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Guild Wars Hits the Million Mark
-pms-mistletoe writes "Hot on the heels of World of Warcraft's breaking the 4 million subscriber mark, Guild Wars has also reached a big milestone with over 1 million users. The differences and similarities between the two games are marked, especially given Guild Wars' lack of traditional sharding and no monthly fee. Are these large numbers of players signals that the popularity of MMORPGs is growing? Or are the same people playing both games?"
I'm a WoW player with many friends there, but I also have a circle of friends that play Guild Wars. Other than the 'no monthly fee' aspect, is there something in Guild Wars that could tempt me away from WoW, or should I keep trying to pull my GW friends into WoW?
I think Guild Wars is more for the casual gamer in the since that it doesn't have a High max level and is based on PvP. It doesn't take 2 years to get to top level and actually have fun, but at the same time you can get the best stuff in the game effortlessly and kinda defeats the purpose. That, along with the fact that there is no monthly fee are the main reasons it is such a good competition with WoW.. IMO.
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I'm a casual gamer. Normally I would never go for the MMORPG things, but for a brief time my fiancee and her dad and brother were deep into Guild Wars and I ended up buying a copy so that I could go adventuring with them as something fun to do together now and then. Ironically, this was about the time she was starting to lose interest in the game and she had to go back to school (where she has a Mac and thus cannot play it anyway), so that pretty much never happened. Every now and then late at night I fire up my old Windows PC and login and go killing monsters for a few hours with the CPU characters. I'm not in a guild or anything and I don't go on to play with other humans - it's just a time sink for me once or twice a month. I'm not trying to be the highest possible level, collect the most gold, find the most hidden areas or anything like that.
The lack of a monthly fee is the ONLY reason I even considered buying the game. Period. I would never pay for a subscription to a game like this as I would never play it enough and, frankly, after a few hours it gets pretty boring. But for that odd time when I don't feel like thinking with a puzzle game or have no side projects I want to do, Guild Wars is a great time waster.
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Well, I was playing Guild Wars back in the Beta Weekend Events and ended up starting a guild with a guy and his brother. I let him become the leader and me just an officer due to fact that I'm off and on all the time. I skipped playing for a month due to school and when I came back, his brother was the new leader. It turns out that he's addicted to WoW and decided to stop playing GW. So I guess you can say there is an overlap between subscribers of GW and WoW but not at the same time ;-P.
Of my group of gaming f(r)iends, all save 1 have bought Guild Wars. There are several reason for it:
1) Linear Campaign - there's a complete story. Sure, go into the desert/shiverpeaks/jungle and kill random stuff. But for us it's more about getting from point A to B, explore, and continue the story, than farming. (And I have no idea what "sharding" is, so I'll pass on that for now)
2) "Instanced": basically, when I step outside the town, it's me and the people I went with. I'm honestly surprised there are other ways to do it. Sure, occasionally it'd be cool to hop on, and join my friends wherever they are, but the fact that we don't have to deal with all the other stuff the MMO people b*tch about is more than a fair trade.
3) No monthly fee. Hey, we've been playing Neverwinter since it came out. We have a Teamspeak server installed on the same linux box as our Neverwinter server. Almost none of us have any interest in spending 15$ a month on these games.
4) It's an RPG. Not just click click clickclickclick. You have your 8 skills and your stats, you have to think about where you're going and what you're doing, before you leave town. Hmmmm.... I'm going into an ice cave - better leave my "icy bow" behind. Maybe other MMOs have this, I don't know.
But overall, for a casual gamer, not an MMO fan, Guild Wars is great. Hop on and play - if your friends aren't on, find some people and go do stuff. I can see the addictive properties (as can my wife). But the hardcore MMO people don't seem to care for GW much, and that's fine. I'd never buy an MMO.
