I’ve just recently acquired Guild Wars: Eye of the North. And according to Xfire, my time spent playing Guild Wars
I’m an MMO latecomer, having subscribed to my first MMO about three years ago, entirely missing the Everquest bandwagon. That first MMO was World of Warcraft. After reaching level 60 with my dwarf paladin, I quickly found very little to do in the game aside from nearly non-existent PvP (this was pre-battlegrounds) and 40-man raids (which consisted primarily of a chat log full of strangers rolling for loot). Since then, I’ve wandered through several other MMORPG’s promising revolution in the genre – including Matrix Online and Auto Assault. I even dabbled in old-school MUD’s, searching for something to hook me as WoW had done for the few months I had played. I later played the amazing EVE Online – an extremely detailed and immersive game. I quit for a variety of reasons – none of which could be attributed to a CCP shortcoming.
But this post is not about EVE – it’s about Guild Wars – a game in which I was at first entirely uninterested. The screenshots, while beautiful, looked just like more of the same fantasy fluff. The character models looked a little… off. The player level was capped at 20. How much content can a 20-level MMO possibly have? And eight skill slots? That’s it? In the eyes of someone who enjoys layers upon layers of complexity, that looked pretty meager and pathetic. A lot of the classes looked too stereotypical – your tanking warriors, bow-and-pet rangers, healing monks, and high-DPS elementalists. A glance at the previews littered among a variety of sites gave me the impression that the total available number of skills was pretty small as well. Admittedly, I hardly even read what the reviewer had to say about the actual mechanics of the game because I was that uninterested. I just didn’t understand the hype, though a friend of mine did and continued to impress that excitement upon me. Time passed and Guild Wars was finally released – and it arrived with some substantial critical praise.
My friend was going to pick it up and highly recommended that I do so as well. I figured that an “MMO” (I’ll get to the reason for the quotation marks later) with critical acclaim, no subscription fee, and a good friend playing it alongside had ample reasons to be purchased. So I bought it, hardly knowing what I was getting into. Fast forward a couple years or so, and here I am, still finding myself going back to the game.
For those unfamiliar with Guild Wars, it’s an NCSoft (the guys who published City of Heroes/Villains and Lineage I/II, among other things) title that boasts free online play and heavily skill-based gameplay. The game is set in an alternative (i.e. non-Tolkienesque) fantasy universe and has, since release, had two major standalone expansions (Factions and Nightfall) and one minor expansion (Eye of the North). Across all of the expansions, there are 10 available professions and some insanely large number of skills (over 1200 in all, according to GuildWiki). The series has introduced a slew of bold innovations and creative design decisions that make it one of my most favorite multiplayer RPG’s of all time.
Skillful Play
Guild Wars literally takes skills to play. Skills are various abilities that can be performed by a character, including attack skills and spells. These are the basis of the game and the foundation of combat. Characters are allowed to equip a maximum of eight skills at any given time, including a maximum of one elite skill – a special classification given to a rare skill that can only be obtained by killing a boss and capturing the skill from it. These equipped skills can only be changed in town and not in the middle of missions. The difference between Guild Wars skills and a typical MMO’s skills and spells is two-fold: 1) Each of Guild Wars’ skills are all designed to be equally useful in various circumstances or functions. Obtaining a new skill will not suddenly make older skills obsolete because each skill is different in function and execution. 2) The number of available skills in Guild Wars is much greater than the number of skills in a typical MMO. I’ve already mentioned that across all of the professions, there are over 1200 active skills (meaning that the skill’s effect must be initiated, as opposed to passive skills that are always in effect). Unlike a typical MMO, however, these skills are not meant to be fit onto multiple toolbars littering the screen. Instead, your character is meant to equip only eight of those skills. While every skill among the character’s professions is obtainable, the extra skills have no effect unless equipped.
