Mounts in Guild Wars 2 - Raptor

This is in relation to the MMO Guild Wars 2. I had previously mentioned that this game is free to play, free to download, and has no monthly fee. However, certain premium content such as mounts, can only be acquired in certain maps that if you have the free, base version of the game, you will not have access to. Therefore you also will not have access to mounts. You will want them and I think that is kind of the idea behind their marketing.

Let's start with the first mount that you will receive and this happens relatively quickly once you have entered the Crystal Desert. It is part of the quest that each character is automatically given upon entering the zones so it is extremely easy to figure out where you are supposed to go. Simply follow the relatively easy (and un-failable) story until you eventually get your raptor mount.

There are massive advantages to having this mount (and all the others,) the main one being that you are much faster on the back of your dinosaur horse. The raptor has another ability which is that it can jump great distances horizontally in order to jump over ditches that would otherwise by impassible. The new maps are designed to include these sorts of traps so it is a much better idea to have the mounts before exploring since you wont be able to get to certain areas.

The mount system was disappointing to some people who kind of see this as Guild Wars 2 staff running out of ideas and I for one hope that is not the case. The storyline is still pretty good and if you are playing on the Free-to-Play version of the game you will not have access to mounts. This is actually a pretty good way for Arenanet to entice new players to shell out a one time fee of $40 or so in order to unlock a huge amount of additional content as well as access to all the mounts in existence. You will still have to do the quests in order to unlock the mounts but that is fine, the quests are fun and you can do them in teams if you so choose.

This excessively long video shows you more than you need to know about the Raptor mount (from Peer Gaming)