Without any background in GW1, this seemed like a well executed traditional MMO to me. World design is very jrpg-esque, with everything being huge, impractical and full of shiny. The Asura apparently live in a huge octahedron floating in the air, the Charr have built their city around a steampunk deathstar, and the Norn capital is like a bigger version of the Sydney opera house. Thankfully, the art direction is pretty good (and the painted backgrounds look way better than anything in game), so it all looks quite good, if a bit ridiculous at times. The world in general feels quite big, although it's hard to tell whether it's really like that, or just does a good job of concealing its potato-landscapeness.
Combat system seems decent enough, nothing especially revolutionary, but there's a lot of utility skills, and you can get significantly better results by being clever, as opposed to mashing every skill on cooldown. Group battles are a huge clusterfuck with everyone spamming aoe, roughly as expected. I participated in the swamp event with the huge boss monster, and it was total chaos. Hopefully, there is content in the game that requires a bit of group coordination.
Levelling based on events is pretty refreshing. It started to lose some of the charm by the end of the Beta, but as far as I'm concerned, it accomplished the goal of making players group and cooperate naturally. This is really something other MMOs could learn from. I cringe as I recall how much of a bother trying to do group quests was in WoW.
Tried to do WvW, didn't get in. Is it as much of a clusterfuck as it would appear?