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Guild Wars: MMORPG.com's Review
Dana
Member Posts: 2,415
Our own David Souza has penned a review of Guild Wars, the recently released no monthly fee online RPG from ArenaNet and NCSoft. The article takes an in-depth look at the game as a whole and awards the title a score of 8.1 out of 10.
;) Im usually not a big fan of a game with few classes and, admittedly, Guild Wars worried me with its limited amount of six. Once again, however, ArenaNet managed to do more with less and still deliver a quality set up in a smaller package.
Players may choose to start as any one of the classes. The available choices include Elementalist, Mesmer, Monk, Warrior, Ranger and Necromancer. Nothing overly innovative or groundbreaking in the selection but the list still manages to cover the core of fantasy adventure. Primary class selection is made at the time of character creation, but a secondary class can later be added. The player garners all the advantages of the second class save for a single primary attribute that only characters who start with a class receive. There are no penalties of any sort for taking a second class and while its not required to do so most players do pick up a second class. Character customization is very limited, and this is one of my few gripes with the game. Character creation leaves players with a handful of simple choices, including face, skin color, hair style and hair color. A sliding bar allows a player to change the scale of their character, which simply affects the characters height. There doesnt seem to be a great deal of variety in clothing looks either, especially at lower levels. And while the graphics of the game go far the limited appearances of characters often leave a feel of redundancy when mingling with large groups of characters. |
You can read the full article at this link
Dana Massey
Formerly of MMORPG.com
Currently Lead Designer for Bit Trap Studios
Comments
Great article, but you misinform the readers about one thing in the article. Ever since the first patch released since GW went Gold, you are REQUIRED to get a second profession in order to move to post-searing Ascalon. Just thought you should know that
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No, you are not required to take a second profession to transport into Post-searing Ascalon. I've done it and it works. However I don't know the exact lvl requirement as I was lvl 5.
Playing now: Cities: Skyline / Ori and the Blind Forest / Banished
- Nellus
Would be interested to know how you guys managed to get to the next stage in the game... I really would rather only one profession as with a 2nd I'm always tempted to train in that too and overall I feel it limits the ability on the main.
I did everything I could to get to the next stage, but unless I do a 2nd profession the quest doesnt open up fo rme and I'm stuck.
Any ideas?
I think David gave a good solid review of guildwars. My review gave a few extra points, but i think I'm able to be more flexible then David can be.
I am wondering how much content we can expect to see from ArenaNet in their expansion packs for GuildWars.
I'd like to see some sort of guild verse guild siege battles. All similar to shadowbane.
But i think that can only be done on a persistent battlefield.
Anyhow great review.
FoE Fist of the Empire
You CANNOT go to Post-Searing Ascalon UNLESS you FINISH ALL Primary Quests in Pre-Searing; ie: Secondary Profession Quest = Required, thus I am right and you are wrong.
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Lets state facts like they are.. This game is popular because it is free to play. Plain and simple.
I can assure you there will be little content added to GW. They are going to be hard pressed to just pay for the band width, unless the game is running on a web server, which it doesn't sound like it is. At least I would have thought that David would have mentioned that in his review if that were the case and he did not so it must be running on its own servers which costs a bundle.
David doesn't mention how many servers GW is running? At least if he did I missed it.
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It's just me, so open the door.
Are you one of those people who like to just say random things without even having some backing up on the matter?
For one thing, Guild Wars has been patched like 5 or more times since release, and most of those patches actually had some significant updates, not just minor bug fixes. Not to mention there are a couple more areas which are going to be streamed into Guild Wars in a few weeks. Also, they have already begun work on the next expansion (chapter if you will) which is set for a very tentative date of first half 2006. I really want to know what the hell you are talking about. The only technical details GW has released so far is that they run 3 data centers in America, Europe, and Korea. Everyone is technically on one server, but Americans, Europeans, and Koreans are split into different districts.