The easiest way to describe this distinction is by pointing to this Gamasutra article quoting Michael Gills, ArenaNet’s tournament coordinator. He mentions that Guild Wars was built to mimic the mechanics of Magic: The Gathering, the mother of all CCG’s in which skillful play and strategic deck construction is key to victory. Making Guild Wars more like an “E-Sport” called for drastically different design decisions from the typical MMO, where time investment and all of its incarnations (i.e. level and better loot are both essentially derived from time investment) determine character power and success. If Guild Wars is like Magic, then the analogy is as follows: the skills are your cards, and your eight equipped skills – your “build” – is your deck. A well-designed and well-played character will prevail over a badly-designed, badly played one, regardless of how long they’ve actually been playing. In fact, the game’s weapons and armor – the farmable elements – were generally designed to have far more subtle, strategic influences rather than being the focus of character progression. Whereas the majority of time spent playing high-level PvE content in World of Warcraft is used to acquire set pieces that will make your character competitive, weapons and armor that are “good enough” in Guild Wars are relatively easy to procure, making the playing field generally level. In Guild Wars, skill and strategy are much greater influences than time investment (disregarding actual skill and proficiency gained from time investment, which occurs in all games of skill). My wife has played far less than I have, but she is already able to contribute a significant amount of help as part of my own questing party. Whenever I’ve failed a mission, I’ve found myself rarely blaming my lack of good equipment and more often blaming the party’s tactical approach or overall strategy. Instead of going back to town to resign until we have the better weapons or armor, we go back to town to discuss how we should’ve spread out a little more to avoid the AoE spikes or how we should’ve targeted the healers first.
Strategic Complexity
Taking the Magic analogy a little further, each Guild Wars profession is like an elemental color, each of which presents an overall different approach to dealing with the enemy. Monks are proficient at healing and protecting (white magic). Mesmers manipulate through hexes and maintain advantage through clever, disruptive spells (a little like blue magic?). Elementalists are the one-off, high-damage spell casters (red magic). I guess you could continue comparing Rangers to green magic and Necromancers to black magic, but you’ll soon find out that the analogy ends there. Guild Wars has a total of ten professions – double the number of colors in Magic (unless you count colorless artifacts). Each of these professions has their own unique ways of dealing with enemies, from the standard RPG classes to the more interesting and creative ones introduced in the expansions. My personal favorite is the Ritualist from Factions, whose skills allow it to summon stationary offensive and defensive spirits, enchant weapons, and buff itself by holding and/or dropping magical items. Furthermore, Guild Wars characters are allowed to choose two professions (a primary and a less effective secondary), meaning that there are 100 possible profession combinations (including solitary profession builds). The dual-profession mechanic greatly resembles the common makeup of a typical Magic deck, in which two colors are generally used to formulate a winning combination of elemental strategies without diluting the deck too much.
While the Magic analogy works at this most basic level, Guild Wars presents at least three more layers of strategic complexity on top of the typical CCG formula of deck construction – equipment loadout, attribute point allocation, and party builds. Equipment can be augmented with a huge variety of stacking upgrades to increase particular weapon or character stats. Some upgrades are simple, bestowing a fixed maximum health/energy benefit, while other upgrades can be a little more specific, like bestowing a random chance of increasing the length of enchantments, or creating the possibility of shortening spell casting time durations. Attribute points are points earned while leveling up to level 20, up to a maximum of 200 points. These can be distributed among seven different profession-specific attributes (four for the primary profession, three for the secondary) to make associated skills more effective. For example, a lightning spell would be more damaging if an elementalist invested more attribute points toward his Air Magic attribute. Increasing a particular attribute gets more and more expensive as the attribute level increases, so eventually, there’s a tradeoff decision of whether to spend a ton of attribute points to increase a high-level attribute by one point or to spend those attribute points to increase a lower-level attribute by multiple levels. Do you spend 20 points to increase your Paragon’s Leadership from 11 to 12, or do you spend 15 of those points to increase his Motivation from 0 to 5? The cost scaling ensures players diversify their characters by investing in multiple attributes instead of minmaxing a single attribute. In my experience, good characters seem to invest attribute points between two to four different attributes. Oh, and Guild Wars lets characters respec at any town for free. In fact, they’ve created a UI that allows players to save attribute/skill templates to facilitate switching between multiple builds quickly and easily. Finally, if there weren’t enough choices, there’s still the task of putting together a winning team comprising of various professions that augment each other. One GvG (guild vs. guild) build that I found especially entertaining was dubbed “The Bomb Show”, in which Necromancers kamikaze themselves with another Necromancer exploding their corpses and a Monk resurrecting them to repeat the process as necessary.
