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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 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.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
I think you have hit the nail right on the head. I am a Guild Wars player (casuaully, at the very most maybe 5 hours per week) - and it fits me perfectly. The things I like best are, of course, no monthly fee, as well as the MMORPG part is well balanced - there is a cohesive (though not stellar) story that you can follow and lead you through the game, a boatload of side quests, relatively easy (though a bit time consumptive) progress through the game, and of course - you get your own copy of the world while out adventuring.
Bottom line, is WoW offers many of those same things, but to me the price and relative lack of story from what I perceive, having never played it, are what has never led me into the WoW realm. RPG's have always been telling a story, and let you take a leading role. Not just participation in some alternate reality world.
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.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
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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