Anyway, to David, I just wanted to say one little thing, you failed to mention that skills can be captured from bosses, which is how you gain elite skills. Other than that, I thought the review was pretty solid, a pretty fair score I'd say.
ArenaNet has said that each expansion will have as much content as the origanal game, but it will also probably cost as much. That is how they plan to afford the costs of running an MMORPG.
Kasmar, GW is designed to run on just one server.
I want very badly to like GW but it just... misses somehow.
Here are some of the things that bug me.
NO aggro management for mobs. Every other MMORPG I've ever played has a way for the hefty guys (warriors in this case) to keep the attention on them. Guild wars does not.
NO way of LFG beyond jumping from zone to zone. Or if there is, I cant find it in the documentation. True, you can use henchmen in many of the quests, but the henchmen are not optimal groupmembers. They are much lower than other players that would be in the same area. And they are dumb.
NO way of managing the henchmen. Considering they are such a big part of the game, they could've put some more options on how you want your henchment to act. You have no squad level direction, no way of deciding how you want your henchmen to be focused.
The quest rewards are VERY weak. I have yet to use one. If they want to give things away, why not give away some of the rare crafting materials? The collectors are also largely not very good rewards. There are exceptions, but mostly I didnt see anything I wanted. They also dont tell you the stats on what you can get, but thats more of a quibble.
I've been playing quite a bit of GW now (close to 300 hours). Aggro can be managed but it works differently from other "MMO's". Monsters will target weakest enemy on their detection range first. To make mobs manageable, use abilities that slow enemies down. Very often slowed down enemy can be attracted to attacking warriors by few whacks from a melee weapon when it realizes it can't really reach caster. Water magic is good for this. Also healers and casters should stay well back so that mobs start attacking warrior types, and then start casting. And finally, since GW cloth wearers are far more durable it won't be that dangerous if one enemy attacks one of them. Just don't get mobbed by several tough melee enemies.
Finding party can be a problem. Mainly if you are ranger, mesmer or necro primary. Warriors, monks and elementalist find parties far more easily (in fact monks get harrassed by group requests even if they don't want one
). For some reason many people think those three classes can't contribute in PvE... Beats me why but I have to say passing all game missions with henchmen besides Thirsty River was extremely hard with my Mesmer/Necromancer. Luckily Anet boosted henchmen a bit so they can stand up to Mursaat on later missions now.
Managing henchies is hard I agree. Only way to influence henchies is to click your own name bar if you want them to come with you. You can still pull aggro, take a long range bow on as a weapon switch, target enemy and fire once and instantly click your name. Now enemies will come to you and your hencies won't rush to meet them.
Quest rewards are a mixed bag. I wish they added rune and weapon mod unlocks because I find randomity of unlocks unbearable. Basically all quests that have skills as rewards are worth doing because in the end your character will become limited in skill points (I'm missing 20 skill points and have finished all missions and quests that give skill points). Now I have to grind for 20 levels worth of experience and quite frankly I'm not looking forward to it. I bought this game mainly in anticipation of juicy PvP (basic system is just about best I've seen in fantasy game but getting all stuff unlocked is a pain), not boring experience grind that is so prevalent in regular MMO's.
Finally about server costs, since GW has lots of instanced areas servers are far more stable and have far less load than in normal FFA envinroment (lets say WoW PvP servers for example). That's one reason they can operate without montly payment. I just hope addional expansions are good and include lots of PvP material that is accessible in quick fashion. At the moment ladder is stagnant because everyone is either grinding for skills and equipment or waiting Anet to put UAS back to game...
I played this game, and ended up with 4 level 20 characters in 2 weeks with no real desire to PVP.
I'm not saying I didn't have fun doing it though. What it boils down to is it is a PVP game, not a PVE game. I wan't end-game content, not pvp.
It was a good game overall - but just not for me, I enjoy the grind.
And I don't see how they would charge for this game, to me its a MMO that revolves around PVP as the high end.
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yup.