Ultimately, each of these layers present more choices and more chances to give your character a unique function. ArenaNet has made a great effort to ensure that there are a huge amount of viable combinations to avoid the class minmaxing problem – a problem in which players are essentially “forced” to build their character a certain way because other players have determined a single, optimal build for that character’s class. The sheer number of choices and strategies makes it nearly impossible to perform traditional minmaxing. The end result is that players and guilds are continuing to discover, publish, and tweak interesting character builds for particular functional roles, much like you might find a less risky burn deck or a faster mill deck in the latest issue of Inquest (or not – ZOMG, it’s been discontinued). The exciting part for me is looking for that one awesome skill combo that is underused or possibly even undiscovered.
Balanced Progression
Eschewing the traditionally long and steep RPG leveling curve, Guild Wars does not allow players to exceed level 20. While the leveling curve is still exponential, characters often attain the maximum level within a reasonable amount of time (between one and two weeks of moderate play). As they say, the game doesn’t really begin until you’ve reached level 20. Instead of the using the character level as a measure of player progression, Guild Wars smartly uses the acquisition of various skills as its general progression metric. A skill is most often acquired by spending in-game money and a skill point. Skill points are awarded in a variety of ways, the most common method being leveling up. Once the player has reached level 20, a skill point is awarded each time the player levels “over” 20. (This “level 21″ XP requirement remains a fixed amount at level 20, regardless of how many times the character has “leveled over” in the past.) I hesitate to call the set of acquired skills a “progression metric” because a player who knows which build he/she wants to use and only acquires those skills can be just as effective as a player who has collected every skill in the game. Again, returning to the Magic analogy, collecting skills is just like collecting cards. Some people will trade their rare, unused cards for cards that will make their deck more powerful, while some people (like me) make collecting every card in a particular edition or expansion a part of their enjoyment of the game. Just as in any other well-designed game, the rewarding of skills in Guild Wars opens up more gameplay options, allowing the player to attempt new builds and strategies.
Unfortunately, a lot of MMO’s will create a cheap, artificial sense of progression by locking gameplay content to particular level minimums – you can’t use this weapon until you’re level 30, or you can’t ride that mount until you’re level 40. You’re forced to invest time (leveling or farming money) to experience an element of the game that could just as easily be made available to you right from the get-go. Moreover, character levels in a typical MMO basically grant indiscriminate power. You might not be able to beat those elite mobs now, but if you just level a few more times, you’ll be tearing through them like paper. Guild Wars sidesteps the majority of the issue by cutting the leveling time down to a trivial amount (a couple of weeks versus the three or so months it took me to hit level 60 in WoW) and making a significant number of skills available early on in the game. Once a character has reached level 20, he is capable of being just as effective as any other level 20 player; the rest of the character’s development is up to the player – both the player’s desires and the player’s actual skill.
While Guild Wars still has time-investment elements, those “grindable” elements generally relate to cosmetic distinctions. The most expensive “elite” armor sets, while requiring large amounts of money and rare materials to craft, are no better than their cheap counterparts. But they look cool. A good chunk of displayable titles require some magnificent feats of persistence (read: time investment) – explore a continent’s entire map, earn some ridiculously large amount of reputation with a certain faction, unlock thousands of high-end treasure chests. But those displayable titles are just that – titles. They don’t make your character more powerful. But they look cool. And people will gaze at you in awe, wondering how much sleep you’ve gotten over the past months. ArenaNet had its priorities straight when they decided to ensure that long-time players would be rewarded – but not to the point where the veterans had an innate competitive advantage.
Unique Setting, Cohesive Narrative
As I’ve already mentioned, Guild Wars was a beautiful game when it was released and it continues to age quite gracefully. The animations are a little exaggerated, and the character models look anorexic (as my friend often observed), but I am utterly enamored by the game’s environments. Between the wastelands of post-searing Ascalon, the Jade Sea of Cantha, and the wurm-ridden Desolation of Elona, every Guild Wars campaign has offered memorable sites to explore.
