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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?"
As others have already said, it is personal preference. But as most comments so far were in favor of GW, I decided to post as well.
I like WoW much more, and I have played both since beta. Do not make the mistale now though to think I am a hardcore player. My main WoW char is level 43, not even 60. I casually play both, but I have played WoW a lot more. I am not playing on a PvP server, but RP, so I do not get griefed at all, and as such do not have that problem. But my main gripe is the quests. I play these kind of games for the setting, not for the PvP (couldn't care less about that, in fact), and GW's setting is, uh, maybe not horrible in itself, but presented very poorly. Quest texts are a joke compared to WoW, I have even see spelling mistakes (never had that in WoW), and generally appear much less polished.
In addition to that I never really got bored even with the blandest FedEx quests in WoW, because the surroundings (meaning setting, visuals, presentation of quest, quest arc if present) were well done. In GW, on the other hand, I often get bored after some minutes because of random monsters "spawning" (crawling out of the sand) with no way of avoiding them because of one of my main gripes with the game: the on-a-rail environment.
This means in plain english: No falling of cliffs, no jumping, no climbing of hills. The world of GW does not really feel like a world, there are seems everywhere, towns and the surrounding area do not flow into each other but are on separate "maps" with a loading screen in between. On the other hand in WoW you basically only ever get to see a loading screen if you change to the other of the 2 continents or enter an instance (of which there are not too many, and they have to be planned in advance, so not in normal game flow). You can walk from the very north of one continent to the south and enter cities and villages in between without ever noticing the loading. This as a whole feels much more alive.
Since I play on a RP server and not a PvP world, I actually welcome meeting people in the wilderness, it just adds to the world. Only rarely have random encounters been with idiots. Most of you ignore each other, sometimes you talk, or even team up. But generally it helps strengthen the illusion of a world, since there are not only monsters outside of town.
Graphically, I think both have their strengths and weaknesses, but are generally equal and really nice to look at. I think GW overdid with the bloom (which can be disabled, I know), and I can imagine people disliking WoWs cartoony look. I also miss bump mapping and more shaders in WoW, but then, it fits with the cartoon style and works as a whole.
In retrospect I kinda regret buying GW, but I really enjoyed the beta. It is just that there was not much more for me after beta, whereas after the WoW beta I could just discover more of the nice world. I also think that the monthly fee is well spent, meaning both that I think my fun is worth the amount of money, and that I think Blizzard is adding more to the game, content and polish, and it really is noticable.