Guild Wars Preview

The first thing you do in Guild Wars is to create your character. There are six character classes: Warrior, Ranger, Monk, Necromancer, Mesmer, and Elementalist. In an interesting twist you have to choose two character classes, a primary one, which determines most of your characteristics, and a secondary one, which provides you with some additional skills. Besides character classes, you also choose the sex of your character, his/her name, and you use five sliders to modify your character’s appearance.

There are no stats like strength or intelligence in this game. Instead, there are attributes that describe your proficiency, for example in casting healing prayers or in swordsmanship. At every level, you receive attribute points, which you can use to increase these attributes. Attributes have a direct effect on the efficiency of your skills. There are 150 skills in this game right now, 25 per character class. But at any given moment you can only have 8 of these on your hotkey bar, and you can only change your selection while in a town. You can learn skills from a trainer in town, by stealing them from a boss monster, or by learning them from a skill charm. The skill charms even allow you to temporarily learn a skill from a character class you don't have, but as you don't have the attribute for that skill, it will be at low efficiency.

After character creation, the game puts you into the tutorial mission. Here you learn how to move by using either the mouse or WASD keys, how you attack a monster by either clicking or using the keyboard, and how you use your skills for added effects beyond the simple auto-combat. You are also introduced to a concept that is unique for MMORPGs: NPC henchmen. In the tutorial there is only one, but later you can form groups with other players, NPC henchmen, or a mix of both. The henchmen take a share of the gold you find and a share of the experience points. They can even level up. Henchmen only have one profession, but they play that one surprisingly well. Not as well as an experienced player, but better than some of the bad players I met.

At the end of the tutorial you reach the city, or let’s say one instance of the city, of Lions Arch. Every zone in Guild Wars is instanced. City zones and mission entrance zones hold several dozen players, but in the zones where combat takes place there is either just you, or just your group, or your group and the enemy groups in the PvP zones. As long as you are in a zone, it is persistent. Monsters you kill don't respawn, and you even leave footsteps on some sorts of terrain, which you will run into if you circle back to an earlier location. As soon as you leave, the zone resets, and if you want, you can do the same zone again. Some zones are just for open exploration, others are linked to a quest or series of quests, and others are for PvP. Travel between zones couldn't be easier. You open your map and click on the zone, and you are teleported there. A zone’s content downloads when you first enter it, so if you play this on a 56K modem, zoning into a new place and downloading up to 10 MB will take a good while.

The most confusing thing for most players in the Guild Wars preview event was the loot. Loot gets automatically assigned to one group member, and only he can pick it up. You can find weapons, coins, dyes to color your armor, crafting resources, or salvage items. But you can't find any armor that fits you; the only way to get better armor is by crafting. For this you first need to buy a salvage kit, and to apply it to salvage items and any found weapons that you don't need. This will give you resources, with other resources being found as loot. Then you should trade with other players, because each primary character class needs different resources. Once you have all the resources, you go to a crafter NPC, select the armor piece you want to have made, and pay him a fee for making it for you.

Trading between players works in two ways. The classic way is to shout your offers for everybody in the city instance to hear, and hope to find another player who will trade with you directly. This is the only way in which you can trade weapons. For resources, skill charms, and dyes, there are NPC traders. These buy goods from players, and resell them at a higher price to another player. You can only buy goods another player has sold, so if you need hides and there are none in stock, you are out of luck. The lower the stock, the higher the price NPC traders will pay to buy the good, and the higher the at which the trader will offer the good. You don't have to travel from instance to instance; all traders are connected and use the same stock inventory. This has the interesting effect that people playing less popular character classes will find the resources they need at a much lower price, while popular professions have problems finding any resources for sale at all.

Guild Wars plays differently from other MMORPGs, in that it is much more structured. You play it mission by mission, with each mission being a zone. In the preview event, the missions were consecutive; you needed to finish mission 1 before you could do mission 2, and they formed a sort of story line. But having completed a mission, you had the choice to redo it, or to move towards the next, more difficult one. Either you play this game with a guild, doing the missions and PvP combat together, or you just join some pickup group at the mission entrance zone. You could even solo them, preferably with some henchmen. The game play is fast, and reminds me more of online squad based shooter games than an MMORPG. The worst thing that can happen to you is that you fail to finish the mission and have to do it again. There is a death penalty on your stats if you get resurrected inside a mission, but all penalties reset to zero if you leave the mission.

With missions and zones being such an essential part of the game, one can understand the business model of Guild Wars. You buy the box, and you play for free, with no monthly fees, but there are a limited missions and PvP zones. After a while, NCSoft will release expansion sets, called chapters, which you can buy if you get bored by the content of the original game. The expansion sets will also add new professions, new skills, new items, and so on. You pay for new content, not for the ability to existing content. The more you play the game, the more sense it makes to shell out additional money for it. Buying expansion sets does not make your character stronger, as you will always be limited to just 8 skills at a time, but it does give you more choice in the selection of the skills. The FAQ compares it to Magic the Gathering, where buying more cards give you more choice when building decks. It will be interesting to see whether the concept works. The monthly fee business model is keeping a lot of people away from the genre.

Finally, no preview of Guild Wars would be complete without mentioning PvP. There are different forms of PvP in the game. The one after which the game is named is the guild war. You assemble a group of eight guild members, with henchmen if need be, in your guildhall, and challenge another guild – either by name, or allowing the game to randomly pick another guild. The game pairs you against "worthy opponents", that is another group of roughly equal level. Each side has its guildhall to defend, with the death of the enemy guild lord NPC the target. You also have a flag, which you can try to plant in the watchtower halfway between the two guildhalls, to gain a morale boost for your side. A battle can last quite a while, as every killed player respawns after a short delay, and you will need to push the enemy back to his castle, then storm the castle and try to kill some of the NPCs there before the heavy defenses overwhelm your group. After several attacks, the NPC defenders die, and you can kill the NPC guild lord. Meanwhile, the other players are trying to keep you from doing so, or are even doing the same to your castle. It is surprisingly fun, as both sides have equal strength, and there is no griefing or zerg rushing. And unlike other games, you do not have to be of the highest possible level to participate, as long as there are other groups of your level looking for a PvP opponent.

Guild Wars is a fast and simple game. As there is no monthly fee, it is certainly worth buying the initial box, which gives you the opportunity to "consume" the content at your own pace without added cost. The preview having covered levels 15 to 20 of a game that will go from 1 to 50, it is not yet possible to say how balanced the whole will be, which might be a problem for PvP. But in any case, in Grimwell Online’s own classification, Guild Wars is firmly in the "game" camp, and has relatively few "world" components. A good game to play, even for short play sessions, whenever you have the time. Not the virtual world in which you live all your leisure time in for the next few of months.

This post is part of of a bigger preview on Grimwell.com
- posted by Tobold @ 8:20 AM Permanent Link