Guild Wars 2: Yes you should play it.

My asura had a tree climbing phase. 

It's really hard to write anything when you have a game as well made as Guild Wars 2 waiting for you to play.  I didn't get a chance to play it's predecessor, but Mystic liked it so he convinced me to try Guild Wars 2.  I never did the MMO thing before (other than a brief foray into Star Trek: Online that didn't impress me) so I promised Mystic I would give Guild Wars 2 a try.  I have to say, I'm glad I've waited until this game to get into them.

Let me go over the basics.

Of course you start with character creation, which has some fantastic options.  The face and hair choices for each race are a little limited right now, but that's something I'm sure they'll expand upon later.  It's pretty easy to get a character you think looks awesome and that you'd like to play.  You choose a race (human, norn, sylvari, charr, and asura) and a profession (necromancer, mesmer, elementalist, ranger, engineer, thief  guardian and warrior) and the get to customizing.  Again, not the best range in choices for some things but you are able to make a choice in every facet of your character's look.  Your first set of armor is selected for you and you have a base set of colors, but over time you are able to collect dyes that will help you personalize the colors of your armor even more.

After you know your character looks great, a quick introduction story gets you a easy to follow tutorial where you start already playing with people.  From there you're dropped off at a starting place for your race and free reign to explore!

The tasks that you can pick to gain experience are scattered all throughout the map, indicated with gold hearts.  As you get close it'll let you know what you can do to help with the task, which is usually one of several things.  Yes you can get significant XP without having to kill everything in site, and you don't get punished severely if you do just want to kill everything you can.  You also get rewarded for reviving other players and NPCs, and for crafting.

Oh man crafting.  You can cook, sew, build, smith, and smelt a ton of items that you'll find around the Guild Wars 2 world.  Cooking is popular for helping you level up fast, and jewelry is a craft people like to take to they can make some serious coin.  I personally like being able to make my own armor.  It's also super easy to pick up and learn how to make new things.  You'll be given some basic recipes but soon you'll be able to discover a ton more.  Not sure what to do with that new shimmering dust you got?  See what ingredients you can mix with it!  You can only practice two crafts at a time but if you leave one for a while and pick it back up, you'll start where you left off.

The best thing is that this is an MMO where you don't need to go out of your way to play with people you know.  Your story line is a well written plot where your choices matter, sometimes more than other popular games that used to advertise how much your choices matter.  No one story will be exactly the same unless you go out of your way to imitates someone's preferences.  It also makes it more interesting to go back and play as a different character, you know you're not repeating a lot of the same stuff.   Along with a well written story to keep you playing when your friends are not, you also have loot that is individualized and incentives for working with people.  Again, revives give you XP, so why not help your fellow gamer?  And if a stranger helps you with a kill, you both get XP for trying to kill the same thing.  It's like the looked at all the annoying things in MMOs that frustrate people and improved upon them. A gaming company that listens?  The world's ending!

And if none of that convinced you, I will leave you with a video of all the different dances of Tyria.  There is no shame in buying a video game merely to have your character dance.  No shame I tell you!