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A few months back, I stated that when I was done with Horizons, I was done with the MMORPG craze in general. After all, none of the new games on the market looked appealing, and even if D&D Online turns out to be cool, it's still months in the future (and honestly, I have my doubts about it). But then I was coaxed into giving Guild Wars a try.
I had misgivings about Guild Wars. I prefer variety in games, and GW offers only humans as a race options, and 6 classes. Of course, further variety is created because you can (and in fact are encouraged to) take on a secondary class. Still, 36 combinations didn't seem like that much to me. I decided to give it a try anyway, and now I'm just as hooked as I was on Horizons (I still miss my berserker pixie character, though. She was awesome).
One of the first things that bears mentioning is that GW is not quite a normal MMORPG. In fact, they prefer to refer to themselves as a "Competitive Online Roleplaying Game." The game world is set up rather interestingly. There are no shards or servers as you may be used to from other games. Instead there are districts (divided into three categories: American, European, and Korean). When you log on, you're automatically tossed into a random district for the region of the world you selected during account creation. However, you can bring up a drop-down menu and travel to ANY other district, even those for other regions of the world.
This removes the old problem of making a new friend who plays the same game as you, only to discover that they're well-established on a different server than you normally play on. When you want to go out with your friends, you just log on and agree to a town and district to meet in, peace of cake. Also, if you log on and the people in your district are being dorks, you can move to a quieter district.
The downside to this is that there's no "Role Play" servers, a feature that I enjoyed on Horizons. Role playing seems to be pretty scarce on Guild Wars, unfortunately. I see a lot of people running around with pretty stupid names and talking in internet shorthand and general doing immature things like dancing naked in the middle of town.
On the bright side, towns and other public places are the only areas of the game that you share with all the other players. The rest of the game is "instanced" for you and your party. The benefit of this is that you no longer have to worry about competition for spawns. The drawback is that you don't meet random people hunting and join up with them.
One of the things that I enjoyed on Horizons was that monsters killed by anyone in your party, as long as you were close together, counted towards everyone in the party's quests. This meant that if you ran into someone else doing the same "Kill 20 zombies" quest as you, most of the time they'd invite you to their party. Then if someone else came along, they'd be invited to join, too. As people killed their 20 zombies, they'd either bid everyone farewell and go back to town for their quest reward, or stick around to help everyone else finish their quests. Total strangers would help each other out and joke around while they were hunting together.
Guild Wars has removed this aspect from MMO gaming. While you can party up with random people in town, it's easy to fall into the mentality of only going out with your friends and guild mates (especially when the people looking to join your party have names like Ladies Dig It). As if to encourage you to be anti-social, they've helpfully provided NPC henchmen that you can hire, for a share of the guild picked up during the time they work for you. Of course, these henchmen are generally lower level than you, and you can't communicate and strategize with them like you can with other players. On the other hand, they stick close to you and don't run ahead and get all of the monsters mad at you, either.
Nonetheless, I prefer the instanced quests and such over the traditional MMO. You never have to deal with jerks kill-stealing your monsters, or harassing you, or stealing your loot. There's also less lag, since the only players in your area are those in your party. You never have to worry about someone leading a train of monsters to you while you get up for 2 minutes to grab a drink. It also adds a slight bit of realism, as the monsters don't "respawn" right in front of you - they only come back when you leave the area and then return to it.
Guild Wars is different from traditional MMOs in several other ways as well. For instance, it actually has a storyline which progresses throughout the game. As you do "missions" (big, story-advancing quests), you get to see cut scenes, learn more about the game story, and reach distant areas of the game world. This makes the game a little more linear than most MMOs, although you only have to do the main missions in order - you can go back and do lesser quests whenever you want. Some lesser quests will open up other lesser quests, but you're not forced to always do everything in the same order.
Your quests will help you in many ways, though. Quests give you more experience than just hunting monsters. Many quests give you items, some of which you may want to use, others that you can sell for more gold than normal loot items. Quests will also give you new powers, help you make your way to cities, and introduce you to important NPCs. The quests here actually have stories and purposes behind them. Instead of being told "Go kill 20 zombies to prove your worth," you might be sent to rescue an NPC, recover stolen goods, or kill 20 zombies because they're taking over some guy's farm. Sometimes, you may even be surprised to find that the NPCs are helping you with your quest! Instead of saying "Go fight those monsters over there," they say "Hey! The monsters are right over there! Let's get 'em!" and if you don't follow along, there won't be any monsters left for you!
