Guild Wars Review

Guild Wars Review

Oct 06

I have always been a fan of RPGs. Being a total Geek at heart, I played Dungeons and Dragons growing up. So found the Baldurs’ Gate series a very good conversion to the PC format.

However, there seems to be a curse on 3D RPGs. Some bad ones of note include Neverwinter Nights, Might and Magic, World of Warcraft etc. All have fallen well short of the mark set by earlier games.
I know their not all RPGs in the strict “D&D” sense. But they aim for the a similar attachment to characters and involved storyline and always seem to fall short of the mark.

This is where Guild Wars comes in!

It’s a very good leap from the older MMORPGs and, in my opinion, a much needed improvement over World Of Warcraft.

The designers of Guild Wars aimed for the mid range PC when creating the game, so it should run on most computers… With a little tweaking.

The game isn’t an internet hog and runs perfectly on my mobile phone / modem (115kb/s down – 6kb/s up!).

Guild Wars takes the traditional role of RPG’ing and gives it a little twist. If you are expecting high leveling for you character and endless amounts of “farming”, well, you have found the wrong game. Guild Wars caps at level 20, which is quite easy to get to. Within a week of casual game play, you will reach the full potential of your characters abilities.

Guild Wars characters come in all types: male and female, large and small, and in any of 36 combinations of the six professions: Warrior, Ranger, Monk, Elementalist, Mesmer, and Necromancer. You have over 150 unique skills per character, which sets your character apart from the other classes of characters.

You can create up to four heroes per unique Guild Wars account. New heroes can be deleted and created at any time.

If you like Player-versus-Player competition, Guild Wars is your game. In addition to building up a character by undergoing missions and quests, you can choose to create a character from the beginning that starts out PvP’ing. Although that character can never enter into normal missions or towns and can never get the weapons like a full played character, you will be able to jump straight into PvP’ing if you don’t like the grinding. The game is made to reward player skill and teamwork, not endless grinding, so you won’t need to spend tons of hours leveling up your character to compete.

The game includes integrated support for guilds, with the ability to create special guild emblems, to play for sigils which give you guild halls, and to keep in touch through in-game guild messaging like Asherons Call had. Guilds can challenge other guilds to battle, compete for control of key parts of the world, and be ranked on a worldwide ladder while in PvP’ing zones. These zones are only for PvP’ing, there is no PvP outside of these zones anywhere else. And since it is “Guild” Wars, you play PvP in groups, not alone. This game doesn’t have a one on one type of play to it like other rpg games. You get a choice of 8 skills to put in your gaming bar that defines what abilities your character will have. So two characters going head to head could possibly not be balanced even in the slightest. I really didn’t like this part of the game. I love the aspect of being able to play solo sometimes and not having to wait for 5 others to log on just to start a match. You can randomly pick others you don’t know and can even choose “henchmen” that are nothing more than bots that have ingame AI. But their AI goes only so far and in the end they are more a henderance sometimes more than help.

ArenaNet’s streaming technology eliminates the concept of patching a game. You no longer have to wait a month for the next big patch to experience new content. Instead, the game constantly and intelligently streams new content to your computer in the background while you play. But at the same time you don’t see this happening a lot unless there is something wrong.

This game is NO PAY TO PLAY. There are no monthly fees!!!

BUT, they don’t spend time creating new content. They have stated that they will use expansions for that. This is one of the reason that many are playing this game. No monthly fees. Areanet has also stated that if you don’t plan on getting expansion packs, you would be left behind as they introduce more content. Your PvP’ing experience will stay the same and you’ll still be equal to those that purchase the expansions.

Creating a character is pretty quick. You choose a gender, appearance, and character class, and you are done. The games character design is actually decent. You can chose hair, face and body designs. At this point you either choose a role playing character or a PvP only character.

On the role playing side of the game, you encounter many missions and quest that can keep you pretty busy for awhile. The levels and quest are also played with groups. You can choose the henchmen (which all have levels equal to the levels of enemies you will be facing on the next mission or quest) or you can group up with those around you that also want to enter the mission you are trying to. These missions take you to your own zone. You will never be competing for a loot drop from hundreds of players, because you are only in a zone with the group you went in with. The only zone where everyone will be will be towns or beginning of mission zones. They seperate zones into “districts” if the town gets to many people in it to keep from flooding you with lag because of the people in the zone.

The missions are pretty straight forward and there is really no hard thinking into figuring out how to finish it. You cant jump or fall off ledges, so you really dont get lost on the path that is set for you.

The game boots up and quits out instantly, downloads software updates quickly and automatically. If you want to just log out, click the X button and you are instantly out of the game and back on your desktop. Your character is also capable of instantly teleporting between all the cities and towns you’ve ever visited, at any time by going to your map and clicking on the marked spot.

I really enjoyed playing this game and personally found the graphics to be pretty stunning. You are able to tone graphics down enough that even the lesser computers can run with minimal lag.

I would give this game a 8.9 I think it still has some bugs to work out as far as game play is involved, but I do believe it is one of the best RPG’s out right now if you don’t have 7 hours to play a day.

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