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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.
Guild Wars is not a MMO. People label it as such, constantly, but it has far, far more in common with Diablo 2.
Gameplay is done entirely in instanced zones. For anyone unfamiliar with that concept, it's essentially a private copy of a zone for each player (or group) - it's just like Diablo 2.
The only part of Guild Wars that even vaguely touches on being massive are the handful city zones. However, they serve only as a staging area for missions and a place for players to trade. Once players go out into the world, it's all instanced, again. Think of them more as graphical Battlenet chatrooms, and you'll get the idea.
Of course they're also planning on releasing expansions every few months.
This of course is your monthly fee.
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There were some things about it that kind of bugged me however, first, you can't jump. I know in RPGs where the point of the game is fighting and leveling up, jumping isn't that big of a deal, but still having the ability does make the game seem a bit more "real" for me.
Secondly, you can only play as a human, no elves, dwarfs, gnomes, or super intellegent shades of the color blue. This was a bit of a bummer for me, becuase I had really hoped to play as a shapeshifting elf (half elf half volf). But I guess they were really trying to avoid the steriotype that has been slapped on them as "WoW rip off".
And lastly, the lack of character design choices, you get maybe 12 hair types (that tend to be the same, no matter what profession you choose), 12 or so hair colors, 6 face types, your basic skin colors, and thats about it. I had really hoped to be able to change tome of the body proportions to have a character that actually looked like me, but all you can really change is hight. Also the clothing choices are very limited, in fact there are none. You get your basic profession spisific clothing and thats it. Although yes you can get new cloths in quests and by trading, it would still be nice to have say, three different suits to pick from at the start of the game.
The gameplay was pretty much what I expected, you have standerd WASD controls, you click objects to select ect... However one minor thing that bugged me was, the second you select an enamy object, you start attacking, regardless of its level. You CAN call off the attack and still have him selected so you can see what level it is, if you have a hand-to-hand weapon out, however if you are a range attacker you shoot one arrow, and you comitted to this fight till death (and death is useually the case).
now these problems are not rearly as bad as I make them out to be, the gameplay is very nice. I had a blast playing it. The quests are quite fun, and not in the least bit dull or tedious, the level design is breathtaking to say the least, even on lower graphic resolutions.And if you can rope a few friends to shell out the 50 bucks and pick it up, get a party going, there will be no end to the fun you will have.
Behold, another webcomic!
Actually with the streaming technology you won't even notice patches most of the time. You just get a little download icon in the corner of your screen that shows you're getting new content. Every time you load into a new area if there are any changes they are streamed to you for just that area.
Occasionally they do a major change that requires you to shut down the client and open it again.. but it's almost always very fast. Other than that, Guild Wars has been very stable during the events, and will hopefully remain that way for release next week.
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.
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?!
There are other great technologies in play in Guild Wars. A streaming update system allows on the fly patching, content additions, and quest tweaks. Zones arround you are streamed so the number of files to load when you first enter a zone is minimal. The game also changes for you based on choices you make. For example: if you do a quest that rids the world of "lizard men" then when you return to that zone, there are still no lizard men. If you return with someone who has not done the quest, there are only half as many lizard men as there would be if niether of you had done the quest. The game focuses on skills gained rather than levels. As such, your spells do no more damage on leveling, they do more damage when skill points are put into them (gotten from leveling, completeing quests, doing PvP or GvG). That being said, the level cap is at 20. For a free MMO (dissagree with the post before, the game is Massive, it is a multiplayer game, and it is online), the content is huge. There is so much to the game that after 4 Betas, I hadn't even scratched the surface