GuildWars, developed by ArenaNet, is a revolutionary design in massive multiplayer online gaming that has been taken RPG gaming to the next level: No more pay as you play. Unlike many of the popular online games: World of WarCraft, EverQuest, and Asherons Call which require a monthly fee plus the cost of the boxed game, you can play GuildWars for the fee of purchasing the software at your local game retailer.
ArenaNet has learned the tricks of the trade when it comes to online gaming, and they’ve taken the “greatest hits” of many games and removed many of the faults. GuildWars exhibits to modes of play: PvP (player vs. player), and PvE (player vs. environment) to give both player types a chance to play in the mode that suites them best. The PvE mode contains a full blown storyline and the ability to unlock items and skills that you can use within the PvP mode.
Networking
GuildWars gets two thumbs up for there ability to design a game system that plays over a modem (yes, some people still require those), or on a badly designed network (yes, many cable companies still don’t understand networking). The game client streams content to your gaming system as you play, obtains maps and information as you need them, and does it with ease. My wife and I can play GuildWars while downloading large files over bit-torrent on one of the most horrid cable connections (adelpha.net) and not even notice that the game is running over the Internet!
Server lag? What is that? GuildWars is an “instanced” based system where a party teams up in town (like a lobby), and heads out on an adventure that is free of all other human players. Every gamer can have they’re own copy of the large GuildWars world or team up with a bunch of friends and/or guild members. Only on the day of release have I ever seen an area lag at all, and since then the only connection drops I’ve had is when my cable companies network goes down.
Pros:
Cons:
Instanced Gaming
The idea of having a separate copy for your own adventure means that you can follow a storyline as if the game was single player. Once in the game, you're faced with the choice of single player or multiplayer The gaming environment is smart enough to aggregate all the plots and quests for each player in your party into one “instanced world” of adventure. If your buddy hasn’t completed the quest where he has to talk to Bob but you have, then Bob will be available in your instance along with any quest keys that you need as well. How do they do it? Pure magic!
No more spawn camping! Anyone familiar with MMORPG’s knows the fun in awaiting a key enemy to “respawn” so that you can kill them to get the quest item. You may know the pain of entering an area and finding everything dead as if a tornado came through and emptied the place. The pain of finding the evil dragon cave to slay the dragon and become a hero…with the other 25 “heros” waiting around for that dragon to spawn. If that is not enough, you can say goodbye to the folks that can pickup weapons almost before the enemy dies, leaving you with nothing but three pennies and a tube of toothpaste. All items in GuildWars are assigned to a party member when they drop, so only you can take them.
Each non-instanced area, such as a town or city, is broken into “districts.” A district is a separate multiplayer instance of a specific town. Why? Rather then having one big town with a half a million players in it there will be server districts which grow/shrink dynamically with user-base. Some towns have 2 districts at off-peak hours and 20 on a Friday night (for all those gamers that don’t realize the social happenings are at the local bars). The main cities have been up to 80 districts at times!
Pros:
Cons:
What is a Guild?
GuildWars encourages team play, and grouping with friends to start your adventures. This may be in PvE or PvP mode. They encourage this by allowing people to start a guild and inviting folks to play along. A guild leader can assign officers, buy neat capes to mark your coolness level, and eventually afford a guild hall for meeting up with friends, practicing, etc.
Guilds that obtain enough status and finances to buy a guild hall can challenge other guilds to battle (guild officers are allowed to do this, not a simple guild member). Now you can truly have your Guild War!
Pros:
Cons:
The Gaming Environment
It’s huge. For the casual gamer you can be adventuring in this world for months. For the hard-core 24x7 gamer… two to three weeks and you’ll have seen it all. The environment is eye candy with a purpose. The enemies (a.k.a mobiles/mobs) are amazingly detailed and just as nasty to fight. The ArenaNet team understands that building an enemy group of five baddies that have skills and magical abilities that work well together can be much more of a challenge then throwing twenty-five of the same enemies at you (a.k.a Diablo-Style). Battling a warrior that can sever your artery (yes, makes you’re health drain), a cultist that can drain your energy, an archer that pokes holes in your chest, and a healer to make sure they stay alive can be fairly overwhelming to the average gamer. An enemy team that works together to kill you rather then flooding you with seven thousand Kobolds?! Outrageous!