To infuse the unique Guild Wars universe with purpose, the designers have taken advantage of the highly-instanced gameplay to create a tighter and more coherent, overarching story by employing cutscenes and well-scripted mission events to advance the plot in a fashion one might only expect in a traditional, single-player RPG. A lot of MMO’s pretend to have a narrative by littering their game with different questlines and “backstory”. While those games have established a solid setting, there really isn’t a cohesive plot in which players can take part. Guild Wars, on the other hand, has that narrative to draw the player into the main storyline in addition to the standard questlines and backstory. The game melds the traditional motivations of the single-player RPG experience with the open-endedness of the MMORPG experience. The only other popular MMO I know of that has this kind of overarching narrative is Final Fantasy XI (according to a friend that used to play it).
Diverse Playstyle Support
Guild Wars offers something for everyone. The game is conducive to a wide variety of play styles. While a lot of the game was obviously designed for multiplayer play, players that prefer going solo have the option of including AI-controlled henchmen to fulfill various roles in the party (albeit not as effectively as a competent human) when embarking on a mission or a quest. For players that wish for a short-and-sweet session, it’s very easy to login to complete some quests and get a bit of XP, reputation, and gold. For players that want a more immersive session, the storyline missions can easily consume a couple of hours. If a player just wants to engage in mindless farming activities, there are a lot of skills to be purchased and a lot of titles to earn. If a player wants an intense fight, there are high level dungeons that require insane amounts of coordination and amazing character/party builds. If the player wants to explore, the environments are quite large and, as I’ve already mentioned, beautiful. If the player wants to socialize, there are some decent guild options – custom guild capes, guild ranks, “guest” passes, and guild halls (complete with purchasable vendor NPC’s) in which to practice PvP. And since I haven’t mentioned this feature elsewhere, I might as well mention it here – the mission radar/minimap allows players to scribble onto it or ping parts of it to communicate plans of attack to party members. I just thought that was a neat idea.
The PvE experience is thorough and compelling without being too repetitive. Even after the main campaign is over, the player can still replay the missions to get all of the bonus objectives, or they can attempt the missions on “hard mode”. For the competitive type, Guild Wars has a tournament-style PvP experience that was built into the game from the ground up. The designers knew they wanted a balanced competitive experience and looked toward the tournament CCG scene for inspiration. In fact, when a new character is created, the player is given the option to create a “roleplaying character” (PvE) or a “PvP character”. While PvE characters can also participate in all of the PvP activities, a PvP character cuts straight to the point – they are created at level 20 with the maximum number of available attribute points (200). They can equip any skill that has been “unlocked” (previously acquired) by any character on the account and choose from any unlocked weapon and weapon/armor upgrades. Their only restriction is that they cannot participate in PvE (for obvious reasons). There are several PvP game types to play, including random battles, point-based objectives, 1v1 “hero battles”, 8v8 guild battles, base-raiding scenarios, and full-on guild tournaments. I honestly haven’t explored all of the possible options as PvP is not my cup of tea, but they’re there and they seem pretty substantive.
Daring Business Model
Guild Wars is one of the few MMORPG’s that requires no subscription fee and doesn’t lock content for “premium” members. Instead of the traditional subscription model, ArenaNet opted to promise regularly-scheduled expansions that can be purchased to access new continents, new professions, and all of the new experiences that those things entail. Aside from the obligatory new locales and new quests, every campaign has also added unique gameplay mechanics in the spirit of the expansion’s theme. Factions introduced tug-of-war alliance-vs-alliance battles and point-based challenge missions, complete with leaderboards. Nightfall introduced heroes – special henchmen that can be customized and controlled to a greater degree than typical henchmen. Eye of the North added three minigames and the Hall of Monuments – a virtual trophy case highlighting your character’s high-level accomplishments throughout the entire game. The Hall will purportedly have some effect on linked accounts in Guild Wars 2. Totalling the MSRP of each of these expansions (not including the Prophecies campaign), the expansions cost a total of $140. Given that Guild Wars was released about two years and four months ago, the cost-per-month for a person who played all of the expansions is about $5 – a lot less than your typical subscription fee but conceivably enough for a studio to survive. With the continuing success of the franchise and the announcement of a sequel, it looks like the business model is working out for ArenaNet, and it’s a definite benefit to consumers who don’t want to be shackled by the subscription fee and an obligation to play but also don’t want to quit the game entirely.
