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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 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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It's all personal preference. Guild Wars and WoW are very different, aside from the fact that they are both MMORPG's. Guild Wars is based almost entirely on PvP, while WoW takes time and effort to reach top level and engage in serious PvP, Guild Wars takes very little time to get to top level, in fact, you can even make a character that starts as the max level.
Some people believe this defeats the purpose of an MMO, some peoplethink it highlights the only good part of MMO's, but like I said, it's just personal preference.
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I've played both, and spent a lot of time on other MMORPGs too. Frankly, no, there's not much there that makes it special and different. If you like playing on a more casual level, GW is great. Missions tend to be heavily instanced, at least through the beginning (haven't played enough to hit the high levels), so there's no waiting for your spawn cycle or any of that mess. Even for "normal" missions. On the other hand, if people like GW they might get frustrated by WoW. Especially on a pure PVP server.
Frankly, as I had less and less time to spend gaming, Guild Wars was great. WoW and EQ2 were just too time intensive to keep up with my friends and they became expensive instant messaging programs for me.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
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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GW has a far better PvP system. After playing many fantasy MMORPGs the improvements in quality, accessibility, variety, and fairness of the PvP are astounding. If you play because you enjoy interacting with other players more than you like collecting levels and gear then GW offers a better experience.
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That's all fine and dandy, except that Guild Wars is NOT an MMORPG. It's completely instanced. It's like if Counter-Strike limited its players to official servers only, and the hub that connected you to those servers was 3-dimensional and looked just like the game. That doesn't make it a "Massively Multiplayer" game, it just makes it appear so.
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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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To draw a few lines from WoW to Guild Wars.
First of all, transporation. No more paying a griffen rider to get from one place to another, you can go anywhere you've already been instantly.
Secondly, it's a lot easier to get together a group for an instance, mainly because you can have fairly competant NPC players take the place of people who you are missing.
Next is skills. Your account stores the lock and unlock status of all of your abilities for all of your classes (in addition to lock and unlcok status of runes, which you can put in items). Once you learn a skill or rune within the game, it's unlocked for your account. Unlocked means that when you create a PvP-only max level charactor, your new charactor can use that skill or rune.
Next is how you use these skills. Imagine being limited to only being able to use 8 skills at any one time. You can swap them out in town, but once you're on a mission, you can't change them out. This forces you to pick and choose your abilities wisely.
Next is charactors. Imagine selecting a Warrior in World of Warcraft, and being able to select a secondary class such as a preist. Your primary profession being a warrior, you would have all your warrior skills and you would wear warrior armor, but you would also have preist spells at your disposal. Guild Wars is like that.
Next is attributes. No skill trees in Guild Wars. You have a attribute points system that's most like the skill points from Diablo 2. However, unlike Diablo 2, your attributes are not as simple as 'attack', 'defense' or anything like that, your attributes vary depending on what two classes you picked. If I could generalize them, they pump up a certain number skills (Fire Magic, for example) to make them more effective, though there is the occational "increase my stats in general" attribute, such as Energy Storage Attribute for the elementalist.
Next is crafting. It's almost non-existant, except for either collecing X number of items to deliver to Y collector or collecting X number of items and using a salvage kit to turn it into Y number of crafting materials that you give to Z crafter to get him to create you stuff.
Next is charactor customization. There are a lot fewer unique looking pieces of clothing per charactor, but unlike WoW, you can dye every piece of it. Dye drops off of enemies very rarely, and you can also buy dye for a (in the case of black, obscene) amount of gold.
Next is instances. You have lobbies in towns. You can see other people in the lobby. However, once you exit town, you and everyone else in your party are the only people in there. The 'main' instances, the ones that advance the storyline, are called missions, and they are a lot more interesting than "go from one instance boss to the next". They even have a 'bonus' in each mission that you can complete for extra experience. The missiosn are the best way to advance in the game and get from one place to another (ie, if you want to get the hell out of the place you are in, just do the missions and you'll advance the storyline to the point where you move on to somewhere else). Of course, you can go to town and wander outside the town for another instance where you do local quests, without the direction of the main missions.
Next is the continent. You have a lot less freedom to explore in Guild Wars than you do in WoW. WoW had a jump button and very few, if any invidisble walls. Guild Wars is full of them, it's less of a 'land mass' and more of a 'network of roads'. Also, while you start out in pre-searing Ascalon which is relatively pretty to look at, Ascalon post-searing is the most boring place to be, ever. Think Desolace, except with mountains and much bigger. Once you get to Yak's Bend, you're getting into much more interesting territory.
Next is end game. The end game in World of Warcraft is either running the endgame instances over and over again for phat lewt or doing battlegrounds over and over again for phat honor (which you exchange f
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
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.