I took the opportunity, before plunging into the Guild Wars 2 beta this weekend, to have another look through their manifesto - that fantastic manifesto - and refresh myself as to what ArenaNet were really trying to achieve. I think it’s important to bear that document in mind, because it’s really the first time that a game has had such a distinctively solid idea to live up to, and it’s even rarer that a company will make such a manifesto and try to really define themselves like that.

With that in mind, it’s difficult to know where to start with Guild Wars 2. How much can you really see, in a weekend? You’ve got to sleep sometime, and frankly any character you do build will be wiped before the game launches. So what are you going to do?

I elected to spend my 48 hours of Guild Wars 2 as a Norn Warrior called Crushface. He was a hulking giant of a man, with a massive red stripe tattoo down the middle of his (crushed) face. Like all characters in GW2, he looked amazing. The faces, hair styles, character models, are all done to a superb level of detail. It doesn’t have the sheer variety of, say, City of Heroes, but what is on offer is beautifully rendered.

During character creation, I was able to make a number of key decisions, such as that Crushface was the sort of guy to get drunk and black out during a victory party. That doesn’t sound like much, but compared to the actual character creation choices you get during other MMO’s, it was nice to actually have something to think about. Was he the sort of guy to get drunk and black out, or did he challenge a rival to a fight and lose? Does he wear a helmet, or no helmet? What does it mean? What are his driving traits?

Once you’re past character creation, there’s no denying that GW2 looks and controls like a generic MMO: WASD to move, ‘M’ to bring up the map, experience bar here, hotkeys there. But it’s in how it plays that it manages to differentiate itself, and here, even with only a weekend’s worth of experience to go on, it’s clear that they’ve managed to make something very interesting.

Out, damned grind

Pleasingly, in all my hours of play, nobody ever asked me to kill ten rats. In fact, my goals for some of my tasks were delightfully open-ended. “Honour the spirit of Bear,” was one of the first goals, and informed me that I could do so by either feeding fish to bear cubs, taking down hunters as they attempted to trap the bears, or just going around and disarming the traps. All of these things contributed overall to my progress bar, and they often overlapped. Other quests were more straightforward but never boring, involving me jumping in and out of instances, helping with world events (GW2’s implementation of WAR’s Public Quest system) or just paying someone to make a sweet book about my monster-killing adventures.

Holding GW2 alongside SW:TOR, it’s clear that we’re experiencing something of an MMO revolution: games that actually want you to care about the storyline, and are prepared to put in the effort to make that happen. To this end, GW2 incorporates small cutscenes during important story-based moments, and personalised instances you can travel into where you story unfolds. The voice acting is unfortunately a little bit on the cheesey side, but the stories themselves are good fun and don’t go out of their way to beat you around the head with in-world lore like Amalur. You get to make choices about which quests to follow or who to agree with, and although the limited playtime of the weekend means that it was impossible to see the full results of the path I had chosen, the tantalising beginnings of that journey were very much in evidence.

Unlike SW:TOR’s fairly bog-standard MMO combat however, GW2 is keen to show how much it’s revolutionising the key mechanics of the MMO space. Combat is infinitely more dynamic, with double-tapped keys allowing you to roll and dodge incoming attacks. Your actual attacks in return are determined by which weapon you’re holding, which means that swapping out to a different weapon completely changes the way your character works.

You unlock new attacks by using existing ones, so you can’t just drop your sword for a hammer and suddenly be a bludgeoning machine: you’ll need to put the time into using a hammer to get good at it. It won’t take you long at all to unlock all five weapon skills - no more than half an hour or so of brutal killing, perhaps - but it’s an incredibly neat system and one that will be copied wholesale (if it isn’t already, with The Secret World promising something very similar).

A radical overhaul

ArenaNet have acted to streamline the experience in other ways, too. As followers of GW2’s progress will be aware, all characters can heal themselves with an ability, which means you don’t need to group up to stay alive. There’s also the fantastic “downed” system, which you don’t really appreciate until you see it in play: being reduced to zero health puts you in the “downed” state, where you lie prone on the ground, unable to move but still able to hack away at enemy’s ankles or throw rocks at them.

Killing an enemy rallies you instantly and brings you upright again ready to fight, so it actually takes a fair amount of opposition to put you down. This works well because it makes dying into a gambit: if you know you’re going to lose, can you whittle a nearby enemy’s health down enough for them to serve as your rally-whipping-boy? If you kill this guy shanking you with a knife, will the shaman over there finish you off? And if he does, will there be anybody left around to use as a patsy for a rally? There’s even a neat last-stand deal where you can rally instantly for a short time, but if you don’t kill any enemies during that time, you just flat-out die.