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To me, I think of Guild Wars more as a typical RPG game, with an integrated group finding feature via visiting the towns, instead of the separate chat room/in game aspect of say Diablo II. So to me, this just tells me Guild Wars sold a million copies, and is overall a decent game if that many people are finding it interesting. I am aware of the PVP aspect of it as well, but again thats more of an in game group finder to then go in and have a small deathmatch. Would Half Life 2 be considered an MMO if every time you went into City 17 you saw other players, but once you left the city you were back to playing alone or with a small group? Well, at least then it could justify the mandatory internet connection to play it, but thats another rant for another day.
More and more games are adding online aspects to them. To me, that doesn't automatically make them an MMO in my eyes.
I am also noticing more and more games specifically putting "No monthly fee required" even if it is a single player game with a 16 person deathmatch or something.
The lack of a monthly fee, has made Guild Wars a great introduction into the world of online RPG's for me. You can buy the game for $39.99 at Amazon and other places. I have been playing it for 6 months now so it's a bargain relatively speaking. They just released some new content for free in addition to the hours and hours of content the game already comes with.
Actually I have enjoyed Guild Wars so much I am now interested in WoW. This "no fee" introduction may help more people get to know this kind of game and then they can move on to the monthly fee games.
Guild wars will be selling expansion packs in the future, to add new content and pay the bills.
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So while yes, games like WoW and GW have opened it up to the masses by toning the game down and taking the challenge out of it (and accourding to a lot of the older generation, the whole point of a MMO), its also a lot of die-hard people who get bored playing one game so they take some time off to play another
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You make it sound like the PvE game is completely disposable. To clarify, you still need to play through the normal game to unlock skills and items.
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... bought guild wars, created an account, played it twice, then haven't touched it since and gone back to playing WoW.
I know at least 10 peeps in my WoW guild that did that.
Let's see how well their first expansion sells (hint, it won't be 1 million).
There is a big difference between 'subscribers' and 'purchacers'. Subscribers can decrease as people stop paying money for them. Guild Wars doesn't have that problem so that when somebody stops playing the game their account stays active.
apples != oranges
To say that Guild Wars is "hot on the heels" of competitor Worlds of Warcraft is being very, very generous to Guild Wars.
First off, in terms of numbers of players: No. They're not. The numbers aren't close.
But much, much more importantly: Guild Wars charges no monthly fee. Even if the numbers were equal, WoW would still own Guild Wars on revenue.
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I played Guild Wars for about 2 months before getting bored with it and sticking it back on the shelf. I played a few other games, took a bit of a break, and (gasp) read a book in the interim. I've now come back to the game a little bit and I have found a new appreciation for its subscription strategy. I love that I can play the game casually or hardcore and have little trouble picking up where I left off. If I played WoW and needed to take a break, I probably would never come back due to the prohibitive cost.
It's trite and oversaid, but Guild Wars truly is the choice of casual gamers. Games like Bejewelled have proven that this largely untapped demographic may have huge potential.
I was playing both. I enjoyed WoW more, but after Blizzard's "interview" here the day before, I decided they lacked respect, so I terminated my account.
What you're witnessing isn't comparative game assessment, but your current gaming attraction. WoW is the world in which you are currently most immersed, and you return to WoW because you *have* to. One always *has* to be where one wants to be.
I played EverQuest to its max level 65, at that time. I loved it until I realized that Sony hated me.
I played Anarchy Online to the max level 220 in Shadowlands, plus alien levels. I loved it, and still go back there occasionally.
And I've sampled other games too, of course, but not to max level.
I'm now playing Guild Wars, from pre-Sear through to its trivial max level 20 and then to where the real player skills begins to show, ie. once you've captured all your elite skills in Crystal Desert and Southern Shiverpeaks and are now starting to learn to use them, which is more akin to being a craftsman than to the dumb use of spells in other MMOGs. I've now completed the Final Assault mission in the latest top-end zone, Sorrow's Furnace. I guess it's true to say that I'm no longer a GW newbie, so I can assess it fairly alongside other games. There is no such thing as a "best game", but in dozens of ways (not all of course), GW comes out either tops or with the top bunch.
I think that that's a more balanced assessment than your "played it twice, gone back to WoW" one. Games are all different, and they all have their individual benefits. Guild Wars is extremely deep and tactical because of its skill system and has an enormous world too, yet you saw none of these things in your brief foray. Enough said.
