and in a lot of games casters have no auto attack. The whole dodging projectiles is pretty interesting, and its something TERA is playing around with too, but in that regard how do you balance casters if their attacks can be avoided by spam rolling. 

5. The questing isn't something that is important to me really, that's not to say I don't enjoy story driven content but gameplay mechanics are paramount. I'm pretty glad that a fire has been lit under developers asses about public quest type systems (Everyone is doing them now), because they are a pretty fun and interesting way to encourage faux cooperation and stage events. 

6. Skills tied to weapons is something I don't know how I feel about yet, it really depends on how many avenues there are and if they scale with level. Its something that could be horribly limited or reasonably interesting.
 
Overall I'm cautiously optimistic, my main concern really is how reactive it ends up being. Any lag issues will just render the game unplayable imo.
 
Edit - I forgot to mention the UI elements, which look pretty neat at the moment. I hope it includes a similar system to GW1 which actually had a fantastically customizable UI as part of the stock UI.

Of all time?  Holy shit!  Well, guess we might as well just hang up the MMO market here and now.  It won't get better than this folks, you heard it here first.  
 
On a serious note:  To DATE, maybe.  Of all time?  No.  Even then, I'd be highly skeptical about this being the best.  It sounds ambitious, sure, but until it actually comes out their ambitions are nothing more than hyped promises that might turn out to be crap in a box.  
 
I'll also add that you act as if no game in the history of MMO's has gotten rid of auto-attacks before.  Or, hell, for that matter, that auto-attacks are even that important in MMO's as a whole.  If you think the only challenge to combat is remembering what buttons to hit, I can't help but think you've never actually participated in anything more than single player questing in, well, pretty much any MMO.  Dodging projectiles also sounds like it has the potential to completely break the idea of ranged characters.  "Why would I want to be a ranged character when my 'ranged' attacks can just be side stepped and I become completely useless?"  There may be more to it than that, but, that doesn't sound particularly great to me just with that little bit of info.  And does "projectiles" include magic attacks?  Can I side step a fireball and just laugh at the other person for their pathetic efforts to try and hit me at range?  I know that may sound a bit cynical, but I'm just keeping my hype in check here.  Games constantly promise or talk up their features only for them to turn out to not even be half of what they were saying. 
 
I also don't get why you say that it throws the old combat system out the window.  It doesn't.  The old combat system is still there, it is simply attempting to evolve it.  You still have hot keys to press, you still attack another target with spells and abilities, you still take damage, so on, so forth.  Out the window suggests that nothing of the basic MMO combat structure still exists there.  It does, it just looks more interactive (which is a positive thing).  The not so positive aspect of that, however, is that at times, watching the combat, it looks REALLY twitchy.  And with how much stuff goes on, at times, having really twitchy combat seems like you might risk entering sensory overload.  That, however, is something that will become more clear once the game is actually out.
 
The most important thing to me, however, is that this game, so far, does not look casual friendly.  It's fine for the game to apply to a niche demographic of the MMO player base, that's good even.  So far though, there just seems to be a lot of things that would make this game very intimidating to casual players.  I'm not saying that every game needs to be over the top hand holdy, I miss the days of games throwing you into a world and going "all right, you figure it out".  That can be fun.  The problem, however, is that statistics have shown that the population as a whole does not like that.  The population as a whole needs hand holding, needs guidance, needs explanations about how things work, need to be pointed in a certain direction, so on.  If they can't get the game to be both very open world exploration based AND casual friendly though, it may be a critical success, but it may not be a financial success (or, at least, a major financial success.)  
 
Over all, by all means, I encourage you, and others, to be interested in this game.  If it does things right, if people enjoy it, good, it means that the MMO market will continue to evolve.  WoW is great, and has been great, but it also can't be THE MMO forever.  So get behind something and try to advance the genre for the better.  At the same time though, try to also be somewhat realistic about things.  Guild Wars 2 is not, and will not, be the best MMO of all time; unless the universe ends the day after it comes out, after being declared "the best MMO to date" by the world as a whole.  Also, I really dislike hyperbole on this kind of scale. 

Unless all my friends go to Guild Wars 2 then it will never be "The Best MMO". I am one of those crazy people that socialize in WoW and because of that it is the best experience I can have with an MMO.

Also weapon skills? Yeah, Shadowbane did that. The two most weapon-based classes in Shadowbane, Warrior and Barbarian, had about 3 skills that were granted by class. Every other skill used was a weapon power, granted by training the weapon skills.

