You Have Been Playing

GUILD WARS 2

(NCSoft)

This is gonna be a bit more of a rant post, and I apologize for that. I just have to get this out of my system.

Having just bought a new PC (it’s not here yet, but will be soon), I figured I could buy a new game to really test it out with. So, I tried to buy Guild Wars 2 today after hearing a lot of praise about it. I watched Angry Joe’s glowing review of the game, and asked around with people who are playing it, and it’s unanimously praised.

At first I obviously tried to buy it from Steam. Turns out this is one of those rare “big” games that isn’t on Steam, so I had to look elsewhere. No big deal really… It also turned out that the game is sold out virtually everywhere. I ended up on Guild Wars 2’s official website, and to my surprise, found that the game is sold out there too… of digital copies. Not only are the boxed games sold out everywhere, but the digital version of the game is also sold out.

I really don’t understand this. Why are they emulating a physical product when it’s literally just a serial code I’m buying? If the problem is bandwidth, why not let me buy the copy and then put me in a queue to join the server, or come up with some other solution? I know queues suck but they don’t suck as much as not being able to join ever. I can’t think of any good reason to do this, and it’s infuriating to me to think that we’re living in the future (as Tycho put it), and I cannot get to this game until they feel good and ready. It’s archaic. That’s exactly the kind of thing that digital distribution is supposed to fix.

I mean, I’ve been buying a lot of indie games and bundles, both on Steam and elsewhere. They never have that problem. How can it be that indie guys, basically small fry (sometimes outright amateurs) can have their stuff together more than these guys?

And it’s not like it doesn’t matter when I buy it either (like a single player game), cause by the time I can get to the game, my friends will be too-high level for me to join them, or they will have moved on to another game (Full disclosure: I read the former has been alleviated with a level scaling system which sounds really interesting, however I’m just judging by what I can expect when I buy this). Also, I happen to be in between projects now with a bit more time on my hand, a perfect time to start an MMO. This may not still be true in a week or two. And why should I even have to defend that I want this game now? That’s just backwards!

So I guess I’m not playing Guild Wars 2, at least not for a while. It looks really, really great, in terms of style, gameplay, music and everything, but I literally can’t get to it. I’m sure they have their reasons to suspend the digital sale, but if you want me to buy something from you, please don’t make it this hard.