The next expansions however speeded up the leveling process. You start level 1, do some story mission that kickstart your adventurer into the real world and you are level 20 by the time you finish the prolog (i.e. you start on an island, and by the time you get to the main continent you are max level).
Then, you can play where you want, with who you want. Only your gear and your skills matter.
GW1 was an amazing game. As much as I like GW2, I wish they had kept more gameplay mechanics from the previous game.
This was my biggest surprise with GW2. All the videos leading up to its release had me really excited. The combat looked so much more engaging and interactive. In the end, I found myself preferring GW1. But to be fair, it may just be age. I find it harder to play games for extended periods of time than it was back when I was in high school.
But while it is fun to keep a mob helpless for minutes in PVE, being at the receiving end of it in PVP is no fun at all. So these days control has pretty much gone byebye, or is heavily curtailed when applied to characters rather than mobs.
Another thing is that in recent years games has gotten more "furious". Back in the day a fight good fight could drag on for minutes, with each side trading blows and coming up with strategies and counter strategies as the fight ebbed and flowed. This put brains ahead of player brawns or reflexes.
But now it is all interrupts and twitch. Dodge this, block that, constantly moving out of fields and looking for "tells".
Interesting. What do they use instead?
Most games use either gear or something akin to gear (like ships in Eve).
This also meant that not every mission was necessarily more challenging than the last (in Factions there were some missions that were much harder right after leaving noob island than those deeper in the game play like in the Luxon/Kurzick areas).
Max level armor/weapons are easily attainable by anyone in GW1 but if you want fancy looking stuff you're going to have to work for it. Makes the game a lot more skill based instead of grind based. Works very well for GW1 PvP.
Players have fairly easy access to all skills and max-level equipment in the game. Skills are (almost) never made obsolete by other skills, so you could very well be using the exact same skill you learned early in the game while you fight the final boss. The challenge is finding the combination of skills and gear to best suit your needs at any given task. Comparable to collecting tools to add to your toolbox, a screwdriver can solve new problems for you, but it doesn't make the hammer any less useful.
You collect a bunch of cards (skills) and then build a deck (skill bar) from that.