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Guild Wars Gone Gold, Previewed
Guild Wars, the first offering from NCSoft subsidiary ArenaNet, has gone gold. A preview of the game based on the last weekend of the Beta is available at 1up.com. From the article: "Once the wonder started to wear off, a creeping hangover of disorientation replaced it. Still standing there slack-jawed, the bustle of people going here and there with purpose made us suddenly aware of how clueless we were. Gathering our senses we fell into the familiar pattern of talking to the residents and picking up the quests of the day." Guild Wars is a unique MMOG offering, as it will not require a subscription cost, has almost no grind, and will focus on organized PvP. The game releases next Thursday, the 28th of April.
Well at least until Dark & Light is released!
The PvP could best be explained as a fantasy themed counter strike match, some people will get bored after a few months but others will get very addicted.
Huh. Lots of battlenet "d00dz" crowding into a server called "Hellscream." What a shocker.
Log into a server with a name which doesn't sound cool to twelve-year olds, and you probably will have much better luck.
(Currently playing on Silverhand, not seeing much of that crap.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I think that the expansions are definetly going to include better skills. Meaning, if your 'Single Target Heal' spell that you use a lot restores 100-200 health, and this month's expansion's single target heal spell now restores 200-300 with the same casting time and mana cost, then you would definetly feel compelled to buy the expansion just to keep up with the joneses.
A couple of months ago, they added a whole "newbie" section of the game. In the first area, you can only party up to two players. Once you hit 3rd level you can move on to the 4 person per party areas.
Through all of this, the grandparent is correct, each party gets their own instance of the world. Only the towns are shared, and then they are broken up by servers (depending on the number of people trying to be in that particular town). Any other characters running about outside of town are NPCs or monsters.
-Redundancy Man strikes again!
Guild Wars really is a superb game, the depth & quality of the PvP is the best I've ever seen. Though this is hardly suprising considering ArenaNet is headed up by brilliant ex-Blizzard staff - "Wyatt was Blizzard's Vice President of Research and Development and most recently acted as the Team Lead and Lead Programmer of Battle.net. O'Brien was the Team Lead and Lead Programmer of Warcraft III, having personally developed the game's 3D rendering engine. Jeff Strain was also a Team Lead and Lead Programmer there and is the author of the Starcraft Campaign Editor." I didn't mind WoW in the Betas, though I was a little underwhelmed... the grind+gank=win style of game doesn't really appeal to me. In GW PvP success is really dependant on skill as you only have 8 skill slots & the equipment doesn't make that much of a difference. There are no seperate servers for Guild Wars, you get to play everyone from around the world. So that means when you win the 24/7 pickup tournament by holding the Hall of Heroes you really are the top PvP team in the world at that moment, or when your Guild itself is ranked on the ladder that is your position in relation to every other guild in the game. It's actually really hard for me to describe just how cool this game is, thinking about it. This weekend my guild played an 8v8 PvP battle versus the #1 ranked guild in the world (Koreans) with no lag whatsoever. Despite the language/cultural/latency that would usually hinder such a meetup, we had a stunning game, got our arses handed to us & parted with a few "gg's". I was a little sceptical when I heard that Guild Wars was billed as a "Competitive Online RPG", but it's a pretty damn accurate depiction. Any self-respecting gamer should endevour to check this game out - top notch PvP, beautiful graphics, free online play, vibrant global community. Where has this game been all my life?!