The world is not very interactive, and if you expecting Half-Life 2 style interaction you’ll be sadly mistaken. The world is beautiful and fun to adventure in and battle in. For instance, as an archer you gain damage from fighting on the “high ground” but you can’t pickup stones and roll them down the hill.
When you are adventuring and find a new town, village, camp, or city you are transported to the non-instanced version of the game. You can now chat with other players, build up new parties to adventure, and trade items. Once a new town is found you can instantly teleport to that town at will and do not have to walk to it again (which can take minutes or hours if the town is far away).
Pros:
Cons:
The Character Build
There are six unique types of characters in GuildWars: Warrior, Monk, Necromancer, Ranger, Mesmer, Elementalist. You can choose a primary and a secondary profession (a.k.a multi-class) for your character build. You have your typical fighter professions as seen in many game: melee warrior, and aerial attack ranger. You have your traditional healer monk; everyone needs one nobody wants to be one, the magic casting mesmer (illusionist type character), elementalist (mage), and your odd disillusioned outcast known as the necromancer. Every RPG is not complete with a necromancer!
Your GuildWars account will allow you to create up to four unique character builds (combined both PvP characters and PvE characters). This allows you to play around with the different types of character combinations and attributes that go along with those professions. You may have an elementalist/mesmer that specializes in fire and earth magic with a secondary profession in jamming spell casters with mesmer domination magic and illusion magic. The options are endless or so it seems!
Your character starts at level 1 in PvE, and level 20 (max level) in PvP mode. The RPGers can enjoy adventuring for experience and building up there levels. PvP folks can jump right and start the bloodshed.
Pros:
Cons:
Players or Henchmen?
The GuildWars environment is not friendly to lonely single adventurers! If you want to head out on a quest you should choose between other players in your party or henchmen (AI driven non-player characters). You can mix and match if that’s your idea of a good time as well. However, you should be warned: Henchmen have a minimalist AI and a selection of six professions that focus on a static concept: cast, tank, or heal. The healer henchmen will do his best to keep the team alive, but might do it standing in a lake of poison and not realize that it’s easier to get out of it then heal himself over and over. The warrior henchmen will charge forth towards the enemy with no regard for his own life. You get the idea…
Human player groups can be better then the henchmen by far, or a lot worse. Like all massive multiplayer games you may end up with a few bad seeds in your group. Your unique player experience may fall on the warrior that charges forth feeling a level of invincibility, the healer that forgets to take resurrection, or the wizard that fights with a sword in his underwear rather then standing back to cast area of effect spells. This is where teaming up with guild members helps you avoid the stress of stupid players or henchmen that can’t make a concrete decision if his life depended on it (and it often does).
Pros:
Cons:
PvP Mode Challenges
Although I'm not a PvP player (maybe when I get bored with PvE) there are many different challanges to the PvP mode. Capture the Artifact (like a flag, but prettier), King of the Hill, straight out bloodshed, etc. Enough to keep those PvP guys entertained for awhile, and with new patches coming out to cater to the PvP players with a "reward system" for unlocking new items this mode is an attractive alternative to normal story based RPG's.
Pros:
Cons:
What's missing?
The game contains a rich amount of data and for five years of development time it truly shows some attention to detail. What could be better then that?
Overall: Risk Vs. Reward
For the average RPGer this game is a must have. You cannot go wrong for the price, and the lack of monthly charges. If you’re a casual gamer with a family to take care of, and a house to keep in order this game is for you. You don’t have to send out a monthly bill and you can take a few weeks off without feeling ripped off.
For the hard-core gamer that wants to item hoard, kill players for cash, this game may be a little slow for you. If you want to play the game for two weeks non-stop you will be 20th level and you will have gone through most of the quests and missions. But for a single price it’s just like any other game: play, beat, shelf.
ArenaNet is constantly making improvements in the game with each weekly patch that has been released with minimal glitches and bugs after the patches. The team pays attention to the customers and reads the message boards to see what people like and dislike and the reaction time of the team is amazing. Enough people like a concept it seems to be implemented. Hat’s off to that crew of hard working developers!