Just to save anyone else wasting time looking at Guild Wars: if you dig through three or four levels of navigation to the online store, it turns out it's Windoze only.
*plonk*
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I have played Guild Wars, and not World of Warcraft. I have been very curious about WoW, so I asked around a lot. I have a thesis:
WoW is an MMO Epic RPG, i.e. it is geared around the long haul, accumulating power, and abilities gained at later levels that put to shame those of early levels, giving players a sense of accomplishment when they level their character and gain abilities.
GW is an MMO Action RPG, i.e. it is geared around doing a specific task at a time, acquiring abilities is easy, and the skills you gain may be better but not in an earth-shattering way, leading the focus towards skill choice and skill use.
That's my thesis. I see it played out in how WoW has different sides, chosen at character creation (I think), which have access to completely separate classes. The game is balanced by the designers' choices of access to different powers for the different factions. On the other hand, there are no disparate sides in GW, and a dedicated player can reach max level and learn some impressive skills within a week of play or less. In that case, the balance comes from the relative strengths of skills, with no skill standing out to steal the show.
These games appeal to very different people, and I think that their audiences should not be compared directly. WoW appeals to the serious gamer, but specifically the power gamer, someone who wants a constant challenge to survive and reach personal goals, and who likes besting others or preventing that. GW also appeals to the serious gamer, but specifically the strategy gamer, someone who likes coordinating with others against equal adversaries and using skills exactly when needed.
Now for the fine points:
Each of these games also appeals to casual gamers, but WoW's monthly fee unfortunately forces many of them to shy away from it.
I do find it a pity that GW only has player mixing in towns, but since the journeys into combat areas are usually done for a specific purpose, that isn't so bad.
Both games are beautiful.
GW could take a hint from WoW and make it easier to articulate the stats for something you want to sell.
I personally don't want to play WoW, because the idea of waiting while playing (corpse camping, for instance) is not appealing, since I might not have much time to play.
In GW, you don't jump, but you can click to walk somewhere. It occasionally seems frustrating to not be able to clamber up hillsides, but I recognize that if you could, then the walls would have to be higher, and that would prevent you from seeing everything you need to see in a large fight.
I see and hear about a lot of 'screwing around' in WoW by bored people, such as taking an invulnerability potion in the middle of enemy territory and yelling "KILL ME!" (there's a video out there), forming a walking 'train' of people, then saying "Woo-wooo!" everywhere you go (a friend of mine), going to a different server and begging for gold, then giving it all to the player who gave them the most (same friend). And of course, playing a high-level character and killing people randomly. In GW, no one is that bored, assuming they find some pleasure in the strategy of the game's combat, except when they are looking for a group (see below).
GW is difficult to play without other humans with you on missions and some quests. For the first few dozen hours of gameplay, or maybe only the first ten if you're hurrying, you can get away with taking NPC henchman with you, but after that you need other people. There is no class combination that has more or less of that need, and there are no 'unwanted' classes. Because of this, everyone gets accustomed to grouping with people, and everyone gets about an equal chance to join any group. Pick-up groups happen everywhere you go. However, it is sometimes difficult to fill up a group, and this causes some waiting. You may wait fifteen minutes to form a group if you are particularly unlucky. However, if you have friends that play with you, this is not such a problem, e
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1 million copies sold != million players. I play GW regularly. Most people are bored and have left the game. Most cities are quite empty as opposed to closer to release. It has no monthly fee so people kind of meander back into the game here and there and leave for a month or so. The real number is pretty nebulus, but I'd say it is most likely closer to 300,000 players based on some math on how many people per district at peak times. Not too shabby but not 1 million for sure... Unless we're talking "Million Man March" math, then it's way over a million :)
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Eh, I don't think Blizzard is quite familiar with the slashdot crowd.
He certainly deserves it for providing such a nice comparison.
I don't know why people keep classifying this game as one or even comparing it to WoW. Arenanet's label of it as a CoRPG (Competitive Online RPG) is much more accurate as the only time you actually meet other players are either in the towns or PvP arenas.
