Guild Wars review

Guild Wars has some noticeable differences from other MMOGs. First of all, it’s being referred to as a CORPG; or a Competitive Online Role-playing Game. Just what does that mean? If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck, right? I haven’t found any clear-cut reason for the new acronym from the developer (ArenaNet) other than pointing out some variations on the typical MMORPG theme. However after playing it, this does make sense because Guildwars is not a typical MMORPG but rather a hybrid of a MMORPG and a Multiplayer FPS like Counterstrike. Yes folks, the PvP part of Guildwars is Counterstrike in an RPG setting. Incidentally you can see a similar development within World of Warcraft which has just released the Honor System where players compete for kill points and soon to be followed by Battlegrounds which is a PvP area.

The key selling point is that you don’t pay a monthly fee; you just buy the retail version and play it online for an unlimited time. How will ArenaNet keep this going then? The plan is to release an expansion every 6-9 months but supposedly it will not be necessary to buy them in order to stay competitive. The level cap is planned to be the same throughout so even if you take a break for a few months you can always jump back in and be the same level as your friends (but they may have slightly better equipment than you of course).

Entering Tyria

Getting started is simple and straightforward and with a painless installation. The first choice you get is either starting a PvP (Player versus Player) character who is already at the level cap (20 is the current max level) or a PvE (Player versus Environment) character at level 1. The key difference, apart from the obvious, is that a PvP character can not experience all of the PvE content (but he can go through the main storyline called missions) and chances are that a PvE character will grab more skills and better items along his progression.

The character creation is somewhat unspectacular. You get the choices of face, hair style and colour and size. There is only one race i.e. humans (although there are dwarves in the game) and everyone looks like a model. They look and animations are well done but I wanted to look battlescarred and evil dangit!

I am what I am

The professions are interesting because it gives you the choice of many combinations. There are 6 types of professions; Warrior, Necromancer, Mesmer, Monk, Ranger and an Elementalist. Monk is not what you expect, you don’t get to do any high-flying kicks; they are merely the healers of Guildwars. Very early in the game you get the choice of picking a secondary profession to complement your main one. If you’ve enjoyed playing paladins in other games then simply pick a primary warrior with a secondary monk (abbreviated W-Mo) or do like I did and pick an Elementalist with a dark side (E-Ne). If you pick a PvP character you can select some interesting level 20 preset character builds.

There are around 150 skills (character spells and abilities) for each class and you get the benefits of both if you dual-class (yes, it’s possible to skip it), but the best ones are reserved for your main profession which also sets what type of armour you can wear. The kicker which makes things really interesting in terms of strategic choices is that you only have room for eight skills at any one time (and you can only change them in home areas so it’s not possible to memorize new ones during battle). This means you have to think about what kind of enemies you will be fighting; their strengths and weaknesses, along with who your teammates are. For added customization you get attribute points each level which you can use to strengthen fields within magic or melee (like boosting sword skills for a warrior or a life-draining capability for necromancers).

One World

Guildwars is almost entirely instanced; everything apart from the cities and outposts is instanced. Instancing is of course nothing new but here it means that almost all of the times you play you have your own map. It’s easy to see the advantages of this, you don’t have to worry about camping, training, loot-stealing or griefing at all but the on the other side of the coin it can feel like playing a single-player game like Icewind Dale through the internet; you don’t see other players apart from your own team at all when adventuring. Personally, I think this approach works with this type of game.

Partially because of this Guildwars is not split into servers, it’s on a single server but the meeting areas (cities and outposts) are split into Districts (which are instances that get copied as soon as there are too many players in one district). Regardless of where your friends live, you can meet them because Guildwars is split into Home and International Districts. If you are in Europe you have your Home Districts but you can meet your, say, American friends on an International District.

Phat lewtz

Since Guildwars has a Diablo like structure it’s surprising that items are not really that big of a factor, skill and selecting the right well...skills, is more important at this stage. They can however give you that slight edge in close situations. Each main profession has their own sets of armour that they need to collect the materials for and then pay an NPC to craft it for them. What this means is that there are no player tradeskills, you use salvage kits on armour and items dropped from creatures to make materials (and some are rarer than others). So the “cool” things you will find won’t be Sleeves of Doom or Legplates of the Destroyer; that is reserved for the wieldable items. You can however upgrade your items if you find Runes on your journeys (or buy them).