CodeMonkey
Networking
GuildWars gets two thumbs up for there ability to design a game system that plays over a modem (yes, some people still require those), or on a badly designed network (yes, many cable companies still don’t understand networking). The game client streams content to your gaming system as you play, obtains maps and information as you need them, and does it with ease. My wife and I can play GuildWars while downloading large files over bit-torrent on one of the most horrid cable connections (adelpha.net) and not even notice that the game is running over the Internet!
Server lag? What is that? GuildWars is an “instanced” based system where a party teams up in town (like a lobby), and heads out on an adventure that is free of all other human players. Every gamer can have they’re own copy of the large GuildWars world or team up with a bunch of friends and/or guild members. Only on the day of release have I ever seen an area lag at all, and since then the only connection drops I’ve had is when my cable companies network goes down.
Pros:
- Runs so smooth you’d think you were playing on your local PC with no networking.
- Streaming updates do not require you to sit and wait 10 minutes each day before playing.
Cons:
- Local network outages mean no GuildWars for you!
- Local dropped network connections mean you have to restart your questing/missions from the start again (you cannot reconnect and start where you left off).
Instanced Gaming
The idea of having a separate copy for your own adventure means that you can follow a storyline as if the game was single player. Once in the game, you're faced with the choice of single player or multiplayer The gaming environment is smart enough to aggregate all the plots and quests for each player in your party into one “instanced world” of adventure. If your buddy hasn’t completed the quest where he has to talk to Bob but you have, then Bob will be available in your instance along with any quest keys that you need as well. How do they do it? Pure magic!
No more spawn camping! Anyone familiar with MMORPG’s knows the fun in awaiting a key enemy to “respawn” so that you can kill them to get the quest item. You may know the pain of entering an area and finding everything dead as if a tornado came through and emptied the place. The pain of finding the evil dragon cave to slay the dragon and become a hero…with the other 25 “heros” waiting around for that dragon to spawn. If that is not enough, you can say goodbye to the folks that can pickup weapons almost before the enemy dies, leaving you with nothing but three pennies and a tube of toothpaste. All items in GuildWars are assigned to a party member when they drop, so only you can take them.
Each non-instanced area, such as a town or city, is broken into “districts.” A district is a separate multiplayer instance of a specific town. Why? Rather then having one big town with a half a million players in it there will be server districts which grow/shrink dynamically with user-base. Some towns have 2 districts at off-peak hours and 20 on a Friday night (for all those gamers that don’t realize the social happenings are at the local bars). The main cities have been up to 80 districts at times!
Pros:
- Greedy item stealing party members? Gone!
- Lining up to complete a quest like you’re waiting for a roller coaster at Disney? Gone!
- Bored 12 year olds cannot hide behind trees to player kill you while you’re grabbing a soda.
Cons:
- You cannot “meet up” with friends that just logged in if you’ve started your adventure.
- You cannot party up with a random group to assist in battling baddies.
- You’re party size is restricted by the game engine to a max of 8 in the most difficult areas (unless your doing large PvP modes where you can have many groups of 8 battling it out).
What is a Guild?
GuildWars encourages team play, and grouping with friends to start your adventures. This may be in PvE or PvP mode. They encourage this by allowing people to start a guild and inviting folks to play along. A guild leader can assign officers, buy neat capes to mark your coolness level, and eventually afford a guild hall for meeting up with friends, practicing, etc.
Guilds that obtain enough status and finances to buy a guild hall can challenge other guilds to battle (guild officers are allowed to do this, not a simple guild member). Now you can truly have your Guild War!
Pros:
- You can feel super cool with your neat guild capes, your guild ranking (which can put you on the guild ladder on guildwars.com), and your guild initials near your name when people check out your character (although “WTF” seems to be popular lately).
- You can build a large group of friends and speak over the text-based “guild chat” (or a 3rd party voice over ip program), and meet up to PvE or PvP others.
Cons:
- For strict PvE players the concept of a guild is not much better then being able to say you have a cape around your neck with a neat picture on it.
- Without a guild hall (like most people) you are really just a group of friends all on the same “team.” No real advantages or meeting places or quests that caters to guild-specific events.