Many hesitate to say it’s “massively multiplayer” – I am even inclined to agree with those people. Unlike most MMO’s, the majority of the Guild Wars geography is instanced (meaning that you and your immediate party get a unique “copy” of explorable world areas and mission areas). However, it’s hardly fair to call it a single-player RPG with multiplayer elements, since the game has a fairly strong multiplayer focus. Not counting the huge PvP component of the game, a large number of the missions and quests are almost impossible to do with heroes and henchmen alone. Success in the end-game content largely relies on having intelligent (i.e. human) party members with exceptional builds carrying out meticulously planned strategies. Victories in the Hall of Heroes are announced to all players. And most importantly, every town node acts as a multiplayer hub. This alone is nearly enough to make Guild Wars an MMO, as the mechanic simplifies the interaction and cooperation between multiple players. The majority of quests and missions begin in towns, so it’s the most natural place to look for a questing party. The most important NPC merchants, vendors, and service providers also reside in towns. Towns are visited often enough that the multiplayer presence is integrated and inseparable from the single-player and instanced components. If that’s still not “massive” enough, then maybe Guild Wars belongs to an entirely different, hybrid classification. Maybe it evades classification altogether. I’m fine with that. That’s the nature of innovation.
In any case, the instancing fixes or minimizes a lot of the issues that haunt a lot of “real” massively multiplayer RPG’s – spawn camping, kill stealing, ninja looting, and a lot of general griefing behaviors. WoW obviously saw the merit of instancing – they used the mechanic for their most important dungeons. Can you really blame Guild Wars for taking it even further?
Conclusion
I’ve almost forgotten the point of this post. I initially intended this to be a short plug, but it ended up being a monster. Anyway – my point? Guild Wars is awesome. Sure, you can play WoW some more and forever be enslaved to the stereotypical MMO formula that Richard Garriott recently harped upon. Or you can do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Guild Wars. It may not be immediately familiar – you might not even like it. But at least it’s different. Try it. The price of entry certainly shouldn’t stop you.
P.S. You can find me online by adding Schlag Hund to your friends list, though I’ll likely be logged on as one of my four other characters. And, if you’re an orphan player looking for a guild, Another Saturday Gone [ASG] sorely needs members – we currently have three. Our size limits us to primarily PvE gameplay, but we have a Guild Hall, if that floats your boat. Anyway, I hope to see you in-game. 
Guild Wars PvP is ridiculously hard for us old coots
After reading a depressingly large pleothora of horribly unenlightened guild wars reviews, your’s was a breath of fresh air…it actually reviewed the game for what it is, and didn’t like so many others go on about they’d rather grind for days on end….
Kudos man, kudos =)
Couple key points missing from this post…
1. GW does not take more ‘actual skill’ then other games. It does place a massive emphasis on THE correct build prior to an engagement though. For example….Going on a mission against necromancers? Doesn’t matter how much skill you have if your build relies on minions. You HAVE to respec depending on the mission. GW doesn’t penalize a respec because the game relies on it. This is never truer then in GW PvP. How your build converges with the opponent’s build plays THE LARGEST part in the outcome of the battle. This is why the top ranked teams ‘minmax’ and rarely try something new. “Skill” is a minor player when your opponent’s build can crush yours. Much in the same way gear discrepancies’ overshadow “skill” in other games. I would even say GW requires the least amount of “skill” of any MMO game I’ve played…other then UO…. kind of the same thing with better visuals.
GW is not a MMO or even a CMO. It has a simple, linear and cohesive story line is because it’s basically a 1990’s version of an online game. Think Diablo on Battlenet except you can see a player’s model instead of just their name on a list. You and your buddies go to the same server at the same time so you can play a singular instanced version of an offline game. GW basically traded an interactive massively multiplayer world for a more coherent storyline and reduced server demand.
Missions are not unique compared to other games. Same old escort, kill x, talk-to quest that are a staple of the genera. Only unique quest aspect is the ‘carry-this’ quests where you can’t use your hands…unless your casting…
GW does not have a more adult following then other games. The server wide chat features in other games are abused by the immature. Limited chat features in GW greatly prevent this.