While other more complex MMORPGs have bazaars, auction halls and so on where you can sell your items there is nothing like that in Guildwars, just the old method of advertising your wares through a chat channel. As I mentioned before items are not really a big part of the game, at least not to the extent they have been in MMORPGs until now. This is just one of the things that Guildwars skips to keep it a more compact experience rather then going for the typical all-around MMORPG.

Are you experienced?

The way you get experience has slowly shifted from grinding (killing the same monsters over and over again) to finishing quests for recent games of this genre. This transformation is complete in Guildwars since you get almost all your experience from finishing quests and missions (although the hundreds of creatures you kill on the way to your goal is arguably some form of grinding). Since level 20 is the level cap I bet a lot of you PvE aficionados like me are thinking that the game won’t last long. The good news is that a lot of the PvE content is built for the level 20 crowd.

The bad news is that there is a serious lack of motivation to explore it all since Guildwars is relatively simple in design compared to other MMORPGs. The quests give mediocre rewards as do the collectors (NPCs who exchange items for mob drops) and since the economy is so underdeveloped it’s hard to find use for money. Bottom line is that if you buy this game for the PvE it won’t last long, which is arguably not a problem since you only pay for the retail package and it will last you as long as a good single-player game. PvP’ers will get the most from this game for sure and it might become a popular game in net cafés.

The Grim Reaper

The main forte of Guildwars in PvE terms is however the storytelling which is told through so-called missions which you will progress through up until level 20. When you accept a mission you start in an instanced area which is often beautifully designed both in terms of content and design. At the end of a mission you will often get a cinematic video furthering the story.

A short note on dying; when that happens you get a penalty to your statistics (lowering your hitpoints and energy (mana)) which accumulates if you die in succession for up to 60%. You can slowly work off this penalty by killing enemies and when you return to a town it gets removed completely. This works quite well; you don’t lose much time since you start from a nearby graveyard but in terms of efficiency you really want to avoid dying.

The Posse

Since almost all the content after the initial areas is meant for groups you have a choice of selecting so-called Henchmen for your team if you feel like soloing. They are surprisingly effective but never as good as a competent team of players. For one thing they quickly become a few levels lower than you for most areas (but at certain intervals they obviously raise in levels as the mobs you fight get stronger).

Another thing is that you can’t really tell them specifically what to do so it’s hard to use any advanced strategic tactics. You’re going to have an interesting challenge of trying to navigate them through poisonous waters since they are perfectly content just standing there. Other than that you at least can set up a balanced team in terms of professions and do missions at your own pace.

Player versus Player

Now this is where the game shines since the PvP is the focus of Guildwars. You can fight one on one, 2 on 2, 4 on 4 and 8 on 8 plus there are guild battles (which I haven’t been a part of yet). In terms of preparation PvP is quite different from PvE.

When I’m soloing using henchmen I rarely change my skill line-up but for PvP you have to think ahead or at least experiment until you have found a few combinations of skills that work (and even then you might have to change that as soon as your opponents have an answer). The best players work their way up to the so-called Hall of Heroes and get their teams listed on the Guildwars website.

Technicalities

The game does look quite good, especially considering that it’s not very taxing on your computer. The graphics are nicely detailed, the animation and creatures look good plus it has that nice glow effect that MMORPGs have been using a lot lately.

It is however not very polished, it does have some technical glitches such as sometimes being summoned to your opponent and back disorientating you, your initial spells not hitting for some reason and your henchmen occasionally getting stuck in the landscape. For example right now I’m playing with henchmen but have to abandon what I’ve worked for the last two hours because my healer is stuck in the landscape and the whole group isn’t able to get resurrected while she is still alive.

The last word

There are two things that you need to enjoy this game to the fullest; a liking towards PvP and some friends because the community hasn’t developed that much yet and frankly you will find more rude and impatient people than not. Maybe this is because people look at it more like a FPS where social etiquette is not really a high priority, I don’t know.

However it’s great not having to worry about a monthly fee, just popping your head in for a little PvP action in an RPG setting or simply waiting for the next expansion. You can also play it a little more “hardcore” if you have an ambitious guild/team trying to make a name for itself battling other guilds/teams.