The Gaming Environment
It’s huge. For the casual gamer you can be adventuring in this world for months. For the hard-core 24x7 gamer… two to three weeks and you’ll have seen it all. The environment is eye candy with a purpose. The enemies (a.k.a mobiles/mobs) are amazingly detailed and just as nasty to fight. The ArenaNet team understands that building an enemy group of five baddies that have skills and magical abilities that work well together can be much more of a challenge then throwing twenty-five of the same enemies at you (a.k.a Diablo-Style). Battling a warrior that can sever your artery (yes, makes you’re health drain), a cultist that can drain your energy, an archer that pokes holes in your chest, and a healer to make sure they stay alive can be fairly overwhelming to the average gamer. An enemy team that works together to kill you rather then flooding you with seven thousand Kobolds?! Outrageous!
The world is not very interactive, and if you expecting Half-Life 2 style interaction you’ll be sadly mistaken. The world is beautiful and fun to adventure in and battle in. For instance, as an archer you gain damage from fighting on the “high ground” but you can’t pickup stones and roll them down the hill.
When you are adventuring and find a new town, village, camp, or city you are transported to the non-instanced version of the game. You can now chat with other players, build up new parties to adventure, and trade items. Once a new town is found you can instantly teleport to that town at will and do not have to walk to it again (which can take minutes or hours if the town is far away).
Pros:
- The average gamer is going to be excited to see that this map is nothing short of huge.
- The enemies are a challenge, and sometimes require some planning before attacking (LEEEROOOOY! JEENKINS!!!)
- Hundreds of cool unique items can be dropped from any number of creatures.
Cons:
- The world is largely non-interactive. You can’t throw stones, sticks, or dig holes to hide.
- For the gamer with no life the world gets small fast. You’ll be awaiting the next GuildWars add-on in no time (at least your not paying monthly for it!).
- Items that are dropped and are unique (cool) will allow you to unlock that item for PvP play similar to how you unlock cool race cars in racing games. The downfall is that you cannot currently get super cool items without running a character through PvE mode first.
The Character Build
There are six unique types of characters in GuildWars: Warrior, Monk, Necromancer, Ranger, Mesmer, Elementalist. You can choose a primary and a secondary profession (a.k.a multi-class) for your character build. You have your typical fighter professions as seen in many game: melee warrior, and aerial attack ranger. You have your traditional healer monk; everyone needs one nobody wants to be one, the magic casting mesmer (illusionist type character), elementalist (mage), and your odd disillusioned outcast known as the necromancer. Every RPG is not complete with a necromancer!
Your GuildWars account will allow you to create up to four unique character builds (combined both PvP characters and PvE characters). This allows you to play around with the different types of character combinations and attributes that go along with those professions. You may have an elementalist/mesmer that specializes in fire and earth magic with a secondary profession in jamming spell casters with mesmer domination magic and illusion magic. The options are endless or so it seems!
Your character starts at level 1 in PvE, and level 20 (max level) in PvP mode. The RPGers can enjoy adventuring for experience and building up there levels. PvP folks can jump right and start the bloodshed.
Pros:
- The six professions with a secondary profession and all there attributes let you build a character that specializes in some type of destruction (disrupting other casters, meat shield, healer tank, hex-master, etc.)
- Well balanced professions allow for certain builds to utterly destroy characters of other builds, but there is always a build that can destroy YOU. Your enemy may just not have one partied at the time
- Instant PvP character w/o having to drone through the PvE storyline (unless you want to unlock all the unique items in the game for a specific set of professions).
Cons:
- The six professions are all bipedal human characters. You cannot create elves, dwarves, cats, dogs, etc.
- Only four slots on your account means that you have to split your PvP and PvE characters, although PvE characters can eventually take part in PvP battles its not the same as building an instant PvP level 20 character, just add water!
- Level cap of 20 means that you will not enjoy the idea of advancement forever (some RPG players like the idea of a goal at the end of the day being a level up).
Players or Henchmen?
The GuildWars environment is not friendly to lonely single adventurers! If you want to head out on a quest you should choose between other players in your party or henchmen (AI driven non-player characters). You can mix and match if that’s your idea of a good time as well. However, you should be warned: Henchmen have a minimalist AI and a selection of six professions that focus on a static concept: cast, tank, or heal. The healer henchmen will do his best to keep the team alive, but might do it standing in a lake of poison and not realize that it’s easier to get out of it then heal himself over and over. The warrior henchmen will charge forth towards the enemy with no regard for his own life. You get the idea…
Human player groups can be better then the henchmen by far, or a lot worse. Like all massive multiplayer games you may end up with a few bad seeds in your group. Your unique player experience may fall on the warrior that charges forth feeling a level of invincibility, the healer that forgets to take resurrection, or the wizard that fights with a sword in his underwear rather then standing back to cast area of effect spells. This is where teaming up with guild members helps you avoid the stress of stupid players or henchmen that can’t make a concrete decision if his life depended on it (and it often does).