@FateOfNever: I don't think the combat (or the game itself for that matter) is trying to be revolutionary. They just seem to be trying to make a big MMO that's legitimately fun to play, by abandoning many of the conventions that for some reason have became standard features, despite being no good. No tedious battle system where you stand and watch characters attacking, no endless grinding and no holy trinity.

I'm surprised to see someone who thinks the game won't be casual friendly though, if anything, one of the biggest complaints against the game is that it seems to very much be designed for casual gamers. Each profession sustains itself and can support all others.. you don't need to wait around to find groups for specific roles and difficulty scales depending on the amount of players. They've also included NPC's who point you in the direction of events/quests for those who don't want to simply go off and explore.. Also remember that events are only side missions, designed to replace quests. There's also a proper over arching main story that will lead you through the game. It's only the dungeons and world vs world content that seems to be aimed at really serious players that are willing to invest a lot of time.

Personally, I've never enjoyed any MMO, aside from the original Guild Wars which I really loved.. and everything about this seems to be 10x better. I know it's a game I'm going to like and I already know that (for me) it's easily going to surpass everything out there.

Still enjoying WoW. Blizzard does it best.

The hype for this game is all the way out of control.

@FateOfNever: I have to post this link again. I really do think it covers the main reasons why people should be paying attention to the game. Again, not because it's revolutionary.. but just because it's trying to be a really fun game.

This game is presenting some seriously compelling reasons for me to check it out. Jeremy Soule? Yes please. Dynamic combat? Yes please. Ditching the tank/healer/dps trinity? Yes please. And it doesn't look like garbage (graphically and otherwise).

It sounds like everything I'd want out of an MMO. But I'd like to try it.

Norn can shapeshift into bears. 
Rangers can have bear pets.  
Norn ranger = two bears.
Every player can potentially command two bears, so a guild of ten people is twenty bears 
A modest guild of around twenty five people? 
Fifty motherfucking bears 
No other MMO is offering this many bears per player

I kind of like the look of it, but you really have to work with other people don't/won't you? That is what puts me off.

Hype much? Just wait until it comes out. The music does sound really good though, I like that.

Guild Wars 2 looks amazing in every way possible. I'm really excited for this to come out. Wish Giantbomb would cover it some more : \

It's not out yet! Make a blog after you played it and made sure everything they said it is, is actually real.

@coakroach said:

Norn can shapeshift into bears.
Rangers can have bear pets.
Norn ranger = two bears.
Every player can potentially command two bears, so a guild of ten people is twenty bears
A modest guild of around twenty five people?
Fifty motherfucking bears No other MMO is offering this many bears per player

Win.

It's actually my most anticipated MMO. And I hate MMOs. But this game looks completely different than others and I have to say it's because of the combat. I simply cannot stand auto-attack based gameplay and I cannot stand the trinity of MMOs, like other have pointed out. (Healer-Tank-DPS)

Wow I really had no interest in this game until I watched that 10 reasons to be interested video, now I am fucking hyped

Yeah, I'm starting to get more interested as they release more information.

At the very least will give this game a chance. At most will convince my best friend to play it too (if it turns out to be good)

Norn can shapeshift into bears. 
Rangers can have bear pets.  
Norn ranger = two bears.
Every player can potentially command two bears, so a guild of ten people is twenty bears 
A modest guild of around twenty five people? 
Fifty motherfucking bears 
No other MMO is offering this many bears per player

I played the demo at Pax last year my verdict then was I want this goddamn game so I think it will be even more incredible. A good point I didn't see mentioned is no subscription fee. Which is what I like for my mmo's

Well, I can't say it will be the best ever, but it will sure be leaps and bounds superior to WoW that's for sure (granted that in my eyes any game is superior to that casual POS).
 
The thing that interests me the most is the "non click and forget while occasionally hitting a skill button or two" combat, finally a effin mmo with a real combat system, and " Also, there is no traditional Tank, heal and dps system", man I LOVE the sound of that.
 
And of course the most important thing of them all, no stupid monthly fees.

Still skeptical about the combat. Tera is doing something similar and it basically failed very quickly in Korea.

@coakroach

Norn can shapeshift into bears. 
Rangers can have bear pets.  
Norn ranger = two bears.
Every player can potentially command two bears, so a guild of ten people is twenty bears 
A modest guild of around twenty five people? 
Fifty motherfucking bears 
No other MMO is offering this many bears per player

Don't think anyone can bear it. :D

I hope there's no monthly fee, I loved that about Guild Wars 1.

It sounds like Rift except for the no auto attacks and dodging attacks part

Damn you and your propaganda buts its worked I really want this game more than I have before.

I don't understand why anyone would play The Old Republic when you could be playing this.