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Free Guild Wars PvP Weekend Event

Posted by Zonk on from the come-try-the-new-flavour dept.

SnoopJeDi writes "ArenaNet has announced a Global Free-For-All PvP Weekend for this weekend. The event is designed to give the public a taste of the new chapter in the series: Guild Wars: Factions. Current players can access the new content from their accounts, and people who don't own the game can use one of the keys to create and activate a new account exclusively for the demo. The announced new features include two new classes(the Assassin and Ritualist), the new PvP Battle Isles, and a whole new continent named Cantha."

2 of 10 comments (clear)

  1. I Play Guild Wars by ClamIAm · · Score: 5, Informative
    While it certainly has its issues, Guild Wars is pretty fun to play. There are several reasons (IMO) why. OK, I'm posting this basically so you have an anecdote from someone who's actually played the game quite a bit. I'm trying to be informative.

    The gameplay itself is pretty fun. You have a skillbar with 8 slots that you can swap in and out of the ones that you know, but this has to be done in town. This makes choosing your skills sort of like constructing a deck in a collectible card game (CCG). You can re-spec your attributes for free, which I appreciate greatly. PvP and GvG are also really fun. Guilding is one of the best (and most fun) aspects of the game, so find a good one!

    There are some problems, though. The story is pretty incomprehensible if you take a break from playing for a while, as I did this, and when I came back I didn't remember the various factions and whether they were supposedly good or evil. You're limited to four characters, total. This is very limiting, although you can create PvP/GvG-only characters to play a certain "build" for a match. And your characters can't carry lots of items, but this probably helps the game economy.

    The tech behind it is good and improves the experience a lot. When patches come out, you only download what you need to. If a newbie zone is updated, and you don't ever go there, you won't download that data. This is partly due to the fact that everything is instanced. Also, this is a company that was founded by ex-Blizzard employees, (suposedly) some of which developed battle.net. So they've had experience with games and the online components of them.

    Instancing everything and limiting PvP to arenas reduces griefing a lot. While it sounds really cool to go out questing and run into another group of adventurers, most online games are filled with idiots (GW is no exception). Instancing helps this.

    Instancing also makes the game feel a lot more "empty". In something like, say, WoW, big cities have TONS of people in them. Not so in GW. I hope that the expansions help alleviate this feeling.

    And ArenaNet seems more competent and less evil than other gaming companies. They have added content to the game, even without subscription money coming in. Nerfs are usually logical. But they are a pretty new kid on the block, so we'll see how it goes.

  2. Re:Character limit? by TrickFred · · Score: 2, Informative

    No extra slots. If you play GW and need another slot, use the key provided at guildwars.com to create a new throw-away account just for the weekend.