No quests? And based on your description, it sounds more like Planetside with swords. Which, again, I would be interested in, but this is beginning to sound more like a shooter(but with swords), which would leave me still wondering about games that actually MMORPGs.
So there's no quests, are there even levels and leveling? Camping for items? Anything that's MMORPG standard?
Is there any update on release for GW2? At this point I want to try it just to see for myself how in the hell it works, lol.
There is levelling but there is no gear treadmill - max stats weapons are trivial to get.
The combat will be something between a 3rd person action game and a MOBA. At any given time you have a limited amount of skills (although weapon switches mid combat and other class mechanics will increase the amount of skills available during a fight plus a trait system that modify how your skills work, so 2 people using the same skills/weapons might still play differently) that have different tactical uses each. There is user controlled dodge - yes, you dodge out of the way of an arrow or fireball. No, you can't keep chaining dodges, there is a endurance bar. You can dodge twice in a row before your endurance bar is drained.
You don't need to target if you don't wish to - throwing you spell at the direction will be enough.
About questing.
Personal story - instanced quests in your home city district a la SWTOR or GW1 campaign.
Renown Hearts - quests in a certain area, that are always there until you complete them. You can complete these by doing several different things (for example in one quest you can kill wasp nests, cut trees, use mines to blow tree stumps and kill certain foes). Once these quests are done you access an NPC that allows you to spend karma to buy different equipment and flavour stuff (for example in a farm they might give you vegetables and eggs while in a bar some wine or whatever).
Dynamic Events - these keep happening around the world, sometimes because someone triggers something but many others just happening. You can join in and participate or not. These dynamic events have failure states, so if the dynamic event was about defending a village and you fail (or no one was there to help the villagers defend themselves and they fail), the village is overtaken. So your next event is retaken the village. Had you succeeded, the event would be raiding the enemy camp.
Depending where these dynamic events are in their chains, they may trigger access to certain areas previously closed, like open world dungeons or may trigger Meta Events, where you will face raid-like bosses.
No camping for items - everyone gets their own loot table. We both kill a mob and even if we aren't in the same party we both get something. When a resource node pops out, like a mining node or plant, everyone can use that individual node once.
While there is levelling, it is less important than in other games.
Flat levelling curve that tops early, meaning it takes the same time to go from 20 to 21 than from 78 to 79; you scale down to the content level (if you are a level 70 and go to a level 30 area you will be level 30, but you still get experience and gear level appropriate); for structured PvP you are automatically level to level 80, gain access to all skills and max level gear; for WvWvW you are levelled to level 80 but you keep your gear and skills, on the other hand you get xp and gear from enemy players you kill and karma/gold from completing WvWvW events like defending a dolyak caravan (these things transport supply that is required to build sieges weapons and repair and upgrade castles and towers) or assaulting a castle.
GW2 started their pre-purchase on April 10th. Pre-purchasers will have access to BWE.
First BWE will be either next weekend or the following.
No release date as been announced but there are rumours pointing to the end of June.
Most people is betting on BWE 20-22 April followed by a release date announcement at 27-29 April during GW1 7th birthday celebration.
PS: And of course, there is no targeted heals and no taunts in GW2, leading to no healers and no tanks, so no holy trinity.
A video with some devs playing some PvE and some structured PvP.
Total biscuit doing some Dynamic Events
Yogscast doing some WvW
Noisy WvW don't forget watching it at 1080p
WvWvW not that epic yet since it was closed beta and all the journalists flocked on the same server, so was a bit unbalanced.