New user pricing

[Zengu]

I would love to try the game. But then looking at the pricetag to entry of 100€ is just not reasonable if the other big MMOs (liek FF14 and WoW) require you to just pay for the latest expansion and you can try out the rest for free.

[messanoir]

Originally posted by Zengu:

I would love to try the game. But then looking at the pricetag to entry of 100€ is just not reasonable if the other big MMOs (liek FF14 and WoW) require you to just pay for the latest expansion and you can try out the rest for free.

You can play the entire core game for free.

As for any other mmo's, well, both FFXIV and WoW require you to buy the game, and the expansions, and then pay to play the game through monthly subscriptions. Guild Wars 2, you buy the game, and that's it, play as long as you want.

This is just a simple explanation, I ma sure others will be along to go into more detail.

[Hefutoxin]

Originally posted by Zengu:

I would love to try the game. But then looking at the pricetag to entry of 100€ is just not reasonable if the other big MMOs (liek FF14 and WoW) require you to just pay for the latest expansion and you can try out the rest for free.

You cannot compare them like that.

The price tag entry for Guild Wars 2 is $0. You can level up to the max level (level 80) and get the top end gear (Ascended) as a Free to Play account. Yes, max level, max gear, for $0.

FFXIV and WoW have sequential expansions and the previous expansions are worthless when the newest releases. That's why they get included with the "base" game.

Guild Wars 2 (and Elder Scrolls Online) have modular expansions. The content remains useful regardless of the number of expansions.

FFXIV and WoW have a mandatory subscription. Guild Wars 2 has no subscription.

I haven't played WoW in 7 years and I still paid far more in JUST subscription costs than I paid for everything in Guild Wars 2.

[Nico]

The entry price for GW2 is 0, since it's free2play. With that you can play the core story and Living World season 1 as well as all of core tyria, including the maps of LW season 2. After that it has content it accumulated over nearly 13 years for which you indeed have to pay. And sure, if discounted if you want to get all content at once it does indeed cost around 95€, but that is truely all the content the game has to offer as of right now (unless you get it without discount, then it's 150€)

And well, if you do not want to buy everythign at once you can also just buy them in pieces. Like at first just the 50€ for the 50% discounted Elder Dragon Saga Complete Edition, which alone is already content that was released over 10 years. Or you can buy in even smaller bits, by buying LW season 2 ingame with gems, then the HoT+PoF package on Steam with a 75% discount for 7.5€, as well as the LW season 3 in the ingame gem store as that's inbetween the 2 expansions and then afterwards you can buy LW season 4 and 5 to then later buy the End of Dragons expansion. Though doing that will be more expensive than just buying the bundle for 50€.

But either way, the entry cost is 0 and with that alone you do already have content for several months (unless you just want to rush through the story) which is more than enough time for you to decide if you want to pay any money on the game and to wait for the next big Steam sale so you can grab your 50% discount for the bundle.

Also, a small comparison to WoW, since you mentioned its expansions. I never played it, so I'm not 100% sur,e but from what I've heard, any expansion but the newest one is basically obsolete, aka barely anyone plays them anymore and you're greatly overleveled so everything dies nearly instantly. This is not the case in GW2. All old content is still very much active and viable content and even though some older content has become easier it's by no means trivial.

And also, the level cap in this game was never increased, meaning when you got your BiS gear back before the first expansion released, it still is BiS nowadays (maybe excluding some small changes like the change of runes where its special effect is now on the new relics). Even legendary equipment isn't actually better than ascended equipment, meaning it is actually rather easy to get the best equipment stats wise and we never have to farm better gear. Though to be fair, this horizontal progression is not for everyone, some players just need the grind for new equipment every new expansion, for those GW2 is probably not quite as interesting. GW2 puts more focus on skill expression than equipment farming. But it still also offers legendary equipment faming, it's just not relevant stats wise and is more for cosmetics and QoL.

And GW2 also offers no subscription, so you pay for the expansions once and you can play them as long as you want. Meaning that on the long term GW2 is much cheaper than subscription based games like WoW. Which to be fair, is probably the reason why the all expansions together cost more than in WoW since WoW tries to get most fo its money over time with the subscription, so it can afford to give out content for cheaper. (also since its old content is worth a lot less than in GW2 where you can find many players in most older maps)