Way back in 2012 I was among those who got Guild Wars 2 on day one and immediately fell in love with it. For, at least, the first year and a half, or so. Then, after some major changes, I just stopped playing, and didn’t really touch the game again for 9 years, until late 2022. From then until early 2023 I had another surge of really playing the game again. There had been 3 expansion packs since then, and a ton more changes which I grew to appreciate. It’s likely my near decade away from the game caused me to approach it from a fresh perspective, but things hadn’t changed so much that it didn’t still feel the same. I could say that, while I wasn’t around for that near decade of progress, I liked what I experienced when I came back to the game.
As mentioned, in early 2023 I stopped playing again for a while. Between getting a back into Minecraft and later in the year an absurd amount of STALKER, among other random games I had put Guild Wars 2 on the back burner, missing out once again on another expansion release.
Move to yesterday, Saturday, May 18th. I decide “fuck it” and fire up the game again, grab the expansion and get back to playing and it felt like being home again. After a slightly rough run of Tequatl the Sunless, I had fallen back into the groove, for at least an hour last night and a few hours this morning. Can’t say for sure if this is just another short wave of interest or if I’m going to be all in the game for a year or two (hopefully the latter) but I don’t know. Doesn’t matter, as long as I’m enjoying the game it doesn’t matter.
What I think would be best is to map out my goals in the game in a given session — set an explicit goal and make it happen, varying them day by day. I tend to focus on world bosses, but it may be better to take a lesser played character through an area on one day, world bosses another day, then maybe hit more quests with yet another character, or, well, if you know MMORPG’s or hell, RPG’s in general, then you know what I’m talking about in trying to figure out the best use of my gaming time.
We’ll see how it goes.