I recently dusted off my old Guild Wars 2 account after YouTube recommend some videos of it.
I was a huge fan of Guild Wars 1, I especially loved its skill system. You had hundreds of skills available but you could only equip 8 at a time. This forced you to think carefully and craft builds, which was half the fun. There were some skills that were only available once you defeated some hard elite enemies, which was also a fun challenge.
When GW2 released I bought the game on the first week, but the skill system was very underwhelming for me. A huge part of why I loved GW1 was not there in the sequel, so I quickly stopped playing.
Around 10 years later I logged in again and created a new character. I'm aware that there were tons of changes made to the game but the very early game stayed pretty much the same (as far as I remember). However, the way I experienced it was very different.
It no longer bothered me that you only have a fraction of the skills available. I'm 10 years older than I was when I first played it and I have much less time. This means that I appreciate not having to spend days to craft a character, I can just go out and enjoy the game.
The story is also pretty good, I've heard that GW2 is one of the few MMOs where the early game is also as much fun as the late game, and it seems to be true. I don't feel like I have to rush to max level to have fun.
Have you ever had a similar experience?
I had a similar experience with GW1, go figure.
Surprisingly, GW1 is still relatively popular. There are still massive events held by Guilds, there are server events held by ArenaNet, and the fact that most people who play end up getting sucked into a MegaGuild by proxy (that's just where everyone plays..) it left me with sort of a worse experience overall in some form. Don't get me wrong, the game is great, and the community is too but playing during the golden years versus playing now, there is a clear discrepancy between what was fresh and new at the time and what is overplayed. There are tons of bots. The large Guild communities focus on end game min-max, and you can't really do that without the pcons (consumables) that are extremely expensive. The largest Guild there and it's leader participate in mass-botting (even though they deny it, I know they do because I became an Officer for a bit when I played and met the real faces behind the wealth of players in game and they all bot) and there is incentive to mass recruit new players so the cycle can continue.
Other than that, Maple Story has been giving me a crazy nostalgia trip as of this last week and I don't think I will be stopping playing that anytime soon. I put WoW on the backburner for now as I grind out on MS.