I play both games regularly (about 1 week's played time in WoW (have a 60 druid), 500 or so hours played in Guild Wars (have 2 ascended lvl 20 characters)) and the two don't compare to each other. In Guild Wars, I've found the only reason to play PvE in Guild Wars is to unlock skills and items for PvP which is where the heart of Guild Wars is at as the story is rather forgettable and it's very easy to reach level cap and find items as others have mentioned. When you make a pvp only character in Guild Wars, the items you pick for that character will have maxed out stats and upgrades based on what you've unlocked.
The PvP in Guild Wars is far superior to the PvP in WoW in that your actual skills as a player and cohesion as a team matter more than how many hours you've spent grinding to get better gear than the other guy as in WoW. The PvP in Guild Wars is quick (no waiting in queues for the random competition arenas) and the action is almost comparable to an FPS which is why you hear the PvP in Guild Wars being compared to CS a lot. The various build combinations and skill selections allow for a lot more player diversity and it's interesting seeing the new types of creative builds that come out (mesmer/necro fragility build, elem/monk smiter-tankers). Teamwork is important in the BGs but when it comes down to it, in WoW, it's whoever has better gear.
The endgame of WoW seems entirely focused on grinding to get better loot or grinding PvP to get a higher rank which seems like a common complaint from bored level 60s who either leave or just roll up a new character.
The endgame of Guild Wars is similar but with the difference that it eliminates the grind for trying to find better items by letting you unlock max stat items by using faction points you get from winning in PvP. The rate at which you get these points is quick (made even faster by recent updates which increased the number of faction points rewarded) and you can unlock every skill and max item upgrade in the game guickly.
The developers of both games are trying to address these complaints by releasing more content for PvE (recent dungeons in the patches for WoW, Sorrow's Furnace update for Guild Wars), but these updates are slow in coming and unless you're interested in PvP, you won't hold interest in either games.
When it comes down to it, when I want to play in a persistent, breathing (though not really dynamic) world, I play WoW. If I want quick skirmishes in PvP, I load up Guild Wars.
I had a quick go at Guild Wars at a friend's house, and when I was stuck on a mission I stood in the middle of a town area and said "Does anyone know where X is?" because I couldn't find the mission objective. Some other player walked up to me and said "Follow me", and we joined up and went outside, killed a few monsters on the way, and he showed me where I needed to go. So if there hadn't been a "massive" number of players in the game, I would have had no chance of finding help.
For the record, though alot of us have played RPGs in some shape or form, and a few of us have done the MUDs, none have taken on anything like a MMORPG. That being said: - August 10th, my friend buys one copy of World of Warcraft. - By August 31st, NINE more copies are purchased by myself and others - 4 more copies are purchased within the coming weeks. I would have to say, yes, MMORPGs are growing. Also, I don't mind paying the monthly fee, since 15-yr old asshole racists on XBOX Live are now no longer a fixture in my weekly gaming realm. Good people vastly outnumber the opposites by a high margin... but "virtual vagrancy" seems to run very high. I NEED 1 GOLD!!!!!1111! HELP!!!11!!! :)
Thats no different then going into Diablo 2's online section, and asking for help in the chat room, except that Guild Wars lacks a chat room and instead puts people togther in game instead of in a chat lobby. From the Diablo 2 chat lobby, players can launch into a game togther, and help each other out.
Massive would have been if 2000 people came up to you and went to help you all at once, something the game doesn't support.
Phantasy Star Online also wasn't considered an MMO, and did things just like Guild Wars does. People could assemble in a common area and chat, but going into the mission/fighting part of the game limited you to a small group of people.
As the Guild Wars FAQ even states, it's not an MMORPG, but more of a cooperative RPG. Thus to me, it's sales figures should be compared to other off the shelf games, and not games like WoW.
I think you're mixing up "massive" with "excessive". That would be ridiculous. There are a large number of people playing the game, enough that there is likely to be someone at the right place at the right time who is inclined to help. Contact is in-character, not in a chat room external to the game.