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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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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
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
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