Pros:
- Henchmen allow you to play almost in a world of your own with a single-player mindset.
- Extremely difficult missions allow you to party up with a group of players with a common goal: bloodshed. After losing a mission or quest with your henchmen sometimes a little human backup can be just what the doctor order.
Cons:
- Some missions are utterly impossible with stupid henchmen AI.
- The AI doesn’t allow for commands so you cannot tell a party of henchmen to wait, to fight a specific monster, to focus on defense, etc.
- A random party of human players can lead to hours of frustration and hate. This is typical with most online games; however it’s also a frustration when driving on the road with some of those folks in real-life too (sometimes I get “the road rage!!!”).
PvP Mode Challenges
Although I'm not a PvP player (maybe when I get bored with PvE) there are many different challanges to the PvP mode. Capture the Artifact (like a flag, but prettier), King of the Hill, straight out bloodshed, etc. Enough to keep those PvP guys entertained for awhile, and with new patches coming out to cater to the PvP players with a "reward system" for unlocking new items this mode is an attractive alternative to normal story based RPG's.
Pros:
- Not just random fighting, but an organized system of PvP. This demonstrates that it wasn't just thrown in as a checkmark on the marketing sheet.
- Bored of PvE? Play against others with the same familar controls, skills, and interfaces.
Cons:
- Some PvE people may feel this takes away from the attention that could be put into strict PvE gaming.
- Keeping both modes of place balanced, yet seperate entities is a challenge. Play balance is always going to be an issue.
What's missing?
The game contains a rich amount of data and for five years of development time it truly shows some attention to detail. What could be better then that?
- Item "ebay" trading system: many hours are spent swapping/selling items to gain money to afford stuff you can really use.
- Items are dropped without care of your parties professional make-up. I've found more axes drop for me as a ranger then I care to comment on. If the drop system could sway a little more towards useful items for my professions then I'd feel less inclined to harvest items in the world, or spend hours swapping items with strangers hoping to gain something of usefulness to my character.
- A henchmen command set: I want to be able to give them primative commands that they can follow rather then closing they're eyes and swinging at anything that moves.
- Higher quality dropped items: Many items in the later part of the game do not seem much better then the start of the game (besides damage bases).
- Better quest reward items: 9 times out of 10 if you complete a quest your getting a smiting staff at the end (along with XP). I have no idea why. You just do. So I sell them for 25gp and move on.
- More: The world is huge, but I don't want to stop playing. I'll lay down another $50.00 for another huge expansion without delay. Give them content and they shall stay.
- Slots: It would be great to be able to house more then four character builds. I've seen many people "end of lifing" there characters to start new ones.
- Message System: The text based message system is ok for town, but it is almost impossible to know when a guild member sends me a text message or logs in. The AOL Instant Message type interface for guild members would be substantially better. If they send a chat message 99% of the time its lost because of the game engine telling me what monster I killed, what they dropped, or who picked up what item. Too much system chatter to even notice a message.
- Perhaps some type of voice over ip internally so that we can all talk live rather then typing?
Overall: Risk Vs. Reward
For the average RPGer this game is a must have. You cannot go wrong for the price, and the lack of monthly charges. If you’re a casual gamer with a family to take care of, and a house to keep in order this game is for you. You don’t have to send out a monthly bill and you can take a few weeks off without feeling ripped off.
For the hard-core gamer that wants to item hoard, kill players for cash, this game may be a little slow for you. If you want to play the game for two weeks non-stop you will be 20th level and you will have gone through most of the quests and missions. But for a single price it’s just like any other game: play, beat, shelf.
ArenaNet is constantly making improvements in the game with each weekly patch that has been released with minimal glitches and bugs after the patches. The team pays attention to the customers and reads the message boards to see what people like and dislike and the reaction time of the team is amazing. Enough people like a concept it seems to be implemented. Hat’s off to that crew of hard working developers!
CodeMonkey
