What I wrote in a forum, and that should be read after general considerations here.

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Without even breaking the NDA, Guild Wars 2 is BY FAR the best MMO out there without even a hint of a doubt. It does EVERYTHING better and more. The Elder Scrolls Online isn’t remotely different to qualify as a non-standard MMO, and it’s shamed by a so much superior designed game like GW2. If you want evolutionary MMO then GW2 is still out there and excellent for the most part, including quite decent large-scale PvP (especially the new map released a few days ago, which is the most fun large scale PvP, even surpassing DAoC).

But for example for me GW2 has that insanely silly and stupid super high fantasy setting. It’s just DUMB AND CHEESY, and ultra-juvenile, and looks like total crap despite they have a great engine and wonderful artists. It’s a mishmash of random stuff without any coherence. Instead TESO has a SO MUCH more immersive and realistic kind of style, actually feels like a place instead of a scattering of assets brought together at random. That’s the whole point why this game has remotely a chance: it’s far away from the stupid settings and over the top, super fluorescent colored, oddball WoW, GW2, Wildstar or whatever. The world can actually look great (sometimes) and at least attempt at plausibility, and I enjoy being in it.

The real long-term problem is that I don’t have any faith in what these devs are doing and they seem to have no vision about where they want to bring it. Maybe if given the chance this game could be great, but in its current state it could fail so hard at release (and already so much money was sunk in development) that I seriously doubt developers’ efforts are going to INCREASE to make it truly great. We basically know nothing about dev’s vision, only that in the beta there isn’t trace of it.

In the meantime, GW2’s new WvW map isn’t getting the widespread love it deserves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLiAe2qAkbg&