Guild Wars Review

My review comes in two sub-sections. The first is more descriptive, how the game works. The second is my personal opinion. As the latter is highly subjective, I'm encouraging you to comment.

Guild Wars game mechanics

Beginning my review at the start, Guild Wars is easy enough to install. The game comes on 2 CDs, which you install, and then run the game. As in all MMORPG, you first need to hit a button to create an account. But as Guild Wars does not have a monthly fee, you only need to enter the code, which you get by scratching the silver area on the back of the first CD cover.

After logging on, you are greeted by a screen presenting the two possible methods of character creation: You can create a level 1 role-playing character, who will develop in the PvE part of the game, or you can create a level 20 PvP-only character. At the start the PvP character can only be one of a limited amount of templates, but once you unlock skills with your role-playing characters, you can create a customized PvP characters with the skills you found.

If you create a role-playing character, it is probably helpful to think of him as going through four distinct phases in his life: The character starts in a newbie area in the city of Ascalon before the "searing" cataclysm. You can leave this newbie area as early as level 3, by going through a series of primary quests. But I'd recommend to do all the quests in this area, and only leave once you are about level 7, as you won't be able to get back to here.

Leaving the newbie area you can watch the "searing" cut-scene, and find yourself two years later in the same area, which is now notably more hostile, due to the destruction that happened. In this second phase of the game your main goal is to finish a series of 14 missions, which will open access to all PvE areas of the game, and also enable your role-playing character to participate in the PvP part of the game. Each mission area has a lobby, in which players gather to find groups, and the instanced mission area itself. This part of the game is very much forcing you to group. While it is theoretically possible to solo the missions, or do them with the help of NPC henchmen, that would be extremely hard to do.

Once you reached the end of the missions campaign, you should be level 20, which is the maximum level in this game, and your life will switch back and forth between the third and the fourth phase: PvP combat in the different arenas, and searching all the PvE areas repeatedly for rare skill drops.

Apart from the very different "flow" of your characters career, Guild Wars plays much like any other MMORPG. You create a character, and get the choice of 6 different professions at the start. You don't get to choose a race, all characters are human, but you can modify the look of your character with four sliders. During the game you get to pick a secondary profession, which makes a total of 30 possible combinations.

Both your primary and your secondary profession give you access to some skills. Skills are lined up on a hotkey bar, and like in any other MMORPG combat consists of an auto-attack, plus you hitting the hotkey buttons for added effects. Most skills cost some amount of energy, which slowly regenerates. Some skills cost "adrenalin", which builds up during melee combat, but isn't as well shown as the energy.

Soon you will have more than the 8 skills which fit on the bar, and from then on you will be forced to chose between them while in a city. While you are outside of the city, in any combat zone, you are stuck with the 8 skills you chose. If you want to switch to another set of skills, you will need to return to the city, which is a simple matter of clicking on the city's icon on the map. Choosing the right combination of skills for the adventure to come is an art. The longer you play, the more skills you find, and the more varied is your choice. This makes it possible to still have some sort of character development after you hit the low maximum level of 20.

Unlike other MMORPGs every player of Guild Wars is playing in the same world, you never need to chose a server. This is achieved by heavy instancing. Every zone in which combat takes place is instanced for only you, your group, and the enemy group in the case of PvP zones. You will never meet a stranger while fighting monsters in the wilderness. Players only meet in cities and mission lobbies, but even those exist in many copies, as many as necessary to limit the population in each of them. Players are also segregated by the version of the game they bought, US, European, or Korean, but they can meet in international zones. And there are special PvP modes which pit the different continents against each other. As Guild Wars seems to be selling quite well, there are hundreds of thousands of players on this one world, and you rarely meet the same stranger twice. But if you meet nice people, you can put them on your friends list, and form a guild with them.

The user interface and controls of Guild Wars have its peculiarities. By default you can either move with the classical WASD keys, or by left-clicking on the ground with the mouse. But as you also left-click to attack and to interact with objects, any misclick will have you running somewhere where you didn't want to go. Fortunately click-movement can be turned off. Another big annoyance is that the landscape is full of invisible walls, which aren't always easy to predict. Some greenery you can walk through, other will block your way. Seemingly tiny ledges can pose an insurmountable obstacle. And there is collision detection with other characters, monsters, and NPC henchmen, so in the worst case you can find yourself trapped between an invisible corner and the henchman who followed you there, and he will take his time before letting you pass.