One drawback is that, aside from class-specific quests, you pretty much have to do ALL the same quests as every one of your characters. Since all characters start out in the same tutorial area, and there's a limited amount of quests there, it can get pretty boring making new characters, as you're doing the exact same quests over and over again.
As the name might suggest, Guild Wars is a very guild-oriented game. For a hundred gold, any player not already in a guild may start their own guild. There's no minimum number of players needed for a guild, nor any need to have a house or a certain amount of logged game time, only the money. However, guild membership is account wide. Any player that joins your guild will have ALL of their characters in your guild. Apparently, this is to keep people from sabotaging guild plans and otherwise exploiting the system. However, it makes it difficult to have a themed guild - you can't have an all-necromancer's guild, since all of the non-necro characters on the account would be in the guild, too.
For an additional 2,000 gold, you can design and purchase a guild cloak. This is a short little cloak that identifies your guild. You can choose from a variety of cuts, colors, patterns and logos for your cloak. For instance, my guild, The Cult of the Eldritch Flame, has a tattered black cloak edged with silver flames, with a grey skeletal dragon rising from the flames. It is very easy as well to make a cloak inspired by traditional heraldry, or a cloak with an Oriental theme, or even a pretty pink cloak with flowers and a dragonfly. There's a lot of variety, and though I've seen a lot of people with tattered black and silver flame cloaks, I've yet to see someone with my exact guild cloak, outside of my guild mates, of course.
One problem with the guild cloak is that you can't take it off. While I'm really proud of my guild cloak, and it looks really awesome on my main character, there are some characters it doesn't look as good on, and sometimes I'd prefer to remove it for screen shot purposes. I will say, however, that the animation on the cloaks is awesome - they move like real cloth when you're running.
If having a guild and an identifying cloak isn't enough for you, you can eventually purchase a Guild Hall. This is a private island which only your guild can access, perfect for getting everyone together for meetings. I had hoped to have a Hall by the time I wrote this review, so I could cover that aspect of the game, but then I found out that to get a Hall one has to either A: win an 8 vs 8 guild PvP match in a difficult to reach arena to win a Celestial Sigil, or pay through the nose for said sigil. I don't know what players are charging for them right now, but the NPC vendor wanted more than 80,000 gold! Since my main character has less than 4,000 gold, I'm kind of out of luck.
However, there are several styles of island to choose from (I have a feeling my guild, lot of pyromaniacs that we are, will probably go for the burning island). Prior to purchasing an island, you can take a tour of all of them to decide which you like best. When I checked a couple out to research the article, they looked pretty cool but empty. I don't know if they come equipped with monsters for your guild to fight after you buy them.
So far, the Guild Hall thing is the only the second aspect of the game that tries to force PvP onto you. Guild Wars is designed to be a PvP game, but all of the battles take place in arenas, so you're safe in town and hunting. The only forced battle I've found is the one when you leave the tutorial area. Two out of the 3 times I've left the tutorial, we've owned the opposite team. The other time, well, I don't want to talk about it!
I'm not very good at PvP, so I haven't explored it much so far. However, according to the manual and the website, there are all kinds of PvP matches, including Capture the Artifact, which looks like the Capture the Flag games you're probably all familiar with. Some matches are timed, with automatic resurrection, others have permanent death and the last team standing wins.
PvP is also made into a competition between the three regions of the world. The results of all battles in the Hall of Heroes (the same place you have to go for a Sigil) are broadcast across the entire game. So in the middle of the adventure, you might see an announcement saying that "Cult of the Eldritch Flame has won a battle in the Hall of the Heroes and wins the favor of the Gods for America." It seems that a country has to win 5 consecutive times to take the favor of the Gods. Said favor seems to switch back and forth between the three regions pretty often, too.
You don't even need to be in a guild to PvP in the Hall of Heroes and win the favor of the Gods. You'll also sometimes see a message saying that a player's team has won a battle. Mostly, however, it's guilds, and there are some guilds that you'll see win like 4 or 5 matches all in a row in one night. Apparently, the PvP aspect of the game is very well done and popular.
I started this article talking about my misgivings about variety. While I still feel that there are too few classes available, it's easy to keep things from overlapping. First of all, you have several attributes that you can raise with points that you're awarded every level. These attributes affect your skills, which are like special powers. Additionally, you can only take 8 of these skills with you on a mission. So even if you have two Warrior/Monk multi-classes in your group, they can take totally different skills and serve different purposes.
