Guild Wars

This review is a review of the core gameplay elements of Guild Wars, including not only the original Prophecies campaign but also the Factions, Nightfall and Eye of the North expansions.

Strong suits:

To put it simply, Guild Wars has the best PvP you’ll find in an MMO. There are literally dozens of viable builds for each class combination, and large scale skill balancing takes place every month. You don’t need to spend days or weeks powerleveling a character and farming gold for the best equipment, since all items and skills that you’ve unlocked on your PvE account or unlocked from the online store are available to use as many times as you want, and your character will be lvl 20 (the highest level) each time you roll one in PvP. There are countless different arenas to play in, most of them active 24/7 with other players to compete with. There are daily, weekly, and monthly tournaments officially sanctioned by Ncsoft and integrated into the game that award different points, items and ranks of prestige, and even real world money (the annual $100k cup that awards 100,000 USD to the winning team). Players of any experience can compete, and even if you’re not into the highly competitive organized team arenas such as Guild vs. Guild or Hero’s Ascent you can still participate alone in Random Arenas (where you are paired with 3 random people and compete against another randomly formed team of 4) or Team Arena (where you and some friends can make a team and play against another team). PvP is also often the only way to earn faction points for various titles in Guild Wars, such as Zaishen and Luxon, which have their own set of rewards separate from PvE, but transferrable. Guild Wars PvP is balanced, fun and doesn’t require grinding to access. If you bought Guild Wars and only played the PvP, you would easily get your money’s worth.

Following the tradition of many Korean MMO’s, the game is technically impressive in more than one way. Although the game is now over 4 years old, the graphics are still quite good and even above average by today’s standards. Notable other games in which Guild Wars easily surpasses in graphics are World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, Final Fantasy XI and Lord of the Rings Online. In my opinion it even has a leg up on technically acclaimed MMO’s such as Age of Conan. There is no questioning that Guild Wars is certainly one of the prettiest looking MMO’s to date.

Another technical feat that Guild Wars pulls off is its content streaming mechanism, in which completely new areas can be downloaded and loaded at blazing speeds. Although maps are massive and have hundreds of creatures, any one map usually takes less than 3 seconds to load. Even on a completely fresh install, new maps are usually downloaded and loaded in less than a minute. This means less time waiting and more time playing.

Finally, Guild Wars tops off its list of strong suits with completely solid gameplay and interface elements. Downtime is further reduced by allowing map travel, e.g. instant teleportation to any area you have already visited simply by opening the map and clicking on it. The interface is intuitive and completely customizable, and you can set a key to literally every possible action in the game. You can play with other players or you can set and choose henchmen (Heros, limited to 3 per team have fully customizable skills and armor). This is especially potent considering the AI is smarter than the average human, and has godlike reflexes when it comes to interrupting spells or responding to the players directions to attack a target, moving away etc. The class system, large number of skills, and large number of weapon mods means there are endless combinations of viable builds for all purposes. Ncsoft has done a great job of making a skill system and a combat interface that scales well, and is easy to use.

Aspects that are not too great but not too shabby:

Guild Wars campaigns, quests and missions follow the path shared by many such as WoW, basically go from point A to point B, kill things in between and kill the boss at the end. Although each quest and mission are given different contexts, it all boils down to the same thing and this will become repetitive sooner or later. Although this is fairly standard for most games in the genre, it’s a bit dissappointing to see one of the heaviest hitters not trying to innovate in any way. The storyline itself is also a bit average, with very little plot or character development spread across a rather generic story arc of saving the world from darkness.

The music in the game is written by the talented composer Jeremy Soule (Company of Heroes, Dawn of War I, Oblivion, Neverwinter Nights but to name a few), but is rather repetitive and is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of the tracks are short and loop constantly, and also resemble other tracks. It wasn’t until I checked the soundtrack listing that I found out there were more than what appeared to be 10 tracks in total across the entire world of Tyria (the land in the first campaign). What’s there is good, especially the title track, but overall tracks could have been longer and slightly better.

The problems with Guild Wars:

Guild Wars’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The “no-grind” philosophy has worked to its advantage in regards to PvP, but the PvE section of the game has suffered heavily from it.  Mainly, the lack of diversity in weapons and armor leads to a lack of an economy, and the low level cap means there quickly becomes no point in gaining experience.

There are thousands of different armor and weapons, but they differ in aesthetics only. An armor that costs 100 times more than the basic armor will have the same stats, except perhaps a few metallic tendrils or flares on the edges. The same is with weapons, in which the rarest weapon may cost dozens of times more gold than the most basic one but they have the exact same stats and thus are equally viable in combat. Players hit the highest level within just a few hours of playing and instantly in PvP, which makes a mockery of experience rewards and bonuses attained from quests and monsters. The XP in Guild Wars feels like the money in GTA3; there’s a lot of it, but absolutely nothing to spend it on. This in turn makes almost all quests feel useless, since their main reward is experience.

MMO’s are the most time-consuming of any video game genre, and while nobody wants to farm the same area for hundreds of hours for gold to buy the armor with the highest stats and to reach the highest level, players would also like to recieve that little enhancement to their character for every hour that they play. The obsoletion of experience and the absence of high level armor in pursuing the no-grind philosophy has that little caveat. A more optimal way to do this would’ve been perhaps to make the difference between the highest level armor and the highest level easily attainable armor just 5-10%; this way gameplay would still be largely based on skill and teamwork, yet players who wanted to spend more time in the game also had something to look forward to and to be rewarded with.

 The lack of skills such as crafting or mining doesn’t help either. In fact, everything outside of the combat in Guild Wars is quite basic. There are titles to work towards such as Cartographer (exploring the entirety of the world map) or Treasure Hunter (open 10,000 treasure chests) but these all require vast amounts of money and time, which is contrary to the no grind philosophy, so you wonder why they couldn’t just implement skills that actually gave meaningful benefits rather than just titles for bragging rights. Another thing that hinders the economy beyond the uniformity of items is that there is simple no auctionhouse, bazaar or marketplace functionality. Rather, players are forced to jury rig the menu designed to find party members for missions to advertise their trades instead. This makes buying and selling items hard, and also makes prices highly variable, differing from each other dramatically even within 5 minutes. There appears to be no reason why a game of this scale, only second to WoW, could somehow fail to develop such a functionality over the years.

One final complaint is that the game overdoes it with the instances. While it’s all well and good that we get our own area/dungeon to explore and don’t have to fight over drops, it doesn’t feel like you’re in a populated world. When you solo, the only people you’ll see are the odd NPC scattered here and there, and at best you can get 7 other people to fight monsters with you. The game feels more like a Diablo-esque game than a true MMO; a single player experience that has multiplayer functionalities (in PvE – again, the PvP is fully functional and well developed). Persistent areas other than towns would have added quite an extra layer to the PvE experience.

Conclusion

 Guild Wars excels as a purely PvP experience, and falters in its PvE mode. While playing PvP is a true treat, the PvE section almost seems pointless once you’re a few hours in. There is no denying that the game has glaring issues, and if it were not for the high quality of the PvP, class structure, gameplay and extremely vast amounts of content, these flaws could have lowered the score to 3 or even 2 stars. If you’re into PvP, not even the aforementioned issues about PvE can detract from the otherwise excellent quality of the game.