GW visuals have more detail, but are not better than other MMOs. The MMOs that have fewer polys and/or dpi have more dynamic animations and a wider variety of models. This is similar to comparing a still picture at 1080dpi and a movie at 720p. Picture will look nicer, but what gives you more for your money?
GW AI is awful. Find friends to quest with early on or suffer.
You can not create an account and jump right into PvP. Creating a PvP character is intended for those that have already unlocked a great deal of content with their PvE characters. The alternative is to lose with your PvP character for weeks until you horde up enough BP to buy useful skills and gear. Even then you will need to do some PvE unlocking to be competitive.
The game is not free. It can be cheaper or more expensive then other options. WoW subscription in my area is about 8$ a month. I purchased the game and expansion for about 40$ each. Since I don’t play every month, I’ve totaled about one year in subscription fees. I’ve experienced all the content in both games for about the same price. If you only plan on spending two hours a week playing WoW or you can see yourself playing GW for a year (nonstop) without getting bored of it…. I would suggest GW to save a buck.
“Sure, you can play WoW some more and forever be enslaved to the stereotypical MMO formula that Richard Garriott recently harped upon. Or you can do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Guild Wars. It may not be immediately familiar – you might not even like it. But at least it’s different.”
It isn’t all that different. Instead of gear grind you’ll do the skill grind. Instead of using 24 rogue abilities you’ll use eight assassin abilities. Tired of the same old WoW crap? Pick up a GW demo, but don’t expect to get the same level of refinement and content. It’s kind of like taking your daughter’s bicycle around the block for kicks.
Fair enough arguments, though I still disagree on a lot of those points. I’ve addressed most of your points below:
I totally agree with the contention over whether GW is an MMO. I already mentioned that in my post. But even WoW used instancing – and why? Because doing so eliminates a TON of the grief associated with MMO gameplay. So yes, it’s a tradeoff, but it’s not without its benefits.
I still contend that GW takes more skillful play on the whole than WoW and other traditional MMO’s. I can’t speak about high-level PvP, since I already mentioned that that’s not my cup of tea. However, getting by in PvE took FAR more effort than it did in WoW. The majority of GW’s explorable areas post level 20 are at least as challenging as each of WoW’s hand-crafted instances. And the difference is that the majority of GW itself is focused on post-level-20 play, whereas WoW had a ton of intermediate content to accomodate the various points on the levelling curve. If you have a problem taking mobs on in WoW, the easy solution is that you grind levels and grind for gear (or gold to buy the gear) until your stats are good enough to take them. Simple. You don’t necessarily have that option in GW. You’ll hit level 20 extremely early in the game, so at that time, you can grind skills, but that doesn’t necessarily make you more effective. That’s what I love about it – GW is a game that grants little to no material advantage to those that invested the most time. You can’t possibly say the same thing about WoW. Go on those 40-man raids over and over again, wait for your epic set piece to drop, and then come and tell me that you didn’t need to grind to get competitive.
Yes, build is important, and I believe that choosing and employing an effective build is part of that required skillset of the game. Skill and strategy go hand-in-hand. When I mentioned that success in GW “takes skill”, I didn’t mean to say that strategy is not involved in any sense. I just meant that, during moment-to-moment play, GW generally forces you to make more decisions than your typical mash-a-key-repeatedly MMO. Of course a team with a superior build will destroy you. I dedicated an entire section to the fact that strategy plays a very important role, and I outlined the wealth of strategic possibilities that the game offers. I believe the GW metagame is far richer than what you’ll find in WoW because of the fact that certain builds tend to absolutely crush other types.
Also, you compared build discrepancies to gear discrepancies in other MMO’s. This is an entirely unfair comparison because gear must be grinded. Gear reflects time investment. Gear becomes obsolete. Great builds, on the other hand, reflect skillful strategy that may never be attained just by “playing longer”. Sure, you have to unlock the skills, but if you know the strategy you want to employ, you can just unlock your eight skills directly at a vendor. Getting the skills you want is orders of magnitudes easier and faster in GW than it is to get your top-tier gear in WoW.