Your primary class determines a lot about your character. Your appearance is based on your primary class - different classes get different body types (one for each gender per class) and different faces, hair styles and colors, and armor/clothing. More on that later. Your primary class also gives you a special attribute that people who take that class as a secondary don't get. My elementalist, for example, gets an ability that gives her 3 extra mana for every rank she has in it. Since you don't gain mana when you level up, this is a very nice perk. My monk, on the other hand, gets an ability that causes her to do extra healing. My mesmer can cast faster. Etc etc.
Appearance is a big peeve with me. Say what you will about Horizons, you could customize the hell out of your characters. I never saw anyone who looked exactly like my dragon or my pixie. There were so many options for every race that it was easy to make a unique character. While Guild Wars isn't as bad as say, Lineage 2, it's still pretty bad. It's easy to make AWESOME looking characters, but don't be surprised if you see someone who looks almost exactly like you.
It doesn't help that your armor is based on your class and your approximate level and progress into the game. By looking at someone, you can easily tell what class they are and how powerful. I have several pet peeves about this. For one thing, I don't like changing my armor's appearance just to get more powerful armor. I like my elementalist's pyromancer armor so much that I've passed on the two upgrades to it (and I wonder why I die so much...). Because she specializes in fire magic, I see no reason to dress her in armor with a water theme. It would just be silly. Not only that, but since many players dye their armor, they lose their color scheme when they have to upgrade armor.
I'd prefer it if there was an option to purchase improvements for your current set of armor or clothes. I really liked the style of my ranger's starting armor, but the upgrades all looked so crappy that they actually contributed to my decision to delete her and replace her with a mesmer (which get awesome powers AND sexxay clothes).
I have a few other complaints about the game. One is the unevenness of how skills are acquired. You can get skills from quests or buy purchasing them from a "trainer," but you're only offered certain skills. My monk cross-classed into elementalist (just about every player in our guild has a monk/ele). Because I already had an elementalist who totally focused on fire, I decided to go for water spells on this character. She's currently level 10 and doesn't have a single water skill yet.
Another is the loot system. On the surface, it seems great. The good thing about it is that gold is automatically split between the entire party, including henchmen. Items, however, are assigned to a specific person. In a perfect world, everyone would get a fair split of items. In reality, everyone around me gets cool rare items and dyes and I get crappy items worth three gold coins. Of course, I hang out with cool people and if anyone gets an item that someone else could specifically use, they'll hand it over, but it would be nice if everyone got a fair share of loot worth selling.
I'm not exactly sure how the loot system works. My husband noticed that the past few times he's gone out as his monk/elementalist and focused on healing, he's gotten crappy loot. This would lead one to believe that maybe loot would be based on damage done during combat, but in that case, you'd think that my elementalist, who focuses entirely on burning things to a crisp, would haul in the awesome loot. No such luck.
It may just be entirely random. Entirely random things (such as my dice during the Mage game) usually don't favor me. Nonethless, I've been playing the game for a month, and I've yet to get a single rare-colored dye. My friend Alex got two in his first night of playing, including one of the rarest color. It's enough to make me a little cranky.
Also, one thing which may bother some people is that Guild Wars does not have a real crafting system. You get crafting materials from monsters and give them, along with a chunk of change, to NPCs in town, who craft you new armor or weapons. However, even my friend Steve who was a big crafter on both UO and Horizons says that he's enjoying the game at least as much as he enjoyed those two, even without crafting.
These drawbacks do little to keep the game from being a lot of fun. It helps that the graphics are beautiful - you can even see the shadows of the leaves on the trunks of the trees, and the shadows move with the breeze. You leave footprints in the dirt and ripples in the water (there's no swimming, though, you can only wade in the shallows). The cloud and sunlight effects are amazing, too. One little nitpick is that it's never night time in the game. I miss watching the sun and moon pass across the sky and the colors change in Horizons.
Part of what helps me enjoy the game so much is my great guild. Although we're starting small, we've got a nice assortment of old friends and guildmates from UO and Horizons, and their friends. If you're currently playing Guild Wars, or thinking of playing, and are looking for a guild which is mainly PvE but welcomes PvP and role play, feel free to contact me using the link at the bottom of the article.
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