Guild Wars has some interesting features, but they are badly documented. The manual isn't all that helpful, and the newbie area doesn't offer much information in the form of tutorials. I had a hard time to find out how to enable the several weapon set slots, which allow you to switch for example quickly from ranged to melee weapon. If I hadn't already participated in two beta events, I would never have found out how exactly crafting works, and how the merchants work. Customizing your weapon to give 20% more damage, or trading special loot items for equipment at a collector are nice features, but you need to stumble upon the right NPC by chance to find out about them. It helps if you run around with the left ALT key pressed, which will show the NPC names all the time.

There are no tradeskills in Guild Wars. Instead you visit a crafter, hand him the resources he needs and some money, and he will craft the item you want for you. Resources are found rarely directly as loot. Most of the time you will need to use a salvage kit (which you have to buy) on the items you find, which will transform them into appropriate resources: A sword transforms into iron, a staff into wood, and so on. Different professions use different resources for their armor, for example warriors need lots of iron, but no cloth. So some sort of resource trade is of mutual benefit.

For trading resources Guild Wars has a very innovative system. There is no such thing as an auction house, but there are NPC merchants who buy and sell resources. The innovative thing is that these merchants only sell the resources they bought, they are carrying a stock of whatever players sold them. And the price varies in function of the amount in stock. If the stock is low, you can sell them your resources at a good price, but buying from them is expensive. But if they are swimming in a particular resource, they only offer a tiny sum to buy more, and sell the resource for a much more reasonable price.

My Opinion

Guild Wars is a difficult game to review, because it stretches the limits of the MMORPG genre. At its very core, Guild Wars is a squad-based tactical combat game. Around this core is applied a thin layer of MMORPG. The core is an excellent game, the best PvP experience I ever had. The MMORPG layer is good enough. But if you buy Guild Wars only for its PvE part, you will probably find that this game doesn’t have enough content, and risk being disappointed.

There is an inherent conflict between the PvE part and the PvP part of any MMORPG that offers both of them. The basic idea of PvE is getting stronger by fighting monsters; but that results in different players having characters of different strengths, which is bad for PvP, because it gives the player who did more PvE an unfair advantage. Guild Wars solves this conflict by making the “getting stronger” part of the game extremely short, and even allowing you to bypass it completely, by creating a PvP-only character of maximum level. All the characters participating in PvP are thus equally strong, and the PvP battles are set up in a manner that also assures numerical equality. This results in a very enjoyable, and very fair, PvP experience, in which a team’s success is determined by skill and cooperation.

The downside of this is, that the interest of the PvE part of the game is reduced to collecting more skills that don’t make your character stronger, but only more varied. All skills are supposed to be equally strong, and you can only have 8 of them available in any battle. Acquiring more skills by PvE only gives you more options when choosing the 8 skills for your next battle. The world is a lot smaller than that of any other major MMORPG, and you will need to visit all the places several times before you find all the rare drop skills. How can you afford to make a MMORPG without a monthly fee? By creating not more than one month worth of content.

So whether I can recommend Guild Wars to you, or not, depends strongly on what exactly you are looking for. If you are looking mainly for a good PvP game, this one is definitely one to try. But if character development is your main goal, Guild Wars will probably feel short and void of purpose. Only the fact that there is no monthly fee might make it worth buying for a PvE fan. Later you will have the opportunity to buy more content in the form of expansion sets.

If you buy Guild Wars for the PvP, you should be aware that this isn’t necessarily a game for casual players. Because PvP is based on team cooperation and skill, achieving success will require a lot of organization and dedication. A team that trained together and is using some sort of voice-over-ip software to communicate with headphones will mercilessly slaughter a random group of casual players. There is a reason why this game is called Guild Wars, the lone warrior won’t score a lot of wins here.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:46 AM Permanent Link