Guild Wars was like SWG Rehab

BigBlackWook

 With the announcement of 4 million units sold for Guild Wars, I got to thinking about when the game first started. Around january- febuary of 2005 came the gcw 'upgrade' in swg. The removal or covert & overt & tef for combatant and special forces, and making player bases worthless. Most of my guild and I agreed it was time to start looking for a new game.

 None of us had any real interest in WoW at that point, as we hadn't seen anything that impressed us. DAoC was a popular alternative, but a dinosaur even then. We dinked around in a few online shooters and rts games, and watched swg destroy itself. Lol I remember one of the things we did to pass the time was leave the password off teamspeak and listen to whatever idiot surfed in to make noise.

 Then I happened to come across a very small blurb in PC Gamer about guildwars. A free to play mmo scheduled for a Q2 2005 launch. There wasn't much information and a really lousy picture went with the article, but the words 'free-to-play' and 'pvp oriented' were all most of my guild needed to here. A trailer was released soon after depicting some cinematics of the game, followed by a trailer featuring some of the dungeons. There was no question that the graphics were second to none at the time, as they still are.

 The free to play aspect I think put the hook into everybody who felt ripped off by sony. While Guild Wars lacks in some areas and I haven't put nearly as much time into it as I did in swg and have since starting up WoW last year, it is always something to go back to. I'd say I played for about a year strait after swg went into the tank, taking some time off to play BF2 night after night that fall, only to settle back in once Factions came out. I dried up for me again after that and I didn't purchase Nightfall as I felt if I needed a GW fix there was still plenty to do in Factions and Prophecies (I think I bet Shiro for the first time like a month ago). The fact that you could return to GW allowed folks in my guild to stay in touch though TS and ventrillo info was always changing. It is one of the factors that allowed us all to find eachother again once we gave up and started playing WoW.

 Now a new expansion is looming, and GW2 is expected to start beta in 08 (and with nc soft's record, they'll met that deadline). GW2 has the potential to be huge, as big as the original, if they learn some lessons from the first one. I think we can all agree that the heavy reliance on instancing steals the fun out of the online experience.

GW was an absolute life saver after the complete bs that went down with swg, and I think it owes some of it's success to the disenfranchised swg player base.

Nerf09

"GLF monk"

 

I couldn't stand it.

gigomeister

Yeah, Guild Wars has always been the game I come back to...I can't believe its been 2 years since I started my account with them. I must say it is the only game that I have consistently come back to for such an amount of time. And I like many genres of gaming. No other game has even come close.

ShiloFields

Interesting perspecitve.  I always thought Guild Wars was the antithesis of SWG, even more so than WoW.  In SWG you can, or at least could, have a permanent impact on the perisitent world.  In GW, there isn't really a persistent world, or not much of one anyway.

Serling

"GW was an absolute life saver after the complete bs that went down with swg, and I think it owes some of it's success to the disenfranchised swg player base."

I played City of Heroes before Cryptic and its president, Jack Emmert, nerfed that once fine game into virtual unplayability, so I can certainly appreciate SWG players and their loathing for Smedley and SOE.

I went to Guild Wars more than 2 years ago, and while it took a couple of weeks to get used to, I've never looked back. The graphics are second-to-none, the music is what you might expect from a movie film score, and the professions - 10 in total - are unique and fairly well balanced. And oh yeah, it's just fun to play, too.

GW2 is going to be cut in the mold of more traditional MMOs, but if it's anything like the first, I'll be buying 2 accounts. (And it will still be free to play).

If you haven't tried it lately, come back for Eye of the North's release (August 31). I played the free preview weekend of that last weekend, and that's simply amazing.

L8R

BigBlackWook

Yeah my dell shit the bed last week so I missed the GW:EN trial. Sucks it's the first beta weekend I've missed out on since before launch. But my new PC is enroute and it's good to here that people are having fun in GW:EN.

xPaladin

I wouldn't say guild wars was the only game to benefit from SWG's "fall from grace." Just mention SWG in almost any MMORPG and you'll probably get a few people saying they played and ditched it.

Empirically speaking, I know WoW got at least a hundred subscribers from Bloodfin alone: several guilds jumped ship entirely and formed a singular guild in WoW.