Each map is littered with teleport stones which you can use for a paltry sum of copper, allowing you to jump between areas of interest with lightning speed and minimal drudgery. No waiting around for thirty minutes for your hearthstone to cool down for no reason: just pull up the map and click on the teleport stone nearest to where you want to go. I personally think this is fantastic, as there’s nothing more frustrating than realising you need to slog back through endlessly-respawning, mob-infested lands just to hand in a quest while your magic stone cools down. You can even check your mail from literally anywhere just by clicking on the menu button. You’re free to pay attention to what really matters: interacting with the story and the world.

But I want to stab my friends

If what really matters to you though is killing other players, jumping into PVP is a simple matter of hitting the crossed swords icon at the top of the screen and choosing where you’d like to fight. You can either choose to head to the Mists, a sort of lobby for PVP where you can meet up with other players, or just get the game to pick a match for you and throw you in.

Joining the standard PVP battles, like the 5v5 and the 10v10 scenarios, the one thing I noticed immediately was that GW2’s mechanics are designed from the ground up for PVP. Rolling and dodging out of the way of enemy attacks only to launch a blistering combo as they struggle to realign is a beautiful thing, and the completely configurable skill system means that once you’ve got a taste of the enemy’s favourite tactics, you can adjust what you’re packing to match. Even though you're scaled to level 80 for your battles, the simple ten-key ability system means there's no down-time while you figure out what you're capable of. It is a very, very clever system.

I found myself in literally a four-minute long duel with a kiting engineer at the top of the Clocktower in the Battle for Kyhlo, and after stomping him off the top, I took the few seconds while he climbed back up to rearrange my skills to focus on stunning and slowing so I could hold him still while I thrashed away with my hammer. Unfortunately, what actually happened was that he came back up with four of his friends and I was summarily murdered.

From the Mists you can also take part in the World-versus-World gameplay that has been much-touted on ArenaNet. The WvW gameplay is nothing short of huge, to the point that it’s conceivable you could spend hours and hours doing nothing but non-stop fighting on this colossal battlefield. The flip side of this is that if you just want to drop in on your own - as I did - it’s also completely overwhelming. Aften an hour of wandering this enormous landscape and killing/being killed in the occasional duelling/ganking experience, I quickly realised that one did not simply dip their toe into WvW.

It all comes back to lag

No matter how much fun the actual PVP is mechanically, I’m desperately worried that unless we get some Oceanic servers it will just all go to waste because - and this is a big problem - the game lags. It’s less noticeable in PVE of course, and if that’s all you’re in it for then you probably won’t even mind at all. But when it comes to PVP, the delay between hitting the button and watching your action execute can be anywhere up to half a second, and in battles of ten-a-side or more, or big gatherings such as when I showed up for the final in-game party in Divinity’s Reach with 70+ other players around, it became a bit of a slideshow. I staggered back to the portal and teleported away to the quiet Norn homeland, where everything was blissful and smooth.

That the game lags this badly in high-pop situations is unfortunate, as the dynamic combat system of rolling and dodging, as well as the configurable skills, has the potential to make for some incredible PVP. For the last few hours of the game Jon Peters, the Lead Combat Designer, popped in to chat to players, and he was very open with his thoughts about the PVP. He described their system as one where they wanted every player to be able to make a difference, and their intent to create a system which was more about in-game strategy and less about perfect rotations and build making.

From a mechanical perspective alone it’s clear that they’ve done that, and at Jon’s “sweet spot” of 5v5 (what he referred to as “tournament size”), the game flows really well, even with the unfortunate lag spikes. I asked Jon about Oceanic servers, but he couldn’t answer with any certainty, and in any case he was too busy teaming up with Kotaku’s Mike Fahey to try and launch themselves into a gigantic pit.

The game’s lag might also be put down somewhat to what seems like an unoptimised engine: GW2 is clearly going for quality over broad install-base appeal, and while the graphics are quite lovely as a result, their loveliness seems disproportionate to the amount of chug they generate. Even on low settings, my machine would occasionally struggle with what looked like fairly undemanding environments, and certainly ones that would have presented no problem in other recent MMO’s. There's also possibly some room to improve the way the server handles large gatherings of people, as the slideshow that was the goodbye party can't be put entirely down to graphical problems.

Guild Wars 2 is a tantalisingly mixed bag. It’s got so many elements in it to love, and it looks like it really could, maybe, be the revolution in MMO’s that it promises. But even once the engine’s optimisation is complete, those of us here in Australia will still struggle to get the ping necessary to enjoy a full half of the game’s smorgasbord of options, and just have to content ourselves with PVE.

That’s fine with me, because I’d still like to find out exactly what I did when I blacked out at that party, and I adore GW2's zero-grind-tolerance policy. But those of you who want to play the game the way it’s meant to be played - in Jon’s words, as an esports title - may find yourselves with an experience that's more frustrating than rewarding.