Same old, absolutely no improvements.
Sounds- I suppose this is better than the preview games' music. The music is "dynamic" during combat, which just means that the longer you are in combat, the longer this battle music plays. This would be cool but its the same friggin song everytime, its one of the reason I avoid fighting when I can.
Gameplay- Absolutely no improvement. The game adds nothing to pvp except the cracked armor factor, which is pointless. Spike damage and 55 type of strategy still rule the day, its compeltely horrible. The community is almost non-existant. Everything town is full of afk people or people spamming trade messages. You are forced to either join some guild or go everywhere with henchies and heroes (npcs) and they are sooo poor. They go out of their way to run into traps, they dont fight unless you are holding perfectly still or they move to correct their formation, and they can't use moves strategically. Instead of making the enemies more complex and use skill combos, they just jack up their hp, casting/recharge/attack time, and give them infinite mana (basically infinite). So instead of figuring out how to disable their combos, you just slap on prot spirit so their 400 dmg spikes only do 50 dmg. Additions- The hall of monuments is kind of cool, not nearly as cool as they made is sound though. The new heroes look good (cept stonehealer) but the new a.i. "upgrade" makes henchies better than heroes imo. The new armors...arent new at all. They are just reskins of old armors and it m'er f'in pathetic. The dungeons aren't dungeons, they are just lame areas that have you fight the same group of enemies 36 times over until u do something stupid like lighting a torch to make a chest with a key appear, there is no thought in the dungeons. The new pve skills are kinda cool, but they lower the gameplay seeing as anyone can use them efficiently, its such a bad decision.
Overall~ This game is lame, it may have been decent if there were a different team developing for it, everything I see in this game tells me that Anet is most certainly trying to run their own game into the groups just to make a quick buck off of the bored fanbase. They are sabotaging their own game, its beyong logic... So.....if you like the old gw campaigns, you probably won't like gwen, the only ppl who will actually enjoy the mindless grind-fest that is GWEN are the fanboys, but they don't count :P
GW is still better than WoW, but the gap is closing with each game release. GW2 won't release, I guarantee it.