And the fact that builds can be swapped so easily facilitates the development of optimal and interesting strategies. You don’t have to save up money just to respec. You don’t have to walk your way over to some respec vendor. You just do it – and then you try your new build and see how it works out.
I don’t remember mentioning anything about an adult-following. I also never argued that GW’s graphics are superior. I just highlighted the fact that it has beautiful environments. The Jade Sea is absolutely gorgeous. Though I do agree that the animations are on the crappy side. But graphics most certainly do not make a game, and graphics are the last thing I’d use to convince someone to play GW.
GW AI may not be lifelike at all – but they’re certainly good enough for the occassional solo play. I got through the majority of the Nightfall campaign with henchies, so they’re definitely not unusable. And ask yourself this: what’s better – imperfect AI or no henchman option at all?
I also think you exaggerate on the PvP side. It really isn’t too bad to jump right into PvP and do random team battles to earn BP. I admit to sucking at PvP, but even I can help my (random) team score some wins now and then.
It’s true that if you go for the longer-commitment subscription, WoW fees can be equivalent in cost to GW. GW’s business model, however, affords you the flexibility to stop and play again whenever you want without worrying about contacting the company or inactive account deletion. Surely you’ve heard many people mention the fact that they’re still paying the WoW subscription even after they stopped playing simply because they didn’t feel like making the effort to cancel the subscription.
And I think all of my previous arguments do, in fact, establish that GW is different. Its design is different at a very fundamental level. I think that truth is quite clear. And sure, the production value is not as high as WoW’s. How could it be, when WoW had a multi-million dollar budget and what – five years? – to develop the game. But most people would agree that WoW introduced very little (if any) actual gameplay innovation to the genre. It simply refined and polished (quite well, I’ll admit) what was already there. But I’m pitching GW exactly because it went for a more interesting and different route. It decided to try something entirely different from the established traditions of the MMO (and even the RPG) genre, and more or less, sales figures and critical reception have proven it a reasonable success. It was certainly enough to ensure a sequel, which is more than you can say about a lot of the other cookie-cutter MMO’s that have recently tanked. But again, some people won’t like it. That’s fair. But those looking for something different would do well to try it out.
It’s not so much like getting off of your tricked out bike and riding your daughter’s as much as it’s like getting off of your tricked out bike and playing some football. It’s just different.
I came very late into the Guild Wars universe. I started playing in April 2008 because I had a friend who started playing prophecies 2 years ago and kept talking about it at work. So I picked up the game and haven’t been able to stop since. I have all 3 campaigns including EOTN and I’ve had my dervish Rayvun Axis complete all of the campaigns (not all of the missions…) and I also have a Ranger that’s completed prophecies and EOTN and my latest character Ritualist, Wayward Gospel Kill complete EOTN first after getting to lvl20 then went back to Cantha and finished Factions.
This is my first exposure into the MMO universe, since the no online fee was one of the factors of me picking up the game. But after spending hours playing and using the PVX Wiki and devising my own builds, I find that the appeal for me are the ‘builds’ and how you can use builds in different areas or situations to be in the environment. I’ve invested a lot of time playing my different characters (even a 55hp farming monk) but my main character seems to be my dervish who has over 2.5 million xp and is currently title chasing and my ritualist which to me is a complete 180 flip from your melee class. I use a lot of build tinkering with those 2 classes and I’m an active member on guildwars guru website always checking out the forums and checking out other peoples idea’s and builds and offering my own advice on certain missions and such.
My friend who’s been playing for over 2 years told me that I’ve pushed 3 characters in finishing at least 2 campaigns and he’s still using his Ranger character…yep I like the game that much and when 1 year comes up, I’ll finally have a bunch of mini-pets that I can dump in my Hall of monuments.
BTW I am an officer in my guild (Qunara Rebels & Patriots) QRAP and you can find me ING Rayvun Axis (dervish) Forever Moor (Ranger) Wayward Gospel Kill (Ritualist)
A really detailed article on Guild Wars, I salute you good sir.
I’ve never spent so many hours on a game, I would begin to praise the game and say why I love it but well your articles mentions why I like this game. <3 Anti-grinding. Kudos sir. Now give me GW2 anet… please
Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog.
Cheers! Sandra. R.