My experience has been similar to what was already posted, to be honest. I reached chapter 7 before finishing last night and found the story so far to be quite engaging. I like the new characters, and introducing them while removing the pact members from the story really makes it feel like we’re in a new era. I feel the narrative team has done a good job moving the story forward, so far.

Skywatch Archipelago is a good map - decently sized with enough unique biomes to not get tired of it quickly. At first I felt it was a little bit of a cop-out to make a “Dragonfall” map with existing parts of the world, but when I really explored it, I realised the entire map is unique - and has some really interesting concepts at work in a ‘what-if’, fractal way. The meta is well designed and enjoyable, though the last boss already feels a bit tiresome and I’ve only done it three times so far. It also doesn’t help that the last boss bugged out on one of those tries, so we got nothing out of it. I haven’t explored too much of the hub yet, but it feels like a nice place with everything we need in a tight area, which I like. From what I’ve seen, it also doesnt have any NPCs giving the same dialogue every single time you walk past them, which is a big bonus.

In regards to systems, I’m not blown away by the glyph system - most of the ones I’ve seen are useless to my spec, I’ve gained 4 so far and, at least for my main character, I don’t really feel like I want any more. I like how we were able to choose which ones we wanted, at least. However the daily system is a big downgrade in my opinion. I like how we can select what we want now instead of constantly being given items we don’t want, but that’s massively offset by the new daily/weekly system. I don’t want to guess ahead of time what content I want to do, and I don’t want to be forced to complete activities I don’t enjoy just to finish the daily / weekly path. The old system of choosing four of the available twelve activities worked great for me, all they needed to do was maybe remove some of the trivial ones like Mystic Forger, Forager, Vista Viewer and add in ones from EoD and SotO. Personally, I don’t want to be forced to log in for 30 minutes every day just to do my dailies, as well as be forced to do exactly what the game wants me to do with no exceptions. For me, GW2 is a casual game I’ll play for a time when not subbed to WoW or engaged with another game, but then I’ll want to drop back to 10-15 minutes of login, dailies and crafting when I’ve got other things to play. GW2 doesn’t have enough engaging current content for me to make it my “only game”, so forcing me to spend more time doing mundane daily tasks is just going to make me want to quit entirely, rather than engage with those systems. If the goal of the new system was to get me to spend more time in the game, they should’ve spent development time on making it more painless to do the content that already exists, and tell me what I’m missing out on, rather than make it more painful to do arbetary tasks. Thats just my opinion, though.